10. Josh #2
“Mom, she came here thinking she was safe from me. You’ve cornered her. This is a shitty thing to do to someone who’s already been through enough because of our family.”
My mother had the grace to look slightly ashamed. “I just thought-”
“You thought you’d Parent Trap us. This isn’t a movie. This is her life. And mine. And we’re divorced for very good reasons that aren’t going to be fixed by forced proximity.”
“You still love her.”
“That doesn’t matter if she doesn’t love me back.”
I walked out before she could respond, angry enough that I needed air before I said something I’d regret. Found myself at Raven’s cottage, where she was almost done packing, carefully stepping around invisible ticks that I was ninety percent sure didn’t exist.
Her hair was in a messy bun that listed to the left. She was wearing an old Nantucket sweatshirt that might have been mine once, back when my clothes migrated to her side of the closet and became hers by squatter’s rights.
“I don’t think that’s part of your wardrobe anymore,” I said from the doorway.
She tensed but didn’t stop folding. “For once, you might be right.”
She turned to face me, and my lungs forgot their primary function.
“Hi,” I whispered, like an idiot who’d forgotten better words existed.
“Hi. What do you want?”
I grimaced. Deserved that. The temperature in her voice could have frozen the ocean.
“I can sleep on the beach,” I offered. “Or I can leave. Come back just for the ceremony. A few hours maximum. Please don’t feel like you have to stay because my family ambushed you.
I didn’t know they’d lie. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known you’d be here.
I don’t condone this, Raven. I’ll do whatever you need to feel safe and happy. ”
“Don’t be dramatic. It’s just proximity.”
“It’s not-”
“We avoided each other for two years, Josh. We can handle three days.”
I wanted to tell her I hadn’t avoided her at all.
That I’d stalked her social media through fake accounts, which isn’t a look that flatters a grown man.
That I knew about every role she’d booked, every interview she’d given, every red carpet she’d walked alone, that I’d watched her HBO show with religious dedication, taking notes on her performance like there’d be a test. But admitting that level of obsession seemed worse than letting her think I’d moved on.
While she finished packing, I went back to the house and quietly declared war on my childhood bedroom.
Stripped the bed and remade it with the softest sheets I could find in the linen closet, quiet and furtive so no one would catch me at it.
Moved both good pillows to what would be her side of the bed, kept the flat ancient one that had probably been there since the Clinton administration for myself.
The smoke detector’s little green light blinked accusingly at me.
I remembered every hotel we’d ever stayed in, how she’d need to cover that light or she couldn’t sleep.
Said it watched her, an unblinking eye in the dark.
I folded a towel and draped it over the detector, making sure it wouldn’t interfere with its function but would block the light.
Found WD-40 in the garage at eleven at night, probably waking the neighbors with my rummaging.
Oiled the door hinge that had squeaked since 1997.
Then the floorboard by the window that groaned if you stepped on it wrong.
She’d always jolted at sudden sounds in the night, that ADHD startle reflex that made her jump at unexpected noises.
Cleared my things into two bottom drawers, leaving her the closet, the dresser, the desk, every surface.
Her brain needed to see her things or they stopped existing.
She’d lose the same lipstick again and again because she’d put it in a drawer.
Visual processor, she’d called it. I’d called it adorable, back when I was allowed to have opinions about her quirks.
None of it was strategy, whatever she decided in the morning.
That was the part I couldn’t make her believe and wasn’t going to try to.
I knew where she lost her lipstick and which light kept her awake and how she took her coffee, not because I was running a play.
I knew it because I’d spent ten years paying the kind of attention I only learned to value once I’d stopped, and the knowing didn’t pack a bag and leave when she did. It just had nowhere left to go.
All of it happened fast, before she arrived, so it would look like the room just came this way. I wasn’t wooing her. I was being a decent host. Basic courtesy.
I was absolutely wooing her and refusing to admit it even to myself.
When she walked in with her suitcase, she stopped in the doorway. Her eyes tracked the changes. The pillows arranged on one side. The cleared surfaces. The towel over the smoke detector.
She said nothing, but her shoulders dropped slightly, some tension releasing.
I busied myself inflating the air mattress, which seemed personally determined to humiliate me.
The pump wheezed and gave out, an asthmatic walrus of a machine.
The valve wouldn’t cooperate, releasing air as fast as I pumped it in.
At one point the half-inflated mattress folded over me, a vindictive taco shell, trapping me in synthetic fabric while I tried to maintain some shred of dignity.
“Do you need help?” Raven asked from the bed, not looking up from the book she’d pulled out.
“No, I’m fine. This is normal. Air mattresses are supposed to eat you. It’s a feature.”
“Of course.”
I finally wrestled it into submission, though it resembled a lumpy crime scene more than a sleeping surface.
Set it up as far from the bed as the small room would allow, which was barely any distance at all.
Close enough to hear her breathe. Far enough to remember I wasn’t allowed to care about her breathing anymore.
We went through our nighttime routines in careful silence. She used the bathroom first, emerging in pajamas I didn’t recognize, because of course she’d bought new everything after leaving me. I brushed my teeth while staring at myself in the mirror, wondering how I’d aged ten years in two.
I lay on the air mattress that wheezed with every movement, listening to her turn pages.
A thousand nights of that sound. Reading in bed together, her feet cold against my calves, her occasional commentary on whatever she was reading.
“Listen to this,” she’d say, then read me a passage that had nothing to do with anything except it had made her leap to another thought, and another, until she landed somewhere unexpectedly profound.
I’d loved her brain. I’d loved everything about her.
Still did.
Just as I was drifting off, her voice came through the dark: “Who told you about the smoke detector thing?”
I didn’t answer. We both knew nobody told me.
I just knew her.