Chapter Twelve #2
“Thanks for hanging out with me on the phone tonight, too. I really do miss you.”
There’s a short silence. Maggie says, “I do, too.” It sounds a little polite. Aubrey wants to ask again about the man she’s seeing. Maggie’s not one to keep these things to herself, usually.
After a moment, Maggie adds, “You will come back to us, yeah?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re just making Lunenburg sound a little better today. Which is good, I mean. I’m glad for you.”
“Of course, yes.”
“There are new guys around here, too.”
“Right.” Aubrey frowns at her phone. She says, “I don’t pick my location depending on the presence of eligible men.”
“Sure. We all do a little.”
“I came here to get away and figure out the next steps of my life. That’s why I’m here. So I don’t agree with what you’re saying.”
“I just mean, it’s a bit disillusioned to think we don’t make our decisions a little based on the possibility of finding true love. It’s on our minds and such.”
Aubrey wants to say no, but she’s not a great liar. “Well, whatever,” is all she finds to respond.
“Okay.” There’s clanging again on the line, the sound of a plate on the counter.
“Did I tell you Nicolas picked up jogging on a psychotic level?” Nicolas is Maggie’s neighbour, a guy just a few years older who rivals Maggie in his rotation of men around his apartment.
“I swear, marathon fever takes new victims every day. He’s got these tiny little shorts. You should see them.”
Aubrey sits up in the tub and pulls up her conversation with Arthur. Her fingers hover over the screen for a second. She hopes he’s already watching the movie and won’t respond for a while, maybe not until tomorrow. She’s not sure how to go about this or how she means for it to sound.
She types, Raincheck for tomorrow? and sends it before she can change her mind. To Maggie, she says, “You’ve got to take a picture and send it to me.”
“I will, yeah. About what we were saying just now, I wanted to ask—you’re not really staying in Lunenburg until next summer, are you?”
Aubrey sets her phone on the top of the toilet tank, next to the tub. When she stands from the water, she’s covered in suds and catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She wonders for a second what she would look like through someone else’s eyes. “What do you mean?” she asks Maggie.
“Well, you know, it’s just a long time. You went there, you gave it a shot. You can come home earlier, no?”
“Why would I do that?”
“I feel like you’re miserable over there.”
Aubrey almost wants to laugh. Just a minute ago, Maggie was saying she seemed to enjoy herself more.
She doesn’t laugh. Instead, she says, “Not more so than I am at home, I don’t think.”
“Then I’m the one who’s miserable, I don’t know.
I just feel like you’re trying to prove something you don’t have to.
I think I’ve decided the whole moving away for a year thing is so glamorized, and why?
You’re away from your family and your friends and everything you know, and we talk on the phone all the time when we could do it face to face, and I could see your expression and figure out if you’re really interested in what I’m saying or not. ”
Aubrey wants to say something. She doesn’t. Adult friendships are so fragile in their balance of what can be said and what can’t, a brittle ecosystem built on nostalgic history and a mutual agreement to endure adult life together without being quite so honest with each other.
“Maggie.”
“There’s a bottle of hair dye in the bathroom now, just sitting on the sink. I bought it the other day and I’ve nearly used it twelve times by now.”
“What colour is it?”
“Red.” Red. On Maggie’s incredible natural dirty blonde.
“So it is serious, then.” Outside, the snow is still falling steadily. Aubrey wraps herself in a towel and drains the tub.
“I mean it, you know,” Maggie says. “I think you should come back. You’re sticking around this place because you agreed to help your aunt, but she’d be fine without you, you said it yourself.
And things are weird between the two of you.
I don’t think you’re having a good time over there, but you won’t really admit it.
And this whole thing kind of makes me feel shitty, honestly.
Like you don’t want to be hanging around in the real world, where the rest of us are. ”
Aubrey says, “That’s just not true,” but the problem is it might be. Maybe just a little. She moves her phone from the toilet to the vanity, and just as she sets it down, it lights up with a new message. She pretends very hard not to notice, but in the mirror her reflection makes it impossible.
