34. Chapter 34
thirty-four
Noel
I promised Kate and Colin I’d be fine, and my phone is still void of any messages from Jamie, so it’s just Mom and me tonight.
“She might be your monkey, but this doesn’t have to be your circus,” Kate said as she hugged me goodbye. I appreciated the reminder, but dealing with Mom’s life imploding is actually a lot more familiar and easier to deal with than the storm happening inside of my own heart.
It takes me a half hour to change the sheets in Nana’s room for Mom and make a space in the loft again for me. I drag a sleeping bag in from the garage, and fold up my easel to make room on the floor. God knows how long she’s planning to camp here.
If she’d shown up yesterday, I would have just gone, taken Pixie and run to Jamie’s place. To him, to the comfort and safety of being in his orbit. But it’s not yesterday. It’s today. And it looks nothing like I thought.
I set us up with some tea and we sprawl out over Nana’s old plaid couch with the fireplace roaring at our feet. The chill of the beach has settled into my bones, so I’m decked out in flannel pajama pants and, embarrassingly, wrapped in one of Jamie’s zip-up hoodies.
Since Mom showed up with only what would fit in her backpack, completely unprepared for the temperature change from West coast to East, she’s in one of Nana’s long cardigans. She looks like a child playing dress up.
“So then he said he needs more room to breathe than the van.” She dabs the corner of her eye with her sleeve.
“I pointed out the window to the literal desert we were parked in and said ‘you’ve got acres of room, you foolish man! Go wander the sand for a bit.’ I don’t know, Noel.
Some people just don’t know what they want from one minute to the next. ”
I nod absently, unable to even respond to that ridiculous judgment coming from her. She’s been bouncing from one thing to another her whole life. Men, jobs, adventures. I keep that thought to myself as usual.
Instead, I reach across the cushion and squeeze her wrist, offering her the box of tissues on my end table.
She takes one and in the same motion reaches for Pixie, scooping her from my lap to hers.
A little squeak of protest escapes me, but she doesn’t notice.
She goes on about California, about Dennis and how his adult kids weren’t supportive of his decision to sell his house to do the whole van thing with my mother either, and I hate the bitterness creeping into the back of my throat.
I hate it but I can’t seem to fight it off this time.
I should be a good daughter, a sympathetic ear.
I’m trying to be whatever she needed from me when she came here.
But I can’t be the port right now when my heart is a swirling storm.
It hits me like a rogue wave, that I’ve never even been a mess before.
I found the emotion I’d been looking for here, found it in droves.
Only for it to end in my first ever emotional breakdown on the beach.
For a panicked moment, I think I’ll actually burst from the ache.
This is what wanting does to you. This is why I’ve never wanted to be like her.
My breath starts to stutter, and my eyes spill over like two raging rivers. “I actually can’t do this right now,” I blurt.
Mom pulls back a bit, blinking at the interruption, and I follow my first real foot-putting down moment with a broken sob that shakes my shoulders.
“Honey, are you okay?”
I shake my head, batting at the tears streaming from my eyes. “No. I’m not,” I tell her. “My heart is broken, and I can’t stuff down my feelings to make room for yours anymore. These ones are too big.”
Mom’s eyes are saucers. “Heartbroken? Honey, over what?”
Despite myself, I laugh, utterly vindicated at her question.
She doesn’t even know Jamie exists. She doesn’t know his name.
His face. That dimple that knocked the wind out of me.
How his eyes are just the tiniest bit asymmetrical, and a color that I’ve tried for hours to recreate with paint or chalk or pencils before I realized I wasn’t talented enough.
How he always sleeps on his stomach. How everyone, everyone loves him but he loved me .
Even when all I ever gave him was hesitation.
All these things have happened to me since I last saw my mother and she doesn’t know because she didn’t think to ask. She touches down when she needs my help, never the other way around.
Such an easy kid . Barely ever cries.
I think I saved all those tears for this moment right now.
With a half sob, half groan of frustration, I move to stand, to leave this conversation for what it is—shallow, one-sided at best, certainly not any help toward putting my heart back in my chest—but she must see it on my face, this despair, because she catches my wrist and tugs me back to the couch. “Tell me,” she says.
“I fell in love. Real love, and I hurt him. I made him think he wasn’t good enough, but really he was too good. I want him too much, and I’m scared of it.”
“You’ve always been full of nerves,” she says with a pious shake of her head.
I choke on more tears. She’s right. I have always been full of nerves. Terrified to want or to love, because her kind of love is chaotic and untrustworthy and scary, and it’s the only example I’ve ever had. Until now.
