REAL LIFE
Wednesday
SOMEONE IS JACKHAMMERING inside my skull.
I roll over, press my face into the downy mattress.
THUNK-THUNK-THUNK.
A voice breaks the bodiless dark: “Everybody decent?”
My eyes snap open on a bedroom washed in the dim gray of morning. The smell of wet stone and brine wafts in from the open window, and rain pummels the roof.
“I’m coming in!”
Sabrina. She’s calling through the door.
My eyes zigzag around the room, my scrambled egg of a brain piecing together my surroundings. I’m sprawled in the middle of a king-sized bed, wearing only my underwear and Virgin Who CAN Drive T-shirt.
“In three . . .” Sabrina says.
My gaze finds the jumble of spare sheets on the floor, the golden-brown leg extending beyond it, the arm tucked under the mess of sun-streaked golden hair.
“Two . . .”
I hurl a pillow at Wyn’s face, and he jolts upright.
“One,” Sabrina says. “That’s it. I’m coming in. Cover up your”—I wave frantically at Wyn—“goods if you don’t want me to see them.”
His gaze clears, widens. He gathers the bundle of bedding around him and launches himself onto the bed, a trail of sheets spilling out behind him.
“Good morning,” Sabrina says, swinging the door open.
“What’s going on?” I jerk the blankets up over Wyn’s lap and mine.
Sabrina’s mouth curves when she notices the bedding half draped on the bed and half bunched on the floor, as if carelessly thrown there in a moment of passion.
“Breakfast was supposed to be twenty minutes ago,” she says. “Didn’t anyone read their itineraries?”
“Our novelty itineraries?” Wyn says. “For the rough schedule we always
keep?”
Parth’s head pops into the doorway, still damp from a shower. “Come on.
We’ve got a schedule to keep.”
Wyn pushes his hair off his forehead. “Are you two on steroids?” “Back-alley Adderall?” I guess.
“Cocaine,” Wyn says. “Pixy Stix and Robitussin.”
“Up, up, up.” Sabrina punctuates her words with impatient claps that I feel behind my eyeballs.
“Is it possible to be hungover on one glass of wine?” I grumble.
“Once you hit thirty, anything’s possible,” Parth calls, and the swell that carried the two of them in takes them right back out.
Wyn exhales, his shoulders relaxing.
The folds in the blankets and pillowcase left little indentations all over his stomach and face. As he stands and ambles toward the bathroom, rubbing his hands over his face, I catch myself studying them like there’s going to be a test later. He looks over his shoulder at me, his voice gruff: “You want to shower?”
Any remaining haze of sleep zooms off me, cartoon-roadrunner style. “Shower?”
He looks puzzled, possibly by the sudden lack of blood in my face. “Do you need the shower, or can I use it?”
Right. As in, Do you want to shower by yourself. Not Do you want to take a shower together. Obviously.
“I’m good!” I squeak. “Give me a minute to get my stuff and get out of here.”
He laughs as he leans into the shower, the water sputtering on. “It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, Harriet.”
I slide off the bed and start digging through my suitcase for a pair of jeans.
“I mean, aside from the new tattoo,” he says.
I turn around before I can tease out the obvious jest in his voice. He’s starting to pull off his shorts, and I yelp and spin back to my suitcase.
“You could wait thirty seconds to start your stripping,” I say.
Another gravelly, fresh-from-sleep laugh. “If it bothers you so much, close your eyes.”
I step into my jeans and hop to get them over my butt. He still hasn’t turned the fan on, and the steam is building behind me. I can imagine how it’s making the ends of his hair curl.
“What if I close my eyes?” he says.
“How would that help?” I grab a fresh T-shirt. “I don’t know. Maybe it would make you . . .”
He trails off as I shuck my sleep shirt off and toss it onto the bed. I hold the fresh T-shirt against my chest and look over my shoulder at him. “Make me what?”
Wyn clears his throat and turns back to the shower. “Feel like I’m not here.”
“Not necessary.” I pull my shirt over my head. “I think I’m done here.” He doesn’t turn around again until I’m out of the room.
