Chapter Thirty #2
“No idiot who wants you to give yourself up should get to marry you.”
I look up at him, smiling. Thoughtful.
“What?” he says. “I’m serious. Is it that or nothing? I don’t believe that.”
“What do you believe?”
Campbell draws a deep breath that lifts me with him.
Lets it out in a rush. “I don’t know. That my parents’ marriage wound up brutal.
That my sister’s mostly happy in hers. That Josie gets married this week and needs me to be excited for her.
” His gaze moves over my face, then out across the water.
“I think it’s probably a mixed bag, like most things. ”
Hard to believe it’s all worthwhile, he’d told me, just a couple days ago in my bed.
I think of my mom, the manuscripts stacked in that box at the back of her closet. The way that marriage and motherhood turned her into a version of herself with so little left to give to me. I wonder, in my most vulnerable moments, if we’d have been friends in a world where she wasn’t my mother.
“My mom was a poet,” I hear myself say. “Published, a few times. When she graduated college she had these grants to travel the world, basically, for free. To live in amazing places and write.”
Something is tightening behind my sternum. I try to focus on the rhythm of Campbell’s breathing. “She’d have had a different life.”
Campbell hesitates. “What does that mean?”
When I don’t respond, he tilts me upward and pulls me across his lap. The blanket tows behind me, tangling around our legs. “Mattie?”
I pull my legs closer, protecting myself, and they tent over his lap so my knees rest against his chest. I press my cheek into his shoulder so I don’t have to look at him as I say, “She got pregnant with me, instead. By accident, right after graduation. So she married my dad and gave it all up.”
I draw a breath and force out the rest of it. “I ruined her life. Me and my dad, who she hated for nineteen years before finally divorcing.”
Campbell’s hand lifts to my face, cradling it against his shoulder. There’s a sweep of cool metal as his signet ring brushes my neck. “You didn’t ruin her life, baby.”
“I did,” I say. “She told me.”
Campbell nudges me off him so he can meet my eyes. His voice is sharp. “What?”
“It’s okay.” I can’t quite look at him; a seagull swoops over the road and I watch it arc toward the ocean. I sacrificed all of it, for the two of you. “It was a long time ago.”
“Hey.”
I drag my gaze back to Campbell’s.
“No,” he says. “It’s not okay.”
“I’ve made peace with it already,” I tell him, which is close enough to the truth.
There is no there there in the relationship with my parents, no better version of our lives I can earn for myself by working harder or writing better.
I know this. I know this, and still it hurts.
“We were never close. Not either of them. But I have Ava, and I’m an adult now, and…
” I break off, unsure what else to stack in this invisible column, this list of things I assure myself of so I don’t have to feel alone.
You, I think, my eyes flickering up to Campbell.
His eyebrows are pulled toward each other, his lips pressed to a line.
So concerned for me that I’d almost take it back, just to see him smiling, instead.
His hand’s settled in the space between us, and I reach for it, slowly turning the signet around his pinky finger.
“She just always made it clear,” I say. “That she had a life, and something she loved to do, and then she got married and it all ended.”
When Campbell speaks his words come slowly, like he’s picking them very carefully. “It shouldn’t have to be that. She could’ve had a family and written her poems. It wasn’t your fault.”
I rub my thumb over the insignia on his ring. “It was, in her mind. She always told me women can’t be artists and wives, mothers. That it’s different for women.”
“It shouldn’t be,” Campbell says. His hand is slack in mine—he lets me spin the ring around his finger, over and over. I pull it off his pinky and slide it onto the middle finger of my own right hand, stalling.
“It shouldn’t,” I agree, finally. “I think a lot of times it is.”
I hear him swallow. “Do you still talk to them? Your parents.”
“Not really.” A cool breeze blows in from the ocean; under the sleeves of the T-shirt Campbell gave me to wear, goose bumps rise on my arms. “Hardly ever, since I graduated college. I don’t think any of us are especially interested in one another.”
Campbell pulls his hand from mine and lifts it to my face, turning me so I have to look up at him. I feel scraped and see-through, right at the precarious edge of tears.
