25. Sloane
Sloane
The two weeks before we leave are a blur of other people’s deadlines, which is the only mercy of late November — there’s no room to spiral when there’s this much to do.
Reading days are two weeks out, finals the week after, and the whole campus has gone feral with it.
The library’s full by eight. The theater department’s in tech for the winter showcase and Reyes has us running the second-act piece until my feet ache, because the center slot is still hers to give and the Yale observer is still coming and I am still, against Vivienne’s best efforts and my own spiraling, the front-runner.
Beau’s buried in comp lit — we do the sessions every night, him talking the argument out and me shaping it, building toward the final he cannot fail, and he’s getting good at it, good enough that the panic’s gone out of his eyes when he opens the book.
The Sailmaker’s still gutted, still smelling of smoke and contractor dust whenever I swing by to check the mail, still months, the landlord says, in the voice of a man who has discovered insurance adjusters.
So I’m still at the Raven House. Still in his bed.
Still a hockey girl with a hook by the door.
And then the deadlines pause for the one holiday America agrees to stop for, and there’s nowhere left to hide from the fact that I’m getting in his truck and driving to Greenwich.
It’s a two-hour drive and it takes us through three Americas.
Haven first, then the highway. Then, somewhere past the third exit, the country starts to change.
The houses pull back from the road. The trees get older.
The stone walls get more deliberate, the kind built for looking at rather than keeping anything in.
I watch it happen through the windshield, the slow tasteful escalation of it, money getting quieter and deeper the closer we get, and by the time Beau turns off the highway and onto a road that runs near the water, I’ve stopped making conversation.
“You’re quiet,” he says.
“I’m taking it in.” Which is true. I’m taking in the fact that the mailboxes out here don’t have numbers, they have names, just like Margaret said, and that the gaps between the houses keep getting longer, and that I am about to walk into a life I have only ever heard described.
“You’re going to love my mom,” he says, for the fourth time, because he’s nervous too, in his way, the away-game nerves, the wanting-it-to-go-well.
“And the twins are going to ambush you, fair warning. They’ve decided you’re theirs.
Liv’s been texting me costume ideas for some bit she wants to do with you and I’ve stopped reading them. ”
“Costume ideas?”
“Don’t ask. Just say yes to whatever Liv proposes, it’s easier, I learned that years ago.”
And he reaches over and takes my hand, the way he does now, like it’s nothing, like my hand belongs in his on a road with named mailboxes, and I let him hold it and look out the window and feel the gap I’ve been circling for two weeks stop being abstract and start being a place, with a driveway, that we are turning into.
It’s not the biggest house I’ve ever seen — I’ve seen pictures, I’ve watched movies, I know what real money’s houses look like — but it’s the most certain house I’ve ever stood in front of.
Weathered shingle, the kind that costs a fortune to look that humble.
Gardens gone November-bare but clearly magnificent in season, Annika’s gardens, the ones Margaret’s described.
Wreaths on the doors, already, real ones.
Cars in the drive that I make myself not catalog.
And the front door opening before we’ve even parked — Annika first, then the twins tumbling out after her, then Erik filling the doorway behind them — the whole small, warm noise of a family that likes each other rolling across the gravel toward us.
I have about four seconds to set my face.
I set it to warm and easy and glad to be here, the offstage version handling the onstage task, and I get out of the truck. Beau’s mother is coming down the steps with her hands already out.
“Sloane.” Annika Sorensen says my name like she’s been saving it.
She’s tall and fair and effortless in the way Beau is effortless, in cashmere the color of oatmeal, and she takes both my hands in both of hers and looks at me like I’m a thing she’s been waiting for.
“Oh, we are so glad. We have heard so much. Come in, come in, it’s freezing, you must be frozen. ”
And there it is. The kindness. Landing exactly the way I knew it would, warm and total and bottomless, and I feel myself brace against it even as I smile and say it’s so good to meet you, thank you for having me, the right words in the right order, the performance flawless.
Nobody can tell. That’s the thing. Nobody at this house will ever be able to tell what the kindness costs me. I’ve made sure of that since I was nine.