In the hallway, a groan of “Haaaarrryyy” reaches me, and I backtrack to peer through the open door to the kids’ room.
Cleo and Kimmy lie in the pushed-together twin beds in the center of the room, the same way Wyn and I used to. While Cleo looks tidy and well rested, her braids tucked in a russet-colored bonnet and her skin luminous, Kimmy is starfished out beside her, freckled limbs strewn in every
direction, last night’s sparkly eyeliner smeared and her hair in a nest atop her head. At least she remembered to take out her contacts, I guess, because she’s wearing her dark-framed glasses.
“Saaaaave us,” Kimmy moans.
“You,” Cleo gently corrects her. “I feel great.” “Save meeeee,” Kimmy amends.
Cleo pats the sliver of space between them, and I flop into it like they’re my parents and it’s Christmas morning.
I mean, not my parents. I had one of those upbringings where my parents’ bedroom was treated like an FBI safe house: don’t go in it, don’t look at it, don’t even speak of it. Probably because it was the only room in the house that was allowed to accumulate mess (if clean laundry in the process of being folded can be considered mess), and I’m pretty sure if given only the two options, Mom would rather join the witness protection program than let anyone see our laundry.
Wyn’s family was different. When he and Lou and Michael were small, the Connors had a rule that they couldn’t start Christmas morning before the sun was up. So Wyn and his sisters would sit in front of the tinseled tree waiting until the minute the sun rose, then run into Gloria and Hank’s room and pile onto their bed, shrieking until they got up.
Thinking about Gloria and Hank always gives me a homesick ache, or something like it. I used to feel that pang a lot as a kid, which never made sense, because I mostly felt it at home.
“I’m hiring a hit man to take out Sabrina for buying that last round of Fireball last night,” Kimmy says, flinging her forearm over her face. “Feel free to Venmo me your contribution.”
“I was starting to doubt you were capable of being hungover,” I say.
“It’s all the half drinks,” Cleo says. “She tries to drink less that way, and then loses track.”
“I didn’t lose track. I smeared.” She holds her arm out to reveal a row of lipstick tallies that run together.
“Ah,” Cleo says, fighting a smile. “My mistake.”
“I need nine more hours of sleep,” Kimmy grumbles.
“Aren’t you two hippie farmers used to getting up way earlier than . . .” I lean over Cleo to see the clock on her bedside table. It’s unplugged and on the ground a yard away, as if ripped from the wall and thrown there. “Whatever time it is.”
“And do you know what time we usually go to bed on those nights before our early mornings?” Cleo says. “Nine. And I’m not saying we get into bed at nine. I’m saying we’re fully unconscious by then. Deep REM sleep.”
“I didn’t notice REM anywhere on this week’s schedule,” I say.
“Oh my god.” Kimmy lurches upright so fast I expect her to vomit over the side of the bed. Instead, she turns an expression of horror on us. “Did I . . . do the worm on a table last night?”
Cleo and I both burst into laughter. “No,” I say. “You did not.”
“But you certainly thought you did,” Cleo adds.
Kimmy gasps in mock offense. Cleo sits up and leans over me to kiss her. “Babe, I love you too much to ever lie to you,” she says. “You could not do the worm if my life depended on it. Some of your other moves weren’t too shabby, though.”
“HEY,” Sabrina screams from downstairs. “GET. YOUR. BODIES. DOWN. HERE. OR. ELSE.”
“Hit man,” Kimmy grumbles.
Cleo pops up onto her feet, balanced in a wide second position on either side of the bed frame. “Babe, who am I?” She presses her hands to her knees and gyrates nonsensically.
“Okay, if I looked that good,” Kimmy says, “I feel a lot better.”
From somewhere beneath us—perhaps deep in the bowels of the earth— an air horn blasts.
• • •
NORMALLY WHEN WE eat at Bernadette’s, we take advantage of the outdoor patio, with its gorgeous view of the harbor and its wide variety of rude, fry-
stealing seabirds, even if the temperature requires us to be bundled in fleeces.
