Chapter Thirty-Eight
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Will giving me space doesn’t push him further back in my brain. It doesn’t transition him from the thing I want most—the person I spend all my spare time thinking of, hoping for, considering—to a memory I can call upon only when I want to.
I imagine myself at Will’s place the first night I saw it, when he whispered into my neck Everything I think about is in reference to you.
Cami wasn’t kidding about the forced time off. Derrick calls me the morning after Will leaves my house and says it’s nonnegotiable, that he’ll be staying in Austin all week to help smooth things over with the employees, the press, the customers.
“You stay home,” Derrick tells me over the phone, “or take a vacation or something. Just don’t come into work.”
I left my computer at the office, so I don’t really have another option.
The next day is Saturday. I wake up to the first blush of fall on the breeze, chilly and golden leaf scented. Gio and Leonie ride over to my house. I greet them at the front door in a slip of a nightgown, my hair piled in a bun, my thoughts groggy with sleep.
“Want to fuck around?” Gio asks. She smiles up at me, her face playful beneath her helmet. I smile back and nod, even though riding a bike will only make me think of Will. Of the two of us riding our bikes together past the sunbathing turtles on the Johnson Creek Greenbelt.
Everything I think about is in reference to you.
That’s the problem with loving someone. When it happens, that person comes out of their box, and they start to fill every crack and shadow in your life. The memories of them get slippery, ethereal enough to move silently and appear before you at any moment.
Still, I change clothes and pump air into my bike tires, then climb onto it and ride away from my house with my friends.
We find a sparkling, dewy glade and spread out a picnic, sipping on grapefruit sodas and passing around a single spliff. We talk about the studio space Leonie rented for her yoga business, Gio quitting her grocery delivery gig because she’s finally earning enough from social media on its own.
They’re both working, earning a wage from something they’re proud to do, and the difference between them and me is, it’s not quietly killing them.
Drop everything, my mind whispers, and change your mind.
What had Camila said? But now I have to do something else.
I’m high, and feeling existential, and terrified of these thoughts.
“What are you thinking about, J?” Giovanna asks.
I sigh out a deep exhale, staring at the clouds. “I’m thinking about what my life would be like if Revenant had never existed at all.”
The ground doesn’t crack open. Lightning doesn’t smite me.
Gio flips over and stares at me for a long time. “I can’t fathom it,” she says.
“I would have a softer, more anonymous life,” I say.
“Do you wish that would have happened?” Leonie asks.
“No,” I admit. “No, I wouldn’t change a thing about the past. Only, possibly, the future.”
I sleep soundly for a third night in a row, no alarm clock to rouse me in the morning. For hours, I stay in bed, hovering in a state of half consciousness, awake and then not, dreaming and then not. Around eleven I finally get up and make a carafe of coffee, and while I wait for the first mug to cool, I eat two raspberry muffins.
As I taste and chew and swallow, I imagine Will checking on me from the door of my bedroom while I slept that first day. I imagine him grabbing my car keys and heading to H-E-B, coming back with bags full of ingredients and unloading them on my counter. I imagine him pulling out a bowl, making a noise of exasperation when he fails to find a whisk.
Everything I think about—you.
I pull open my refrigerator door to see if I have any unexpired cream for the coffee.
It’s completely stocked.
Vegetables, fruits, coffee creamer, black bean burgers, cauliflower korma, a giant bowl of salad he made himself topped with chickpeas and pepitas. Seltzers and wine and bottled iced tea.
I collapse onto the floor in tears, overwhelmed beyond belief I get to be loved this way. We started off rocky, but Will has shown me again and again and again how much he cares, how far he’ll go.
I want to be this way for him.
I need to figure out how to get myself to that place.
Suddenly, the quiet of my house feels engulfing. Ever since Camila moved out, I have felt a loneliness in this place I can’t even comprehend. Now, with her moving away, the feeling punches me in the stomach as one final, devastating blow.
