Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
I have to buy sneakers. Obviously.
I take a picture of them—pure white, chunky-soled, undoubtedly impractical for hiking—and send it to Dexter. Think I could expense these?
He replies immediately. No.
So it’s with a heartrending hit to my checking account that I show up for the hiking shuttle on Wednesday morning. The sneakers are stiff and clunky as clown shoes—cute, maybe, for a lady at the national average of 5’4”, but not for the size ten feet that carry me around at 5’11”.
Soraya’s the only one here yet, wearing clothes that actually look like they were made for this: waterproof pants, a T-shirt, hiking boots that hit above her ankle. By contrast, my black yoga pants / zip hoodie combination paired with the new shoes makes me look like a mime.
“Morning, Mattie,” Soraya says. We haven’t really spoken since the bar on Friday, and being beside her with no one else to buffer us makes me feel itchy and exposed.
Campbell and I have spent so many years in this specific, professional gridlock that calling him out has never felt mean.
But on Friday, in that dimly lit miner’s bar, Soraya had made me feel mean.
I briefly entertain the fantasy of sprinting upstairs to get my notebook so I can show her what he wrote there.
Is that all you’ve got?
After an indisputably great presentation. After I made Lucia Perez say Wow.
After I didn’t take his bait, for once.
“Campbell’s not coming,” Soraya says. She’s bent over, tightening the laces on one of her boots. “It’ll just be Nolan and me on our end.”
I blink down at her. Then out over the circular drive, where a Wicksteed-wrapped shuttle is pulling in to collect us. The morning feels warm for September: mid-seventies, already.
Why do I feel…this? Not quite disappointed, but at the very least stopped short.
I’ve spent all morning anticipating a full day of Campbell Porter, of purposefully ignoring him to display just how little he affects me.
Two days ago I decided I wasn’t going to pay attention to him, and now I don’t get to prove it?
What I don’t feel—what I should feel—is relieved.
Lucia comes through the double doors, then, smiling graciously at the bellman. Nolan is close behind her and says, quickly, “Ah, Lucia, we’ve had a change—”
They turn toward each other, and Nolan continues speaking in a hushed voice that I can’t make out. The unsettled feeling in my chest flares into something bordering on concern. It’s hot and clammy and, for a moment, hard to breathe through.
Soraya stands up, and I look at her. “Is he okay?”
I brace for her to snap, What do you care? or maybe to slap me in the face. Instead, she’s as kind and collected as ever.
“Should be,” she says, which isn’t quite an answer. “Some family things about.”
I think of Campbell this weekend in the Pantry, his shirt damp with sweat, his eyes landing on mine. Yes, Ma. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.
I’ve only heard from my own parents twice since leaving Chicago—one text each.
My dad to tell me he’s in Amsterdam for work, no recollection that I’d also told him I’d be traveling this week.
He sent me a photograph of a canal and I sent him one of a mountain and our exchange ended there.
My mom because she was clearing out the storage room in our basement and wanted to know if I’d like to keep all the stories I wrote in kindergarten, or if she could throw them out.
Throw them out, I’d told her. And didn’t add what I wanted to, which was: Why don’t these matter to you? They’re the earliest artifacts of the person she’d wanted so much for me to become. Or, maybe: the person she’d wanted to become. Evidence of my first attempts to be just like her.
My mom kept the house in the divorce and has spent the years since making it hers.
My parents took four years to finalize the deal after separating when I was in high school.
There was a yearlong stretch when it actually became unclear if they’d ever legally divorce; they fought each other so hard on every infinitesimal detail that for a moment it seemed simpler to just stay together.
But they saw it through, and then the house became my mother’s—an ownership she took to with such gusto she’d transformed my entire bedroom into an exercise space before I even graduated college.
When I came home on breaks, I slept on the living room sofa or at Ava’s.
Dad had always traveled for work, and after their split, even more so.
He kept an apartment in the town over from Mom’s house, but I never went there.
He didn’t ask me to, and I didn’t offer.
It seemed all that travel was the life Mom and I had been keeping him from, while he and I were keeping Mom from her writing.
They were free to live honestly, without each other.
And I was over eighteen by then: there was no custody arrangement to work out at all.
“No Campbell?”
I look over at Iris, who’s adjusting the strap of her watch as she steps up beside me. Dexter shuffles behind her with a reusable water bottle dangling by its handle from one of his fingers.
“Has a bit of family business to attend to,” Soraya tells her. “Staying back today.”
“Oh, too bad,” Iris says. “Hope everything’s all right.”