But by the time we get downtown to the red-shingled greasy spoon, the storm has blown back in. In the span of our run from the car to the front doors, we get soaked. We score a table at the back, where the windows look out on the faded gray patio, the striped umbrellas shut tight and wobbling in the wind, lightning streaking down to touch the waves in the distance.
Bernie’s is packed with summer visitors like us, here for the Lobster Festival’s grand opening tonight, and the locals having their morning cups of coffee and reading the Knott’s Harbor Register while tolerating the people “from away,” as they call us.
At the counter, I spot my seatmate from the flight over and wave. He harrumphs and looks back to his newspaper.
“Friend of yours?” Wyn murmurs against my ear as everyone’s peeling off their drenched outermost layers. His cool breath against my damp skin makes me shiver.
I drop into my chair and look up at him. “That would depend on which of us you asked.”
“What,” Wyn says, “has he been bugging you to define the relationship?”
“Other way around,” I say. “I’m head over heels, but he’s married to the sea.”
“Ah, well, it happens,” Wyn says.
The eye contact goes on a fraction of a second too long, then Wyn’s phone buzzes, and his brow furrows as he checks it. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he announces and slides away. I watch him back by the host stand, phone to his ear, his face brightening on a laugh.
The expression makes my heart feel like it’s blooming and then withering just as fast. It always surprised me, how quickly the ratio of his face could change. In a second, he can go from that broody, tender look to almost boyish delight. Every time his expression changed, I used to think the new one was my favorite. Until it changed again and I had to accept that whichever Wyn was directly in front of me, that was the one I loved most.
The server comes up to take our order, bringing with her a wave of maple syrup, coffee, and pine—Bernie’s signature scent. If I could walk around smelling like this restaurant for all time, I would.
I would also have to start wearing a fanny pack stuffed with blueberry pancakes, though, and that could make things awkward at the hospital. People get all up in arms if their surgeon has a partially zipped knapsack of food strung around their waist.
Sabrina puts in our usual drink order. Coffee for everyone but Cleo, who gets a decaf, plus a cup of ice to mellow out Bernie’s famously (dangerously) hot and strong brew. “We should go ahead and order food too,” Parth says, and when the server gets to me, I order my pancakes along with Wyn’s usual, the egg white omelet with sriracha.
“Gloria?” I ask when he gets back to the table and wriggles out of his canvas jacket.
He looks vaguely surprised, like he’d forgotten I was even here. “Ah, no,” he recovers, avoiding my gaze. “Work thing.”
Wyn’s not a liar, but the way he said it feels distinctly like a dodge.
Cleo pushes back from her vegan hash, groaning as she massages her stomach. “I’m having some kind of Pavlovian response to this place. Three bites into this meal, and I feel the ghost of all my past hangovers.”
Parth says, “I feel it too.”
“Yeah, but you, Kimmy, and I also drank shots of something that was on fire last night,” Sabrina reminds him. “Don’t think blaming Bernie is appropriate here.”
I swallow my laugh, which somehow makes it louder, and Parth spins toward me and thwacks me, hard, between my shoulder blades.
“What the hell, Parth!” I cry. “You were choking!” he says. “I was not,” I say.
“Okay, well, I’m not the doctor here, so.”
“And is WebMD now telling people that if someone’s choking the best thing to do is punch them in the back of the head?” Wyn says.
“It wasn’t the back of her head,” Parth objects. “It was more like . . . mid-spine.”
“Ah, yes, the lesser-known cousin to the Heimlich maneuver,” I say. “The right hook.”
“I’m sorry, Harry,” Parth cries. “Instinct took over!”
“You have the instincts of a Victorian women’s hospital orderly,” Cleo says.
“Next time, stick with the leeches,” I say.
Parth frowns. “I left those at the cottage. Are you okay?” “I’m fine,” I say.
“Trust me,” Wyn says. “She’s quietly plotting revenge.” “Our Harry?” Parth scoffs. “Never.”
“You think that . . .” Wyn sips from his steaming mug. “But she knows how to bring a person to their knees when she wants to.”
I angle myself abruptly back toward Sabrina. “So, what is there still to do for the wedding?”