The twins ambush me within the hour, exactly as promised.
Liv and Britta are sixteen, identical until you’ve known them ten minutes and then not at all, and they have indeed decided I’m theirs.
They want to know everything — about theater, about Whitmore, about how I “tamed” their brother, about my hair, about whether I’ll let them do my makeup for the family photo Annika insists on every year.
They’re sharp and funny and unguarded in the way of girls who have never once had to wonder if they were safe, and I like them immediately and completely, and that’s its own ache, because watching the Sorensen twins be sixteen and certain is like watching a home movie of a childhood I didn’t get.
“Beau never brings anyone home,” Britta informs me, lying across the foot of the guest bed while I — I don’t even know what I’m doing, unpacking my one bag into a room bigger than the Sailmaker’s living room.
“Like, ever. There was a girl sophomore year of high school and that’s it.
Mom cried when he said he was bringing you. ”
“She did not,” Liv says.
“She teared up. In the kitchen. I saw it.”
“That’s different from crying.”
“Sloane, settle it, is teared-up crying—”
“It’s adjacent,” I say, and they shriek like I’ve said something brilliant, and I file the information they’ve handed me without meaning to hand it to me: Beau never brings anyone home.
His mother teared up. This isn’t a casual visit.
I’m not a girlfriend being shown the house.
I’m a thing that means something, brought home to a family that brings meaning to things, and the weight of that settles onto my chest and stays there for two days.
Erik Sorensen is the one I’m most afraid of and the one who unsettles me least, in the end.
He’s exactly what Margaret described and exactly what the framed jersey in the Raven House promised — big, silver now, the kind of physical certainty that fills a doorway, the shadow Beau measures himself against. The trophy room is real.
Margaret calls it the shrine and she’s not wrong; it’s a study lined with the evidence of a life that mattered to a lot of people, and Erik shows it to me himself, Thanksgiving morning, because Beau’s off being commandeered by his mother for something and the silence between his father and me needed filling.
But here’s the thing about Erik that I don’t expect: he doesn’t perform it.
He shows me a photo of himself at twenty, gap-toothed, holding a cup, and he says, “I was an idiot at this age. Thought it would last forever. It doesn’t.
Nothing does.” And he looks at a picture of Beau — eight, maybe, on skates, grinning — and something crosses his face that isn’t pride, that’s closer to fear, and he says, quiet, “I worry about that boy. He carries things. Always has. Smiles through everything and carries it underneath where you can’t see.
” He glances at me. “You’d know about that, I think. He says you see him.”
And I don’t have a flawless line for that.
For once. Erik Sorensen, hockey legend, the shadow, has looked at me across his own shrine and named the exact thing Beau and I both do — carries it underneath where you can’t see — and said you’d know about that, and for a second the performance slips and something true shows on my face before I can stop it.
“I try to,” I say. Which is the truest thing I’ve said in this house.
He nods, like I’ve confirmed something, and we go in to dinner.
There’s a moment with Annika, before the meal.
I find her in the kitchen — a kitchen the size of the entire Sailmaker ground floor, copper and marble and a window over the sink looking out at the bare gardens — and I do the thing I always do in someone else’s house, which is offer to help, because being useful is how I earn the right to occupy space, it’s the oldest thing I know how to do.
And Annika hands me a bowl of green beans to trim and we work side by side, and she talks the way her mother talks, in a warm river, and somewhere in it she says, light, not fishing, just making conversation the way people from certain houses make conversation: “And your family, Sloane — will they have you for Christmas? Or do we get to steal you again?” She smiles.
“I’m allowed to want to steal you. Beau’s never brought anyone to this kitchen.
You’re the first bean-trimmer he’s ever produced. ”
And there it is. The ordinary question. The one that has no answer I can give in this kitchen, in this house, over these beans.
My family. My father in the town I won’t name.
My mother in Arizona with her first-name Christmas cards.
My brother in Germany. The family that isn’t a family, that I changed my name to escape, that I have built my whole adult life around not having.