Chapter 48
NOW
“Oh my god, oh my god,” I say, fanning my face. “Should I go throw up? What do I do?”
Austin takes another big bite of the tainted dessert, and says, “I say you just go with it, Red. Think you could use it.”
I shake my head and then press two fingers to my pulse. “My heart rate is very high.”
“That’s because you’re panicking,” says Sammie in a soothing tone, putting a hand on my back.
“We get drug tested at work. I can’t fail that, I can’t.”
“Psilocybin actually doesn’t turn up on drug screens,” Austin provides, helpfully.
“Hey,” says Matt, standing and also coming over to me. “Didion, look at me.”
I do, my eyebrows in a fretful knit, eyes wide.
“You’re going to be fine. People do this all the time. Do you want me to tell you why this isn’t a big deal?”
I lose the strength in my legs and melt down onto the floor. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
This is so not like me. I never let anyone see me sweat.
But losing control like this scares me too much, and it happened so unexpectedly that I didn’t have time to put up my usually strong facade.
I’m also not a total square, I don’t care if other people do it!
I just don’t want to! It messes with my whole I-hate-losing-control thing!
“Hey,” says Matt. “Listen. Mushrooms are pretty tame in small doses like this. You probably didn’t have that much anyway.”
Sammie makes a sound that means I wouldn’t be so sure about that.
I look at her in horror. “I melted half the chocolate bar! I grated a bunch on top!”
“Didion, look at me. It cannot stop your heart. Cannot shut down your organs. Doctors use it therapeutically all the time for everything from migraines to PTSD. If anything, it could be a good thing.”
“Don’t you have to be in a good headspace for something like this?” I’m breathless.
Austin crouches down too and says, “So let’s get in a good headspace.”
Sammie sits down and holds my hand, and the guys set about putting the dishes from dinner away and lighting candles. Austin puts on some calm jazz and gets me some water.
“What if you go with it?” asks Sammie. “Maybe it would be good for you to let go, like Austin said.”
Yes, in theory, this might be true. But in reality—or whatever we’re in right now—I’ve got a death grip on the steering wheel of my life. I might want to let go, but I don’t even know how.
I realize that I’ve said this out loud when Sammie says, “I know you do. I know.”
Twenty minutes later, and my panicking has … actually started to subside. The house is calm, and I’m suddenly struck by its beauty. The lights glow with a soft warmth, the music feels like it’s coming from another time. I say something out loud about loving Artie Shaw.
Against all odds, I am kind of okay. More than okay, actually. Maybe even peaceful? I feel gooey inside and like the world is really only as small as Birdsong right now.
It all feels like a movie. Or like Disney World, the Tower of Terror. Like someone designed Birdsong, intentionally, every detail.
Designed. The way the one book on the mantel leans against the others at an angle.
The open window. Sammie’s sweatshirt thrown over the back of the kitchen chair.
The things on the table that have accumulated there over the course of the day.
Austin’s keys, the bottle of wine. Nora’s copy of The Giving Tree, which, to all our horror, she loves.
It feels so intentional, all these things, to have—wait.
“Nora,” I say, alarmed. “Where is she?”
“She’s in bed,” Matt answers. “Thankfully she was tired from being at the beach earlier with Sammie. She would have been all over that tiramisu.”
Sammie shivers at the thought.
I lean back against the unbelievably soft leather of the arm chair and stretch my legs out. It feels good to be long.
I keep trying to put my finger on what it feels like. Everything is really so nice. It strikes me how adorable we all are. Just little people with our little accessories, keys, jackets, shoes that fit our feet just right, that we have to get things that fit our bodies. It’s so cute! Oh my god.
I start trying to explain this to Sammie, who immediately says, “Yes. Just for us. Our personal things.” She then pulls gently at the ponytail band in my hair so that it tumbles freely over my shoulders. “Your hair smells so good. Is that the shampoo in the hall bathroom?”
Matt is looking at the books on the shelf. Austin is getting a fire lit.
I see Birdsong through new eyes. I’m seeing it for what it is, in a way, this little shelter on the beach that has stood here, housing us all and our memories, for so long.
And it has so many rules of its own. By the fireplace, the hanging rack with all the tools—Austin is using the little pincer things to flip a small log, just as my grandfather would have.
