Chapter 29 Now
When I imagined a day at the beach, this is almost what I pictured.
The real thing, quite on theme, is even better.
The lemon-yellow sun, its zesty rays sprayed across the cloudless aquamarine sky. The sea-glass ocean, tumbling in, crashing into frothy white waves, spread like lace on the hot sand. I’m hanging out with Mia, who’s starfished on the blanket beside me, taking a sun break under the umbrella.
Alex and Jen are on a walk, having their talk about what I told Alex last night, about what Ethan said, the harm I’m worried he could do. And hopefully, even more than that, about how things can be better, friendlier, for Mia.
Ethan, thankfully, isn’t around. He drove off an hour ago, I assume on some beach-wedding-eve errand.
“Hey, Mimi.”
“Hey, TheeThee,” she says.
I laugh. “Never heard that one before,” I tell her.
“Just thought of it,” she quips, wiggling her eyebrows, which dart above, then beneath her big white frame sunglasses. “I think I’m kind of genius.”
“I know you are.”
She swivels her head my way. “What’s up?”
I peer over at her, heart tugging. I don’t know what to say, when I know so much is about to change for her, when it’s not my surprise to ruin, but I can’t help worrying that she’s not going to like it.
“What’s your favorite thing about being six?” I ask her.
She turns her head back, facing the umbrella, brow furrowed. “All the words I know,” she says. “Because the more words I know, the better stories I can write when I grow up.”
“You want to write stories when you grow up?”
She nods. “Lots. Like Daddy does, but not about food. Stories like what Mommy teaches—people being brave and going on adventures and fighting monsters and learning something and coming home and being happy again.”
I smile. “That’s a good way to sum up a lot of great stories. I think you’ll do an amazing job at it.”
“Thanks,” she says. “Maybe, first, I’ll write stories like you read at StoryTime. For kids like me to use their ’maginations.”
“You like using your imagination?”
“Love it,” she says. “It’s my favorite. Maybe that’s my favorite thing about being six. My ’magination.”
She turns my way again, this time propped up on her elbow, and shoves her glasses up on to her head. Every beat of that choreography is 100 percent Alex, and it makes my heart twinge with hope.
What happened last night is just a beginning.
There’s more I have to say to Alex, words and intentions we danced around last night.
Tonight, I’m not going to play a single round of euchre; I’m going to lay down all my cards and tell him everything.
I hope that means we’ll figure out a relationship.
I hope that means I’ll get to watch Mia grow up, use her imagination, become a big girl, a tween, a teen, a woman I get to love.
“Thea?” she says.
I blink, pulled from my thoughts.
Mia’s frowning.
“Sorry,” I tell her. “You had to say my name a couple times, didn’t you?”
“That’s okay, I could tell you were dickstracted.”
My mouth twitches as I fight a smile. I can’t wait to tell Lauren this new Mia-ism. “I was distracted,” I say to her, “but I’m listening now. What were you telling me?”
“I was telling you,” she says, rolling onto her stomach, propped on both elbows, “that I guess you like ’maginating, too. Because you spend all day trying to get people to buy stories, and stories are all about ’magination.”
“Yep,” I tell her. “I’ve always liked imagining, and daydreaming, letting my mind wander to unexpected places. And I’ve always loved stories.” My throat catches as emotion hits me, unexpectedly. I lean in and tell her, “I actually used to tell myself my own life story.”
Mia tips her head. “Like what?”
I glance around, then back to her, like I’m sharing a secret I want no one else to hear. “Like, ‘Once upon a time there was a girl named Thea. She had wild brown hair and eyes like the forest and sunshine kisses on her nose, and every day she woke up and wanted to climb trees.’ ”
Mia smiles. “You made your life a story.”
“I did.”
“Did you stop?” Mia asks. “When you growed up?”
“When I grew up,” I tell her, weighing my words, “I still told my life story, but I started to get a little mixed up, which wasn’t good. Like a lot of good things, when you use it the way you shouldn’t, it can be not good anymore.”
“Like eating candy for dinner instead of eating it for dessert.”
I smile. “Kind of like that, yeah.”
“So what happened?” she asks.
“Well… instead of listening to myself, telling my life’s story as I went along, I started telling my life it had to be a certain story. I started trying to write chapters before they’d even happened. And then, I got all turned around.”
Mia frowns. “You got lost,” she wisely summarizes. Then she says, “That sounds scary.”
