Chapter Twenty-Six #2
“Maybe not this one thing,” I say, quiet. His expression flickers, nearly a flinch. It’s brutal enough that I find myself tipping forward to kiss him—gingerly, the headache still throbbing behind my eyes. I wilt down at his side and lean my cheek into his chest. “Tell me more about your sisters.”
Campbell swallows. He jokes about hearing the sound of my brain, but the truth is I can hear his, too—in the silence before he speaks, I catch every bit of the way he’s wrestling with himself. Something he wants to bring up, but doesn’t.
“They’re funny,” he says, finally. The arm I’m leaning against lifts to tuck me closer to his side. His hand lands on my head, rubbing gently, and I close my eyes. “Viv is four years older, Josie just one. We call them the birds, because they’re always chattering over each other.”
I rest my palm on his stomach, where it rises and falls with his breath.
“You don’t have siblings, huh?”
“No,” I tell him. “Just me.”
“Yeah.” His thumb rubs my temple. “I could always tell you were an only child.”
My eyes open, but all I can see is the bottom hem of his T-shirt. His legs stretched long across my bed. “Because I’m weird?”
Campbell laughs, one short gust. “Because you’re so self-contained. An entire universe all on your own.”
I close my eyes again. “Lonely, you mean.”
Campbell hesitates. Under my ear, his heart beats steadily. “Is that what you mean?”
“Sometimes,” I say. My head hurts too much to work up a lie. “A lot of times, growing up. I’ve always been jealous of people with big families.”
Campbell’s fingers find the base of my skull and slide up into my hair. “And then you met Ava.”
“And then I met Ava,” I agree. The way Campbell describes his sisters reminds me of the Zimmermans’ house—how it was always so full of noise.
Ava’s brothers hollering with laughter from the living room, one of us cranking the volume on her stereo so we could hear our music over them.
Ava’s dad humming under his breath after knocking on her bedroom door to ask if we wanted study snacks.
And then the relative quiet, when I went home. It was always my father waiting up for me on the living room couch. The TV light casting him blue and washed-out, like a hologram.
Good day? he’d ask me, a script we stuck to. Great, I’d tell him.
It was always enough for them, just to know I was home in one piece. When Dad traveled, I’d text Mom so that she didn’t need to leave her room at the back of the house to know I was in for the night. I’m alive, all those interactions said. It was the one thing they kept track of.
I craved the intrusiveness of Ava’s family, the way they drove her crazy with curiosity about her life. I’d have done nearly anything to feel like my parents had an interest in me. To have anyone else around who I belonged to. Who belonged to me, too.
I lift my head to meet Campbell’s eyes. “Do you have a picture of them? Your family.”
He looks at me for a moment, his fingers still moving through my hair, before reaching into his pants pocket.
“Yeah,” he says, and pulls out his phone.
I sit up higher and he comes with me, both of us propped against the headboard.
My headache is easing a bit—I can look at him, now, without squinting.
“Here.” Campbell holds his phone out to me. “That’s one of the more recent good ones, all of us together. Family weekend, my senior year of college.”
One of the more recent good ones, I think. At least six years old.
I take the phone in both hands. I can feel Campbell watching me take them all in: standing in front of a redbrick building with cherry blossoms in the background, Campbell at the center of the shot with his family radiating around him.
His sisters stand on his right, the younger one—Josie—with her arm looped around his waist and her head thrown back on a laugh.
Vivian’s beside her, arm draped across Josie’s shoulders.
Their dad’s in a wheelchair to Campbell’s left, smiling behind dark sunglasses.
His mother, at the edge of the shot, has one hand on her husband’s shoulder and a bright orange T-shirt that reads My kid and all my money goes to Vanderbilt.
“Nice shirt,” I say, and he smiles on an eye roll.
“I was there on a scholarship.” He doesn’t take his phone back, just lets me keep looking. “Did work-study all four years. She just thought it was funny.”
“It is funny,” I tell him, and he shakes his head.
I look down at the Campbell in my hands: younger, his hair cropped too short, something looser and rangy about him. I’m trying to remember the details of that photo on his desk at Slater, back when we were interns. It was all five of them; I’m sure of it. All five of them standing on a beach.
“My dad went to Vanderbilt,” Campbell says, finally. “I grew up hearing so much about it.”
“That’s special,” I say, and he exhales through his nose.
“Yeah, it was.”
I hand Campbell his phone, and he sets it face down on the bed beside him.
“How’s he doing now?” I ask, and Campbell’s eyes slide back and forth over mine. His hand’s resting on my hip, close but still.
“Not his best,” he says. “Jo’s getting married in our backyard and we’re trying to have him there, with an aide from Plover House.
It’s been—ah.” He smiles unsteadily, like he’s a little embarrassed.
“It’s been sort of an undertaking. That day I missed the hike in Aspen, my dad had fallen, and there was this whole insurance mess that I had to help my mom with because—” Campbell stops, wavering.
His eyes cast over me like he’s weighing something.
Eventually, he just says, “But it’s important to Josie. ”
“That makes sense,” I say. His thumb brushes across my waist. “Will he take her down the aisle?”
Campbell draws a deep breath. “That’s the plan. He did it with Vivian, when she married Gabriel a few years ago. It went all right, but things are a bit different, now.”
“How so?” I want to know everything: what his dad’s like; what it’ll mean for him if this doesn’t go well; most of all, what he’s feeling about it.
“He gets upset, sometimes,” Campbell says. Slowly, like he’s choosing the words very carefully. “When he’s confused. But he has good days, too.”
I lean my temple to his shoulder. “What happens if he isn’t up for it?”
For a minute, Campbell’s quiet. Just the steady rhythm of his thumb at my side. “I’m the backup,” he says, finally.
I look up at him. “Big job for someone who doesn’t believe in soulmates.”
Campbell smiles. “You remember that, huh?”
“ ‘Pretty staunchly opposed,’ I think you said.”
He shakes his head. “Yeah, well. Hard to believe it’s all worthwhile when you’ve watched your dad forget who your mom is.”
“Does that mean they weren’t meant for each other?”
Campbell looks down at me. We’re so close that I catch every movement of his golden lashes as his eyes track back and forth over mine. I’m thinking it had to be worthwhile. I’m thinking, They’re the reason I have you at all.
“I don’t know, Mattie,” Campbell says, softly. I know I’m pressing on something tender, the way he’s gone so still beside me. The unfamiliar tension in his face. “I just know it’s been hell for her. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. Campbell only swallows, lifting his hand to my hair so I’m held close against his shoulder. Also, maybe, so I can’t see his face.
I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
On the beach, Ava told me that love is a good thing. But Campbell doesn’t want that—he only wants seven days.
I wrap my arm around his body. His fingers brush, lightly, through my hair. And I close my eyes against the increasingly intolerable truth of all this.
It’s only seven days.