Chapter 42
As I drive north again, the summer swirls through me.
My parents, the theater. Reuniting with Theo, Nick surfacing and his dramatic exit, the play, the people, the community, the many, many ways they inspired me.
And Will. Of course, Will. The boy who drove me home.
The man who pulled me out of the lake. He just kept saving me.
It’s nice to be saved, but I don’t want to be someone who always needs saving.
But there he is, anyway, continuously drawing me back in, back to myself, back to reality.
And all I’ve done in return is run away.
I texted my parents and told them I’ll be home for dinner. My mother is ordering a celebratory meal, but first I need to fix my whole life.
I pull into the cidery. It’s busy, one of the last golden days of summer.
I guess I had some romantic reunion in mind: The place would be silent, dusk, maybe, and I would wander up the lane in some diaphanous skirt and a winsome hat, and I’d see him, he would see me, he would run to me, all would be forgiven, forgotten, but no.
The parking lot is full, and there are clusters of people gathered at picnic tables and a local girl with a guitar singing in the corner.
I look around at this thing he built, this safe, charming place where people are gathered, relaxed, together.
The whole vibe is exactly him. Casual. Unpretentious. Genuine.
I imagine walking in there, awkwardly approaching the bar and asking for him, waiting in the entrance while people enter and order drinks.
It’s not what I imagined. And what if he doesn’t come?
What if he hears I’m here and won’t see me?
I wouldn’t blame him. It occurs to me that he might not even be here, he might be with Barb at the hospital, if she’s even still—
A car pulls up. The window rolls down and a white head peeks out. “Couldn’t stay away, huh?”
“Barb!” Tears rise quickly, surprising me. I rush around her car to hug her. “I thought—my parents said you had a stroke!”
She laughs. “I had low blood sugar. Broken telephone and all that.”
“So, you aren’t . . .”
“Not dying today, dear.” She looks me up and down. “You look terrible.”
“Jeez, Barb.” I glance again toward the cidery, and she follows my gaze.
“He’s not here,” she says.
“Ah, okay, yeah . . . I get it.”
“He’s in the back orchard.” She points down the laneway past the house and the cidery.
“Oh,” I say. “Do you think . . . Does he even . . . ?”
Barb looks over her glasses at me. “He’ll want to see you, sure.” I feel a small flicker of hope.
“I’m so sorry I left like that,” I say in a rush. “I’ve behaved so badly, I . . .”
“That boy is my heart,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “He is mine too.”
“Well, go get him!”
I walk down the lane to the far edge of the orchard, where the newer trees are. Dozens of saplings, roots wrapped in burlap, are laid out in neat rows on the ground. There he is, digging.
“What are you doing?” I say without thinking, though the shovel, work gloves, and dirt all over him make the answer pretty obvious. He stands up and looks at me, holding his hand over his eyes like a visor.
“Is it you?”
“Hi.” I take a step toward him. It all feels so stark in the daylight.
“You’re here.” He is blank in that way when I first met him, unreadable. His face is completely neutral, his tone pleasant but unrevealing.
“I, um . . . Can we talk?”
He shrugs. “Sure.” I take a few more hesitant steps toward him, but he doesn’t move.
“I heard about Barb.” He doesn’t blink. “My parents . . . their flair for the dramatic . . . they said she had a stroke.”
“A stroke? No, she had a blood sugar thing.”
“Yeah, I know. I, uh, saw her.” I pause. “She sent me here.”
He raises his eyebrows slightly. “So you came back to North Lake because of my grandma?”
“Well, not just her, but, I mean, they made it sound like she was at death’s door.”
“They do that,” he says, and only in that moment do I really realize that my parents have played me. They have bullshitted me back home.
“They sure do.” He doesn’t reply but wipes his forehead with his sleeve. “So, what are you doing?” I ask.
“Planting. The storm took a lot of trees down, so I’m replacing them.
Need a little new life around here.” He keeps digging.
I think of that night in the storm, how frantic it felt, how willing I was to save anything he loved.
“It’s later than I’d like, depends on what kind of winter we have for the root system to develop.
