Chapter 42
Okay, settle down. I heard it, too.
I called her Sis. So what? It saved me time.
I took the stairs to the apartment at a clip. I still had to get my guitar from my bedroom and a song fragment from my boot and get back to the band, but maybe avoid Quin in case of any more awkward interactions, but also get Alex alone and make sure he didn’t sign those papers. And then—
I remembered Sis outside McPhee’s, pounding on the vestibule door with her skinny wrist poking out of her puffy coat. Edith and her bank accounts had pulled Marisa into something bad, and Sis didn’t have a clue. That kid could knock on the door of some real trouble.
As I reached for Oona’s apartment door with my key, I had a premonition of the dark hall ahead of me, the empty kitchen.
Not just Oona empty, but dog empty. I should have been relieved they’d still be at Alex’s house.
I could avoid another awkward conversation here, too, with Oona in her bunny slippers.
But I had so easily grown accustomed to coming home to a hero’s welcome. That’s what dogs were good at.
Everything was about to change. Oona and the dogs would move to the house permanently. Alex would sell the building to someone, and then I wouldn’t come to this door again.
I should have been happy to move on from this door, this halfway life.
Happy to have Bear and Lemondrop tearing around a backyard.
Lemon would be able to clear the fence and become a menace to the neighborhood, and I loved that for her.
As Bear got old, sweet boy, he wouldn’t have to climb all these stairs.
It would all happen, no matter what I thought about it.
Marisa would come back or be found—I couldn’t let in any other possibility—and Sis would settle down to her accounting courses, or not.
The band, that fragile thing, would hold together or wouldn’t, and all the girls would do what they planned: families, careers, ambitions that had nothing to do with homemade stages or who had financed which mic cord.
The future was one of those moving sidewalks, one that you couldn’t hop off. You had no choice in how fast it went. The distance would pass under your feet whether you walked or just stood there.
You know who I thought of then? Joey.
His life had been about to change, he’d told Heather. Maybe not in the way he wanted. That ring he had from his mom would have gone right back into his pocket.
But he would have liked being an uncle. He’d have taken Heather’s kid to the park, to the aquarium, to spoil his dinner with a Chicago hot dog or one of those seven-flavor rainbow ice-cream cones that melted down your hand and into your sleeve.
Both. He would have taught the kid to fingerpick a banjo, to throw darts—eventually.
To argue, to believe. To want things. To try, even though you knew you might fail.
The future must have seemed like such a long, clear path to Joey while he was painting that nursery.
I really wished he’d had a chance to walk it. And Sis—I didn’t want her to find out this early in her life how hard it all could be.
Was that what being a sister was?
I inserted my key and heard galloping through the apartment and scraping on the floor. Lemondrop, that Clydesdale, reached me first by a wet nose.
“Hey, you knuckleheads.” I dropped to the floor and let them climb over me, slobbering and snuffling. Honest-to-god tears in my eyes! What was wrong with me?
Oona poked her head around the corner. “Hey, there,” she said shyly.
“Hi.”
I found it easier to cling to Bear’s neck than to look directly at Oona, but I didn’t really have time to waste. Not just today. Again, ever. I looked up.
“I’m sorry—” I started.
“I’m sorry—” Oona said at the same time.
We both smiled. “Let me,” I said. “I’m really sorry I freaked out about … the whole thing.”
“I’m sorry it happened behind your back,” she said.
“Things happening behind my back is a trigger with me but you didn’t know that.
You were just…” I almost said, protecting your heart, but that made me think of Alex, building up defenses around us both to make sure he could never be hurt.
Fortifications had consequences, and also this wasn’t about anything Oona had done, or hadn’t. “I just worry about him.”
Oona twisted her hands together. “Is it that or…”
“What?”
“I mean, is it … me?”
“No, of course not.”
“Am I … ruining the show?”
“What?” Bear leapt away from me.
“Like, is having me around a problem? While you’re blowing Alex kisses from the stage and stuff? I know you’re just playing it up for the crowd. Just part of your act.”
My act. Doll Devine, the gal, the broad, laughing big and throwing a huge, lonely cowgirl shadow. She was exhausting, and I was so tired. If I stripped away all the spangle and bluster of Doll Devine, what was left? What was true? It was all too much to explain.
“I want to say I’m not bothered by it,” Oona said. “But it’s a little intimidating, trying to find a way in. Not just at the pub.”
“Well, Alex is hard to get to know.”
Bear walked over to Oona and sat at her feet. She reached to scratch behind his ears. “I meant … you,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Your reaction to me and Alex was whoa, you know? It made me think … maybe there’s something else to this. Maybe she does, you know, have a little bitty crush on—”
“Don’t say it,” I said.
“Okay, I won’t. But maybe by stoking the speculation down in the pub, you’re … keeping other women away? Because it protects him but also you and what you have. And maybe … maybe there’s not a way in which this can work out. Him and me.”
Tears sprang into my eyes again, this time in earnest. “Don’t say that either.”
Oona concentrated on Bear’s ears.
“I don’t know how much he’s told you,” I said. “About how our lives were thrown together?”
“I think I have the relevant facts.”
“We should never have met. There are all sorts of reasons why we shouldn’t have ever had to rely on each other. If he told you everything, then you must understand by now. I’m just this … burden he never asked for.”
Oona looked confused. “That’s absolutely not how he sees you—”
“I don’t blame him for dumping me immediately into foster care, okay? What choice did he have?”
“But didn’t he…? Hold on.”
“But I’ve relied on him and kept him to myself too long, so long that I can’t—” Bear walked back to me. I put my head on his neck. “I can’t lose him again.”
I shook with sobs against the dog.
“Dahlia Devine,” Oona breathed. “There you are.”
Oona crossed the room and sat on the other side of Bear. Lemon got up from the spot where she had settled and came over to nudge her way in.
“You were just a kid,” Oona said. “A scared kid, so some of the details of what happened … I think it would be good for you to talk to Alex about this, set the record straight. But I can tell you one thing that I know. You are not a burden to Alex. He loves you so much.”
I turned my chin on Bear’s back to look at her.
“So much,” Oona said. “So much that it’s hard to believe there’s any room left for me. But I want so much to … to nose my way in, like this dog.” She grabbed Lemon’s muzzle and gave it a gentle wag.
“You don’t have to nose in.” I wiped at my face with my sleeve, feeling every bit the six-year-old. “Alex said he was sure about you. And you know he doesn’t make declarations.”
“Understatement,” she said.
“And he doesn’t lie, at least not very well. He usually can’t keep secrets, either.”
“I’m a bad influence,” she said, smiling.
“He needs prompting,” I said. “He hardly ever gets an idea on his own…” Which made me curious about something. I swiped at my nose again. “Whose idea was it for me to move in here?”
“I thought we could be friends,” Oona said. “I wanted to try, anyway. I didn’t realize how much it would cost me. In cereal.”
We grinned at each other.
“I borrowed your hair dryer, too,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“How? I put it back!”
“You didn’t wrap the cord up right.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. But I heard your ghost, when I was grabbing it. She was really going to town. How do you sleep?”
“I told you,” Oona said. She reached over the dogs to brush my hair away from my face. “But she’s not my ghost, dollface. I’m pretty sure she’s yours, if you want her.”