Chapter 20
Lola
Friday night I don’t pretend I’m going back to Doris Harrow’s.
I don’t construct a reason to stay. I don’t wait to be invited.
I show up at the pack house at six with the leftover honey from the stall and a bag of the good bread Tristan made.
I set them on the kitchen counter. Tristan looks at the bread and at me and does the quiet-pleased thing, and that’s the full extent of the negotiation.
I live here now, apparently.
I’m not examining this. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.
This Friday evening has a different feel than the previous ones, and I notice it from inside it, which is new.
Before, I’ve been noticing things from a careful remove, by observing the room, observing myself in the room, keeping the analytical distance that lets me pretend I’m here for reasons rather than wants.
Tonight I don’t have the distance.
Tonight I’m just in it.
Tristan makes dinner with the bread and something slow-cooked that has been running since this morning and fills the whole house with a smell that is one of the better things that has happened to me in recent memory.
Jack sets the table with the chaos of someone who knows where everything is and chooses to be chaotic about it anyway. I take the stack of plates from him mid-process and do it properly. He watches this with an expression of delight like I’ve performed a magic trick.
“She fixed my table,” he says, to the room.
“Your table was wrong,” I point out.
“My table was artistic.”
“Your table was going to cause someone to have an uneven number of glasses.”
“That someone would have coped.”
“Now they won’t have to.” I set the last glass. “You’re welcome.”
Ryan comes in and stops in the doorway. He looks at the table and then at me.
“She fixed it,” Jack says again.
“I can see that,” Ryan replies, and there’s something in his voice that I put in the pile of things I’m not examining.
We eat.
And this is the thing I can’t adequately explain, the thing that has been happening for two weeks but that I’m feeling tonight without the glass between me and it: dinner at this table is the best part of the day.
The food and the noise and Jack’s tangential stories.
Tristan’s satisfaction and Archer across the table, who ate the bread first, who I kissed today, who has said nothing about the encounter and somehow that’s the right call.
Ryan at the end of the table who looks at me at intervals with the expression I’ve noted a hundred times.
I eat the slow-cooked meal and I am not managing myself tonight.
I notice this.
I’m just here.
After dinner Jack produces a pack of cards.
This is, I discover, a recurring thing. They play cards after dinner when there’s nothing urgent.
It’s a loose and mostly structureless game that seems to have rules which are a combination of standard and invented and entirely dependent on who’s winning and who’s decided to change them.
“This is not a real game,” I say, within about ten minutes.
“It’s a real game,” Jack insists.
“Which game is it?”
“Our game.”
“Which real game is it based on?”
He pauses. “Several.”
“This is chaos with a deck of cards.”
“This is tradition,” Tristan says, and he’s holding a completely inexplicable hand and looks entirely comfortable about it.
“How do you win?”
“Most points,” Archer replies.
“How do you get points?”
“Winning rounds.”
“How do you win rounds?”
“Best hand.”
“What constitutes the best hand?”
Archer looks at his cards. “It’s contextual.”
I stare at him. He looks back with an unbothered expression. His mouth does something at the corner.
I kissed that mouth today.
I play the cards.
I lose the round spectacularly, which is apparently very funny.
I argue that the system is rigged, which Jack refutes with statistics I cannot verify, and somewhere in the argument about the statistics I am laughing.
I just let it happen, and it sounds strange to my own ears, my real laugh, unfamiliar from the inside.
The pack reacts to it.
I deal the next hand.
“She’s going to win this round,” Jack says.
“You don’t know that,” I reply.
“She’s been learning the rules for three hands. She’s going to extrapolate and she’s going to win.” He looks at Tristan. “The ring toss. First go, she was testing the physics. By the third throw she had it.”
“I was watching the axe throw,” Tristan says.
“First throw was exploratory,” Archer adds, without looking up from his cards. “Every subsequent throw was precision.”
I turn my attention to him. He looks at his cards.
“You’ve all been watching me,” I accuse.
“You’re very watchable,” Jack says, with the absolute simplicity of someone stating a weather fact.
The table is quiet for a beat.
Ryan, who has not said anything for this portion of the conversation, looks at me across the table. “Yes,” he says. Just that.
