Chapter 17
HOLLY
An owl hoots in the distance and my head snaps in that direction, my entire body tensing. My cheeks puff on a long exhale as I coax my racing heart to slow.
It reminds me that I don’t belong here. I should be in San Francisco with my husband and son. Not in the wilderness on a crazy mission with my best friend’s remains and an ex-best friend who can’t put aside her own selfish needs.
“No offense, Z, but you’re wrong,” I say to the urn on the table beside me. “Anna hasn’t changed.”
If she had, she wouldn’t be off partying. She’d be inside, asleep, packed, and ready for the next leg of our trip. Exactly where I should be.
But no, I can’t sleep. Not when I’m worried if she’ll make it back in time. She’d better not make us late. We miss that van, and the entire trip unravels. All of Zoe’s efforts will go up in campfire smoke.
The owl hoots again, and I wrap the quilt I’d brought outside tighter around my shoulders. “Oh, shut up,” I grumble.
I think of Anna talking me up to the ledge on Pelican Rock. The way she tried to negotiate with the winery staff when our tour was canceled. How she saved the day by roping Brody into helping us find the perfect place to release Zoe’s remains.
“Okay, I’ll admit, Zoe, I see glimpses of this new Anna you talked about. But just when I think there’s hope, she pulls a stunt like this, or spills her guts all over social media. I see this turning into another Greece.”
Because, yes, I read her posts this afternoon about our trip. I couldn’t help myself. And with each post, I felt another piece of myself crumbling. This isn’t the Anna I know.
Correction, this isn’t the Anna I convinced myself I know. The Anna in those posts is the one I knew in college, the best friend I traveled with and laughed with for all the years until Greece.
I also hate how exposed I feel after reading them.
It’s as if Anna’s broadcasted my own feelings about Zoe when we scatter her ashes.
Aren’t we supposed to feel better each time?
Shouldn’t each release help us let go of the pain?
This trip is supposed to be a celebration of her life.
And yet, it feels like we’ve been stuck in funeral mode.
A notification pops up, alerting me that Anna has posted a new story.
Like the people who can’t not look at a car accident, I open Instagram and click on Anna’s story.
There’s a group of people line dancing, a few sitting around a bonfire drinking, someone is playing a guitar and others are singing along to it.
A long pause on three women talking and laughing.
And there’s Brody, reaching a hand toward the phone, with a look on his face that tells me exactly why Anna isn’t back yet.
Then Anna turns the camera around and flashes a coquettish smile before waving goodbye at her viewers.
Anger roils through me and collides with hurt. Anna Fisk is all about having a good time. Something I seem to have forgotten how to do.
My phone rings, the sound jarring against the night sounds of a secluded ranch in the mountains.
“Hey, Jack,” I answer. The ringing changes to a FaceTime call and I tap to accept. “Hey,” I repeat, my anxiety easing a smidge at the sight of him.
“Hey yourself.”
“What’s up?” We spoke a couple of hours ago when I called to say good night to Quinn. We’d gone through the usual “how was your day” chitchat, and I have nothing new to add. Nothing except for Anna flouncing off to party with the locals. And me being tormented by a know-it-all owl.
“I was worried about you.” Jack tilts his head, reading my face.
“I’m fine.” I shrug, hoping I’m proving the point that everything is just fine. Which it isn’t, but I’m tired and cranky and we should have been in bed hours ago.
“What are you two doing?”
“Sitting on the porch having a nice girl chat.” I turn the camera and pan the small porch of the cabin to show Jack, then turn it back on me.
“Girl chat?” The fact that he didn’t see Anna with me hasn’t escaped him.
I show him the urn on the table next to me.
“And Anna is…”
“Off partying.” I don’t disguise my annoyance.
“Ah.”
Innocent enough little word, if you can count it as a word, but it’s the spark in his tone that sets me off. “What does that mean?”
“It means, ah, that explains why Anna isn’t with you.” He may know me well enough to have sensed that I wasn’t okay, but I know him well enough to hear the lecture coming before he can clear his throat.
Which is exactly what he does. I shift in my chair, putting myself into the shadow to cover the exasperation on my face. Last thing I need is to get into a fight with Jack as well.
“You’re not going to like hearing this, but you need to put Greece and the feud with Anna behind you.”
I suck in a breath. Jack may have been furious with Anna after the Greece fiasco, and he’s always been on my side in any argument, but he’s also forever nudging me to make amends with Anna. I brace myself for what, I suspect, will be a full-on shove this time.
“I heard that,” he says, giving me a we’re-on-the-same-team smile.
“I don’t trust her, Jack.”
“What has she done to make you not trust her?” I level an are-you-serious glare and he quickly adds, “On this trip.”
“She’s out partying. That’s so typical of her.
We leave at five in the morning, and she’s off doing god knows what with Cowboy Brody instead of getting ready.
The room’s a disaster. Her stuff is everywhere.
She’s not taking this seriously.” As the words fly out of my mouth, I hear it.
I wince inwardly at my own rigidity, but I’m not about to give an inch.
I’m right this time. Mostly right this time. Okay, somewhat right.
“Hols, come on.”
“Don’t Hols come on me.”
“Instead of sulking, you could be at a bonfire singing and having fun. Exactly what you both need.” He saw her Instagram story.
“I’m not sulking.” I am, but that’s beside the point. The point is that Anna hasn’t changed, not really. And if she hasn’t changed, then I can’t trust her. “I’m packed and ready to go so that I can honor Zoe’s wishes.”
