Chapter Twenty #2
“I’ll be back soon.” Aubrey sounds eager when she says it, and it feels nice.
She looks forward to seeing Florence again, to getting back into a routine that feels like hers.
She’ll miss Maggie, like she always does, like she always will.
But the thing is, she misses Maggie even when she’s home, and living in two places makes it harder to have only one heart.
So now she can only choose herself, and do things for herself, and Maggie will have to get on a plane and join her by the sea and understand things Aubrey can’t put into words yet.
To Florence, she says, “My brain’s begging to be picked, not to worry. ”
“Good. I think Arthur’s gone a little insane, too, so maybe you can put him back in his place.”
Aubrey’s breath itches. “How’s he gone insane?” she asks, in a very normal way. In the depths of her stomach, her secret stirs. It feels precious and fragile, unsteady on its feet.
“Mostly he doesn’t talk very much, and he takes a lot of walks.
It’s very weird. Who willfully takes walks in the winter like this?
It’s not like he’s got a dog or anything.
” Florence hums, as if thinking to herself.
Then she adds, “And when he does talk, he asks me all these pressing questions about how things have been, like he’s suddenly very interested in what I’ve got going on.
What I’ve got planned, how busy I’ve been.
I mean, I know you don’t find it funny, so I won’t joke about it anymore, but I swear at some point I was like, are you trying to get me to talk about Aubrey or something? ”
“Did you say that to him?”
“I did, yeah.” Florence doesn’t say anything else, like the anecdote doesn’t merit much more attention. But Aubrey presses on, “Well, what did he say?”
A second passes before Florence answers.
There’s a smile in her voice but her tone has shifted a little to something more serious.
“He got very flustered, and he blamed it on the beer, though that wasn’t very convincing.
He said something like ’Can’t a guy show interest in his friends’ lives without being questioned?
’, and then he went all, whatever, I don’t care. ”
“Mm.” Aubrey tries to picture the scene Florence recalls—maybe they were at a pub, maybe at Florence’s place. She wonders if it really was the beer, if maybe he did want to hear about her. “That’s funny,” she says, though she must not sound like she means it.
“I’m glad to hear you’re on your way back. I’ll make sure to let everyone know.”
“Oh, you don’t have to.”
“No, I know. I think they’ll want to know. People miss you up here.”
There’s something in the emphasis Florence puts on they, and people, that makes Aubrey’s ears tingle. Maybe she hopes Florence has figured it out, somehow. Maybe it’s disgustingly obvious, though she likes to pretend it isn’t.
Everything beyond this very moment is dizzying and scary—returning to Lunenburg, talking to Arthur, talking to Florence, to Louise.
When Aubrey pictures lengthy scenarios in her mind of how things might unfold, she can’t figure out the roads to take that would make it fun and easy and like the movies.
She anticipates instead a sort of crippling shame she can’t quite explain, as if it seems so daunting to go back on her word.
She’s told everyone she didn’t like him.
How can she go about this now? And why does she care so much?
She hasn’t even talked to Arthur yet, hasn’t even figured out if he feels as she does and if there ever might be something there at all, and all she thinks of is herself, and other people’s eyes on her heart. She worries about pride that no one but herself could possibly worry about.
And yet.
Pride is nestled so intimately with love, and relationships, and people, so closely intertwined with fear of failure and weakness, which love is soaked in through its core.
Aubrey has sat and watched the people around her flirt with love and pride in equal measures as if they’re impossible to distinguish from one another, dipping their toes in one while dragging the other behind.
Refusing to text first, to call before a certain amount of time has passed.
To say “I love you” first, to talk through issues that can too easily go unsaid instead.
She’s seen it so often as she sat on her own and her expectations lowered, her patience expired.
She’s had time to grow desperate and annoyed at the way people won’t talk about things, and how terrible they are at conflict.
It felt very easy to watch and decide she’d do better.
Now she finds herself exactly as bad as everyone else, sitting here and overthinking everything except him, and her, and the two of them.
Everything that matters less but that feels like more.
She promises Florence to let her know the second she’s on her way back. Some things linger unsaid between the two of them, but Aubrey chooses to ignore them for now.
The next day, she sits at Maggie’s kitchen table and writes a response to Renée.
In it she is careful with her words, with relating without letting her own experience tint her thoughts too heavily.
She insists to Renée that life is too short to force yourself to go on a second, third date.
That she deserves something sweeping. Aubrey reads it to herself four times, and once out loud to Maggie, who says, “Shit, this is good.”
Then she reads and rereads the other message from this guy Theo. He’s a childhood friend of Renée’s who comes off shy on the page, but in the way guys do sometimes when they try to talk about their feelings while fighting their instinct to shut the world out.