45. Aria
ARIA
Last festival before I go, I told myself, like saying it made it easier.
It did not make it easier. I stood at the edge of the town square with my camera bag cutting into my shoulder and watched volunteers string the last strand of lanterns between the gazebo and the old oak that anchors the whole green, and I felt exactly as much as I had been trying not to feel for a week straight.
Lily had my free hand in a death grip, bouncing on her toes, already scanning the crowd for the hot cocoa stand like a bloodhound that had caught a scent.
"Can we get the kind with the marshmallow tower this year?" she asked.
"Not the regular marshmallows. The tower."
"We'll see."
"That means yes."
"It means we'll see."
"You always say we'll see when it's yes and you just don't want to admit it yet." She said this with the flat confidence of a girl who had cracked the code on her mother years ago and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
Ellen found us before we'd made it twenty feet, clipboard in hand, wearing a Santa hat over her usual sensible bob like it was part of a uniform she took very seriously.
"There she is! My favorite photographer in the whole tri county area, and don't you dare tell the woman I hired for the spring brochures I said that." She pulled me into a hug that smelled like peppermint and printer toner.
"I still can't believe you're leaving us. Who am I supposed to bully into shooting the Founders Day parade next summer?"
"You'll find someone."
"I will find someone adequate. It is not the same thing." Ellen glanced down at Lily, softening instantly the way most adults in this town did around her.
"And how's my favorite assistant photographer?"
"I'm getting the tower cocoa," Lily informed her, as if this settled several matters at once.
"As you should." Ellen turned back to me, voice dropping into something more businesslike. "I need the lantern arch, the tree lighting at seven, and if you can get one decent shot of the ice sculptor without him flipping off the camera again, I will personally frame it for the office."
She checked something off her clipboard with real satisfaction.
"Last shoot for us. Try not to make it your best one. I need something to complain about after you're gone."
"No promises."
"That's what worries me."
She swept off toward the hay bale maze, already flagging down someone about a generator, and I stood there a second longer than I needed to, watching her go, feeling the particular ache of doing a familiar thing for the last time while everyone around you treats it like any other evening on the calendar.
Bev caught me next, manning the cider table in a coat that had clearly seen thirty winters and intended to see thirty more.
"There's my girl." She poured a cup without asking and pressed it into my free hand.
"On the house. Consider it a going away tax on everybody who's going to miss you."
"I'm not gone yet."
"No," Bev agreed, studying me over the rim of her own cup with the kind of look that misses very little. "You're not."
I let that sit without picking it apart, because Bev has never once in her life said a thing she didn't already know the truth of, and I was not in the mood to confirm anything out loud in the middle of a crowded town square.
Lily tugged at my coat and pointed toward the cocoa stand with the single-minded urgency of a girl on a mission, and I let her drag me off before Bev could say anything else that would have gotten under my ribs.
We got the tower cocoa. Lily inhaled the top three marshmallows before we'd gone ten feet and declared the whole enterprise, in her words, "extremely successful," and I photographed her with whipped cream on her nose in front of the lantern arch because some shots you take for the client and some you take for yourself, and I already knew which category that one belonged to.
That was when the goose showed up.
It came waddling out from behind the hay bales like it owned a season pass, honking at a toddler who had made the mistake of holding a churro at goose height, and half the square scattered while the other half pulled out their phones to film it. Lily lit up like the tree hadn't even been lit yet.
"It's here! Mama, it followed us into town."
"It did not follow us into town. It lives at the marina."
"It followed the festival, then." She said this like the distinction mattered a great deal, already tugging me closer to get a better look. "Do you think it likes Christmas?"
"I think it likes churros."
"Everyone likes churros. That's not the same as liking Christmas.
" She watched the goose chase a very determined volunteer around the cider table with the rapt attention most children reserve for actual fireworks, and I got two frames of it before somebody's Labrador got involved and the whole scene dissolved into the kind of chaos this town seems to specialize in, cheerful and slightly out of control and over almost as fast as it started.
It was somewhere around the ice sculptor, still arguing with his chainsaw about the exact angle of a swan's neck, that I noticed Carol wasn't at her usual table.
Every year Carol runs the ornament booth, selling the hand-painted glass balls she makes all summer for the library fund, and every year she complains the whole time about how nobody appreciates real craftsmanship anymore while selling out completely by dusk.
This year the table was there, ornaments and all, but a teenager I vaguely recognized from the diner was running it instead, looking mildly terrified every time someone asked her a question about paint technique.
"Where's Carol?" I asked her, mostly out of habit.