“And what exactly are Zoe’s wishes?”
He’s got me and he knows it. This trip isn’t just about scattering her ashes, it’s about us reconnecting while scattering the ashes. We’ve scattered successfully—mostly successfully—but there’s been precious little reconnecting.
When I don’t answer—because, as I tell the kids, “if you can’t be respectful, be silent” and I’m too cranky to go along with this—Jack continues, “Hols, the two of you need each other. You need to work through your grief together.”
“She doesn’t need me for that, she’s posting it all online for the world to see.”
Jack takes a patient breath. “Did you ever consider she’s posting because she needs connection and you’ve been emotionally closed off?”
I bristle. “I am not emotionally closed off.”
“You are with her.” He lets that sink in.
“I’m not saying you need to throw your arms around her and sing ‘Kumbaya’, but what you guys are dealing with is huge and you can’t go about it alone.
You have to open up to Anna. You hold yourself to standards most mortals can’t live up to.
Especially when they don’t know what’s expected. ”
“Come on, Hols, take off the cape and come play with us mortals,” Zoe used to tease when I’d be all up in my head.
“That’s ridiculous,” I answer Jack.
“Did you ever say anything to Anna about what happened in Greece?”
He knows damn well I haven’t. And he knows damn well that this is the one topic guaranteed to start a fight between us.
“Don’t go there, Jack.”
“You don’t have to talk to me about it. But you do need to talk to Anna.
Not necessarily about Greece, but about your feelings.
Then, now, the time between then and now.
Holly, most people never have the kind of friendship you, Zoe, and Anna had.
Don’t let your stubbornness be the reason you lose it a second time. ”
A few months after we returned from Greece, Zoe had planned a weekend in Carmel.
She didn’t tell me Anna was coming. Just before leaving my house for the weekend, I’d checked Instagram.
And there she was, posing in front of one of the iconic Carmel-by-the-Sea cottages.
The #girlsweekend tag and the look of utter clueless excitement on Anna’s face was all I needed to unpack my overnight bag and cancel.
“Something came up at work,” I’d texted Zoe.
I hadn’t been honest, not with Zoe, not with Jack, not with myself. The humiliation and horror of what happened on that trip and the ensuing days, weeks, months, was burned into my heart and mind. I couldn’t face Anna. Seeing her would mean facing my failure as well.
“Holly,” Jack says, his voice soft, encouraging, comforting.
“I need to go,” I say and abruptly click on “end.” I stare at the dark phone, my heart pounding. I’ve never hung up on anyone before. And this is Jack.
A fresh wave of hurt courses through me: at Jack for pushing me to do something he knows I can’t, and at Anna for dealing with her grief when I haven’t been able to.
Rustling on the path jolts my body into flight mode, my elbow making contact with the urn in my scramble to untangle from the quilt. I grab the urn before it can topple off the table and send my phone clattering to the concrete floor of the porch. The screen lights up. A call from Jack.
I ignore my phone and hug the urn to my chest, forcing air into my lungs. Zoe is okay. The ringing stops and someone giggles.
“Shhh,” someone else loud-whispers.
“Is she going to be upset that you were with me?” a man asks in a suggestive tone.
“Ah, yeah.” A giggle, then a hiccup. “Whatevs.” More giggling. I know that giggle.
They step into the cabin’s faint porch light, and I see Brody and Anna clearly. He pulls her into his arms, and she leans up to give him a kiss. It’s a quick one, but it’s a kiss on the lips. A kiss that suggests this wasn’t the first one they shared tonight.
She pulls away, puts her finger to her lips and repeats, “Shhh,” then walks the rest of the way to the cabin by herself. It’s only when she’s on the bottom step and looks up that she notices me.
“Oh, jeez.” Anna clutches the base of her neck. “You scared me.” She releases a little hiccup/burp. “Oops. ’Scuse me.”
And this, this simple bubble of Anna-ness, something that in the past would have sent Zoe and me into fits of laughter, pops my cork.
“Where the hell have you been?”
Anna stumbles back, grabbing the rail to steady herself. “With Brody. I told you.”
“It’s after midnight.”
“I’m here now.”
“Do you ever think of anyone but yourself? We’re here because of Zoe, and instead of focusing on her, you’re off hooking up with some cowboy. What about Leo?”
She frowns, trying hard to focus on my face as she weaves where she stands. “What about Leo?”
“Or Zoe? Or us?” I hurl questions that aren’t really questions because I’m too fired up to wait for answers.
“Zoe and you are all I think about,” Anna says.
“What more do I have to do to prove I’m sorry?
I hurt you. I get it. God, Holly!” She throws up her arms, the movement throwing her off balance momentarily.
She stumbles off the step, catching herself before she falls back in the dirt.
“This morning sucked. It really, really sucked. And I just wanted us to talk.”
“Sucked so much that you promptly got drunk and threw yourself at some guy. You haven’t changed.”
Anna stills. The forest around us stills. And for a long minute the only thing I can hear is my heartbeat pounding in my ears. My heartbeat and the owl.
Her chest expands as she inhales and I clamp the breath in my chest, bracing for her explosion.
She exhales, lifting her hands in surrender. “I give up. I’m done.” For the first time in all the years I’ve known her, Anna’s shoulders slouch in defeat. She turns and walks away. No crying, no drama.
Just done.
I stand, rooted, clutching the remains of the one person who could have fixed this while watching the one person I only just realized I need the most walk away from me.
“Oh my god, Zoe, what have I done?”