Chapter 7. Lenore
Lenore
I scrunch my eyes against the midday light searing through the curtains. My head is pounding so hard, I can barely think. Images from last night flash through my mind like a highlight reel that gets murkier as the evening wears on.
We kept talking, and we kept drinking. At some point, the two things became inextricably intertwined—the drinking led to looser conversation, which led to another round, and so forth. I think, at some point, the Red Sox won. Everyone in the bar was shouting. We took celebratory tequila shots.
I slap a hand to my forehead without thinking, and it feels like a hammer bashing against my skull.
I live in Manhattan, for Pete’s sake. I don’t even like the Red Sox. It’s possible I like tequila even less.
I let my hand fall to my side and blink bleary eyes at the ceiling, fighting to remember.
We had the wherewithal to call a cab. There was only one driver operating in Whitbury, a man named William Billings, who I learned on the ride home moonlights as the town clerk (I also learned that he is known around town, unironically, as Bill Billings; I figured out that he wasn’t being ironic because when I sputtered a drunken laugh, he pinned me with a scowl in the rearview mirror).
There’s another memory: calloused fingers brushing against mine in the dark back seat.
A handsome face, swathed in mostly shadow.
My heart in my throat. A prickling awareness, heightened by alcohol, that my adolescent crush on Callan Bradford never quite went away—except now that I’m a grown woman, that attraction takes on a whole new color.
I fling an arm across the bed and release a breath when my fingers find only smooth bedsheets, cool to the touch.
Empty. Thank God.
The slide lock on the inside of the bedroom door is latched shut. I went to bed alone.
I’m relieved, but the knowledge that we could have easily made that mistake fills me with unease. I don’t want to be a drunken decision, someone he can’t quite look in the eye the next morning.
Another memory, this one clearer than the liquor-tinged flashes of last night: a humid night in August, bulb lights strung in the orchard, sweating in my satin slip of a bridesmaid dress as I twirled around the dance floor.
My hair coming loose from its updo, strands sticking to my cheeks and the back of my neck, full-throated laughter as I caught Katie by the hands and we spun, tripping in heels over the train of her wedding dress.
Callan, standing with his back leaned against the weather-worn red of the barn, nursing a glass of whiskey on the rocks.
There was no mistaking the way his eyes had followed me all day, starting with the moment we’d stood across from each other at the altar while Damien and Katie said their vows. Shy smiles, and lingering glances.
“You look great,” I’d told him after the ceremony, standing at the open bar inside the barn while waiting for Damien and Katie to make their grand entrance.
“So do you,” he’d said. His eyes had trailed over me, underpinning that comment with the barest suggestion—that he’d been looking, and it wasn’t entirely innocent.
The night wore on, and the drinks kept flowing, and after long the looks he gave me weren’t so subtle.
Until I’d called him out on it. Grabbed his hand, trying to lead him onto the dance floor, only for him to pull away. “Maybe later.”
I laughed, happy enough to find humor in everything. “What better time than now?”
“I’m not in the mood to dance,” he said.
“Please?” I pouted, grabbing the sleeve of his dress shirt. “For me.” Even now, the memory sends a shudder of mortification through me.
“Go back to Katie,” he told me. “Enjoy your night. You don’t want to spend it sulking around with me. I’ll find you later,” he promised when I didn’t make a move to leave him there.
Reluctantly, I returned to the dance floor. I kept looking for him in the crowd the rest of the night, waiting for him to make good on his promise, but he never did.
When everything happened with Gran a while later, I should’ve forgotten about the promise altogether.
Except I didn’t. At the end of the night, while Damien and Thomas packed away rental chairs, Callan found me sitting in the grass beneath the string lights, barefoot in my bridesmaid dress, my face puffy from crying. He sat down next to me.
“Hey,” he said softly. “You all right?”
It was too vast a question, the answer too obvious and all-encompassing. I sniffled and smeared a hand across my damp cheek. “You never found me for our dance.” It was the only thought small enough to put into words.
It took him a long time to say anything. After a while, he sighed heavily. “We were never going to dance together, Nore,” he said, with a devastating gentleness.
It was that gentleness that hurt the most—like my naivety was something fragile he didn’t want to break. I was something to look at, but not to touch. I was sick of being locked inside a glass case.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand, jarring me from the memory.
I drag it toward me by the charger to peer at the screen.
Incoming Call: Katie Nguyen-French is plastered over a contact photo of my brother and his wife in matching pajamas, squatting in front of last year’s Christmas tree with their bernedoodle.
It’s a little after eleven in the morning.
Nausea lurches through me. I drop the phone onto the nightstand, rolling onto my back and clamping a pillow over my head with a moan. Everything hurts. Sunlight. Sound. I’ll call her back later.
After what feels like an eternity, the call ends. I’m drifting somewhere warm between waking and sleep when the vibrating starts anew.
I groan, but my protest is muffled underneath the pillow. Without looking, I paw around the nightstand until my fingers close around the phone. I yank out the charger and lift the pillow from my eyes, squinting at the bright screen.
It’s a text, also from Katie.