"She said she had somewhere to be." The girl shrugged, already distracted by a customer holding up two ornaments and demanding a tiebreaker.
"Something about a project. She seemed pretty worked up about it."
"A project."
"That's all she said." The girl turned to her customer, visibly relieved to be done with me, and I stood there a second with my cocoa going lukewarm in my hand, filing the word away without quite knowing why it snagged on something.
I saw Deacon's truck twenty minutes later, or thought I did, a flash of that particular faded red passing the far side of the square where the road curved off toward our street, moving fast enough that I couldn't be sure.
I told myself plenty of trucks were red.
I told myself it was none of my business what Deacon Reyes did with his afternoon, even if my chest did something small and complicated at the sight of it, some old reflex I hadn't managed to retrain yet.
"Mama, look." Lily grabbed my hand and pointed at the ice sculptor's swan, now fully formed and glittering under the string lights. "It has a whole neck and everything."
"It's beautiful, bug."
"Do you think it's cold? Being made of ice?"
"I think it's already cold before it's ice. That's sort of the whole point."
She considered this with the seriousness she brought to most philosophical questions and decided, apparently, that it checked out, and went back to watching the sculptor work.
The tree lighting happened right on schedule, the whole square counting down together in that ragged, half joking way crowds do, and when the lights came on all at once the old oak went from a dark shape against the sky to something out of a storybook, and Lily gasped like she hadn't seen it happen every single year of her life.
I got the shot Ellen wanted, and three more nobody had asked for, because some things you photograph for the job and some things you photograph because you already know you'll want to look at them later, on a day when this town is a plane ride and a whole life away.
I found myself scanning the crowd twice for Jake before I caught myself doing it and made myself stop.
He wasn't there. Neither was Noah, and neither was Deacon, and now that I was paying attention, neither were half the guys from his job site who usually showed up to this thing every year, loud despite the cold biting at their ears, arguing about whose truck had the better sound system.
The absence had a shape to it once I noticed it, the specific shape of people who were all somewhere else at the same time, on purpose.
"Everything okay?" Bev appeared again at my elbow, refilling my cider without being asked, watching my face with that same knowing look from earlier.
"Just tired, I think."
"Mm." She didn't push it, which somehow felt worse than if she had.
"Big day tomorrow. Or big week. However you're counting it these days."
"Something like that."
"Well." She patted my arm once, the same gesture Carol favors, like the women in this town had all learned comfort from one unspoken manual. "Whatever it is you're counting toward, I hope it surprises you."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything, and she wandered off to refill somebody else's cup, leaving me standing there with a strange, unplaceable feeling settling low in my stomach, something between dread and its opposite that I did not have a name for yet.
We stayed until the crowd started thinning, until Lily's cheeks had gone pink from cold and cocoa in equal measure and she started leaning her full weight against my leg the way she does right before she announces she's not tired at all.
I packed up my camera, said my goodbyes in the scattered, unfinished way you say goodbyes when you know you'll see most of these people again before you actually leave, and we started the walk home along the road that curves past the marina and up toward our street, lanterns still glowing behind us the whole way like the town was reluctant to let the night end.
"Carry me," Lily said, in the tone of a formal request rather than a plea.
"You're getting too big to carry."
"I'm not too big. I'm just tired in my legs specifically."
I laughed despite myself and hoisted her up anyway, her cocoa breath warm against my neck, her whole small weight settling against me the way it had a thousand times before and would only so many more times before she outgrew it entirely, and I walked the last stretch home that way, one arm aching and my mind still turning over Carol's empty table and that flash of red truck and Bev's strange little blessing, none of it adding up to anything I could name, all of it adding up to something anyway.
The marina slid past on our left, boats bumping gently against their moorings, dark water catching the last of the lantern light in broken pieces.
Somewhere behind us the festival was still going, faint music and the occasional burst of laughter carrying on the cold air, and somewhere ahead of us was a house full of boxes I still hadn't finished packing and a contract with my name already on it and a life waiting on the other side of a plane ride I had already pushed back two weeks, telling myself it was only about logistics.
I told myself the ache in my chest was ordinary leaving grief, the same kind I'd felt walking out of every apartment before this one.
I did not entirely believe myself, but I let it go unexamined the way you let go of a lot of things when your arms are full and your daughter is half asleep against your shoulder.
We turned onto our street just as full dark settled in, streetlights flickering on one by one overhead, and I was thinking about nothing in particular, about hot showers and the last of the packing and whether I'd left the porch light on.
Lily tugged my sleeve, pointing toward our street. "Mama, why does our garden have lights?"
I did not have an answer. I had a feeling.