Chapter 37
I awaken in a bedroom. The ceiling and the darkness and the crispness of the sheets are so familiar it’s a moment before I realize I’m not in my own bed.
“No,” I say out loud. “I didn’t read it tonight. I’m not supposed to be here.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to will my body back to sleep.
Nothing happens. I count sheep. I recite the alphabet twice from Z to A.
Finally, I resign myself to counting the knots in the wood on Dot’s pine-planked ceiling, which soothes me somewhat until I am startled by the sound of a car engine outside.
“I’m not going out there,” I say to no one in particular, and as if the universe is answering back, I hear the soft plink of a rock hitting my window and then Kitty’s whispered voice.
“Dotty? Dotty, are you there?”
I pull the covers up and over my head, but the rocks continue to come.
Plink.
Plink.
Plink.
Plink.
I get up with the idea that I will shut the curtains and thus shut Kitty out of my life for good. But as I reach up to close them, I catch a glimpse of her.
The moon illuminates her finely made wool coat, her fancy hat, and the gleaming town car with its engine still running. Suddenly, I no longer want to hide here in Dot’s bed. I want to give Kitty a piece of my mind.
I don’t bother trying to keep quiet as I stomp down the stairs, pulling open the front door and slamming it behind me.
Kitty smiles when she sees me. She extends her arms as if she expects me to fall into her embrace, but I stop short, folding my arms across my chest.
“What do you want, Kitty?”
Her face falls as she registers my tone.
“I’m leaving now. I’ve come to say goodbye.”
If there was any uncertainty about which part of the story I stumbled into, it is cleared.
“So that’s it? This is how it all ends? You move to Toronto, marry Beau, and leave all of us behind to pick up the pieces of our lives?”
She closes her eyes and draws in a deep breath. “I don’t know what you want me to say. This was always my plan. You knew that.”
“In the beginning, yes.” I throw up my arms. “But you have to admit there was a while where you…”
Fell for him. Chose love. Made me think this was all going to work out.
I give in with an exasperated growl. There is no use fighting a past that has already happened. “I just thought that this was somehow going to be a love story.”
A single tear runs down Kitty’s cheek. She makes no attempt to wipe it away. “I hoped for a while it might be, too. I really wanted it to be.”
She glances toward the waiting car. “And you never know. Maybe one day it will be. But for now, I like to think of this as not an ending, just maybe a new chapter.”
She reaches toward me, trying to take me in her arms again, but I take a step backward.
“Dotty. Don’t be mad at me, please.”
She sounds so young and so sad. And part of me knows she’s just eighteen.
A kid, really. But the rest of me is thinking only of how Kitty St. Clair has inserted herself into my life without permission, leaving me a dance hall and sucking me into these dreams that have brought nothing but more heartache.
“I believed you, Kitty. All that crap you said about carving out your own destiny—never settling. Despite my better judgment, despite knowing the ending, I…”
I hoped.
With my whole heart for everything to end differently. For Kitty. For me.
“Did you even love him?”
It’s a full minute before she answers, and her voice is so quiet that I almost don’t hear her. “Of course I did. I do. But it’s complicated.”
“How is it complicated?”
She stares down at her feet, but her chin is high when she lifts her head again.
“I love him, but I love me even more.”
I laugh. It’s a single, bitter “Ha” that I cling to in hopes it will hold back the tears threatening to fall.
“At least you’re honest about it.” I throw out my arm in the direction of the waiting car. “Go. Be the fabulous Kitty St. Clair. Live your exciting life.”
I continue to back up toward the house. Done with Kitty. Done with the dream. Done with everything.
She turns and walks back toward the waiting car, pausing with her hand on the door.
“Take care of yourself, Dotty,” she says. “And if you have a moment, take care of him, too.”
With that, she gets back inside, and the car pulls a slow U-turn, its tires crunching against the gravel road as its taillights disappear into the dark.
—
I awake to the smell of coffee.
Then to the panic of thinking I must have slept through my seven a.m. alarm, and the brief relief that comes when I check my phone and see 6:50 on the screen.
That reprieve lasts only until I spot two voicemail notifications from Reeve—which I don’t listen to—along with two text messages, which I refuse to read.
