Hayden and I sit in a nest of blankets on the living room floor, eating our peanut butter and banana sandwiches, the candles glowing in a line on the mantel and TV stand.
“I haven’t had one of these since I was a kid,” he tells me between bites.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever had one,” I confess. I just happened to grab the ingredients in my last-minute grocery run.
“Do you think that eating these is a betrayal of Margaret?” he asks, and I try to subdue my surprise that he’s mentioned her.
“Why would it be?” I ask.
“Peanut butter banana,” he says. “That was Elvis’s thing, right? Not Cosmo’s.”
“True,” I allow, “but I don’t think Cosmo Sinclair had a famous sandwich of choice. And aside from that, I doubt they were ever enemies. I think the media just loved to speculate about that.” My eyes cut back to him. “Unless she’s told you otherwise?”
He gives me a sly, slightly disapproving look.
“Oh, come on,” I say, lightly shoving his shoulder. “You’re the one who brought her up.”
He sets his sandwich down on the plate beside his knee, keeping his eyes on it as he chews. “So now that we’ve been here longer, does anything about this job seem…weird to you?”
“How so?” I ask.
He drinks some water before meeting my eyes. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
I remember what she said—that he was basically an animated suit of armor—and debate telling him, but that seems like crossing a line, different than talking generally about our time together.
“I think it’s a little strange that she’s making us audition like this, but she’s not very trusting, and I can understand why.”
“It’s not that, exactly,” he says, shaking his head, lips parting like the words are right there and he hopes they might spill out. “I guess I feel like she’s testing me. And I’m not sure how, or why. And maybe it really is just about choosing which one of us she’d rather work with, but I don’t know.”
“Well, in a week and a half, maybe we’ll know,” I say.
“Maybe,” he agrees, clearly unconvinced. “I meant what I said. I don’t have to do this. I can find a different book.”
I push my own plate aside and scoot forward against him, his arms wrapping tight around me. “I meant what I said too,” I say. “We’re in this situation because of her. Let’s let her choose how it ends.”
“If you change your mind,” he says.
I rest my head on his shoulder. “I won’t.”
He holds me a little more tightly, burrows his mouth against the crown of my head.
I stir awake on the couch to the sound of birds, but the room is mostly dark. It takes me a minute to remember why.
The storm.
The plywood window coverings.
Hayden.
There’s a soft clink in the kitchen, and I blink away the sleep in my eyes to see Hayden putting a mug in the dishwasher. On the table beside the couch, the lamp has turned on at some point, the electricity evidently restored.
Hayden catches me watching him. “Hey,” he whispers.
It feels like my heart is splitting open in a smile. “Hey.” Despite his size, his footsteps are nearly silent as he crosses back toward me. “Leaving?” I murmur.
“Storm’s over, so my interview’s back on.” He crouches in front of me, his hand palming the entire right side of my head, like the basketball player he never was. “Go back to sleep.”
He leans forward and kisses me once on the lips, my eyes drooping shut, like if I can’t see him leave, maybe it won’t happen.
I listen as he approaches the front door, then give in, slitting one eye open as he turns back, his hand on the knob. “See you tonight?” he asks.
“I’ll have to check my schedule,” I joke. “Don’t want to forget anyone’s half birthday party.”
“No, never,” he agrees.
“Tonight,” I say.
He opens the door, and another beautiful day of Georgia sunshine pours in around him.
He looks like an angel. I mumble something along those lines and then close my eyes and let sleep pull me down into itself.
When I next wake up, with a crick in my neck and sweat coating my skin, light is spearing into the room. I sit up, bleary eyed, and nearly scream when someone appears in the window directly across from me.
It’s just the bearded maintenance guy from the rental company, prying the plywood off the windows. He gives me a cheery wave, and when I return it, he flashes me a thumbs-up.
For some reason, I return that too. Then he goes back to his work, his whistle mostly muted by the glass between us.
I gather the blankets off the couch and carry them back into the bedroom, my stomach flipping at the smell of almond caught in the sheets. Last night we’d drifted off together on the couch, and twice we’d woken up already moving together in our sleep, then kissed and touched each other until we were shaking with need, only to eventually, against all odds, fall asleep again.
Or I did anyway. Hopefully Hayden did, or his full day of interviewing will be grueling.
I toss the blankets back onto the bed and grab a change of clothes before heading into the bathroom for a shower.
Afterward, hair combed and sunscreen on, I make a cup of coffee and take it out front. The maintenance guy has left, and out on the driveway, two trash barrels are stuffed with fallen branches and debris from the storm, including one of the bungalow’s shutters, which looks like it ripped off and broke in half at some point in the chaos.
