Twenty-Four

twenty-four

I have done some pretty stupid things in my life, but this plan of Savvy’s—Savvy, the responsible one—might be the stupidest thing I’ve done yet.

In fact, plan is a generous word. She wants us to go out and find our parents, and by our parents, I mean each other’s parents. As in I am walking through the woods, one pair of binoculars away from getting labeled as a certified stalker, because Savvy is sure I’ll find Dale and Pietra on this specific trail. Meanwhile, Savvy is using her one break during the day to hitch a ride with one of the morning teachers up to the little stretch of town.

“We’ll ease them in this way,” she reasoned. “We’ll ‘accidentally’ bump into them, chat them up, make it seem like our own parents said something about missing them, and nudge them in the right direction.”

“So lie to them.”

“It’s not lying. They clearly do miss each other. You saw those pictures.”

“Yeah. But Savvy…”

“But what?” Savvy asked.

I sighed. “Say we find them. Then what?”

“We draw them back to camp. Maybe they’ll be loosened up and it won’t be as weird.”

I raised my eyebrows, wondering when Savvy became the lawless one and I became the rule follower. I didn’t know what her night looked like, but I personally had a vested interest in never seeing those looks on my parents’ faces again.

I expected her to say something challenging—Got any better ideas?—but instead she tapped my camera, this quiet little pulse, like it was more a part of me than tapping my actual arm.

Her voice went quiet. “If we want to see each other ever again without them getting majorly pissed about it, this might be our only shot.”

Most of the fear deflated out of me. She was right. And it was even grimmer than that, considering we have another year and some change before I turn eighteen.

“And if your parents hate me?”

Savvy relaxed, recognizing she’d won me over. “Trust me,” she said, taking her hat off her head and putting it on mine. “They won’t.”

The only comfort I have is that my odds of running into them in the woods, specific trail or no, are somewhat slim. It’s not that I’m not committed to the plan—I do want them to get along, so we can get whatever happened out in the open and move on from it—but I am also acutely aware that I’m not exactly winning Kid of the Year out here, compared to her. Savvy is a trophy child. I’m more of a participation award.

I take Kitty with me, feeling like I shouldn’t be carrying Poppy’s camera around when I’m deliberately plotting against my mom. At some point the trail forks into one that’s clearly the main path and one that’s thin and steep and a little muddy. It takes a minute to maneuver myself up the muddy one without sliding down, but it’s worth it when I do. There are three deer, a fully grown one and two skittish, frozen little ones, all peering at me like we accidentally stepped through a veil into each other’s worlds.

“Hi,” I whisper, moving as slowly as I can for my camera. There’s a clearing beyond them, the sun’s rays peeking out from behind a cloud, crisscrossing their thin faces and the trees. I can already see the end result, and I’m salivating like the photo is something I can taste. “Stay right there, little buddies … ooooone second, and I’ll—”

“Dale, are you sure we can’t ask one of your friends with a boat to—”

The deer take off like rockets, and I’m sliding buttfirst down the hill to avoid them before the woman down below can even finish her sentence. I manage not to yelp, but there’s no chance of not giving myself away—I have transitioned so fully from girl to mud monster that I’m pretty sure I can feel some in my armpits.

“Savvy?”

I don’t know Savvy’s mom’s—Pietra’s—voice well enough to recognize it, but I do know the universe well enough to assume I have been completely screwed over. So it’s no surprise when I look up and Savvy’s parents are hovering over me with worried eyes, their faces shiny with sunscreen and shadowed by matching brimmed hats.

“Nope. Just the knockoff version,” I manage, pulling Savvy’s hat off.

Pietra shakes her head, embarrassed, before getting her wits about her. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I have a sturdy butt.”

Thanks for nothing, brain-to-mouth filter.

“Let me help you up,” says Dale.

Before I can protest, he takes my hand and hoists me up so easily that my feet fully lift up from the ground before they find purchase in the mud again. I blink, righting myself, and they’re both gaping at me like they’ve seen a ghost.

Pietra looks away, her gaze a fixed line on her shoes, but Dale’s eyes widen on me. “You really do look like her.”

My face burns. “We’ve been getting that a lot.”

“No, not Savvy. Like Maggie,” he says.

I’m not used to hearing people say my mom’s first name, but Pietra reacts before I can.

“You’re bleeding,” she says, half scolding, half concerned. She touches my cheek, and I’m too stunned to react. She’s every bit as stunned at herself as I am. Like it’s something she’d do to Savvy, maybe, but only accidentally did to me.

My face is stinging, but I already know from experience that whatever it is, it’s not that bad. “I’m really fine.”

“Are you—”

“Your camera, on the other hand,” says Dale.

