Chapter Twenty-Four
“I’ve always wanted to try surfing,” I say to George, kicking my feet.
We’re sitting on a bench, waiting for our instructors in a beach parking lot.
The forest is so dense around us that we can’t see the ocean, even though we’re practically right beside it.
The lot is full of camper vans and old Volkswagen buses.
Nearby, a father and teenage daughter in wet suits are tethering their surfboards to the roof of a station wagon.
A sign warns of cold water, unpredictable waves, and slippery rocks, and another about rip currents—how to avoid them and how to “escape the grip of the rip” by swimming parallel to the shore.
“I know,” George says. “I lived through your Blue Crush obsession.” He’s wearing contacts, and I’m having trouble meeting his eyes. He looks mischievous without his glasses, more of a rascal than a reporter.
“I’m super excited about this.” Maybe it will help me work off this unspent sexual energy. “I have a feeling I’ll be a natural.”
George grins at me—a full, unguarded smile—and the look sends me reeling back in time. To the same smile, under very different circumstances.
I’m almost fourteen years old, standing in the gap of the cedar hedge, waiting for George’s dad to leave.
I hadn’t seen my best friend in seven months, not since he moved back to Montreal with his father.
The day he left was one of the most painful of my young life.
When I learned it hadn’t worked out with his dad and that George was coming to live at the Big House for good, I cried with relief.
I should have felt guilty. Mimi had visited their apartment without warning and found George alone, as he’d been for forty-eight hours.
As soon as his dad’s car pulled out of the driveway, I raced over.
Mimi tried to send me home. She said George wasn’t feeling well, but I wouldn’t budge until she let me in.
I ran up to his room, threw open the door, and found him face down on his bed, sobbing.
He didn’t look like George. His body was all wrong—long and wiry—and his hair had been buzzed almost to his scalp, like when we first met.
I knew from his emails that his dad had made him cut it.
I’d never felt hate until that moment, but I hated George’s dad. I hated him for taking George away from me. I hated him for not loving George well enough. And I hated him for cutting George’s gorgeous hair.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw something. But I lay down beside George and rubbed his back the way my mom used to do for me when I was little.
“Once upon a time, there was a girl named Francesca and a whale named Francesca,” I whispered, my mom’s bedtime story coming back to me like the lyrics of a favorite song.
“Francesca the girl lived by the sea, and the best thing about living by the sea was the whales. Francesca loved the whales that fed in the waters by her home on the Bay of Fundy. She waited all year for them to arrive.”
By the time I’d finished, George had stopped crying.
“Hi, Frankie,” he said into his pillow.
“I’m sorry you’re sad,” I told him. “And I hope this doesn’t make me a bad person, but I’m really happy you’re back.”
George turned his cheek in my direction. He looked so much older without the waves on his head. “Me too.”
“Your hair,” I said, trying not to cry.
“I know. My one beauty.”
We both cracked up at the Little Women reference, and even though his face was damp and his eyelids were puffy, the smile he gave me was the nicest I’d ever seen.
My chest aches at how far he’s come from that heartsick boy. I love it when George lets himself really smile, the way he is right now.
“I can’t believe you were going to spend a week in Tofino and not take surfing lessons,” he says. “What were you guys going to do?”
I give him a meaningful look. “It was supposed to be our honeymoon. What did you think we were going to do?”
“Oh,” he says. “Right.”
I clear my throat, resolving to stop thinking about sex, especially around George. “Please explain how surfing fits into The Plan,” I say, handing him a power bar, even though he ate an omelet, two pieces of toast, and a chia-berry parfait at breakfast.
“Day Three is focused on movement.”
“And by movement, you mean exercise.”
“That, too. Surfing’s a good workout, and I thought it would be a fun way to let off steam. Plus, you’ll be doing something you’ve always wanted to do.”
This was mentioned in George’s articles. Choose a new hobby. Shake up your day-to-day routine. Spend time outdoors.
“I assume you have a speech prepared about the positive impact of exercise on mental health. Endorphins, stress relief, et cetera.”
“I did.” He gives me a sideways glance. “But it sounds like I can skip it.”
I laugh. “I appreciate how seriously you’re taking this. Some of the research you gave me was pretty illuminating.”
A corner of his mouth slants. “Oh?”
“Yeah. I know I didn’t cope well at the beginning. But reading those articles confirmed something for me.” I think of the question marks George had written in the margin.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t think Nate was the only one for me.”
George, who has been bobbing his knee, goes still. His face shifts an inch in my direction.
“I’m not sure there’s only one person for any of us. But if there was…” I’m caught off guard by the sudden crush of emotion, and I look into the evergreens, their trunks straight and proud, bare of needles until the uppermost branches.
“If there was…” George quietly prompts after a few seconds.
“If there is one person out there, one person for me and only me, then that person isn’t Nate.”
I turn back to George. “I wanted it to be him. I wanted the kind of relationship Aurora and Betty have. I used to think having a partner would be like tying an anchor to my leg.” I’d either drown or need to get the thing off to survive.
His laugh is low. “Believe me, I know.”
“But Aurora and Betty are so good together. They have their own lives, their own careers. They build each other up—they’re more together, not less. I’d never seen an unfailingly supportive relationship like that.”
George tilts his head. “What are you talking about? Your parents support each other.”
I give him a sharp look. “My mom wanted to help whales. My dad wanted to be a woodworker. Who got what they wanted?”
He takes a bite of his bar and makes a sound like he doesn’t agree.
“She got pregnant and gave everything up,” I say.
