Chapter 22 #3
Outside, away from the heat lamps up top, the cold air blowing off the Quince onto the street was frigid.
I barely noticed. Just like I barely noticed the crowd of people standing at the entrance to the restaurant, laughing and happy.
The couples walking along the river walk under the glow of streetlamps.
It was only when I reached my car that I saw Eli running across the street toward me.
“Leave me alone, Eli,” I said, fumbling with my keys.
“Chelsea, where are you going?”
I thought wildly. Where the hell was I going? I’d only thought of away. “I’m going to Greenville. To the animal shelter.” Maybe I could salvage one good thing here. Maybe that love would be enough.
“Now? Chelsea, it’s Saturday night. They won’t be open to the public.”
“I don’t care.”
My door locks popped. I was about to slide into the seat when Eli grabbed my door. “I’ll drive.”
I hesitated, looking up at him. He was serious. Without a word, I handed him my keys, thinking of the set in Seamus’s hand upstairs.
We made it halfway to Greenville before I spoke. “Pull over, Eli.”
Eli pulled onto the shoulder without a word. We were at the top of a stretch of low hills here. Far to our left, the Quince glinted in the starlight. The only sound was the car rumbling under us, the heat rushing out of the vents.
“It’s pointless,” I said. “I can’t take her, anyway.”
For a moment, we both looked out toward the water. “Maybe Jude?” Eli said. “He has a yard.”
“He’s already looking after Rafe’s dog,” I said.
“Maybe he can take another?”
He probably could. He’d probably do that for me. But it wasn’t about Lola.
I shook my head. “Lola should be adopted by someone who can love her the way she deserves. Someone steady and with their life together.”
“You’re going to be that person, remember?”
“I just walked out on an event I organized. How can you call that on my way to getting my shit together?”
“Everyone else has it in hand for now. I’ll head back there too for the take-down. No one blames you for leaving, Chels. Jamie wanted to go after you himself. He was worried.”
I looked at my brother. He ran his hand through his hair. “And I had to hold Seamus back.”
I swallowed, fresh tears running down my cheeks, as I stared out at the sliver of silver water in the distance.
A memory hit me then, one I hadn’t thought of in years.
“Do you remember that time Jude took one of my sketchbooks?” I asked. “He was going on that fishing trip with his friends and he took my backpack because he couldn’t find his. It had my sketchbook in it. I’d been eleven, making Jude…” I did the math. “Thirteen, so you were… seventeen?”
Eli nodded.
He lost everything—all Dad’s fishing equipment. My pack. My book.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Eli said.
Of course he did. It had been a huge thing.
It turned out that Jude and his friends had capsized their canoe—the canoe they weren’t supposed to have taken.
Mom and Dad were furious. Not that he’d come home empty-handed, but that he’d put himself in such danger.
I remembered Mom and Dad’s faces. They hadn’t just been angry. They’d been panicked.
Suddenly, it dawned on me. “It was because of what had happened to the Reilly’s, wasn’t it?”
Eli nodded. “They were paranoid about us being in the canoe after that happened.”
My chest tightened. That accident—it had affected everyone.
“You went out to look for it,” I said, remembering. “The sketchbook. You and… Seamus.” I’d forgotten all about that part.
Eli leaned back in his seat. “It was Seamus’s idea. I said it was stupid—it would be long gone, ruined in the water anyway. But he insisted we look. Even though I knew just looking at the river gave him panic attacks after…” He trailed off.
I pressed a hand to my mouth. Seamus had wanted to help me, even back then. He’d been so good. Always so good, even in his own grief.
Eli rested his forearms on the steering wheel.
“Mom took Seamus in. Do you remember that? His own mom was like a ghost after Kev died, and Mom always made me make sure Seamus was invited everywhere we went. She always sent him home with food for his family. She loved him.”
“So do I,” I whispered.
Eli froze, examining me.
I shifted my gaze to meet his, the truth feeling like a liberation. Like air I hadn’t been able to access before. “I love him too, Eli. Like, I really love him. I’m in love with him.” I laughed, through the tears, then the laughter died. “I just didn’t know it.”
“You mean that, Chelsea? You’re not just…”
“Into him? Going to be done with him in a couple weeks?” I shook my head. “I’ve never known this feeling before, Eli.” It’s why I didn’t recognize it. Why I kept trying to pass it off as me being overwhelmed or confused. Why it took me this long.