“I do worry about you, is the thing,” Maggie insists.
“I’m not just being selfish here. I thought it’d be a good idea for you to do this but I think you’re avoiding things, and telling yourself they’ll work themselves out, or maybe they’ll fall into place if you take enough planes and trains and car rides and remove yourself far enough from the elements of your life that you think are ugly.
It’s fine if you don’t like everything about your existence.
But maybe this is just delaying solutions by a year. ”
There is a very long silence. Aubrey is staring at herself in the mirror. So Maggie also thinks she’s not doing the right thing. As is Louise. The list of people who seem to support Aubrey’s decisions is growing so short. Maybe she is getting all of it wrong.
When she looks away, she realizes she’s holding her phone now, her other hand holding the towel to her chest. Maggie adds, softly, “Sorry about all this.”
“You’re just catching me a little off-guard,” Aubrey confesses. Her heart is in her throat. She pretends it’s because of what Maggie said even when she pulls up Arthur’s response.
She reads an apology, and something about the date he’s got planned tomorrow night. In the background, Maggie is saying, “It’s just something I’ve been thinking about recently. I guess I just had to tell you about it now. Maybe I’m wrong.”
“No, yeah.” Aubrey rereads the sentence on the screen. She wants to ask Arthur who he’s going out with, where he met her. She’s not sure why, but she feels she wouldn’t like her. “I’m sorry,” she hears herself say. “I’m not—can we talk about this later?”
She takes one, two steps back to sit down on the toilet lid. In the back of her mind, she hears Maggie’s words, and she fails to make enough sense of them to agree. Even if she did, she wouldn’t know what to say. Maggie sighs. “Fine.”
“What do you want me to say to that, Mags? I’m not going to fly back home tomorrow morning because you think I’m making a mistake.
You told me I should go out and fuck up and regret things, but you also want me to sit by your side and iron every little aspect of my life out and have all the answers by staying put.
I don’t think I’m entirely in the right, but I don’t agree you’ve got it all figured out.
And I don’t think I’m delaying everything by a year.
By that definition, everything is delaying everything.
I’m just living. The days will pass whether I’m here or elsewhere. I mean, I don’t know.”
Again, Maggie says, “Fine, yeah. I guess neither of us knows best.”
“I feel that’s pretty obvious.”
“Okay. I should let you go, then.”
Outside, the snow is relentless. Aubrey says, “I actually do like it here. Even if I can’t figure Louise out, and the house is frigid, and the days are long. I’m enjoying my time here. I think that’s all that matters.”
“Mhm.”
“I do want to see a picture of those shorts.”
“Of course, yeah.”
“And if you decide you don’t believe in jinxes anymore, I’d like to hear more about that man who’s keeping you company, too. If ever you feel like getting validated on how hot he is and whatnot.”
“You know me well.” There’s a little smile in Maggie’s voice, though maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
Aubrey says, “Yeah.” And she thinks about how knowing someone well is knowing what they like to hear. How she omits very purposely to remind Maggie she’s yet to visit her, too.
They bid each other goodnight, and then silence returns for the first time in over an hour.
Aubrey sits there in the bathroom with water running down her legs, snow outside the window, and Arthur’s name on her screen saying he’s got a date the next day.
Good for him. Some adults go out on dates with other adults in hopes of finding a lifetime partner.
It’s what Aubrey ought to be doing, too.
She’s not sure why she’s been holding off on that these past few months.
It feels like summer’s just ended, and how did it get to November?
This is such an intrinsic part of adulthood.
Wondering how it got to a season, though you were there the whole time.
She doesn’t write back to Arthur. She’s not sure what to say, anyway. She pulls up her conversation with Florence instead and writes, Tomorrow night, let’s go out?
Florence responds very quickly. Aubrey buries her head in her drawers to pick an outfit. She leaves her phone in the bathroom.