35. Chloe
I was having a hard time deciding whether the book I was reading was more of a comedy or a tragedy. At college, I once took a Shakespeare class where the professor posited that old William’s best works were the ones where he fused the two. Real talent, she’d said, was the ability to showcase the light in darkness and the darkness in the light.
I wasn’t sure how true any of that was, since I’d had to drop the class halfway through, but I felt pretty sure that when it came to making me want to both laugh and cry, Shakespeare had nothing on a young Catherine Martin.
“What’s so funny?” my mother asked as she walked into the living room where I sat with my legs tucked under me and the copy of Wuthering Heights open in my lap. “I could hear you chuckling to yourself from outside.”
I smiled faintly at her. I had yet to get used to her walking in and out of the front door as if she, well, owned the place, but I was getting better at not showing my strain.
“I’m reading one of the books Jasper gave me yesterday,” I said as I held it up. “Catherine wrote all kinds of notes in it for him back in the sixties. Look—right here, it’s the part where Catherine is about to die. ‘“She’s fainted or dead,” I thought, “so much the better. Far better that she should be dead, than lingering a burden and a misery-maker to all around her.”’”
My mom wrinkled her nose in a way that looked exactly like Theo puzzling over a difficult Minecraft build. “That doesn’t sound very funny to me. You forget that I’ve read that book. I remember how it ends.”
“It’s not supposed to be funny,” I explained. “But in the margins, Catherine wrote, ‘You already know how I feel about the heroine-must-die-to-save-the-hero trope, but there’s truth in this. What’s the point of living if all you’re going to do is make everyone around you miserable? What are we put on this earth for if not to make life better for those we leave behind?’”
My mom’s frown only deepened. She crossed her arms and leaned against the doorway in a gesture I’d almost forgotten about. She always used to look at me exactly like that whenever she’d come in to find me reading under the covers long after bedtime. “That’s not very funny, either.”
I sighed and closed the book. “I know, but she was literally staging her own death while she wrote it. She was killing off the heroine—herself—in order to save the hero—Jasper. But instead of going to her grave, she went off and lived the kind of fabulous life most of us only dream of. It might not be ha-ha funny, but there’s irony in there for sure.”
I paused, studying my mother for a long moment. When she’d first arrived at the house, with Todd behind her holding enough suitcases for an around-the-world cruise, she’d looked as though she’d stepped onto the front porch straight from the catwalk. Her hair had been salon-straightened, her nails filed to delicious red points, her heels so tall that she towered over me. Now, a little over a week into her stay, and she looked…different. Everything that had been bright and shiny about her had dulled to a faded, weary gray.
“She was only a few years older than Trixie when she wrote this,” I added, since I had to say something. One of us needed to move this conversation along, and as usual, that someone was going to be me. “That’s the thing that gets me the most about their whole situation. They were little more than kids at the time, but they carried the weight of the whole world on their shoulders.”
“Don’t,” my mom said suddenly. She flung up a hand as if to keep any further discussion at bay.
I blinked up at her, startled by the vehemence of her tone. “I’m sorry. Is it tedious for me to go on and on about them? I’ve been a little obsessed lately, I’ll admit, but—”
“Chloe. Please.”
“I’ll stop,” I promised, trying not to show how much her words stung. While it was true that I didn’t have very many conversational gambits outside books and the kids, I liked to think that I wasn’t a complete bore. In fact, for a little while there, before I’d learned that Zach was only using me as a way to get close to his grandfather, I even thought I’d had a little dazzle.
I set the book aside and fixed my attention on my mom instead. “What’s up?” I asked. Suddenly realizing that the house was awfully quiet for a change, I added, “And where is everyone? I know Theo and Trixie are at school, but—”
“Noodle and the dog are at that man’s house. Next door.” My mom took a step into the room, changed her mind, and stepped back out again. “And I sent Todd to pick up a few groceries. Just some staples and things. I’d like to leave the house well stocked when we go.”
I shared none of my mom’s hesitance. I was on my feet and across the room in flash. “Wait. You’re leaving? Already? Before Noodle’s even out of his walking cast?”
She winced in a way that felt like a slap across the face—though whether it was her face that was being slapped or mine, I couldn’t say.
“This isn’t easy for me,” she said, her voice small and growing smaller by the second. “None of it—coming home again after all these years, seeing how grown up everyone is, how much they hate me…”
I knew it was my job to protest, to reassure her that Theo and Trixie were only struggling with their emotions and hormones and that all would settle down eventually, but I couldn’t. Not only would it be a lie, but I wasn’t so sure she deserved to hear it.
Less than two weeks. That’s how long she lasted this time.