Eli smiled, a little sadly. “It feels like getting knocked on your ass and catapulted into the sky at the same time.”
“Yeah.” That was exactly it. “And plummeting back to earth at the same time.”
Eli grimaced. I knew he’d had his heart broken by Kelly, his ex-wife. But I was pretty sure the same thing had happened with Reese, our restaurant manager. Only he’d ended things with her—badly—so things were more than a little hostile between them.
Then Eli looked even more pained, his forehead. “Seamus told you he’s going to New York, right?”
“Yeah. That’s why he told me it was over.”
“He what?” Eli stiffened, his hands clenching on the wheel. “What the hell? That doesn’t make any sense. I see the way… I know he feels the same way, Chels.”
Once again, I shook my head. “It was the right thing to do, Eli. He did it for me.”
“We can go back there right now, and either you tell him to take it back or I will.”
“Eli!” I exclaimed. “No. I want to be… I told you the other day, I need to figure some things out first. But it’s more than that.
I want to be able to stand on my own two feet.
Before I… I relied on Mom, and when I lost her, I was unmoored.
Now I don’t want to be codependent. I want to be independent, so I can be a stronger person for…
” Seamus. “For whoever I end up with. I don’t want that person to think I’m going to fall apart when hard things happen. ”
Like people leaving. Or dying.
“I want to be happy with myself first. Then I want to do it right.”
I knew it was a risk. A huge risk. Seamus could easily find someone new in the time it took me to get my life sorted the way I wanted it to be, on my own, without leaning on someone else.
But I knew as I said it that it was the only way.
I’d lost myself before, and I never wanted that to happen again.
That was the biggest risk of all—giving Seamus anything less than the person I knew I could be.
“You know that’s kind of why I ended things with Reese,” Eli said, his hands still tense on the wheel.
But they were loosening as he spoke. “I was in a shitty spot, fresh out of my divorce. She didn’t deserve the messy pile of human I was then.
” He turned quickly to me. “Not saying that’s what you are. ”
I laughed. It felt so good I kept laughing. Then Eli grinned too and shoved me in the shoulder, which only made me laugh harder.
When we pulled into the parking lot back at the apartment, I put a hand on my brother’s arm.
“I owe you one, Eli.” I’d meant it for pitching in for me back at the party. But I hoped he knew I was talking about tonight—and the past few weeks, too. I’d thought Eli would be a disaster about all of this, but he’d been a rock.
Eli winked. “That’s what big brothers are for. Now go get some rest while I show these guys how to clean up a party.”
After waving him goodbye, I ran up the stairs and into my dark apartment filled with gratitude. I’d owe Eli for everything he did for me tonight. But that was for later. Right now, I was buzzing with something I hadn’t felt in a long time: hope.
I’d have to apologize to Jamie for leaving. And I’d have to take on some more ad hoc jobs on the weekends before I could leave the Rolling Hills. But I could do it. One step at a time, I could do it, I know I could.
Once inside, I headed straight for my closet, the place those new blazers hung, waiting for me to start my new life.
I pulled one of them off its hanger and slipped it on.
It felt good. Like I’d taken an important—if baby—step there.
After that, I pulled on my winter parka along with the wool hat I’d worn the other night.
Next I rummaged around in the giant crate in the back marked camping supplies, grabbing the battery-powered lantern and a folding chair.
Then I reached far into the back for what I was really after. A package in brown paper.
I headed up to the roof, where I could turn away from the Quince, where I could point myself east. Then I shook the contents of the paper bag out on my lap.
It was the sketchbook and pack of drawing pencils Seamus had thrust in my hands back in his office.
I opened the book, poised the pencil, and before I could think too hard about it, began to draw.
I thought I’d be rusty, or just plain bad, drawing images from memory. But I made myself go loose and easy, and before I knew it, everything in my mind started appearing on the page. The view from the ridge at Seamus’s place. That sweater he wore, slung over a chair.
My mom’s face, her wide smile that Eli shared.
Her tombstone, over in Quince Valley Memorial Gardens.
Cass’s island in the river.
Seamus’s cottage. The chickens.
Lola.
I drew even as my hand ached, filling the pages of that notebook with a pent-up explosion of everything I’d tucked in the back of my mind.
I love you, Seamus, was the constant refrain in my mind as my pencil filled in the shadows and light. I love you, I love you, I love you.
I drew until the first rays of golden light arced across the sky, touching my face like a tender hand.