Instead, I roll out of bed, throw on the scrubs I laid out the night before, grab my bag, and follow my nose to the kitchen, where my mom sits, fully dressed, mug clasped between her hands.
“Oh good, you’re up.” She stands and begins to pour me a cup, adding just the right amount of cream.
“You didn’t tell me last night what time you needed to leave.
I assumed it was early, but I wasn’t…” She leaves the thought unfinished as she hands me the coffee.
“I can drive you home. You won’t be able to get a cab this early. ”
Assuming Keady is like West Lake—one random Uber driver who has a habit of playing Call of Duty until dawn—I trust that she is probably right. I take a sip and nod. “Okay, thanks.”
She grabs her mug and heads to the front door. I grab my things and follow her, realizing she means we’re leaving right now. We get back into her little Toyota and begin to drive. The only sounds are of the wheels on the road and the sipping of coffee as each of us nurses our drink.
When we get into West Lake and she pulls onto Main Street, I begin to compose something to say.
My emotions range from lingering anger from our fight to gratitude for her midnight pickup to emotional exhaustion.
I think I’m going to go with a simple “Thanks, I appreciate it,” but then she zips right past my apartment and keeps driving.
“I still live back there.” I point at the pizza parlor, wondering if she forgot.
“I know,” she says and makes another quick turn, and it dawns on me exactly where she’s going.
She pulls up in front of Gigi’s cottage and puts the car into park.
We both stare at it silently for a moment before she finally speaks.
“My mother died in that little green house.” Her voice is quiet. “And her mother died in that little green house. I was hell-bent on getting as far away from it as I could.”
I snort at the bluntness of her statement. “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Did you know I lived in Toronto once?” she asks.
I don’t answer her question, but she takes my silence for a no.
“I was there for a year, right after high school,” she continues.
“My apartment was the cutest little bachelor above a laundromat on Queen Street. During the day, I worked at a twenty-four-hour diner—which I told myself was cooler and far more sophisticated than Lou’s, but now, with a little perspective, I see it was exactly like Lou’s—and on the weekend, I bartended at this gloriously dingy dive bar with live music. It was the best year of my life.”
My eyes remain on Gigi’s front porch. “So then, why did you come back?”
“Well.” She hesitates. “I met your father. And as you know, he didn’t stick around for very long, so when I found out you were coming, I knew I wanted to care for you but I wouldn’t be able to do it by myself. So I moved back in with Gigi, and I guess you know the rest.”
I am very aware. “You spent the next twenty years resenting being here and trying to get out again.”
She finally turns to me, waiting until I, too, make the move to meet her eyes.
“No. I didn’t resent it,” she says. “I made my choice. No one forced me to come back. What I resented was that when I was growing up, neither Mom nor Gigi supported me in wanting to have a life outside this town. They didn’t push me to meet new people or get an education past high school.
I wanted you to grow up seeing that there was a big, beautiful world out there.
I wanted you to know you could have a life that was more than just West Lake. ”
The silence stretches between us, and I think this conversation is over. I adjust the strap of my seatbelt, hoping she gets the hint that we should get going, but she places her hand over mine and squeezes, waiting again for me to look at her.
“I thought about what you said last night about how you couldn’t pay for your school.
” Her eyes drop momentarily before returning to mine.
“It made me realize that I went too far. I wanted more for myself, and I made some very bad choices. I know I don’t have the right to ask you to forgive me, but I am sorry.
I really thought I was doing the right thing for both of us. ”
I hear her apology, and I get it—sort of. While I can appreciate what she is saying, I’m not ready to open my arms and tell her everything is forgiven. Maybe I’ll get there someday, but right now my insides are too raw and too hurt from everything that has happened.
“Well, at least I’ve learned to be happy here,” I tell her. “And I guess that’s a good thing, seeing as I am not going anywhere.”
My mother is quiet for a moment, then two moments, then three. The clock on her dash starts ticking too close to nine.
“I need to go to work.”
My mom shakes her head, shifts the car from park to drive, and circles the block until we pull up in front of my apartment, where she cuts the engine.
I grab my bag, but her hand finds my arm as I push open the passenger door.
“If you’re truly content here, then be content.” Her voice wavers slightly. “But if you’re not, I hope my mistakes won’t be the things that stop you, because trust me, Julia, you will regret it.”