“You sure about this?” asks Roz as I turn off the ignition.
Sure or not, I don’t have much of a choice because Josh notices us. He hugs the basketball to his chest. My heart squeezes. I have missed this boy so much.
“I’m just giving him something,” I tell Roz, but mostly I tell myself.
“I don’t know, Viola.”
Frankly, I don’t either. I’m not even sure if Josh will actually stay to see why I’m here. He doesn’t just stay; he swaggers toward me, all superhero confidence, whisking me right back to MoPOP. My throat clogs with pre-tears. I so much prefer the hello of Firefly to this good-bye.
No matter how many times you play a hard conversation in your head, practicing your side of the dialogue, predicting the other person’s responses, what actually comes out might be garbled to this:
“I missed you.”
I know, I know, I know. (Head bangs against an imaginary wall.)
Prepare, prepare, prepare. And then prepare some more. That is the Golden Rule of Lee & Li crisis communications. Death by mortification will happen later—approximately five nanoseconds after driving away—but for now, in this moment, all I feel is the ending of us.
“You have a new necklace,” he says.
An (astute) observation, not an emotion.
Clearly, I am a finalist for the Darwin Award because my first instinct—the death instinct—nudges me closer to him. I want to feel him against me again, filling my arms.
Just as swiftly, he steps back to do a quick perimeter check of his house, frowning at the blazing lights on his garage. Josh is already swiveling to his house as he says, “Wait a second.”
“No, don’t,” I tell him, and reach for his arm, unthinking. Not now. Not yet. Not again. That innocent touch is like getting zapped by an electric fence, an invisible but effective repellant. Instinctively, we jerk away from each other, sending yet another fracture line in my heart that I thought had already shattered. Apparently, there is room for more breakage.
“Wait, I’ve just—” I start to say just as Josh tells me, “Wait, it’ll just—”
Once upon a time, talking over each other would have only been uncomfortable, the awkwardness of a new acquaintance: “You first,” “No, you.” Now that we’re living in the Land of After, this is yet one more sad proof that we’ve lost our syncopation. We’re off-sequence, arrhythmic, one heart beat too fast, the other too slow.
…
THE WARNING SIGNS OF AN ATTACK OF THE HEART
Light-headedness: check.
Shortness of breath: double-check.
Chest pain: always.
…
Weeks and weeks of silence have attacked my heart. 911 won’t help me now.
“How’re your parents?” Josh asks.
I reply, “I think they used the words, ‘House arrest lifted.’ ”
“Good.”
That’s it? That’s all I get? Good? “Yeah.”
“Do you need anything?” he asks.
Duh. You. Knocked uncertain, I keep my answer to a single “Nothing.”
If I needed another reason why I could never be a crisis manager, I get it now. Suddenly, inexplicably, unpredictably, I see red. Angry, enveloping, destroying flames of red. Actually, I don’t just see red. I feel red: The heat races up my neck, burning my cheeks. I’m mad at myself for chickening out of the conversation I’ve played and replayed in my head. I’m furious at him for his one-word “good” treatment. You don’t end a relationship by fading away and punctuate it with a single “good.” Whether the (dumb) guy admitted it or not, we had a relationship.
“You know,” I say (spit), “I’m the one living with this. I’m here to help you with Caleb; I didn’t run from that. That’s what a relationship means: We help each other through stuff. So you can’t use my condition to run.”
Josh says pretty much the only thing that could defuse my anger: “But it was my fault we went to the Draconids.”
“We settled that weeks ago. I asked you to go there with me. I asked you.”
“You could have died.”
“I didn’t. I could be hit by a car.”
His body jerks at that.
“I could be in Paris when a bomb goes off. I could get cancer. I could slip down a cliff trail, running. I could have a weird allergic reaction to something I don’t even know I’m allergic to. Life is so unpredictable, my parents think living itself is dangerous. But what are you going to do? Never love anyone or anything ever again?” I breathe out and hear the incessant danger-thrum of the Serengeti that is unpredictable, chaotic, beautiful Life. I watch myself unzip the tent door, risks be damned. “I don’t regret it.” (Or you.) “Or you.”