“I did. And it was,” I admit. “But the great thing is—just like you might eat jelly beans for dinner one day and really regret it, but then, the next day, you can go back to eating a yummy, helps-you-grow dinner and then have jelly beans for dessert—I realized I could find my way out of it. I could stop telling myself the story I thought my life should be, and start living it again, then telling myself the story afterward.”
“Sort of like remembering!” Mia says. “But with your ’magination.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s really cool.” She flops onto her back, tucking her hands beneath her head. She’s quiet for a moment, then says, “You know what word sounds like ’magination?”
“What word?”
“Magic,” she says, smiling wide. “Wonder if ’maginations are magic.”
I swallow the lump in my throat as I watch her dreaming, wondering, figuring out the world around her. “Yeah, Mia, I think they are.”
She peers over at me. “Can I have a new word, Thea Thesaurus?”
“Sure,” I tell her. “What word do you want? A synonym or antonym.”
“Cinnamon,” she says confidently, dipping her toes beyond the reach of the umbrella, wiggling them in the warm sun, then adds, “please. A cinnamon for… sunbathing.”
“Ooh, that’s a tricky one.”
I glance out at the ocean, the waves rolling in, crashing on the shore, dragging back out to sea; Argos digging in the sand, filthy and euphoric, wagging his tail.
I peer down the beach at the two specks that are Alex and Jen, gradually drawing closer, Alex’s ball cap tugged low over his bedhead hair, Jen with her wide-brimmed straw hat.
I think of everything that brought us here, how I fought it, resented it, feared it, wrestled with it.
How strange it is to look back on so much pain and realize, somehow, you’re grateful for it, because it was necessary and true, the dark forest you had to stumble and claw your way through to finally emerge into the other side of your life.
“Apricate,” I tell her.
“Ooh.” Mia smiles. “I like that one. Apricate. Sounds like apricot.”
“It does. Apricate is one of my favorite words.”
“Why?” she asks.
“Because it comes from an old word that means to open. And it makes me think about flowers blooming, turning toward the light; that delicious shivery feeling you get when you stretch out beneath the warm sun.
“It makes me think about how, to soak up what’s beautiful in life, you have to open yourself to it.
You have to expose yourself. And that means not just to the beautiful stuff, but to the not-so-beautiful stuff.
You can’t pick and choose. You’re either open or you’re not.
But the sun’s worth that exposure. All beautiful things are. ”
“I love it.” Mia stares up at me, a slow smile on her face. “I love you, Thea.”
I blink, stunned, tears filling my eyes. I feel like I’ve been bathed in a bucket of sunshine. “I love you, too, Mia.”
Mia turns back to the umbrella above her, wiggling her toes again. “Apricate,” she says, like she’s trying out the word, tasting it on her tongue. “Apricate.”
Trying to keep myself together, I peer toward Alex as he walks toward us. My heartbeat thunders, pounding out its truthful rhythm.
I love him. I love him. I love him.
This time, I don’t silence that voice or push it away or lock it up. I open myself up to it, my heart stretched out wide, exposed, reaching toward that beauty.
For as perfect as the day was, the evening is… not. We eat an early dinner, per Jen’s request, which peeves Ethan, which peeves Alex, who suffers through cooking with him, even though Ethan is a shadow of the cook Alex is.
Mia has an after-dinner meltdown about not wanting to go to bed, which means she desperately needs to go to bed, and not even two requested verses of “I Am Here” help her settle.
I step out of her and Jen’s room, where Mia’s cuddled up in her twin bed with Alex, who seems to maybe finally be getting through to her, stroking her hair, doing something silly with her fingers that makes her laugh sleepily.
Just as I’m closing the door, I hear her say, “Apricate.”
I smile as I close it with a click, and then my smile immediately dissolves. Down below, in Ethan’s douche den, I catch voices. Yelling voices.
I hear the white-noise machine in Mia’s room go up in volume. Which means Alex heard them, too, and he’s trying to cover them up.
I jog into our bedroom and unplug my white-noise machine, then plug it into an outlet in the living room, right by Mia’s door, twisting the lid until it’s as loud as possible, its soothing roar so like the ocean, I haven’t used it since I unpacked it, when I had the real thing right outside my window.
The yelling doesn’t stop, but thankfully, it doesn’t get louder.
I pass the time, nervous, by deep cleaning the kitchen.
Not because I give a shit about making things nice for Ethan or his ancestral beach home.
But because tomorrow Alex will cook here, tomorrow Mia will scrounge around for breakfast and snacks, twirling across the tiles. I can make it nice for them.
