Chapter Twenty-Two
Nine years later
The car windows are blurred with rain, the street beyond the windshield streaked by the steady rhythm of the wipers. In the passenger seat, Aubrey bends over to tie up the strap of her heel.
To her left, Maggie says, “We’re nearly there.” They take a left to pull into a half-full parking lot. “I can see the door!” she squeals, her nails rapping on the wheel.
Aubrey sits up to watch the building come into view. “Jesus, it’s been a while,” she says, mostly to herself.
Last time it was weird in a different way, when she was twenty-seven and felt like she’d barely just left this place, had hardly changed at all.
Now she can’t find much in common with the last time she set foot here.
She feels like a mom driving in after dinner for a parent-teacher meeting.
In the little purse on her lap, she feels for the weight of her phone.
She’d turned it off when she got in the car, at Maggie’s insistence.
She knows Aubrey too well, knows she wants to check if anyone’s tried to call or text her.
“Are you with me?” Maggie asks as the engine clicks off, and Aubrey realizes she’s staring off into space.
“Sorry,” she says with a pitiful smile. “I am, yes. I swear.”
Maggie’s gaze drops to Aubrey’s hands, tucked under herself. “You got your fingers crossed?”
The sound of their laughter melts in with the rain as they step out of the car.
It’s a short walk to the entrance but already Aubrey’s hair is wet, and her coat, and her shoes.
Their heels click on the pavement and the rain is relentless.
Aubrey slows at the top of the stairs, but Maggie rushes on without a second look at the ridiculous carvings on the doors.
Aubrey dabs her forehead with care. She worries for a second about the creases in her powder, the rain messing up her makeup, but only for a second. She doesn’t really care what these people will think of her—they’ve all aged the same, grown the same.
“Come on,” Maggie says, one foot inside and the other still out, her entire body used to prop the door open.
Behind them, a group of three women is also rushing through the parking lot. Maggie presses on, “Get in, for shit’s sake. I’ll get us something to drink.”
Inside, nothing has changed except for the people.
Aubrey slips her coat off with a polite smile at the surrounding crowd.
She thinks they’ve all changed so much. They probably think the same of her, and themselves.
She crosses her hands over her chest and makes sure, without really thinking about it, that her ring finger is showing.
The hall isn’t arranged exactly like last time, but it’s close enough. It’s weird how the last reunion is what she thinks back to now, and not the last days she spent as a student in this place.
Maggie reappears by Aubrey's side with bright eyes and two glasses of champagne.
“I’m so glad you came,” she says with a relieved sigh. They clink their glasses together and take a long sip. “I’m even more glad I didn’t have to organize this one.”
Aubrey studies the faces surrounding them. The place is full—surely almost everyone is here already. “Seen anyone good yet?”
“Mhm.” Maggie shakes her head no. “But I checked the RSVP’s, and apparently Victor won’t even make it, so I’m not sure there’s anyone good I could see.”
“Remember last time? You dreaded him showing up.”
“Yes, well. Rightfully so.” Maggie shrugs, her attention obviously stolen by the people around them. “But I would’ve been glad to catch up, this time. I kinda wanted to see which one of us turned out the best.”
“Obviously it’s you.”
Maggie snorts. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Everyone is on their own this time as well, no spouses or children allowed, so it’s hard to see at a glance where everyone’s at.
It’s a nice feeling, reminiscent of days far behind Aubrey.
She used to like it, that people couldn’t tell how lonely she was just by looking at her.
Or maybe they could tell, but at least it wasn’t outright obvious, like a badge stitched to her shirt that announced to everyone she didn’t have a funny story to tell about an irritating boyfriend yet.
She smiles at the thought. Next to her, Maggie waves at someone and asks how they’ve been from across the room.
Aubrey looks down at her hand, then at her bag for just a second.
She misses home already, though staying with Maggie for a few days has felt like stepping back in time.
In the weight of her eyelids, she still feels the wine they drank yesterday.
It only takes a minute for Ivory to show up, heading straight for Maggie with arms wide and a face that hardly moves now. She looks eerily unchanged by time, still a dead ringer for Julia Roberts, except maybe she looks more tired now, and her hair is a somewhat different shade of red.