Loving Jamie is like a hug after a bad dream. A cup of tea after a white-knuckle drive in the snow. He’s my wild streak and my calm place. One minute he’s the wind and the next he’s the sturdy ground, and I don’t know if I ever could have seen that coming even with a glimpse of the future.
Mom points her teacup at me. “You know, Noel, your Nana used to say ‘Life is one part fate, two parts figure it out.’”
I run a hand under my nose. “What does that mean?”
“It means humans have a knack for screwing up a good thing. God knows I do. You know she knew about you before I did. Saw it in a candle. I was only twenty years old,” she says, like I’m not acutely aware of the youth I stole from her.
How she ended up taking mine in return by leaning on me the way she did.
“But before that, I had these plans to go to Europe when I graduated high school. I wanted to study art like you. Well, first I was going to backpack through the countryside, but then I was going to get serious. I had the money too.” She waves a hand. “It was the nineties. Everyone had money then.”
I’ve heard this story a hundred times, and I nearly give up again, dump my tea and head to bed just so I can have some peace to wallow in, but she keeps going.
“Anyway, I hadn’t even told your grandmother about this plan, and then one day, she was reading my candle wax and she saw the whole thing. Wine and paintings and French men.” She winks. “And you know what I did? I picked your father. Stupid me, I guess.”
I flinch at the careless reminder. My whole existence is a result of that “stupid” decision, but I don’t have any more pain to dedicate to her, so instead I go back a step. “I never heard Nana say that, the thing about fate only being part of it.”
She shrugs. “Well, maybe she didn’t think you’d want to hear it. You were always her biggest skeptic.”
I sniffle scoff. Those were the days. I wish I could go back to being a skeptic, forget all of these glimpses and half-clues as to what’s in store. I think of the belief draining out of Jamie’s eyes and it’s like pouring lemon juice on a cut. I finally did believe in magic, and it betrayed me.
Except… maybe what Mom’s saying is it didn’t.
Two parts figure it out.
After I saw Jamie’s tattoo, I asked Kate what the point of seeing the future was if I could change it, but what if that’s the whole point? Or at least two parts of it.
I’ve had signs that it could change this whole time. Jamie’s tattoo, the scar. I ignored them. I feared them because I thought they challenged the magic. But maybe they weren’t evidence that the visions were wrong. Maybe they were little bits of accountability. Proof that our choices matter too.
That’s what I told Jamie when he first shocked me with his story about getting the money for his business.
He still had to know what to do with it.
That’s what I’ve been hoping he’d figure out about himself and his ability to run his business, that it’s more about him than he thinks.
But I’ve ignored the way that could also apply to me, to us.
I sit up a little straighter, and Pixie stretches her front paws, trotting back to me.
Mom’s saying Nana saw her having a whole other life, but she chose something else.
She made choices and the future changed.
Sure, I saw Jamie and me together, but even after he showed up on my porch, I could have refused to see him again like I did the first time.
I could have said no to Cara despite the vision, left when I was supposed to and taken Ned’s job. I could have never come here at all.
Every time I tried to turn away from Jamie, the universe lodged him back into my brain, showing me a new version of us—the first vision on the roof, his bar when I tried to walk away, then that night on the beach when I ran away. But the moment I went all in, the visions stopped.
What if the lesson isn’t that Jamie and I are a destiny that I got a glimpse into? What if it’s to show me what I could have if I stop talking myself out of the things I want and into something safer. If I stop telling myself that loving anything enough that it could wreck me is akin to madness.
When I thought I was following fate, I let myself love harder than I ever have, let Jamie love me back because I thought I couldn’t fail, but he’s not a pawn in my future.
He’s been choosing this all along too. He believed in fate but he also figured it out.
He’s always been braver than me that way.
I close my eyes and picture him—pushing through the things that he struggles with, terrified he’s going to make a mistake but going after what he wants anyway.
Handing me his heart with so much trust in his eyes—and there’s a sudden quiet in my brain, like dipping my head under water and losing the ambient noise.
Only one message floats around in there now.
It’s not a vision, but a peaceful realization.
I haven’t lost the future I could have with him or this house or this new life. I’m just at the figure it out part.
“This is new,” is all Mom says while I clutch Pixie to my chest and cry so hard I’m snotty and sweaty in this oversized sweatshirt.
“It is,” I choke out.
A moment passes with Mom just staring at me like I’m some sort of bug under a microscope. Then she nods resolutely. “My little hot mess,” she says. “I like it.”
I give her an incredulous sniffle-laugh. Only her.
Then I wipe a hand under my nose and push my shoulders back, chin tipped. “Good,” I say. “Because I put the condo up for sale and I’m moving here. The spare room is only available for visits.”