Kitty is lens-down in the glop, and not looking so hot. Dale picks her up for me, trying to wipe some of the mud off. He sucks some air between his teeth, making a grim prognosis. Pietra doesn’t look away from me for the whole exchange.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” I say, taking Kitty and saying a silent prayer up to the DSLR camera gods.

“We should get her to camp, have someone take a look at that,” says Pietra to Dale, as if I’m six and not sixteen. I square her up more easily, now that she’s not shouting her head off. She’s one of those mothering types, the kind who does it to everyone, not just her kid. “I’m sure I have some coconut oil in the car that we can put on it.”

She takes off, and Dale tilts his chin to indicate that I should follow. It seems that, much like Savvy, Pietra is a woman unused to hearing the word no.

I follow them in silence, hearing our feet squish in the mud in different rhythms. I’m supposed to think of something to say—Savvy would—but everything I think of is too blunt.

Instead, I am occupied by a much larger, weirder thought: if someone had like, shaken up the eggs or something—if I’d bullied my way down a fallopian tube first—I would have been born before Savvy and belonged to these people. And maybe I would have been the one with a closet full of pastel spandex and Instagrams full of comments with heart-eyes emojis and a head full of rules.

“So you’re into photography?” Dale asks.

He’s clearly the kind of person who fills silences. He reminds me of Finn. Someone who puts the grease on awkward moments, with a little forced cheer, and makes them go down a little easier.

“Um—just—mostly landscapes. Sometimes animals, like birds and deer and stuff.” I unconsciously touch the magpie charm on my lanyard, wrapped around my wrist.

“You sure your camera survived?”

“It’s definitely seen worse.” I turn Kitty back on to check, and sure enough she flickers back to life, her lens whirring into place. A few lives left to go, I guess.

“Is that—that’s from the hill up there?”

Dale is tall enough that I doubt anything gets past him, let alone the hot second the Puget Sound popped up on Kitty’s screen. I freeze, horrified for being so careless.

But this isn’t about me or my stupid photos. There’s way too much at stake for me to worry about Dale seeing one of them, even if my palms are sweating enough to create their own small pond.

“Nah, that’s, uh—from another spot,” I say, clearing my throat. “A trail on the other side of camp.”

Dale peers down at the screen with such sincere interest that I don’t even notice he’s reached out to take Kitty from me until she is in his grip. To my mortification, he starts to scroll, going through the different vantage points I took photos of the sunrise from yesterday morning.

“These are lovely.”

It feels weird to say thank you, like I’d be agreeing with him. And although my brain has abandoned me more than once in the last few days, it is not so far gone that I don’t remember that Savvy’s parents are Serious Art People. I can’t tell if he’s complimenting me because he means it, or because he feels like he has to, a charitable gesture toward a kid whose work doesn’t have any teeth.

“These three here,” he says, lowering the screen down to my eyeline. “You can blow them up, put them on canvas side by side. Where are you displaying your work?”

I laugh, but it comes out as a wheeze. “Uh, nowhere.”

“Not even Bean Well?”

It’s Pietra, surprising me and Dale both. She immediately turns back around, staring ahead at the trail, but not before I see a flicker of something she wants buried streak across her face.

I don’t want to say anything. I’ve lived sixteen years pointedly not saying anything in situations like this. But if I don’t, I’ll be kicking myself when I report back to Savvy and tell her I came up empty.

“You’ve been to Bean Well?”

Pietra takes on a breezy tone that even I, a person who has known her for less than a day, can hear right past. “That’s the name of it, right?”

“Pietra,” says Dale, chuckling, “you practically lived there.”

She turns to Dale sharply. “It was a long time ago.”

It takes me a moment to wrap my head around the idea. Savvy’s parents come from money. And while anyone was welcome at Bean Well, it was a far cry from Medina mansions and charity galas, which seem entirely more Pietra’s vibe.

Still, it’s more information than I had five seconds ago, and I can’t waste it. I channel my inner Savvy and ask, “Is that how you met my mom?”

Pietra winces, but softens when she looks over at me.

“It was a long time ago,” she repeats, in the gentle, firm way of someone closing a book they have no intention of reading ever again.

It’s a cheap shot, but it’s all I’ve got. “Well, it won’t be Bean Well for long. We’re selling it.”

“No. Why?”

I didn’t think ahead this far. They’re both watching me so intensely that it feels like I just lit a spotlight on something that I haven’t even figured out the shape of, a hole in me I’m still trying to figure out how to fill.

“Well…”

I don’t have to tell them, in the end.

“Oh. Abby, I’m…” Pietra has stopped walking, and so has Dale. I’m the one who stops a beat late, caught in the unexpected net of their grief. “I’m so sorry.”

Dale puts a hand on my shoulder. “Walt was a good man.”