“Mattie,” he says. It’s gentle and unwavering, so earnest that my eyes sting. “Everything about you is interesting to me. They must be the stupidest people in the world, to waste a shot at loving you.”
Mine, I think, as he blurs out in front of me. As he presses a soft kiss to my mouth and thumbs one wet line from my cheek. Mine.
“I was always trying to impress her,” I say, swallowing hard to unclench my throat.
I draw a breath, and when I blink Campbell takes shape, again, in front of me.
“Being the best at this. Writing. Silly.” I wave a hand, rolling my eyes and clearing the rest of my tears with the motion.
“You were always going to be there to beat me, anyway.”
I mean it as a joke. Something to cut the heaviness of this—the intimacy of this thing hardly anyone knows about me that I’ve given, now, to him. But Campbell doesn’t smile.
“Mattie,” he says. “You’re impressive as hell.”
“Stop.”
“You stop.” Campbell sits up straighter, tilting back so we’re looking right at each other. “You care so much about this. I’ve seen it for five years, how hard you try. It’s the—”
“Jesus, rub it in.” I try to muster a laugh, but I’m too shaken to pull it off. “I get it. I have to work really hard to be good at this.”
Campbell looks straight up at the sky. “You’re impossible.” He drops his chin and says, “I’m trying to give you a compliment, so can you let me finish?”
I huff a breath through my nose. “Fine.”
“Watching you do this job makes me better at it,” Campbell says. “Watching you be so dedicated to your work, and care about it so much, and be so fully yourself in it—” He breaks off, his eyes casting over my face. “You don’t need to beat anyone to prove anything. You’re fucking great at this.”
In the silence that follows, I sniffle wetly and Campbell pulls me into him. His big, warm hand lands on the back of my head. “I wasn’t trying to make you cry,” he says.
“Well, you did, so nice work.”
“Sorry.” I hear him smiling. When I pull back, he threads his hand into mine. I can tell he’s going to say something else—something kind, probably. Something that’ll wring around my heart so hard it hurts.
“It looks good on me,” I say, so he can’t. I spread my hand between us, the ring tilted sideways on my middle finger. Too big. I look up at Campbell, smiling. “Mine?”
He laughs, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger to slide it over my knuckle and back down. “We’d need to get it resized.”
I shrug, and he looks up at me. “It’s my dad’s.”
“Oh,” I say, softly. I reach to take it off and he stops me, curling my fingers into a fist and then wrapping them in his own.
“His class ring from Vanderbilt,” Campbell says. “He gave it to me before I left home for freshman year. He was, ah—” Campbell falters, looking at our folded hands instead of at me. “He was really happy I went there.”
I run my thumb along the edge of his palm. “You said he got sick when you were in high school?”
“Yeah. Vivian was in college but my mom’s coworkers did this big fundraiser so they could send Jo and me to summer camp for eight weeks. Get us out of the house so they could figure out what to do.” He glances up at me. “First time we’d done anything like that. Only time I’d ridden a horse.”
I think of him in Aspen, framed by all those yellow leaves. One hand on his thigh as he guided his horse toward me. All of his pain, and all of mine, and all these ways we’ve misunderstood each other.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
Surprised, Campbell says, “Don’t be. I had a great time. I had no idea what was going on yet, and I got to do all sorts of things I didn’t at home.” He leans closer. “Like eat ice cream every single night.”
When I tip forward to kiss him, Campbell slows. Sinks into it.
I want to hug him in high school, a boy loved so dearly he was given a good summer while his parents confronted the impossible. I want to hug him heading off to college, armed with his dad’s class ring. I want him now—even with his hands around mine, the taste of him on my lips, it’s not enough.
“When did he leave home?” I ask. “Plover House.”
Campbell lets out a long, steadying breath. “You remember when If Not You launched? Spring, a couple years ago.”
I don’t tell him that I’ll never be able to forget when If Not You launched, because it felt like the entire world was shoving it in my face. That it was part of every strategy briefing I attended for a year. That I hated it so much—was consumed by it so entirely—I dreamed about it.
I just say, “Of course.”