Even without a crisis plan for this moment, I know it is too much, the moment too fragile to sustain the weight of all this unfettered emotion.
“We’re moving,” Josh says—an explanation for his silence or a deflection from a hard conversation, I can’t tell.
Whatever it is, I ask, “Where? Why?”
“My mom wants a fresh start. Mazama.”
“Mazama? Where’s that?”
“Central Washington. It’s a small town. No traffic.”
I know a crisis management plan when I see it: Yeah, sure, escape to a small town, and flee the specter of another fatal car accident. But let me be the first to tell you this: No place on our planet is completely safe. Not bomb shelters, not underground bunkers no matter how tricked out they are, not even a girl who refused to look at another guy until Thor trooped his way into her life. Hurt can seep into even the most reinforced places.
So can love.
“But you’re doing okay?” he asks, looking straight at me. For the first time since we’ve spoken, I feel like Josh is really and truly present and locked in on me.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then, I should—”
The car door opens, slams shut, reminding me that we have an audience. Roz approaches with the apple cobbler that I’ve forgotten in the station wagon.
“Here,” she says, thrusting the dish at Josh. So much for gastrodiplomacy. The cobbler is less a kiss good-bye than a kiss-off. “Hey, Viola, we need to get going.”
She’s right, of course. My first real outing, and I should be home, not just on time, but early.
“Here,” I tell Josh, holding my letter to him, but his hands are occupied with the cobbler. His hands that I can feel on me, skimming my shoulders, running along my clavicle, curving on the small of my back. He lifts the crook of his arm, and I tuck the letter snug next to his body where I once belonged.
“I’ll talk to you later,” he says to me.
I could simper the corresponding lie: “Yeah, for sure.”
I don’t because we won’t. For as long as I can, I look deep into Josh’s eyes, memorized long ago so I can see the sunlit blue despite the blackness of the night.
“ ‘She understands.’ ” I start to quote River Tam, but for once her words slay me. I will myself to speak through that lump of grief lodged in my throat when I want so badly to go back, not to MoPOP when my skin was still my ally. But to the meteor showers when Josh was my Thor. No tears, not yet. I try again, “ ‘She understands. She doesn’t comprehend.’ ”
Roz takes that as her cue to tug me back to the car. I’m grateful to follow her lead.
Grief, sharp and keening. Grief that makes me gasp, the pain of an excised heart. I rub my chest even as I hear my parents: Both hands on the steering wheel. At all times.
How the hell did heartache literally hurt so much?
“You okay?” Roz asks.
I nod, a silent lie, and keep focused on the road. I hadn’t felt this demolished when Darren faded away. But Josh? I miss him at a soul-deep level.
“He isn’t worth it,” Roz says.
“He was,” I tell her.
Auntie Ruth signed up for death-do-us-part until death came to collect early. I can finally understand why she has placed herself in a self-imposed
exile. I can’t even bear the thought of being shattered like this again. But Josh showed me what lay outside my (post-Darren) tent: a true connection, so much more than mere physical lust. Although that was good, too.
I correct myself, “He is.”
As I press my foot on the gas pedal, I spot an orange hazard sign: ROAD WORK AHEAD.
No truer words. Josh has his work ahead of him.
So do I.
And now I laugh.
“Should I call Mom and Dad?” Roz holds her phone, ready to emergency dial them.
I refuse to be a tent-woman, someone who remains hermetically sealed and who keeps her pain in mint condition. I refuse to take tidy, polite, no-thank-you bites when the next right guy asks me out. Our universe is way too large, populated with way too many unexpectedly cool people not to cough up or hand deliver the next right one, even if I want Josh.
“You sure you’re okay?” she asks.
“Not yet,” I say, “But I will be.”
Dear Josh,
So.