“Please tell me you’re at least going to stick around long enough to say goodbye,” I said, feeling the ice coursing from my veins into my voice. “They survived it once, but I don’t think you realize how close of a call it was. It took me months to go through the whole guardianship process and get them back under this roof. In fact, I’m still paying off the legal fees.”
“I’ll have Todd write you a check to cover them,” she said with a complete disregard for the point. “And I’m going to send money home this time—every month, I promise.”
I closed my eyes, hoping that by cutting off the sight of her, I might cut off all the rest: how tired and sad she looked, how drained by all the memories this home carried. I also wanted to cut off my understanding.
Because I did understand. That was the thing that annoyed me the most. When my mom stood inside these four walls, she didn’t see how full of memories and life this house was. She didn’t notice the sticky notes set up around the computer monitor where Theo liked to remind himself of all he had planned for his Minecraft kingdom: creeper cages, a slaughterhouse for the cows, underground lava tubes in the shape of a pentagram. She also didn’t see the stack of books that Trixie kept meticulously piled next to her bed: all of them biographies of famous legal minds, and all of them so far above her reading level that it took her months to get through them. Noodle she still treated like a little boy afraid of his own shadow instead of a young man who was finally coming into himself—soft and sweet and, yes, a little bit strange.
And me, well. Sometimes I thought she didn’t see me at all. If she did, she’d have never walked out on these kids without first giving me a heads-up. She had to have known that I’d do anything for them—that I would continue doing everything for as long as they needed me.
Because that’s what the Catherines and Jaspers and Chloes of this world did. Sometimes we struck out on grand adventures. Sometimes we stayed home and buried ourselves in books. But we always, always put our love first.
“The money will be nice, thanks,” I said, trying not to notice how bitter the words tasted on my tongue. It was killing me to accept such a sad second-rate gift from this woman, but Lonnie and Pepper had been right. As much as I hated accepting help, some things were more important than my pride.
My family was one of them.
“You can also come by and visit anytime you want,” I said. “This is your house just as much as it is ours. More, actually. I can’t promise the kids will welcome you with open arms, but you’re within your rights to try.”
“About that.” She held up a finger before turning and going to the kitchen, where the sound of rustling papers soon followed. When she returned, it was with a manila folder in one of her manicured hands. She shoved it at me before I had time to do more than blink. “This is for you. It’s the deed to the house. I’m only sorry it took me this long to sign it over. I don’t think I realized it was still in my name until—” She grew flustered and tried to cover her sudden discomfort. “Well, anyway. It’s yours now. Stay here if you want. Sell it and take the kids somewhere else. Just make sure you send me your updated address if you do, okay? I’d like to stay in touch…as much as I can anyway. You get it, right?”
The enormity of what was passing between us wasn’t lost on me. She was giving me the house—small and in disrepair, yes, but still worth at least a hundred and fifty grand. She was also giving me a way out of this life, this town. I could take the kids to Spokane if I wanted. Start over near colleges and opportunities. Build something of my own.
But when I spoke, it wasn’t about the deed in my hand.
“Until what?” I asked.
She blinked her confusion—and a few wayward tears I pretended not to notice. “Huh?”
“Just now, you said that you hadn’t realized the house was yours until…and then you stopped. What were you going to say?”
She dashed at her eyes with the back of her hand. Clumps of mascara transferred from her lashes to her skin, leaving a black smear behind. “Nothing, really. Just that I am sorry, Chloe. I know it’s too little, too late, but you have to understand that this place was killing me. When you lived here and were able to help with the kids, I got on all right, but after you left…” She shook her head in what I assumed was supposed to be a gesture of supplication—maybe even regret—but all I saw was her vanity and weakness, her inability to love anyone as much as she loved herself. “I wasn’t built to do this sort of thing alone.”
That was when I snapped. I wish I could say that I went off on her in a full blaze of glory, spouting venom like Jasper Holmes at his angriest, letting loose all the stress and anxiety of the past four years—or even that I eloquently reduced her to rubble with a literary quote.
Instead, I severed any remaining ties in my heart and let myself feel the one emotion she genuinely deserved: my pity.
“You were never alone, Mom,” I said. “That’s the thing you got wrong—not sneaking out in the dead of night or abandoning three underage children to the state, not even how long you stayed away without a single word. Your problem was that you had some of the best people in the world living in this house with you, and you never once stopped to think of how lucky that made you.”
She winced but took each word as it came. “I know. That’s why I’m giving you the house. Your next-door neighbor had a lot to say on the subject. I don’t know what you kids did to win him over to your side, but it must have been something big. When I lived here, he was so nasty to me that I used to quake every time I saw one of his lights come on.”
“He’s still that nasty,” I said, the words automatic. “We just learned to look past it to the man he is underneath.”