But I need something in before winter.” He glances up at me. “Never mind.”
I take a step toward him. “Will, I’m so sorry.” He stops. He jams the shovel in the dirt.
“Why did you leave?” There is the finest break in his voice. “Is it because I said . . . ?”
“You scared the shit out of me.” I sigh. “It was so much, so fast. It was so soon after Nick and—”
Will snorts. “You’re going to compare this”—he gestures between us—“you and I, to that guy?”
“No . . .Yes, because it messed with me. He hurt me, and then suddenly there’s you and it’s all so perfect, and nothing ever has been, and . . .”
“Who says it couldn’t be?” he says. I take another step toward him.
“Well, at this point . . . you,” I say.
Will is quiet for a moment. “Mira, I’ve already lost the person closest to me.” I want so badly to interrupt him. “I think it has made me more open to life. To love.” He looks at me pointedly. “But it also has shown me how precious time is.”
“I know. I get it.” He doesn’t want his time wasted.
“No, you don’t.” He turns back to his shovel, hacking at the ground.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I don’t want to lose you.”
He stops suddenly. “I’m not afraid of losing you.” He looks up at me sharply. “I’ve already lost my soulmate. It was the worst thing of my life, and I don’t have a lot of time for people who don’t get that. I survived it. I can survive you.”
“I don’t want you to.” I step forward. “Will, please.”
“I’m not going to beg you or chase you, Mira. And I’m not going to spend any more time trying to convince you why you and I—”
“You and I what?” I say, a small shred of hope in my voice.
“Fuck it.” He throws his shovel to the ground. “We’re supposed to be together, Mira.”
“We are?”
“Yeah.” He shoves his hands in his pockets, defeated. “I’ve felt that all summer.”
“I have known for . . . less time,” I say. “But you’re right. We are.”
He finally looks at me, and I see the hope in him too. “How do I know you won’t run away again?”
“Well, I’m moving back here, for starters.”
“You are?”
“Yeah. I have a few options here now.” He raises an eyebrow. “Creative options, I mean! Just the one option for . . .”
“For what?” He steps toward me.
“For you. For this. For whatever this is or could be.”
“What do you want it to be?” We are so close, I can smell the earth on him.
“Everything,” I say softly. I reach for his face. He catches my hand in his.
“I don’t need promises,” he says gently. “I know I came on too strong. What I told you—”
“Did you mean it?” I interrupt him.
“Yeah,” he says. “Of course I meant it.” He searches my face. “If you’re not there yet, it doesn’t mean . . . We can slow down. The show is over. It’s just real life now.”
“Real life.” I smile. “Whatever that is.”
“Whatever that is.”
“So you still like me?”
“I more than like you, you know that.”
“I more than like you too,” I say. “Lots more.”
“This is feeling very high school.”
“I love you, Will Reed. Now kiss me.”
He laughs and grabs my face and kisses me like we never stopped. It feels real. It feels like home. I had my first kiss under an apple tree, and here I am again. We pull apart and he starts laughing. “Oh, God, your face.”
“What?”
“It’s covered in dirt now. I’m sorry.”
I wrap my arms around him, burying myself in his arms. “So you think this can be salvaged?” I ask.
“Our . . . love?”
“This orchard. How much damage did the storm do? Can you fix it?”
He pulls away from me and looks at it, then back at me. “I’ll die trying,” he says.
“Well, then,” I say. “Let me help.” I pick up a shovel and stick it in the earth, my best Scarlett O’Hara pose. He laughs.
“Sounds good, let’s go.” He grabs some tool and starts lifting the earth. He glances over, noticing I haven’t moved.
I pause and clear my throat. “Yeah, that was more of a symbolic gesture . . . I don’t actually know how this thing works.”
“You can’t work a shovel?”
“I know Shakespeare,” I say. “I have other skills.”
“Yeah, you do.” He laughs. “I know this is where I abandon everything and we make love among the trees or whatever. But it’s going to rain tomorrow, and I need to get these in.”
“Gotcha,” I say. “Farm life!”
“This is where you start digging, Belmont.” He eyes me. “You said you’re staying . . . so stay.”