For half an hour, Alex doesn’t come out of Mia’s room. And neither Jen nor Ethan come up from Ethan’s douche den. Finally, the yelling stops, dipping to murmured voices. I try not to hold my breath, to worry, to fill in the blanks. I keep on cleaning.
I’ve just finished scrubbing the floors, the last task I could think of, when I hear a car engine roar to life, the squeal of tires peeling out across gravel.
Then the slow, light tread of footsteps up the stairs. The door from the douche den swings open.
Jen stands at the top of the stairs, wide-eyed, looking a little shaken. Lauren was right. She really does look like Tinkerbell. Beautiful and pint-sized, a determined glint in those big blue eyes.
She looks at me on my hands and knees in the kitchen, the yellow rubber gloves I’m still wearing, and sighs. “No use doing that,” she says, shutting the door behind her. “Ethan’s gone.”
I spring up, tugging off the gloves, chucking them in the bucket, then follow her out onto the deck.
Jen’s staring out at the ocean, her back to me, still, silent. No sign of crying or emotion. I thought watching her break down in sobs outside The Bookshop was unnerving. This is much worse.
Slowly, I walk up to her. “Jen?”
“Hmm?” She dabs her nose with the back of her hand.
I come close enough so that we’re nearly shoulder to shoulder. “What happened?”
“I told you, he left.”
“Why?” I ask carefully.
She huffs an empty laugh. “Because I called him out on what he’d said to you, told him that I was tired of playing these games where it’s me and him versus you and Alex, that I wanted to get past that and focus on Mia, and, because he’s a manbaby, he told me he wasn’t going to do that, that I had to choose. Him or her. My daughter.”
She shakes her head, sneering at the deep-blue horizon. “That fucker actually thought I’d need a moment to decide.
“And when I told him ‘Mia’—that it was always going to be Mia—he didn’t like that. So I told him he could leave.” She peers over at me, eyes wide, triumphant. “I kicked him out of his own house.”
“Badass, Jen,” I say honestly.
“Was it?” she asks.
“You stood up to him more than I ever did.”
“That’s because you’re nicer than me,” she says. “And you were with him for pure reasons. I was not.”
I feel a little unsteady, clutching the deck railing. “What?”
“It was a rebound fling. He was hot, I was angry and hurt. I could tell he was a selfish boy in a lot of ways. But he was also doting and spent time with me. We liked doing the same things, so, for a while, I enjoyed that. And then… you and Alex, you weren’t a fling, either.
And I was jealous. Not because I wanted Alex back, but because…
I could tell, even when I’d blown up his life, he was still happier with you, more himself with you, than he’d ever been with me.
And I wanted to punish you both for that.
“But then… I started to like you, started noticing the things Mia had learned when she was with you, the curiosity she brought home after being with you and Alex, the smart words she’d picked up, the books she was tearing through, the…
joy she had. I started to see why Mia loves you, why Alex does.
And I thought, maybe, we could make something better, the four of us, than we’d had before, a sort of odd, but good, adult blended family.
I focused on what I liked about Ethan, told myself it could work, that there were enough things I liked about him that outweighed the things I couldn’t stand. Until…”
“Until Alex told you,” I say to her, “what Ethan said to me.”
She sighs. “Yes. So now he’s gone.”
“For good?” I ask dazedly.
“From my life, yes. For the rest of our vacation, too,” she says. “He’s driving somewhere else now, I don’t even care where, just that I told him he’s made us all miserable enough to last a lifetime, and the least he could do was fuck off for three days and leave us in peace.”
“Seriously, Jen. You are a warrior queen.”
She laughs, before it catches at the end, thickening with tears.
I step closer and set my hand on her arm. “I’m sorry.”
“You have literally nothing to be sorry for,” she says. “Ethan is the one who should be sorry, but I don’t even care if he is. It’s done.”
“I’m still sorry,” I say again, quietly, “that he hurt you.”
Jen nods. “He did, but only a little.” Then she glances my way. “I never let him in much, never really opened up. Probably because I knew, all along, he was going to let me down.”
A tear slips down her cheek, and I reach for her, the instinct to comfort her taking over, but she steps back, shaking her head. “I’ve cried in front of you enough, Thea.”
“Jen—”
“Please.” She takes another step back. “I swear, I’ll be okay. I just need some time alone, with my own thoughts.”
I nod, before retreating across the deck, then slipping inside, quiet as I drag the door shut.