Sabrina waves a hand. “Nothing. Like I said, it’s just the six of us and an ordained unitarian universalist minister I found online. I wasn’t even planning on having flowers until Cleo and Kimmy stepped in.”
“We don’t mind helping,” Cleo says.
“You’ll get to when we have the big wedding for family next year,” Sabrina says, squirting maple syrup into her mug. “This week, I just want to be in my favorite place with my favorite people. I want every second to count, and I don’t want to miss anything.”
At the clap of thunder and flash of lightning outside, she gestures toward the window. “I mean, what is this? We were supposed to go sailing today.”
I check my phone’s weather app. “It’ll be sunny and hot tomorrow. We could sail then?”
“Just because the house is selling,” Cleo says, “doesn’t mean this has to be the last time the six of us come here.”
I try to smile encouragingly at Sabrina, but guilt spirals through me. I want so badly for this week to be perfect, to be good enough to compensate
for the fact that it will be the last. Not just in this house but as a sixsome. Truce or not, I can’t be Wyn Connor’s friend.
Sabrina’s gone quiet and sullen, and I know she’s already thinking about next week too.
I clear my throat. “I have an idea.” “Matching tattoos,” Parth says.
“So close,” I say. “It’s this thing I used to do as a kid because I hated my birthday.”
Sabrina, a woman deeply devoted to the concept of a birthday month, audibly gasps.
“It was hard to manage my expectations,” I explain. “And it seemed like something always went wrong.”
A pipe burst and my parents had to put repairs on a credit card.
Or Eloise was failing a class and needed a tutor. Or Dad’s second job called him in for a shift the night we were supposed to go out. No matter how much I told myself I didn’t need any big celebration, I always felt disappointed when things fell through, and then guilty because I knew how hard my parents were working to keep things going.
“A couple days before I turned ten, I had this idea,” I say. “If I chose one thing I really wanted—and knew I could actually get—on my birthday, then no matter what else happened or didn’t, it’d be a good day. So I told my parents I wanted this Oreo cheesecake, and they got it for me, and my birthday was great.”
This earns me crickets from the audience.
“That,” Sabrina says, “is so incredibly sad.”
“It’s nice!” I say. “It’s practical. I had a great birthday.”
“Honey, it’s tragic,” Sabrina says, right as Parth says, “I’m emotionally scarred.”
“I think you’re missing the point here,” I say.
Sabrina sets her mug down. “Is the point that all parents invariably fuck up their children for life, and there’s no avoiding it, so we should really stop procreating rather than continuing to make one another miserable?”
Cleo rolls her eyes. “Neither the point nor accurate.”
“We can’t control how every little thing goes this week,” I say. “But it’s been amazing, and it’s going to keep being amazing. So maybe if each of us can choose one thing—one thing we must do or have or see or eat this week
—then no matter what else, we’ll have that. The one thing that we really needed out of this week. And the week will be a success.”
There’s a beat of silence as everyone considers.
“It’s a good idea,” Wyn says. Across the table, his eyes meet mine. His overgrown hair is damp from the rain, tucked behind his ears. So many of his details are slightly different, but my heart still sees him and whispers into my veins, You.
Hearts can be so stupid. “I like it too,” Cleo says. Parth shrugs. “I’m down.”
“Do we say what our goals are, or do we have to keep them secret?” Kimmy asks.
“Why would you have to keep it a secret?” I ask. “So it comes true,” she says.
“It’s not a birthday wish,” Sabrina says.
“No, I like that.” Wyn’s eyes dart toward Kimmy. “It’s less pressure if it’s private.”
Parth nods. “So no one tells one another their goals until after we’ve met it.”
“You all love rules too much,” Kimmy says.
“This started with you, Kimberly Carmichael,” Sabrina reminds her. “Lots of things start with me. That doesn’t make them good ideas.”
Cleo puts her hands on the tabletop and gyrates in another stunning approximation of Kimmy’s dance moves.
Sabrina narrows her eyes. “What am I looking at, and why do I feel like I had a nightmare about it last night?”
