Chapter 35
The Interview
ZOE
“Jerry,” I say, “go home.”
“I’m leaving.”
“You said that ninety minutes ago.”
He’s not leaving. He’s going to die in this building, and they’re going to bury him under the cartoon beaver out front.
I’m cutting the cold open for next week’s Zoe Knows.
The segment is a deep dive into the local school board’s apparent inability to count, and, against my own better judgment, I’m having a great time.
Two monitors. A chair that does not have a name.
A succulent that I brought down from Seattle in the passenger seat of the Jeep, buckled in.
On the third monitor—the one we keep on a feed because we’re a news station and that’s what news stations do—the Trout are playing the Seattle Seals. First game of the Western Conference Finals. The kind of stakes that make grown men in Idaho cry into their beer.
I’m watching with one eye. I’m cutting with the other. I’m calm about it.
It goes into overtime.
I’m not normal about it.
I push the chair back from the desk. I set the editing software down. I cross my arms tight across my chest and stand four feet from the monitor like distance will protect me, which, historically, it has not.
The puck drops. Carter wheels. McDavid passes cross-ice. Then Jonah Holt—number four, auburn hair sweat-darkened under the helmet, jaw set the way it gets when he’s about to do something I’ll think about later—glove side, perfect, goes in for the kind of shot you can’t un-see.
The lamp lights.
I make a sound somewhere between a yelp and a hiccup, and I’m not proud of it. Jerry materializes in the doorway.
“Did we win?”
“They won. Holt’s gotta be MVP.”
“Atta boy,” Jerry says, with feeling, and disappears again.
I stand with my hands pressed to my mouth, watching the Trout pile on him at the boards.
Carter slams into him. Jenkins is doing a dance that should be illegal.
McDavid is, for the first time in recorded history, smiling.
The broadcast cuts to the crowd, and there, third row, Tom Holt is hauling Eli up onto his shoulder, and Eli’s screaming with his whole face, both fists in the air, the Flash hoodie sleeves bunched at his elbows.
I have to sit down.
I sit. I press the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, which is, apparently, my move now.
I breathe through my nose for a count of four.
I’m happy for him. So happy for him I might throw up.
I’m also—and this is the part I wouldn’t say out loud—sad for me, which is a private wound that hasn’t healed. Not even close.
“Okay,” I say to nobody. “Okay. Back to work.”
I reach for the mouse and focus. The school board. The numbers that don’t add up.
I lose that focus when I look up at the monitor.
The post-game interview has started. Sydney Holt’s on the ice in her good blazer, her hair somehow surviving the humidity that comes off two hundred bodies on frozen water, and she’s holding a microphone up to her brother’s chin.
Sydney. Interviewing Jonah. On the night he won the game.
The universe sometimes gets it right.
I drift to the monitor, not realizing it until I’m standing in front of it with my hand on the top of it.
Jonah is sweat-soaked. Helmet hair. The pad of tape across his cheekbone says somebody caught him with a high stick at some point, but he’s grinning—the one with the mouth closed, because he does not, as a rule, let strangers see his teeth.
Sydney’s saying something. MVP. Game winner. The playoff implications. Jonah’s nodding along and giving good answers in that low, rasped-out voice he gets after sixty minutes of yelling on the ice.
“It wasn’t me,” he says. “It was the team. Every guy. Carter blocked a shot with his thigh that should have ended his season. Jenkins ate a penalty in the third for the team. Sawyer—” He clears his throat.
“McDavid played that game on, like, four hours of sleep total. We left it all out there. I’m proud of every guy in that room. ”
Sydney smiles, and it’s a sister’s smile sneaking in under the reporter’s face. “Anything else you want to say to the folks back home?”
He looks at her. He looks at the camera. “Yeah. Actually.”
I stop breathing in the way you stop breathing when you sense that the next thing you hear is going to rearrange you.
“This win is empty without you, Zoe Lane.”
I make a noise. Jerry, somewhere in the hallway, drops something that sounds like a coffee mug.
Jonah’s still looking at the camera. He’s looking at me. He has the courtesy to look terrified, which—frankly, thank God, because if he’d been smooth about this, I would’ve had to learn to hate him.
“So as soon as I shower,” he says, “Eli and I are heading to the W2Beaver station, because we have a very important question to ask you.”
Sydney’s professional face cracks straight down the middle. She turns to the camera with the wide-eyed grin of a woman who’s been waiting for a brother to get his act together for several months, years actually.
“You heard him, Dickens,” she says. “Stay tuned.”
The screen cuts to a beer commercial.
I stand with my hand on the monitor.
“Jerry,” I say.
“On it,” Jerry says, from down the hall.
“Jerry, what does that mean?”
“I have no idea, Zoe, but I’m calling Priya.”
“Why are you calling Priya?”
“Because this is big, and she knows everything.”
This is true. Priya does know everything.
Word, in Dickens, Idaho, moves faster than information has any right to move. By the time I’ve managed to reapply lip gloss in the bathroom mirror—shaking, like a woman who’s had eight espressos—I can hear the parking lot.
The parking lot is loud.
I peek out the side window. The parking lot has, as best I can count from a slit of window I’m pretending not to be hiding behind, half of the town of Dickens in it.
Jane is out there with a tray of to-go cups, because Jane responds to every life event by feeding people.
My mother is out there. Maddie’s out there, and both of my brothers are out there, even the one who doesn’t live here, which means he got in a car in Boise the second the broadcast cut to commercial and broke at least one law on the highway.
The mayor’s out there. The mailman’s out there. Linda from accounting is out there.
Tom and Claire’s car is pulling in.