Daily check-in to make sure
everything is okay!!
I scrub a hand over my face and read it again. Damien put her up to this, obviously. I swipe to open my camera and hold the phone at arm’s length, snapping a picture complete with bedhead and sleep-swollen eyes. I send it with a caption:
Proof of life
It’s tempting to try to sleep off this hangover, but I should probably get something to eat.
I allow myself a few minutes to scroll on social media.
Hayden posted a picture of her in front of her latest work displayed in a gallery, champagne glass in hand, her wheat-colored hair cropped into a chic bob.
Behind her, the spotlight simmers on a small impressionist portrait of a woman, undressed but with her knees tucked in and her arms hooked around them to cover herself.
Her wide green eyes stare unabashedly back at the viewer.
The placard beside it reads Hayden Thompson (b.
1999), Untitled Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas.
I double tap to like the picture, reveling in that familiar bittersweet ache that comes with watching my friends succeed where I failed.
Last night, Callan asked me why I was wasting my talent, and I didn’t have an answer.
I tried for years after college to get my work into galleries, but it was always the same refrain: My watercolors were a shade too pastoral, too illustrative, too kitschy.
They were art, but they weren’t fine art, not quite highbrow enough for the sleek galleries that housed paintings like Hayden’s self-portrait.
Well-paid work as a freelance artist with no recognition was hard to come by, which left me selling my art as a street vendor in front of the Met or taking meager commissions to scrape pennies together.
There’s that law in physics that states energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. Art is a little like that. It’s self-sacrificial—you can’t create something from nothing, which means you can’t create art without chipping away little pieces of your innermost self.
After a while, I was exhausted by giving pieces of myself away for nothing. So, I stopped creating at all.
“I need a ride,” I say, squinting against the violently blue sky.
Callan stands a solid five feet above me on an orchard ladder, shoulder deep in the leafy, green branches of an apple tree. The sugar maples are the first to change with the seasons; the apple trees are usually the last.
“Sure,” he says. “As soon as I’m finished with work.”
It’s Sunday, but there are no days off on a farm.
There’s always something that needs doing.
I understand that full well, but I’m antsy to grab my rental car from where I parked it a few blocks away from the Penalty Box last night.
Cal’s truck is parked by the outbuilding, which means he must’ve had someone drop him off downtown before work this morning.
“Your car will still be there in a couple of hours,” he says, reading my thoughts. A harvest bucket is slung around his middle, filled with the classic Red Delicious cultivar that French Hill Farm has long used in its hand-pressed cider.
I fold my arms, shoulders hunched. “Someone might bust out the windows.”
“Lenore,” he says, “people don’t bust out windows in Whitbury. If they did, there would be at least ten witnesses who could probably tell you the culprit’s home address and mother’s maiden name.” He descends the ladder, rung by careful rung, until his boots find solid ground. “Sort of a deterrent.”
I frown as he folds the tripod ladder and hauls it over to the next tree. The sleeves of his plaid flannel are rolled up to his elbows, revealing the strong curve of his forearms, suntanned and covered in dark hair.
He squints at a branch as he lines up the ladder. “You could always lend a hand, if you want to hurry things along.”
Under the best of circumstances, unpaid manual labor sounds like my own personal hell. Today, my body feels like it’s been run over by a high-speed train, and my brain is operating on fumes.
Not the best of circumstances.
“All right,” I say. “Give me an assignment.”
“Carry those into the barn for pressing,” he says, indicating the weather-worn wooden crates already filled with early-season apples. “If you can lift them.”
I scoff. “Of course I can lift them.”
From his high horse on the ladder, he arches a skeptical brow. I do a quick tally of the crates. Nine in total. I’ll have to carry them one at a time.
I haven’t worked on the farm since high school.
The orchard hasn’t been profitable for at least half a century, but Gran used to hire local teenagers for part-time seasonal work anyway—another way she gave back to her community.
Damien and I were never on payroll, but Gran always said that hard work built character.
I wait until Cal isn’t looking and then hoist one of the crates into my arms. It’s heavier than expected. My grip on the left handle slips, the whole crate tipping sideways. A few apples tumble out, thudding in the grass. I puff an exhale, balancing the crate across my knee to readjust my hold.
“Doing all right back there?” Callan calls without looking at me.
“Fine,” I grunt, and awkwardly shuffle toward the barn.
It’s slow going, the crate bumping against my thighs, my arms screaming in protest.
The barn doors are thrown open on their tracks.
Sunlight slants through a large loft window, falling across a dirt floor scattered with picnic tables.
Vintage fruit crates filled with crimson-flushed apples are stacked against the far wall.
Their labels are faded and illustrative, artifacts of a more commercial time in the orchard’s history.
FRENCH HILL FARM is written in a retro script above artwork of glossy apples on a gnarled twig, with orchard rows stretching toward the Green Mountains in the background.
I add my crate to the pile, next to the rusted behemoth that is the antique scratter for pulping the apples, and a hand-turned wooden press. I plant my hands on my hips and take a moment to catch my breath. One crate down. Eight to go.