And beside him on the hearth is the old, very folksy seventies square pillow that always perches there, an extra seat in a pinch.
How many times have I sat on it and warmed myself up, looking out at this living room full of different people?
I get up to explore, like it’s a museum.
The Le Creuset pots and pans in the kitchen, scarred by fire from all of Babe’s cooking.
The small collection of pictures and tickets and ancient, out-of-date things that have been pinned there with magnets.
How have I not slowed down to wonder at them yet?
The Lawson’s church key magnet with a seven-digit phone number from pre–area code days.
The torn piece of paper listing Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code, which includes never shooting first, honesty, tolerance.
Sammie comes up to me after a while and she smiles. “Are you feeling okay?”
I nod. “It’s weird.” My voice feels weird, distant. “I should be freaking out right now.”
“About which part?” she asks, curiously.
“The mushrooms. Babe. The time thing. Austin. All of this.”
“But you’re not.”
This makes me laugh, and then I say, “No. I’m taking a tour of the house.” More laughing, and then, “Do you want to come?”
She nods and puts a hand in mine, and I feel like we’re eight years old again, playing pretend. Pretending the world is unfamiliar and mysterious. Which, of course, it is.
She understands what we’re doing immediately, as we go to the side porch and stand in the doorway. Birdie comes up behind us, and as if leading us—though really only being a dog who always wants to go outside—she takes us to the side door that leads to the alley garden.
We step out, protected somewhat from the rain by the canopy of trees.
It’s unbelievable out here.
Rain falls in pitter-patters above us, and the old Disney song “Little April Shower” from Bambi is suddenly playing in my head—somehow in such exact time that it’s really as if someone actually pressed play on it. I ask Sammie if she can hear it, and she nods.
“Drip drip drop little April shower,” she sings, just as I was on that part in my head.
I go over to the herbs and smell the rosemary, the mint, the basil, the tomato vine.
I’m taken back to yet another memory, when Babe had taken me outside and had me smell each one, then taste them all.
I had repressed the exact memory, but somewhere in my consciousness, I think of that every time I cook.
Migla the cat bounds out of the bushes then, damp, and runs inside. It makes sense to me, as she was in that memory too, so of course she should arrive then.
The peaches smell so strongly, I don’t know how I haven’t made a million pies since arriving.
I pull one down from the leafy branches—which are sort of spinning and moving like pinwheels—feeling its fuzzy skin.
I take a bite, and it’s the most insane explosion of flavor, I can almost hear it.
I suddenly want to pair it with goat cheese and mint and watercress.
I hand one to Sammie, who takes it, and then responds just as gratefully as I had to its flavor.
I cannot now relate to the self who has spent a decade in New York making food she doesn’t care about to live in an apartment she never sees.
She doesn’t go to Broadway shows or shop for fakes on Canal Street or go to Blue Ribbon for escargots at one AM.
What she’d do to meet up with friends at Sheep Meadow in Central Park on the first warm spring day with a bottle of wine.
She doesn’t do what you’re supposed to do in New York.
But she’s also not doing this, putting bare feet into the damp, grassy earth and feeling the soft soil give beneath her feet.
She’s not standing in the world and letting herself feel it.
She’s controlling everything she can. And why would she?
Why, when experiencing it is so much nicer?
I try to explain this to Sammie, and I think I’m sounding like a high idiot—I’m sure I am—but she gets it, again.
“We should bring the boys out here,” says Sammie. “They’ll love it.”
She calls out for them and they come out a minute later, both looking so beautiful I could cry.
The garden light bounces off Matt’s perfect, moisturized skin and he looks like a painting.
Austin is the picture of a guy, and I don’t know how to further explain that.
He just looks like the kind of guy that warrants a crush.
The picture of a boyfriend, if that makes sense.
My eyes drift down his strong forearms, the ones that can catapult a tennis ball practically through time and space with the power they hold.
I shiver as I think how he has repurposed that strength on me, so many times.
He comes over to me and puts one of those arms around me, kisses me on top of the head, and says, “Doin’ all right?”
And I say, “Yeah,” with such convincing enthusiasm that it makes him laugh.