You’ve been on my mind. First, rewatching Firefly (actually, relistening since, well, screens and UV rays and tech curfews). Also: I’m feeling unsettled because we didn’t get to talk. So I hope you’ll let me say my peace.
Our hearts are a renewable resource, according to Auntie Ruth. I believe that. But could yours still be somewhat depleted from everything that happened pre-Us? All this to say: If this is where you are, I understand. Of course you could have simply lost interest. It happens. I just wish you had told me.
I’ve decided to officially quit my consulting job with Persephone, hang up my Muse shoes. I’ve overstayed in my own Necromanteion, and there are other places in the world I’d like to see. I hope you get to Chile, too.
Zoë’s right (as usual): “She’s torn up plenty, but she’ll fly true.”
Take care,
Viola
P.S. I did have one last idea. What if Persephone seeks out the Oracle of the Dead? She thinks she can find the answers to her twin sister’s fate, but instead, the Oracle of the Dead (always the cryptic) tells her to live it all—the good, the bad, the deeply awful, and the extremely joyful. Sometimes, we are never given the answer to why.
P.P.S. And now your own mixtape.
STARLIGHT
Another Sunny Day—Belle & Sebastian
Sunday Morning—The Velvet Underground, Nico
See the Sun—The Kooks
Everlasting Light—The Black Keys
Rise to the Sun—Alabama Shakes
Mornings—Tica Douglas
Sunburn—Ed Sheeran
Pocketful of Sunshine—Natasha Bedingfield
When the past direct dials you, sometimes—not always, but sometimes, it’s possible to turn leftovers into something even more delicious, like Caramel Rum Banana Bread Pudding, the best use for day-old banana bread.
—Viola Wynne Li
The Gastrodiplomat’s Guide to the Galaxy
My Astral Projection Hat casts a warm halo of light in the kitchen. Even though I’m tired from baking, I can’t help but admire the vinaterta, my first attempt at the multitiered Icelandic celebration cake, which is a fancy way of saying: prune cake with the shelf life of freeze-dried astronaut food. Gastrodiplomacy has to start somewhere, and this is a surprisingly delicious invitation to my parents to migrate from “we should go” to “we went.”
After a few hours of smelling sugar, I need fresh air. Mom’s maternal radar may be a fine-tuned security system, but Dad is our designated night guard. Before going to bed, he’s the one to check the perimeter, testing the locks and latches on all the doors and windows. That’s what I’m counting on when I press the four digits of our security code—the month and year of my parents’ anniversary. The alarm beeps, then disengages. I wait.
Sure enough, Dad patters down the stairs.
“Where are you going?” he asks in a calm voice, taking in my armful of coats and the front door, still locked shut.
“Waiting for you,” I tell him, and hold out his down jacket.
“For what?” Dad asks, but he’s drawing to me, halfway to maybe.
“To look for Planet X.”
“There are only eight planets in our solar system.”
I suppose, one day, innocent statements won’t trigger memories of Josh, but for now, it does. Hello, again, memory. I must wince because Dad asks, “You okay, honey?”
“Yeah, I’m going out.”
“At night? Why do you have to? I never snuck out at your age.”
“Maybe you should have.”
It’s true. If I was my sister’s keeper for fifteen years, how has it been for Dad, who’s been everyone’s keeper since he was my age? I tell him, “Since I’m asking you to go with me, it’s technically not sneaking out. Besides, it’s testing. And besides that, Dad, you need to play more.”
“I play.”
“With crisis containment strategies, maybe.”
At that, Dad chuckles. I don’t want him to wake my mom or my sister. It’s rare to have him all to myself.
“Come on, Dad, let’s go,” I whisper to him, and wonder whether he’ll follow. But then Dad opens the front door, which chimes. Like me, he glances swiftly toward the stairs and then mutters to me, “Hurry.”
Our attempt at skulking is amateurish at best because we start cackling, then staggering down the driveway.
“Seattle emits too much light to see the stars,” Dad says, tilting his head back. I knew that even before I lured him outside. There’s no way we could have found Planet IX or X with our naked eye, not even if they existed, not even with our best intentions.