My mom nodded as though she understood, but she didn’t—not in any way that counted. If you were to put the two of them side by side, one a cranky old man who had few graces and even less tact, the other a beautiful woman in her forties with a smile that lit up the night sky, everyone would say that they’d prefer the company of the latter.
But they’d be wrong. Jasper was craggy and full of sharp edges, yes, but my mom was a beautiful, ethereal nothing. It had taken me a long journey through Jasper’s past to realize it, but life was better when you had something to hold on to. Not memories and not hopes, but something real. Someone real.
“He’ll take good care of you from here on out,” my mom added as if reading my mind. “Much better than I ever did, that’s for sure.”
She paused then, looking equal parts uncomfortable and hopeful. “Can I hug you, Chloe? One last time before I go?”
I nodded before I’d even had time to finish processing the question—not about the hug, but about it being one last time. Maybe she genuinely believed this was the first of many such embraces, but as her arms came around me and squeezed, I knew, deep in my heart, that she wouldn’t be back.
“Todd and I will pick up the kids from school,” she said as she let me go, her bright color already starting to come back. Now that she’d severed the last of her ties to this place—and to her family—she was a like a bird regrowing its plumage. “We’ll say our goodbyes then.”
“And Noodle?” I asked, feeling tense.
She fixed her gaze on a spot a few inches above my head. “I’ll pop by and let him know we’re leaving, but I doubt he’ll even notice we’re gone. He’s the one who called me to come back, but…I don’t know, Chloe. He doesn’t have much of a heart, does he?”
With that, I realized she was giving me one final gift. By disclaiming all understanding of and for Noodle, she was cutting the last thread of my affection for her. In a way, it was almost like faking her own death and escaping into the night. She would send money home—when she remembered to—and maybe even stamp the occasional birthday card, but we were finally free.
“‘His heart was a secret garden and the walls were very high,’” I said, one of my favorite The Princess Bride quotes rising naturally to my lips. Then I finished with a line of my own. “I’m afraid you just never learned to scale them.”
She picked up on the quote almost at once. “We did always love that book, didn’t we, you and I?”
“There are worse things in the world to have in common,” I agreed, a bittersweet smile touching my lips. “Goodbye, Mom. And thank you.”
She looked as though she wanted to add more, but we both knew there wasn’t anything left to say. She’d done what she came to do, given what little she had to give, and would disappear as easily as she had the first time.
The only difference was that this time, I knew I was going to be okay.
The house felt oddly empty after my mom and Todd finished dropping off the promised groceries and headed out to pick up Theo and Trixie from school. In an act of absolution, they’d gone way overboard, investing in things like gourmet frozen pizzas that I had no room to store and exotic juice blends that the kids would be sure to avoid, but there were several boxes of name-brand cereal in the bags, so my mom hadn’t completely failed.
I had just finished reorganizing the freezer so that I could cram the last of the groceries inside when I heard a knock at the door.
“It’s open!” I called as I pushed against the freezer door with all my weight. I heard a cardboard box tearing inside, but the door managed to latch shut, so that was good enough for me. “And if you’re a child coming home from school, please don’t dump your backpack on the floor. Put it in your room where it belongs, or I won’t hesitate to revoke your internet privileges.”
“Is it bad that I like it when you get all authoritative and mean?” called the last voice I expected to hear.
“Zach!” I cried, more to myself than to the man in question. I poked a tentative head out of the kitchen to find him standing in the foyer, looking somehow both sheepish and like a man who’d never feared anything or anyone a day in his life. “What are you doing here?”
He whipped the knit cap off his head and clutched it in his hands like a beggar of old. I didn’t buy his act for a single second. No one who looked that good while pretending to be sorry was the least bit trustworthy.
I crossed my arms and glared at him. “If you’re here to see Noodle, you came to the wrong house. He’s over at Jasper’s—I mean, your grandfather’s.”
The venom in my voice was so thick that even I winced a little at the sound of it. Zach glanced quickly up, his expression bleak enough to wring a heart made of much stronger stuff than mine.
“You’re really mad about that, aren’t you?”
Since I’d already gone this far, I saw no reason to hold back now. “You mean, about that time you lied about who you are and why you live in Colville? About why you sought me out and inveigled yourself into my life and the lives of my brothers and sister?”
“Chloe, please. It wasn’t like that, I swear.”
I flung up a hand to stop him. I didn’t want to hear the way his voice cracked over my name or see the way his lips turned down at the edges. I didn’t want to see those crinkles around his eyes, which held so much sadness that I almost—almost—believed him.
“I did try to tell you, you know,” he added. “That day at the library when I gave you my grandmother’s copy of A Farewell to Arms. I told you it was from my fairy godmother, but you thought I was joking.”
The air constricted around me. “That’s not fair, Zach.”
“I know it isn’t fair. But it is the truth.”