Otherwise, you’d never know there was a storm at all.
When I go back inside, I remember to plug in my phone, which is now thoroughly dead. The second it turns on, I’m barraged with all the calls and messages I missed last night.
There are the ones I knew to expect—Margaret and Hayden each trying to get a hold of me, Hayden in an increasingly panicked fashion.
The ones I could’ve guessed I’d get—my friends’ group chat devolving into an argument about a true-crime docuseries that Priya, Bianca, and Cillian all had vastly different opinions on.
And then there are the messages that surprise me.
Theo, at some point yesterday, wrote to say I’m really sad our visit didn’t pan out. Miss chilling with you. And when I didn’t leap to reply to that, he followed up with Might actually be heading back to ATL soon. You still in that area? I leave that one alone. Regardless of what does or doesn’t happen with Hayden, I’m finally done making Theo’s plans for him.
And then the last, and most worrying, surprise.
Four voicemails from Mom.
Three messages.
Call me.
Why aren’t you answering your phone?
Please call me, Alice.
The panic is immediate. The heat, then cold, that flushes through me is intense. I’m instantly sweating, afraid I’m going to be sick, despite the fact that my throat feels impossibly tight.
My first thought, like so many times before this, is a deep, desperate Audrey!
I dial Mom, and it rings out, all the way to her voicemail. I hang up and try again, wishing I could pace, but tethered in place beside the electrical outlet, all the restless energy inside me trapped.
The line clicks halfway through the third ring. “Oh, thank god,” she says.
“What happened?” I get out between chattering teeth. “Is she okay?”
“What? Who?” Mom says.
“Audrey,” I blurt.
“Why wouldn’t your sister be okay?” Mom sounds very nearly offended by the idea.
That alone is enough to interrupt the anxiety circuiting through my body. I slump onto the arm of the couch, my shoulders slackening and a headache starting up, as if the sudden burst and then abrupt dissipation of cortisol has put me in a state of withdrawal.
Why wouldn’t your sister be okay? What a strange question to ask, after all those years when her very existence wasn’t a sure thing, let alone her okayness.
I shut my eyes tight and massage the bridge of my nose. “What did you need?” I ask.
“Why weren’t you answering your phone?” Mom asks with her signature bluntness, entirely avoiding my question.
“I let it die by accident,” I say. “And then the power went out.”
There’s a silence on the other end.
“Hello?” I prompt.
“So you’re still in Georgia?” she says.
“Yeah, for now,” I say, noncommittal. “What did you need, Mom?”
“Nothing, nothing.” She sounds distracted if not disinterested.
My gut twists. “You sent me a few texts and left some messages. I thought there was an emergency.”
“Well, good thing there wasn’t,” she says lightly. “Seeing as how I had no way to get a hold of you.”
I grimace, move my fingers up to the spot right between my brows, and draw little circles there, trying to ease the tension. “Sorry. But I’m here now. What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I just saw we had a big storm coming in, and realized I didn’t even know where you are.”
There’s a serrated edge to her voice, almost like she’s mad at me.
But it’s not like I was keeping my location from her. I told her I was on a work trip a couple of hours away from her, and she didn’t ask for any more information.
“I’m up on Little Crescent,” I tell her now.
There’s another long pause before she says, “You guys get hit pretty bad up there?”
“Not too bad, no,” I say. “Lost some branches, but the power’s already back on, and the house I’m staying in didn’t take too much damage.”
“Good, good,” she says, distracted again.
“What about you?” I ask. “Any issues?”
“Oh, no, nothing major,” she says. “You know how it is. We’re far enough in from the coast to miss the worst of it. Heard there was some flash flooding, but we were fine.”
That we lodges itself into my heart like a tiny arrow.
I’m not sure if the we in question is her and my dad, or if it’s her and the chickens, and I’m not sure which of those possibilities would break my heart less.
I clear my throat. “Good.”
“And your friend? Hayden? He’s all right?”
“He’s good,” I assure her. “I saw him this morning. He’s fine.”
The truth, just not the whole truth.
“Well, good,” she says, like we’ve settled something. “Then I’ll let you go.”
“Okay, well, thanks for calling,” I say, uncertain what exactly just happened.
This is how it is sometimes between the two of us, like we each speak a different language and so have to do our best muddling through rough translations in a third language, one that’s native to neither of us.
“Yeah,” she says, then adds, a little more softly but still almost chiding, “Charge your phone, kid.”
“I will,” I promise.
She hangs up without a goodbye.
At our next session, we board the boat prepared. For one thing, I’m wearing a pair of loose linen pants and a light button-up, so my limbs are covered. For another, before we came down to the dock, Margaret doused our hands and feet in some kind of homemade concoction that Jodi swears by.