I look at my cards.
I inexplicably and questionably win the round.
The closing weekend announcement happens at nine.
There’s a tradition—Jack explains it while Tristan makes tea—where the last two days of the carnival get a closing ceremony, held at the central stage.
The full town comes out for it. Music, the mayor doing a short address which Jack says is always exactly seven minutes long because the mayor has done this seventeen times and has it fixed, the lighting of something ceremonial.
“You have to come,” Jack urges.
“I was going to—”
“You were going to say you’d think about it.”
“I was going to say yes,” I say, which is true, which I would not have said two weeks ago.
He looks at me. Something in his face does a soft, unguarded thing. “Good.”
* * *
We walk to the central stage as a group and it’s the most natural thing that has happened in two weeks, which is saying something given that natural has been happening gradually, incrementally, without my permission.
We walk in the formation that has become our formation, which I’ve noticed and not commented on. Ryan at my left, slightly ahead. Jack at my right, slightly behind. Tristan level with me, close enough for easy contact. Archer behind, his presence that familiar cold-air pressure at my back.
They don’t discuss this arrangement. They don’t negotiate it. They just find it, every time.
I’ve stopped fighting the warmth of it.
Main Street is full. The whole town is out with the energy of a community doing something it does every year and enjoys every time.
People greet the pack as we move through, greet me in the same breath, the and Lola that has started happening as a matter of course, the way you include someone you’ve absorbed into your understanding of a group.
Elsie from the gas station grabs my arm briefly as we pass, says something about the stall that I respond to, and when she releases me Ryan guides us around the cluster of people at the stage area, his hand briefly at my back.
His hand at my back is different from Saturday at the pier. Saturday it was weighted. It was the near-bond pressure, the everything at once, the pull I stepped away from. Tonight it’s easy. Like a door held open. No pressure. Just: this way.
I go this way.
We find a position at the stage edge with a good sightline.
The mayor begins at exactly nine o’clock.
Jack mouths along to the opening sentence, which apparently doesn’t change year to year.
I look at him doing this and the laugh surfaces again.
Archer is beside me, his shoulder against mine is warm and solid and he doesn’t move it away.
The mayor’s address is, as promised, exactly seven minutes.
The ceremonial lighting is a suspended lantern above the stage, larger than the individual ones from opening night. When it goes up, the crowd makes the sound it made before, that communal exhale of people seeing something that still works on them after sixty years of seeing it.
I watch the lantern rise.
Tristan hands cider around and I drink it while watching the lantern clear the tree line. I find Ryan in my peripheral vision. He’s watching me. Not the lantern. Me.
“It’s so pretty,” I say.
“It sure is,” he agrees.
After the ceremony the crowd disperses into the carnival proper. The closing weekend energy is different from the opening, it’s more settled, familiar, the ease of something at its ending after an intense couple of weeks.
Jack takes me to the game alley. Or, he gestures toward it and I go, which is the same thing at this point. We do the full round, ring toss where I beat my own record, axe throw, the ball game at the end that I’ve never tried and which Jack is extraordinarily bad at despite claiming expertise.
“You said you were good at this,” I say.
“I said I had experience. I didn’t specify talent.”
I throw. It lands.
“You’re insufferable,” he says.
“You’re a bad liar.”
“I’m an excellent liar, I just didn’t apply the skill here.” He retrieves the balls with the dignity of someone who has made a choice to lose and owns it. “Do you want to try the maze again?”
“The maze where we made out?”
“The maze where you found the gap in the canvas that none of us knew about.” He looks at me. “But if you want to keep your mind in the gutter, I won’t complain.”
I go into the maze.
We spend forty minutes within the winding canvas walls, which are lit for the final weekend with different lighting. The disorienting effect has been softened into something more like atmosphere. Jack knows the layout now, or he says he does, and he gets it wrong twice, which I gleefully point out.
“Left,” I say.
“I know.”
“You went right.”
“I course-corrected.”
“After the dead end.”
“The dead end is part of the experience.”
We come out through my gap and emerge into the exterior corridor in the warm night air. Unfortunately, there are too many people around to make out this time.