“Ladies!” she exclaims, standing before Aubrey and Maggie as if awaiting appraisal.
She and Aubrey don’t hug, or comment on how long it’s been.
Ivory’s hands are empty and she moves slowly to drop them on her belly.
“So nice seeing you here tonight. It’s a shame we couldn’t bring our husbands, huh? ”
Maggie snorts. “Real shame, yeah. How’ve you been, love?”
“Oh, you know.” Ivory giggles. “Wonderful, honestly. Got the whole squad waiting for me at home, the only one I got to bring tonight is this one.” She points at the top of her belly, which is hardly protruding at all.
Aubrey and Maggie hurry to congratulate her.
Ivory tells them about Steve and their recent five-year anniversary, how amazing he is, and while she speaks their circle grows bigger, with women whispering “Hi!” to each other as they attach themselves to the conversation and gasp at Ivory’s stories.
Julie, Marianne, and Rachel are there, strangers that Aubrey recognizes in an instant.
It’s so funny to reunite like this, with people she hasn’t seen in years and yet still knows so quickly, so easily.
She’ll know them forever, and then not know them at all, recognizing their faces while not having the slightest clue who they’ve become or what they do with their time.
They used to share the majority of their lives together.
Now they smile at each other politely and pretend not to find it odd.
While Aubrey stands there, she thinks almost exclusively of her life outside of these walls—her home, her family, how she has to head back first thing tomorrow, the things she’ll have to catch up on.
The group doesn’t pay her much mind. When she was younger, she used to think it was because she wasn’t really part of who they are, too different from their experiences.
She’d blamed herself for lagging behind and digging a well between herself and the friendships of her past.
Now that she’s caught up, and there’s no well to fill or distance to close, she finds that her experience wasn’t to blame at all.
The friends we make as kids are simply not the friends we make as adults, and when old memories are replaced by enough new ones, we allow them to fade and keep only the desire to be admired by the people we used to envy.
Marianne suggests that they visit that same room they’d hung out in last time, for old times’ sake.
The group moves to the classroom that still looks and smells exactly the same as it always had.
When the girls take a seat this time, they do it differently—more conscious of their movement, of how they sit, and they each seem a little distracted, like they’ve got lives awaiting them beyond this school, a constant call only they can hear.
It makes Aubrey smile to notice this, because it highlights so plainly something she doesn’t think about very often anymore: that she feels the same way as all of these women.
These girls who used to look at her with pity and tiptoe around her.
Who asked questions with puzzled surprise and failed to wrap their heads around her reality.
Now she sits with them and knows that if they turn to her and say, “We’ve all been there, haven’t we? ”, she’ll say yes.
It doesn’t matter today whether it took fourteen or twenty-eight years. Even if it took more, at some point the differences of life blend in and disappear, until you get old enough to understand that no one really cares in the end.
Everything is different this time, but also oddly the same. Maggie tells the girls she’s been seeing this guy, Colin, for about six months now.
Marianne gasps and says, “Oh, you’re so brave! I can’t imagine still being on the market now. I just about thank my husband every day for sticking around.”
The group laughs as one cohesive unit. Ivory nods along with her hand still on her barely-showing belly.
Rachel interrupts to say, “Well, it’s one month until I’m officially divorced, so I’ll let you know how that goes,” which elicits an aww of empathy.
“I’ll take you out, Rachel,” Maggie insists. “You’ll see it’s not so bad.”
“I kind of envy the both of you, honestly,” Julie cuts in.
Her hair is cut short to her shoulders, and she looks exhausted.
With pinched lips and angry eyes turned to the ceiling, she says, “If I could get just five minutes to myself without my kids and David asking me where stuff goes, what’s for dinner, whether I can wipe their ass, I might just trade it all in for some peace.
Just a little. Not forever, but you know. ”
The girls hum in approval. Ivory says, “I think we all would, honestly.”
Maggie and Aubrey share a look. It’s quick and only for the two of them, but immediately Julie says, “What about you, Aubrey?”