“Zoe.” Jerry steps up beside me. “The station has, uh. Decided to cover this. I think the only call I haven’t gotten in the last ten minutes was from the governor, and that’s because the governor is in Boise and Boise hasn’t caught up yet.”
“Jerry.”
“Take a breath.”
“I’m going to throw up on a beaver.”
“Take two breaths.”
He hands me a glass of water, and I drink half the glass in three gulps. I look at myself in the dark glass of the conference room door, and decide that the woman there is going to be okay.
I push out the front doors.
The roar that goes up is not, technically, for me. It is for the moment. It is the kind of crowd noise that belongs to a town that’s been quietly rooting for a happy ending to something and now gets to root out loud.
There are, conservatively, four cameras pointed at me. There is a boom mic. The cartoon beaver is, in the lighting from the streetlamps, watching me with what I can only describe as enthusiastic interest.
Jonah’s SUV pulls into the lot.
He gets out. He’s clearly showered—his hair’s wet at the ends, dark from it—and he’s in jeans and a Henley, no jacket, in May, because the day doesn’t call for it. Eli comes around the passenger side in a Trout jersey, and his hair’s wild. His eyes find me, and his whole face lights up.
He runs at me first.
He hits me at full speed. I catch him, and the crowd cheers.
“Hi,” I say into the top of his head. “Hi, hi, hi.”
“We came here for you,” he says into my collarbone.
“I heard.”
“We have a surprise.”
“I can’t wait.”
Jonah’s walking up the asphalt like a man on a mission. He stops three feet from us. He looks at me, then he looks at his kid wrapped around my middle. Then at me again.
The whole parking lot goes quiet.
“Zoe,” he says.
“Jonah.”
“You showed up when I was falling apart. Over and over again. You stood by me until I pushed you away.”
“Jonah, people, everywhere—”
“I know.” His voice cracks once and resets. “I was—“ He searches for it. “Scared of letting anyone in. Scared of losing everything again. I handled it like a coward. I’m not proud of that.”
“You don’t have to explain everything. I know.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “You should hear it straight. I pushed you away because I couldn’t be the one taking away your dream.
You deserve the world, Zoe. But now that your dream’s here, I’d love to be the one sharing it with you.
Working every day to be the man good enough for you.
Enjoying all of life’s detours, because you were a detour, and you were right—they are the best part. ”
Eli detaches from my middle and looks up.
“Dad—”
Jonah glances down. “Yeah, bud?”
Eli steps back up to me, serious. “I miss you living with us because you could play chess with me all the time. And I miss that, even though you aren’t very good.”
A laugh breaks out of me. Somebody in the crowd—I want to say Jane—lets out a cackle.
“And when you live with us, we make mac and cheese together more,” Eli says, “and we always had fun. Can we go back to that? Because that was just how I liked it.”
Now I’m crying in a parking lot on local television. I don’t care.
“Me too, Eli. It was just the way I liked it, too.”
Jonah steps closer. His voice drops. “I’m still afraid,” he says.
“But I’ll work through it. Because not doing that means losing you.
You—” He swallows. “You’ve become the person I want to build my life around.
You make our house feel like a home. You make me laugh.
You inspire me. You make me a better man. ”
He drops to one knee.
The parking lot loses it. Jane is weeping. Maddie’s filming with one hand and crying with the other. My mother is, I’m almost certain, on the ground.
Jonah opens a ring box.
The ring is my ring. The ring is, somehow, exactly my ring—a thin band, no catch on it, because he knows I work with my hands and my hair and my coffee cup all day, but dressed up, real, a line of small bright diamonds set flat into the platinum.
He put thought into it. He thought about me, specifically, in jewelry stores, and I don’t know what to do with that.
“Because of you,” he says, “I’ve become good at showing up. And I plan to keep showing up.” He breathes once. “I love you. So much. Will you—will you marry me?”
Eli, beside him, both hands clasped under his chin. “Say yes, Zoe. Say yes so we can go back to exactly how it was. Please.”
My hands shake, and I press them against my stomach. The lights catch the wet ends of Jonah’s hair. Eli is looking at me like his future, his dreams, everything he’s ever imagined for his life is balanced on what I do next.
“Jonah,” I say. My voice cracks. “Eli. I—”
I can’t get the next sentence out around the size of my own chest.
“I love you both,” I manage through a croak. “And yes, I’ll marry you, Jonah. One hundred percent yes.”
The parking lot detonates.
Jonah’s on his feet in one motion. He pulls me in—Eli’s between us, both arms locked around my waist, Jonah’s arm coming down over the top of him, the three of us a single unit in the middle of a circle of people who are screaming.
The ring is in Jonah’s left hand, not on my finger yet, because he’s too busy holding us both.
Eli, muffled against my hip: “Can we go home now?”
I laugh. I sob. I laugh again. I press my face into the top of his head and then into the side of Jonah’s neck and then back down to his head, like I’m collecting them.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, Blastman. Let’s go home.”
Somewhere behind me, the cartoon beaver approves.
The mayor shakes hands with my father. Jane hands out coffee.
Jerry has, at some point, removed his tie and is waving it in the air.
Maddie is sprinting toward us with both arms open.
My brother’s distracted, flirting with W2Beaver’s new weather girl.
I lift my chin. I let the lights find me. I let the cameras have it.
It turns out, you can move five hundred miles away and still end up exactly here, in a parking lot in Dickens, Idaho, under a rickety awning, with a nine-year-old around your middle and a man who learned, finally, how to say the words out loud.
I am, against every odd I stacked against myself, exactly where I’m supposed to be.
The ring goes on my finger. It fits.