Something about his simplicity caused me to fight even harder against the pull of him.
“It’s not as if it matters either way,” I said. “You might find this hard to believe, but I get why you did it. I’ve lived next to your grandfather my whole life. I know how prickly he can be. You wanted an in, and I provided the perfect opportunity.” I smiled then, a little wryly but with genuine feeling. “I’d have probably done the same thing, to be honest. When it comes to doing the tough jobs, I don’t think there’s a limit to how far I’ll go.”
He didn’t return my smile. If anything, his expression tightened to one of genuine pain. “Do you remember what I said to you that night we went bowling? About how lonely I was growing up? How much I enjoyed being around a family as loud and fun as yours?”
Of course I remembered that night. It was forever burned in my mind as the first time I actually allowed myself to hope that my life might be something different. But all I said was, “Sure. Why not?”
He lifted his hands as if to reach for me before dropping them again. “I meant what I said, Chloe. My dad is every inch Jasper’s son, even if the two of them have never met before. He’s just as prickly and self-contained, an avid outdoorsman like me.”
“So? What does that have to do with me?”
“Everything,” he said. “And also nothing.”
That time, he really did reach for me. He didn’t pull me into his arms or anything like that, but he did take both my hands in his own. His fingers were large and rough and capable, and I could suddenly see why a young Catherine had fallen so hard for an equally young Jasper.
“I moved to Colville last year for no real reason other than a curiosity to see the place my grandma used to talk about. She used to say that it was both the best and the worst place she’d ever lived. It was where she’d first fallen in love and learned to stand up for herself—where she’d buried one part of herself and given birth to a whole new one. Obviously, I was curious about Jasper, but that was only secondary to the rest.”
“Which was?” I asked. I didn’t try to pull my hands away.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I think that’s the Jasper in me. As soon as I set foot in the forest here, I knew it was where I belonged. Like my father—and my grandfather—there’s something about the wild that calls to me. It’s where I feel most at home. But like my grandmother, I also need more than just a few trees and the night sky. I don’t mean nice clothes and a high-powered career, but people. Siblings and friends and family. Maybe even you.”
I tried not to let that last remark get to me, but I was only human, after all. “Does this mean you’ll be sticking around for a while?” I asked, watching him through my half-lowered eyelids.
He seemed to sense that I was asking more than just a passing question. “Yeah, I am. I enjoy the town and my work, and Jasper has yet to slam the door shut in my face, so I figure that’s as good a sign as any that he’s willing to see what we can make of this whole grandpa/grandson thing. I’d also like to see what we can make of this whole Chloe/Zach thing, but I know I’m going to have to work hard to regain your trust. But if you’ll be here, I’d like to try.” His smile quirked again. “No pressure or anything. Just hope.”
My heart gave a sudden, heaving lurch. As fun as it was to indulge in the what-if dreams of selling the house and packing up the kids, of moving to Spokane and finding a way to pay the bills and pick up where my education had left off, the reality was that my life would very much continue the way it always had. Theo and Trixie were deeply entrenched in their respective schools. Noodle was happier than I’d seen him in a long time. I had Lonnie and Pepper to look out for and a job that, despite its low pay and even lower prestige, I genuinely enjoyed.
Besides, Zach was here. Jasper was here.
Catherine Martin may have been able to tear herself away and start over somewhere new, but it was like I said before—our Sampson roots drove deep. I couldn’t pull them up without damaging the whole lot of us in the process.
“I’m not leaving any time soon,” I said, and for the first time, that felt okay. “So you’re welcome to do your worst.”
He fought to hide his sudden, beaming smile. Although he eventually managed to tamp it down, the damage—for damage it was—had already been done. My heart gave a bona fide pitter-patter. Whatever stops he pulled out to earn my forgiveness were sure to be good ones. Nonsensical, probably, and highly suspicious, but good all the same.
But he wasn’t done yet. “In that case, I’m supposed to drag you next door.” He tilted his head toward the door. “Jasper’s throwing a little going-away party.”
“Going away?” I echoed. “For…my mom and Todd?”
“No, for my grandmother. I’m driving her down to the airport first thing in the morning.”
My heart gave a sudden, heaving lurch. “Oh, no. She’s leaving already? What about Jasper? What about their love story?”
“I think they both agreed that story was better left without a sequel.” He extended a hand to me. “Will you come? She really wants to see you before she goes. There’s something she wants to give you.”
I slipped my fingers into his, drawing comfort from the warm, rough feel of his hand in mine. “If that something is you, I should probably warn you that I prefer my gifts to be of the monetary variety.”
“Duly noted,” he said, his hand squeezing mine. “But I think you should wait and see. If there’s one thing my grandmother’s good at, it’s giving people the one thing they didn’t know they needed most.”