“Oh.” The attention shifts to her. “I don’t think I’d trade anything in, honestly,” she says. It feels good but sacrilegious. The girls offer blank stares in return.
“So, things have been good,” Rachel says. It almost sounds like a reproach.
“Amazing, yeah. I’m still up in Lunenburg these days. I’m not sure how I ended up sticking around, but here I am! My family and I manage a couple of inns up there. It’s been great. Not the most lavish living, but you know how things go.”
Julie’s usual hard expression softens. She says, “Must be stunning.”
“It’s hard to beat, yeah.”
Marianne jumps in, “It’s been a while since I’ve seen your name on that column you used to share around.”
“Oh, right. Yeah, that ended a couple years back. Had a great run, but after a while it got a bit repetitive, I think. At some point you just run out of words. But I loved it. I’m working on putting a few of my best pieces together in a collection, maybe.”
Marianne huffs a quick laugh. “Let me know when it’s out. I think my oldest might benefit from hearing about what you went through. She’s not fifteen yet and already worrying about getting her first girlfriend.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Marianne,” Aubrey says, and she means it. Her smile is wide and almost painful, and for the first time in a really long while, she sits with these women and feels like she could stick around.
They start chatting again about the complexities of seemingly simple lives—how fast the kids are growing, how long it’s been since they’ve hung out like this, if they’ve heard about so and so separating, getting back together, how messy things seem to be.
With time, human nature doesn’t change—it still sits comfortably in the fascination of observing others, in human connection, in the emotion that runs so deeply at the very core of existence. Love.
And it’s so funny, how Aubrey had spent so long waiting for it, yearning for it, and now that she’s soaked in it for years, she knows that even though this love is precious and intimate and something she couldn’t imagine parting with, she’s also done a whole lot of great things in her life other than being someone’s lover.
The story didn’t end when she met Arthur, or when they kissed, or when they had their first fight.
There is really no beginning or end, because life is both at once, all the time—she sits now among women who are on their own, who wish for a different life, for things Aubrey has.
They stand in different pastures and look at each other in envy.
And it has to be beautiful, because it’s such an intrinsic part of existing, of growing, of loving.
Happiness is simply not a permanent state of being.
It’s an emotion that comes and goes, like sadness or anger, and when it passes by, you grasp onto it whether you’ve got everything you could ever dream of or you’re desperately trying to mend yourself.
“Thanks for coming,” Maggie says to Aubrey a couple hours later, when the crowd grows thin and they collect their coats. “I don’t think I could’ve done it without you here.”
Aubrey tucks a strand of hair behind Maggie’s ear. She’s grown more protective of her, now that she has children, and the two of them live so far away from each other. “It’s been wonderful, really.”
Often, she wishes Maggie could enjoy the things she gets to enjoy, but she never says it out loud, because it would sound too much like what she once hated to hear.
“I’m really very proud of you,” Maggie says.
Aubrey blinks, surprised. “What for?”
“You know what. Everything. It’s great, what you’ve done. I think about it all the time.”
“I think about you all the time. I want you to have everything you hope for.”
“Oh, I don’t think I’d do well with everything I hope for. My head would get too big. But I have everything I need, and more. I’m good.”
They share a one arm hug, both aware of the people around them, blurs of their youth that linger.
Tomorrow, they’ll be back to their regular lives and routines, so different from each other but meeting in the middle in the little things—taming their hair, worrying about dinner, shaving in the shower.
They’ll send each other pictures of the view out of their windows.
They’ll ask each other how things are going every couple of weeks.
In a few months, one of them will travel to see the other in their natural habitat.
Aubrey longs for this already, the normal rhythm of the everyday.
“Go on,” Maggie says with a jut of her chin, as they step outside of the stuffy building. “Get your phone out and have a look already.”
They both snort, and cover their heads on their way down the steps.
When they sit in the car and buckle their seatbelts, Aubrey allows herself to pull out her device and turn it back on.
When the screen lights up, a single message waits patiently for her.
Expected now, but never once taken for granted.
Hurry back. I miss you.
* * *