“Do you think that’s how your mom sees it? She and your dad were in love.”
Mom moved from Halifax to the Kawarthas in ninth grade, and Dad always says he fell for her the moment he spotted her in the cafeteria.
But she didn’t agree to go out with him until their final year of high school.
They broke up when she left to study marine and freshwater biology at the University of Guelph.
She wanted to help bring North Atlantic right whales back from the brink of extinction.
My dad stayed in the area to apprentice as a cabinetmaker, but every time my mom came home to visit, they’d find themselves at the same parties and they’d nestle into a quiet corner and catch up.
Four years went on like this. My parents were apart more than they were together, but they thought about each other constantly.
The summer before my mom moved back to Halifax for her master’s, their friendship spilled over.
This time, their connection was deeper than it was when they were teenagers.
It felt inevitable and impossible to stop.
They spent a year in a heated long-distance romance, colliding like tectonic plates whenever they saw each other.
They were young and in love, and they had no real plan for the future except that they wanted one together.
Then, my mom threw up during her advanced molecular biology final.
She was pregnant. She said farewell to her whales.
“I know they were in love,” I say to George. “But look at what it did to her. To us.”
It takes him a moment to respond. “I think,” he says softly, “that you’ve been telling yourself your own version of your mother’s story for a long time. Maybe you should ask her to tell it herself.”
It’s annoying how reasonable he sounds. “It’s annoying how reasonable you sound,” I tell him.
He chuckles. “So you were saying…We’re blaming Aurora and Betty’s perfect relationship for Nate?”
“Ha. Yes.”
“We’ll send them your therapy bills.”
“Way to sneak that in there,” I say. “But I think Nate was also a matter of timing. I was burned-out and sick of pushing so hard. What I was doing wasn’t working for me anymore. I wanted a fuller life and someone to share it with. I think he was the wrong man at the right moment.”
George watches me for a beat and then gives me the final bite of his power bar.
“Can I ask you something without you getting mad?” he says.
“No promises.”
“Why Nate? He’s not who I pictured you with.”
I frown. “Who did you picture me with?”
“I don’t know.” His gaze drifts to a couple about our age. The man has a baby strapped to his chest. “I guess someone with a little more depth, someone less…toothy.”
I sputter out a laugh. “Toothy?”
“He was always smiling, like a cartoon prince. Was he like that all the time?”
“Kind of.”
“And you were into that?”
“Sure. I mean, he was easy to be around. We liked each other, maybe even truly loved each other, but in a way that wasn’t threatening.
” Nate was divorced and didn’t want his heart broken again, and I didn’t want to be with someone who’d subsume me.
“It was never intense. Never the kind of relationship that could destroy you.”
George looks at me, squinting against the sun, but he doesn’t speak.
“Shows what I know. Now I’m thirty, living with my parents, and I don’t have any of the things I thought I was supposed to have by now.”
“Like what?”
“A place of my own. Meaningful work. A passport full of stamps.”
He ducks down to meet my eyes. “Nobody’s going to give you an award for ticking off all the boxes you think you should have checked.”
“Oh. Well, fuck it, then. I was only getting my shit together because I thought there was a trophy at the end.”
I sit back on my hands and arch my back, stretching out the knots.
“Anyway, I’m doing pretty well on the breakup front.
I’m not pining for Nate, or logging into his Netflix account so I can see what he’s watching, or rereading his texts.
I don’t feel angry the way I used to. I don’t think I’ll ever recover from the way he ended our relationship, because that humiliation was truly horrific, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s over. ”
He studies me, frowning slightly. His thinking face. “So there are no residual feelings there?”
“Mostly confusion,” I say. “I can’t understand why he waited until the day before our wedding to break up with me. It feels like part of the equation is missing. He obviously had doubts, which makes sense, given that I’m me and he’s him.”
“Frankie,” George says, his voice gentle, “you’re as good as a thousand Nates.”
“I’m honestly not. My temper is appalling. My obstinance is—”
“One of your finest qualities,” George interrupts.
I ignore him. “I was always careful not to be too argumentative, too me, around Nate, but clearly I was still too much.”
“You should be able to be yourself with your partner without dampening your spark,” George says. “People fight, Frankie. Every real relationship has conflict. I’m not saying there aren’t healthy and unhealthy ways of arguing, but it happens. What matters is wanting to work through it.”
“The last time we fought, I barely heard from you for six months.”
“I know. I’m unpacking my own issues.” He leans closer. “In therapy.”
“Wow. You really brought that one home.”
“Thank you.”
He waits a moment before continuing. “You said you only had one big argument with Nate. What was it about?”
“He wanted me to take his name.”
He snorts. “You would never.”
“Never,” I agree. “I thought he was fine with it, but then he signed me up for a gym membership under the name Francesca Bacon. Frankie Bacon. Can you imagine?”
“I’d prefer not to.” His expression darkens.
“I was furious when we checked into the resort and Nate had made the booking under Mr. and Mrs. Bacon.”
“I noticed.”
When he signed me up for the gym using his last name, I panicked. It felt like I was being dragged under.
“I think what really bothered me is that the idea of belonging to him felt oppressive,” I tell George.
“Do you think that’s about Nate or marriage in general?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t want to be absorbed by another person, but maybe I wouldn’t mind belonging to someone if they belonged to me, too. If we belonged to each other as well as to ourselves.”
“An equal belonging.”
“Yeah, exactly. I think I could be into that.”
George hums. “I think I’d be into that, too.”