This is a test. This is like the canoe. The apples in the storm. This is where I am supposed to roll up my sleeves and prove my love by planting baby apple trees.
And so I do.
We won’t know if the trees take until spring. Sometimes the answers need to gestate. Will has hours of work left.
“Meet me at home?”
I smile. I nod. I kiss him. “Okay.”
But first, I have a stop to make.
I pull up to the house where I spent so much of my youth, running lines and practicing kissing.
It always struck me as such a cheerful house, white with red shutters, a spray of ferns hanging from every corner.
I see his mom, Annie, on the porch, wrapped in a blanket, and when the man next to her stands up, I see that it’s Max, not Theo.
He sees me pull up across the street, waves, and calls into the house.
Theo steps onto the porch, my beautiful friend, with a blanket and a cup of tea, which he hands to his mother.
He sees me and stands there on the steps, his face blank.
I raise my hand tentatively and give a half smile.
I don’t know how I will be received. He comes down the steps and waits at the curb as I cross the street.
“You’re covered in dirt,” he calls as I come toward him.
“I was digging a tree.”
“As one does. Dare I ask if it was an apple tree? At a cidery?”
“I only do apple trees.”
“So you and Will are . . . ?”
“Yes.”
“Attagirl.”
“Theo.” I take a big breath. “You were right about everything. I’m selfish. I treat people like shit, and I’ve abandoned you over and over, and I am starting to understand why, but that doesn’t excuse—”
He cuts me off with a tight, fierce hug, lifting me off the ground.
“There you are,” he says when he sets me down, his eyes full.
“Here I am.” I take his hands. “I’m sorry.”
“The course of true love never did run smooth.” He smiles and my insides loosen in relief. We are our own kind of love story.
I take a breath. “So I was thinking maybe Private Lives.”
“For what?”
“It might be a nice show for us. For the fall slot at the theater . . . I bet my parents would go for it. Well, if you’re still in town?”
Theo glances back at the porch, at his mother. “Yeah, I might be . . . For Noel Coward with the right gal, I could almost guarantee it.” His face crinkles into a big smile. “I’d love that, Mirabel. I think 1930s Paris would look good on us.”
“I think it would.”
I stay for tea with Annie and Max, then make my way home, which, I have learned, is an apple orchard down a dirt road with fairy lights and my own real love.
I drive through my hometown, past my high school, past the theater, where I spent so many hours this summer, so many hours of my whole life.
The idea of directing or teaching acting scares me, but they are slowly sparking, taking shape in my mind.
The idea of the next show, a new show, another chance to act with Theo, thrills me.
I text my parents to cancel dinner. They’ll understand.
This is all their fault anyway. I think of the chaos that brought me here, right back where I started.
I think of the play. I wonder if there wasn’t a little fairy magic there after all.
To act, that is, to act well, you need to simulate realness, even when you are wearing someone else’s clothes, speaking words in a voice that isn’t your own.
A good actor can translate all the artful trappings of life and present them as reality.
A good actor knows how to find her light and knows the boundaries of the stage in the dark.
A good actor forgets the audience and also plays to them.
I have been acting for years, but am only starting to realize that I’ve been doing it all wrong.
I have been so afraid of reality that I have simulated it, hiding in a big city, in a role that required zero creativity, in relationships that held no risk.
I have been so afraid of the cracks in life, of real life getting in.
But that’s where real life is. This summer, my hometown, my family, my best friend, who refuses to let me self-sabotage, and Will, who dares to love me in spite of myself .
. . They have cracked me open. They have shown me the beauty in my realness.
They have shown me that life, real life, needs an audience too.
We are here to witness each other. We are here to grow together.
We are here to love each other. Yes, sometimes we get a little lost in the woods.
We chase the wrong people and take the wrong paths.
Sometimes magic potions, or accidental brownies, make us do things we normally wouldn’t, but sometimes they help the truth spill out.
Sometimes we don’t know who we are or what we want; our minds aren’t our own.
But we end up where we need to. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you awaken from the dream and let the realness of daylight draw you home.
The End
or
(Fifteen weeks until opening night . . .)