“Come on,” I say, heading for the street.
“And where are you going?”
“Dad. Dad. Spontaneity.”
That is such a foreign concept to my father, the crisis manager whose timelines have timelines. The thought of a single unpremeditated action freezes Dad. In the moonglow, he looks so youthful in his indecision: unguarded, unsure, unbalanced, the way he must have felt when he sacrificed his Georgetown dreams to go to UW to stay near Auntie Ruth.
“It’s glacial out here,” says Dad, shivering, but he rubs his hands on my arms, warming me, not himself. As always. “You okay?”
There are so many ways to answer that. Like: This is nothing compared to how cold it’s going to be, shivering in the middle of Iceland when we watch the northern lights.
I settle for this: “Freezing will make us appreciate going back inside.”
“Have you appreciated enough yet?”
“I can still play.” I head into the dark, alone. One moment of silence spills into the next. And the next.
Then I hear Dad at my side a moment before he tags me on my Astral Projection Hat and races ahead into the dark: “So can I.”
Three minutes after Dad and I start to defrost inside our home, four nights after I have said good-bye to Josh, I get the text that Aminta has been adamant would come.
Josh: So.
According to Lee & Li, response time matters. It signals something. Even now, as Dad reads over my shoulder since I must have made a strangled sound, he says, “Hmm. Let him wait.”
“Says the man who says I can’t date That Boy.”
“Says your father, who thinks That Boy should work hard if you’re giving him a second chance.”
“With you?”
“With you.” Dad kisses me on top of my head. “Good night, kiddo.”
“Hold on, where are you going?” I whisper-hiss to him as he heads upstairs. Now would be a good time to have some male interpretative help or to make it easier for me to opt out of responding to Josh. “Aren’t you going to lecture me about him? Or my tech curfew?”
“I trust you,” Dad whispers back, rubbing his cold hands together. “Just remember …”
“What?”
“Do you know why I try so hard to make sure your mom never questions where she stands with me?”
“Because you love her.”
/> “Because being left is her worst fear.”
With that, my dad heads up the stairs. I know I won’t be able to sleep, not with that cryptic parting thought in my head, and not with Josh’s dangling proposition on my phone. While I figure out whether (when) to respond, I begin to prep tomorrow’s second Souper Bowl Sunday dessert as quietly as I can. I coarsely dice the loaf of banana bread I had made for breakfast yesterday. Then I taste-test the caramel rum sauce that’s been chilling in the fridge: The waiting time has magnified its rumminess. Delicious.
Maybe Dad has it right. Maybe waiting time is good for a girl’s soul, making sure I know what I want before Josh offers anything.
So I let Josh wait, but not too long. Twenty-three minutes seems the right amount of time to signal a casual, noncommittal, Oh, hello, friend.
Me: Story time?
Josh: Yes.
Josh: The story of an idiot.
Me: Is it good?
Josh: Depends on you.
Josh: Depends on if you’ll accept my apology.
Josh: Depends on if you’ll hear me out.
Me: Depends on how long I’ll have to wait.
There is a soft knock on the front door.
“Semicolon.”
Josh’s first words to me after so many nights of silence, and I get, semicolon? That settles it: This boy is staying right there at the front door with the cold wind blasting his back. I whisper, “Excuse me?”
He mansplains in a low but urgent voice, “Two main clauses—two complete thoughts—separated with a pause.”
Sorry, confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“Like us.”
“Are you talking about your running away, and this is you coming back again? Because I don’t do mysterious pauses anymore. I’m not a toy you pick up when you’re bored and put down when you’re scared.”
Josh breathes out. While I can see and feel his struggle to strip down to the scary, revelatory truth, I can’t help him. I won’t. This, he needs to say all on his very own, if he wants me. I don’t just need his words. I deserve them.
He says, “Semicolon, like us. We don’t just have the same thought; we’re part of the same thought. You and me. Put together, we’re more.”