I shut the fridge, search for my phone in a panic to text Will thank you just before a knock comes from the front door. My head snaps up, and I run across the hardwood floors of my house, peering through the tiny window as I stretch onto my tiptoes.
It isn’t him. It’s a delivery man, with a truck parked at the curb behind him.
I pull open the door. The man smiles at me. “Josephine Davis?” I nod hesitantly. “Sign here.” He hands me a tablet.
“I wasn’t expecting anything,” I say as I sign my name.
“Well, you should clear some space. There are a lot of bolts here that someone wants you to have.”
I tilt my head. “Bolts… of fabric ?”
The man nods, turning away to head down the steps.
He brings them in two at a time. I offer to help, but he shakes his head at me firmly and asks me where I’d like them. I clear a space in the living room so he can line them up on the floor. There are cottons, silks, polyesters, chiffons, satins, rayons.
“That’s the last of them,” he says, hands on his hips.
I fish a twenty out of my wallet and hand it to him. “Who are these from?”
The delivery man shrugs. “It was your name on the invoice.”
When he leaves, I crouch down on my carpet and start running my hands over the fabric. Already, my mind is spinning, inventing designs in my head.
Did you send the fabric? I text Will.
You once told me that if you had nothing to do, you’d start designing again, he replies.
I don’t have the energy to tell him he shouldn’t have. It just means too damn much that he did.
Josie: Thank you. I don’t know how to repay you for this, but I’ll think of something.
Will: Is it okay if I swing by tonight to drop off one more thing? I won’t stay, but this is important.
Josie: Of course. I love you
Will: Love you too
I smile down at my phone screen, my heartbeat rocketing skyward.
All the things that mattered most two days ago seem inconsequential now. I have no craving to go online and read opinions about myself I know are untrue. I have no craving to overwork myself because I found five spare minutes to answer emails. The only thing I crave is to make, with my hands.
I clear off my kitchen table for the first time in months, pull it into the center of the room, and line up my three sewing machines on it. I check the bobbins, dust off the dials. In the back of the closet in Cami’s old room, I still have all the patterns Mom gave me when Oma died. I pull those out, too, pick a few of the fanciest to experiment with.
This time, when my mom’s contact lights up my phone screen, I answer.
“I’m sewing,” I tell her.
I hear her breath audibly cut off, stopping whatever rant she was about to embark on in its tracks. Because what I meant but didn’t say is I’m healing.
And Mom remembers from years ago—right after Oma died, right after Zoe and I cut each other off—when I’d been slashed open twice and tried to sew myself back together. She remembers it wasn’t until I put my focus into this that I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
“What are you sewing?” she asks.
“A dress, I think.”
“A fancy one?” she asks hopefully.
“Very fancy,” I say. “I came into some high-end fabrics.”
“If it turns out nicely, you should wear it to Camila’s rehearsal dinner,” she says.
“Maybe I will.”
“Now,” Mom says, settling in. “Do you know what you’re going to say during your maid of honor speech?”
I’m having a hard time putting into words what Camila means to me. Mom says she can write down the ideas since my hands are occupied. We talk on the phone for two hours. When we’re finished, I have half a dress made. The top part, mostly, which is a fitted princess style, in a midnight-blue color that looks almost purple in the window light. I put it onto a mannequin I find in my garage.
“Darling, I have to go. We have dinner tonight with those frightful Spanglers.”
I smile to myself, holding up a bolt of chiffon fabric against the bottom half of the mannequin. “Okay. Thanks for calling.”
After she hangs up, I spend another thirty minutes deciding whether to go for a different fabric with a full, billowing skirt or keep the same material and do something slimmer.
I’ve just decided to go with the fancier skirt when my doorbell rings.
Will.
My heart feeling lighter than it has in days, I sprint to the front door and fling it open.
Only it isn’t him standing on my front porch.
It’s Zoe.