Soraya only smiles, which doesn’t give me nearly enough information. I think of that look on Campbell’s face when I thanked him for the notebook, like he didn’t quite recognize the way I’d made him feel. I feel it now, unsteadying.
“Lucky break,” Dexter whispers to me.
Lucky, I think as we board the shuttle. Right.
The hike is six miles, which is about five and a half miles too long.
We stop halfway through at an alpine lake, where our guide—a sinewy man in a Wicksteed-branded Patagonia vest—pulls picnic lunches out of his backpack.
I eat my artisan turkey sandwich while watching a chipmunk rummage through a pile of twigs and try not to picture what Campbell’s doing back at the resort.
Video-calling his family from his suite two doors down from mine?
Pacing on the West Terrace while he talks on the phone?
Sitting naked in the spa sauna while—I don’t know—weeping?
By the time the shuttle drops us off, I’ve decided I can make one last attempt to salvage this day by returning the godforsaken shoes. I hiked so carefully. There isn’t a speck of mud on them.
Alone in my room, I rinse their soles in the gargantuan bathroom sink.
When I catch my eyes in the mirror mid-scrub, I nearly don’t recognize myself.
I look undeniably frazzled: flyaway hairs escaping my ponytail, smudge of something brown on my chin, streak of unabsorbed sunscreen at the top of my forehead.
There’s a pink sheen of sunburn still, somehow, on the crests of my cheeks and the bridge of my nose—right above the hole from my piercing.
I pat the shoes dry with one of the twenty-five hand towels rolled up beneath the sink and then retie my ponytail. Wipe the dirt off my chin.
I slip into my leather boots, a glorious match for my hobbled-together hiking outfit, and head back down to the first floor.
The resort has a row of shops in a wide hallway off the lobby: the Pantry, a jewelry shop with diamonds so big they look like costume pieces, a swimsuit store, the apparel shop where I begrudgingly bought these sneakers.
I see Campbell the minute I step inside, flicking through a rack of men’s shirts at the far corner of the store.
I’ve built up his family situation (family crisis?
emergency?) so much in my head that it’s nearly jarring to see him looking so normal: jeans and a threadbare T-shirt, that Vanderbilt Swimming hat, perfectly placid expression.
His eyes aren’t red-rimmed from crying. He doesn’t look like he’s spent the whole day panicking.
I guess that was just me.
“Good afternoon,” an employee calls to me from the register.
At the sound of her voice, Campbell looks up.
His eyes slide the full length of the store, from the employee to me, before settling.
I want to scream, Are you okay? Can you just be okay so I can go back to hating you?
I am so fucking uncomfortable with this feeling.
I am going to crawl entirely out of my skin.
Instead, I stand completely still and then lift my hand in a wave.
Campbell smiles. It’s not his usual one. No teeth, just a slight sideways tilt of his mouth. And that’s the change: he looks tired. Campbell Porter, a lit fuse of a person, flattened out in a way that I feel right at the base of my throat. It’s like a fingertip pressed to my windpipe.
“What are you doing?” I say. A broad enough question to mean anything: Why did you skip the hike, why are you in this room at the same time as me, why are you smiling like that?
Campbell says, “Trying to find a shirt for Friday.”
Friday: our last night in Aspen. A formal dinner at El Rio, Wicksteed’s Michelin-starred restaurant, with the clients and both agency teams.
“I know you packed shirts,” I say.
Campbell holds my gaze. There’s something trapping about it; I don’t think I could move from under his scrutiny even if I wanted to. “I’ve been led to believe none of them are nice enough for an occasion like this.”
I swallow. “Maybe not the horseshoe one.”
He takes a step backward, away from the clothing rack, and gestures to it. “Help me, then.”
Help me. In all the years I’ve known him, he’s never once said those words to me. They hit like a drug, intoxicating. The feeling carries me across the room to the rack.
Campbell stands just behind me, watchful, as I rifle through the hangers. I’m hyperaware of the close barrier of his body as I consider the shirts with one hand and grip my white sneakers with the other.
I know I’ve found the right shirt the minute I spot it: a navy linen button-down, gorgeously textured.
A perfect neutral but for the placket, which is lined in brilliant cobalt fabric.
It’s everything I love in a garment. Thoughtfully made, a classic neutral that a person can wear and not be worn by.
But it’s Campbell, too: that bright shock of color.
I hand it to him without meeting his eyes. “This one.”
Campbell’s fingers close over mine on the hanger. I think of them shaking on that martini glass. Hovered an inch above my waist in that bar. When I look up at him, I pull my hand away.
“Okay, French,” Campbell says, softly.
He goes to the register and buys it, then leaves without saying another word.
They don’t let me return the shoes.