My throat goes achy, my fingers clutching Kitty like a life preserver. I wish for Poppy’s camera instead. I wish for it even though that means it would be the one muddied up, and that Dale wouldn’t have seen my photos, and we would have finished the walk back without a word.

But instead of knocking me off course, the ache grounds me. Gives me something to level the distance between me and these absolute strangers. They knew Poppy. They understand how special he was.

I forge ahead.

“You could come by,” I offer. “Before it sells, I mean.”

Dale lets my shoulder go, and Pietra takes an uneasy half step.

“I don’t think your parents would like that.”

I shake my head. “They miss you.”

Pietra lets out a shuddering breath that might have started as a laugh, looking up at the sky. I watch her carefully, this woman who is clearly frazzled within an inch of her life, and I’m hoping she’ll tip over and accidentally reveal something else and also hoping she won’t. The closer I get to knowing, the scarier the knowing seems.

“They said that?” says Dale.

I turn to him. “Yeah.” A lie. “Well—I know they do. Last night…”

“Abby, honey, we appreciate what you’re trying to do. You and Savvy,” says Pietra. She has the same borderline desperate look my mom had, and just like that, I feel myself losing my nerve. “But you have to understand that what happened was—it can’t be undone.”

I can’t believe that. I actively have to not believe it. Savvy and I may be related, but my parents and her parents—they’re family. Or they were, once. One look at that wedding photo, one glance at the faded magpie charms, is all it takes to know that. And to me, that’s the thing that can’t be undone.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened, I just…”

Pietra starts walking again, slowly, with more resignation than anger. “Don’t be sorry. I know Savvy put you up to this.”

I open my mouth to protest, but I catch the knowing glint in her eye. It makes me smile, and then she’s smiling back—I’ve been caught out, and we both know Savvy too well to pretend otherwise.

Still, she hasn’t fully caught me. She thinks Savvy put me up to finding out the truth. What Savvy put me up to was finding a way to get our parents in the same space together.

“At least consider going to the Bean Well closing party at the end of the summer,” I say quietly. “If you really did spend time there, Poppy would have wanted you to come.”

Pietra opens her mouth—to gently shut me down, I’m guessing—but Dale says, “We’ll consider it. But only if you put some of your photos on display for the party. They really are quite stunning.”

“You’ve got your grandpa’s eye for light,” Pietra agrees.

I try not to let the embarrassment swallow me whole. But it’s a different kind of embarrassment, maybe. There’s a thrill beneath it, humming under the surface. Like maybe they mean it. Like maybe I am as good at this as Poppy was always saying.

“You knew him well?”

This time I’m not asking to pry. I genuinely want to know.

“I worked for him.”

I try to swallow my surprise, but I’m not sure how effectively. She’s not looking at me though, her eyes and thoughts somewhere else.

“But you’re…” I duck my head, knowing there’s no way to end that sentence without sounding rude.

“I found myself like most girls in their twenties do, having a rough patch.”

Whatever it is couldn’t have stuck too badly, because she seems almost nostalgic about it. Just nostalgic enough that I decide to push my luck.

“And that’s how you met my mom.”

She turns her head to the opening of the trail, which has appeared in front of us sooner than I expected.

“You remind me of her.”

I hold my breath so I don’t laugh. I’m nothing like my mom. She’s organized and whip smart and—well, a lot more like Savvy than like me.

“Blunt,” Pietra clarifies. “In a good way, I mean. You seem like someone who says what they think.”

Well, she’s wrong about that, if the last sixteen years of my life are any indication. But maybe that’s starting to change.

“I think you and my parents should talk out whatever happened.”

Dale lets out another sigh from behind me. “I think we should table this discussion for a time when we’ve all had a chance to cool off.”

Pietra has already shifted gears, going back into mother hen mode, squinting at the cut on my face. “Maybe some turmeric,” she tells me. “It’s a natural antibiotic, and I definitely have some in the first aid kit in the car. Oh, and coconut oil, to prevent scarring.”

“You’re going to smell like a farmer’s market when she’s done with you,” Dale informs me.

I nod, following them to their car. Considering there is about a bajillion years’ worth of science behind the perfectly good modern medicine just down the path at the camp office, it doesn’t make much sense, but one thing does: I know exactly where the roots of Savvy’s Instagram came from now.

And, as if conjured by my brain, there is Savvy, flanked by my parents. Pietra is elbows deep in her first aid kit, and Dale is crouched to let Rufus lick his face, so I’m not expecting them to pop up as fast as they do, or the low “What the fuck?” that comes out of Pietra’s mouth.

Then there’s a “Shit” and a “Hold on” and “What were you thinking?” until Savvy and I can’t keep up with who’s saying what. Our eyes connect, and through the chaos, there is a pulse of understanding that goes deeper than friendship, deeper than sisterhood: it is the pulse of understanding between two people who are simultaneously and extremely fucked.