Ryan is outside. He’s always where I’m going before I get there, not in a way that feels like surveillance but in a way that feels like he’s coincidentally moved in the same direction I’m moving. Oriented the same way.
“Lost?” he asks Jack.
“Never,” Jack says. “We used the gap.”
Ryan looks at me.
“It’s a secret,” I state.
“A secret?” He asks, then shakes his head like he doesn’t want to know anything more. “Feel like a walk?”
We walk. All of us, eventually. Jack peels away to the game alley but returns, Tristan finds us at the river path, Archer materializes from the perimeter like he does.
The five of us along the river in the closing-weekend carnival light, the water dark beside us, the music from the stage reaching us in fragments.
I am walking in the center of them. The warmth of them on every side is wonderful. It’s the thing I couldn’t tolerate on Saturday night. The thing that overwhelmed me.
Tonight I breathe it in.
Something has changed since Saturday. Since the pier, since the honey jar, since the ring toss counter and Archer’s mouth and Jack’s hand-offered coffee and Tristan’s midnight stall and Ryan’s okay.
Something has settled.
Jack says something. Tristan responds. Archer walks in silence at my right, shoulder near mine. I listen, and I look at the river, and I think about the fortuneteller. You’re going to spend a long time looking for the right place to land.
I look at the lights on the water.
I think: what if this is it?
Not a plan. Not a commitment. Just what if? Held lightly, carefully, like something fragile and new.
What if Sweetwater Valley is the right place? What if the pack house couch is where the carrying ends? What if four men who smell like home and cedar and wood smoke and snow are the reason the town felt different from the moment I drove into it?
What if I’m meant to be here all along and just needed to run far enough to arrive?
I breathe in the river air.
Jack laughs at something. Tristan walks confidently, like he’s where he belongs. Archer’s shoulder is warm. Ryan is at my left, slightly ahead, and he turns his head and looks at me and I look back and…
I feel it.
Not overwhelm. Something quieter. Something with less emergency in it. The feeling of something that has been true for a while and has finally been acknowledged. Not with drama but with the simple, almost mundane recognition of a fact.
I want to stay.
The recognition is so clean, so quiet, so entirely without the panic I’d have expected, that I almost don’t notice it’s happened.
But I do notice.
I look at the river.
I hold it.
We’re on the pier when the sound reaches us. I know it before my brain names it. The body knows first, the signal that hits the nervous system before cognition. My shoulders go up. My hands, in my pockets, close on empty air.
The distant wail.
Then it’s closer.
Blue and red in the trees on the far side of the bridge, light strobing through the branches.
Police.
More than one vehicle. The sound splits the air. Sirens. Two, maybe three cars, coming from different approach roads. They wouldn’t do this for a traffic stop, it’s not a noise complaint, it’s coordinated.
My heart rate doubles.
I am here.
I am here and the law is here. I have been in Sweetwater Valley for two weeks and I have done everything right. But it wasn’t enough, it’s never enough, and the thing I stopped running from has been running toward me the entire time.
The pack has gone still. Ryan first. That immediate quality of his stillness that means he’s read the situation and is already three steps into response. Archer’s hand comes to my arm, not grabbing, just present, and I feel it through my jacket.
“Lola,” Ryan says quietly.
The carnival around us is still operating and the sirens are coming from the bridge. In approximately two minutes the distance will close, and I have four hundred dollars and a burner phone and a borrowed car with a slow tire and I should run, I should…
“Lola.” Ryan again. “Look at me.”
I drag my panicked gaze to him. His face is exactly what it always is. Calm. Present. Not afraid. Looking at me like he has already made a decision and is waiting for me to catch up to it.
“We handle this,” he says.
“You don’t—” My voice comes out different than I want. “You don’t know what this is.”
“No. But you’re going to tell us. Right now.” His eyes hold mine. “And then we handle it.”
The sirens are close.
The blue and red light is painting the tree line.
I look at Ryan. At Archer’s hand on my arm. At Jack, who has gone to absolute stillness and is watching me with eyes that are not afraid of whatever I’m about to say. At Tristan, behind me, warm and solid.
The town I wanted to stay in.
The words I’ve been holding alone for two weeks, heavy and private, are right there on the tip of my tongue. I just don’t know if I’m brave enough to release them.