“She still on vacation?” I ask as we’re climbing into the boat, and Margaret blinks at me for a moment before averting her gaze and settling herself on the seat beside the fan.
“Yep,” she says. “You know how it is. Sometimes you just need a break.”
I try to give her a reassuring smile, but she’s not looking at me, already focused on starting up the fan. I take my position on the seat nearest to her, and we motor away from the dock, into the reeds, the thick air billowing over my hair and skin like thousands of tiny fingers.
We can’t really talk until we get to “The Spot” she’s keen to show me—not over the roar of the fan—and in the interim, I find my mind wandering back to Hayden.
After he finished with Margaret yesterday, we went to dinner at Rum Room, sat on opposite sides of his favorite booth, picking away at our work while eating veggie dogs and fries, our legs tangled together beneath the table.
Every time I got up to use the bathroom and had to walk past his side of the booth, he snapped his laptop shut, as if the temptation of seeing his screen might be too much for me to bear.
I started making a game of it, getting up and walking past him every few minutes. Finally, after four trips to the bathroom in twenty minutes, he left his laptop open, and in my surprise, my eyes actually did go straight to the screen.
In ludicrously large font, on an otherwise blank page of a Microsoft Word document, he’d written, Having fun?
At my snort of laughter, he turned sideways on the bench and hauled me down into his lap, a public display of affection that surprised and delighted me.
Made me feel like he was claiming me as his, like he was openly mine.
After that very long working dinner, he drove me home, walked me to the door, and kissed me slowly, roughly against it until we were both out of breath.
He didn’t stay over, and I understood why. He looked so tired a light breeze could probably have knocked him over, and it had occurred to me, way too belatedly, that the fiveish inches of height he had on me had probably made our night together smooshed on the couch all the more brutal for him. Plus there was my snoring.
I doubted that spending the night in my bed would’ve been any more restful.
So we said good night, and then he texted me from his hotel room, can’t stop thinking about you, and I lay awake a solid hour anyway, regretting not dragging him inside when I had the chance.
The boat’s fan cuts, and Margaret tosses a speculative gaze my way. “What’s got you smiling like that?”
“You know me,” I say. “I’m always smiling.”
“Not like that,” she says, digging a net out of the bottom of the boat and passing it to me. “That’s a secret smile.” She waves an arm toward the shore. “See that little outcropping there?”
We’ve stopped at a bend in the creek, and a sandy gap in the dense curtains of live oak along the shore reveals the charred remains of a campfire and a couple of wooden crates I’d guess someone’s been using as makeshift chairs.
“Yeah.”
Margaret pulls another net out of the bottom of the boat and swings this one over into the water. “That is where the teenagers come to drink.”
“And?” I must be making some kind of face, because she rolls her eyes, as if to chastise me.
“And they litter,” she says. “A lot. You can’t see it here, but there’s a road back that way through the trees, and Jodi says the cops patrol around here because they know kids like to come here to get in trouble.” She sweeps her net through the water in a slow, graceful arc.
She pulls it up, and the water gushes down through the net, leaving behind two green glass bottles. “And either these kids hate the planet, or else when they see the headlights, they throw their shit out here. Maybe it’s both—what do I know?”
“Bummer,” I say.
“There we go,” Margaret replies. “There’s a frown. I’m much more familiar with that expression. It’s comforting even. We’ll make a cynic out of you yet.”
“Good luck,” I say, dropping my net into the water on the other side of the boat. While I’m swooshing it around, she opens up a trash bag and dumps her bounty into it. Under the surface, I catch something too. A little whoop of excitement escapes me.
“Reel her in,” Margaret orders, and I lift the net upward, water pouring through it to reveal…a neon-green rubber clog. A Croc, or an off-brand version of the same thing.
“I hope no one’s missing this,” I say.
“I guarantee they’re not,” Margaret replies, and opens another trash bag. “Here.” She thrusts it toward me. “For all the trash we can’t use.”
I drop the shoe into it. “So should we get started?”
She sighs, like the thought exhausts her, and I wonder for the millionth time why she agreed to this, if she’s genuinely still considering my original proposition or if she’s already checked out. “How are you feeling? About the interview process?”
“I’ve been dreading today.”
“Really? Why?” I ask.
“Because,” she says with a small shrug, “we’re coming up on all my greatest mistakes.”
I frown. Is that how she’d categorize it? Her epic, highly documented love story?
“Guess we might as well get to it,” she says. “But keep working while we talk. There’s plenty more shit in the creek.”
“I’m not sure that’s how the saying goes,” I say.
“Should be, though, shouldn’t it?”
