Happy Place, page 9
I love this shirt, I grumble.
I know, he says, sliding my hair out from under the collar. That’s why I brought it. Now go to sleep.
“Har?” Cleo jolts me out of the memory. “You actually are puce now.”
“That word.” I press my hand over my mouth and bolt for the bathroom.
* * *
• • •
The instant I step under the jangling bells and into Murder, She Read, I feel five hundred thousand times better.
Which is to say, I still feel like utter shit, but shit ensconced in books and sun-warmed windows. Shit with sugary iced latte flowing through its veins.
I’ve never finished a chapter on one of these trips, let alone a book, but I’ve always loved coming here, picking out my next read.
Wyn and Cleo split off for Nonfiction, and Kimmy darts to Romance. Parth heads for General Fiction, and Sabrina veers toward Horror. I alone head for the black coffin mounted to the wall, door ajar and waiting, Mysteries painted in gold letters at the top of the box.
I step through it to the room beyond, a space nearly as large as all other genres combined.
I’d never been a big reader until the summer before I started at Mattingly, when all my high school extracurriculars and AP summer work abruptly ended. My acceptance to (and funding for!) the school of my dreams was already assured, and I was bored for the first time in my life.
I found the dime-store mystery in Eloise’s old room, now the family office, when I went in to look for packing tape. I sat on the windowsill to read the first page and didn’t look up until I’d finished the book. Afterward, I went straight to the library for another. I probably read twenty cozy mysteries that summer.
I run my fingers along the paperback spines, each title featuring a worse pun than the last. As I pull one out, Cleo appears at my side. “I thought you’d read that one.”
“This?” I hold it up. “Maybe you’re thinking of Dying to Give. The one about the auctioneer murdered at the fundraiser. This one’s Dying to Sieve, about a baker who finds a body inside a bag of flour.”
“A whole body?” she says.
“It’s a really big bag,” I say. “Or a really small body, I’m not sure, but for a mere six dollars and ninety-nine cents, I could find out. Did you find something already?”
She holds up a dictionary-sized tome with a giant illustration of a mushroom on its pale green cover.
“Didn’t you already read that one?” I say.
Her mouth curls. “You’re thinking of Fabulous Fungi. This is Miraculous Mushrooms.”
“How silly of me,” I say.
She leans away from me to peer through the doorway to the rest of the store. “So what do you think about all this?”
“All what?”
“Sabrina and Parth,” she says. “Getting married. In like four days.”
“I guess when you know, you know.” I slide the book back onto the shelf and keep skimming.
“Yeah.” A moment later, she says, “I guess things have just felt a little off with her.”
“Really?” I haven’t noticed anything, but then again, I haven’t been exceptionally present the last few months. I’ve known that the next time we talked—really talked—I’d have to talk about the breakup.
“Maybe I’m reading into it too much,” Cleo says, swirling her raspberry iced tea. “But last month, she texts me out of the blue that she and Parth were going to come up for a visit. And I said yes, because she seemed set on it. Only later I realized we were way too swamped, so I asked to reschedule, and I’ve barely heard from her since then. When we got in yesterday, I tried to talk to her about it, but she brushed it off, and then today she seems mad about it again.”
My fingers stop, hooked over a spine: Murder in the Maternity Ward. “I think she’s just taking this cottage thing hard,” I say. “I don’t think it’s personal.”
Cleo screws up her mouth. “Maybe.” She lifts her braids off her shoulder, shaking them to fan her neck. There’s no airflow in here, and the humidity is dense. “I guess I’ll try to talk to her again tonight. I just wanted to see if you’d noticed anything . . . different with her.”
“Nope!” I say, probably a bit too chipper. “I think everything seems totally normal.”
Cleo’s head cocks. I’m fully expecting her to cry You and Wyn broke up, didn’t you? at any second. Instead, she tucks her arm through mine and rests her head on my shoulder. “I’m probably just tired,” she says. “I always worry more when I’m tired.”
I frown. I’ve been so self-absorbed (and/or drunk) that somehow I missed the way her face has thinned, and the faint purple blots beneath her eyes. “Hey,” I say. “Are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” That’s a weirdly evasive reply for Cleo.
“Because you run a whole-ass farm,” I say. “And you are but one dainty five-foot-two-inch woman.”
Her smile brightens her whole face. “Yes, but you forget: my girlfriend is a five-foot-ten-inch Scandinavian American goddess who can drink four barrels of moonshine and still win a grocery store race.”
“Clee,” I say.
She checks over her shoulder, then drops her voice. “Okay, yes, I’m stressed,” she says. “The truth is, Kimmy and I went back and forth about bowing out of this year’s trip for the last three weeks. When I told Sabrina we might have to miss it, it did not go well, so we decided we’d come for a couple of days. Only now we can’t head back early after all, so we’re scrambling to have neighbors go take care of things for us at home.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “How can I help?”
“It’s okay. It’s one week of stress. Well, and the full week it will take us to catch up on the time away.”
“Hey!”
For some reason—quite possibly all the subterfuge I’m currently engaged in—I jump when Sabrina pops her head in between us.
Cleo does too. “Don’t sneak up on us.”
“Um, I literally just walked up,” Sabrina says. “Did I catch you two in the middle of a drug deal or something?” She reaches between us to grab Cleo’s book, scrutinizing the cover. “Mushrooms? Again?”
Cleo’s lips thin. “They’re fascinating.”
“What about you, Sab?” I cut in. “Did you find anything?”
“Oh my god, yeah,” she says. “This book is a fictional take on the Donner Party.”
“How . . . nice,” I say.
She cackles, grabs the book out of my hand. I didn’t realize I was holding one—I must’ve yanked it out when she surprised us. “Harry,” she says, reading the back of it. “This book is every bit as fucked as mine.”
“I guarantee it’s not,” I say.
“An interior designer finds a hand behind a wall,” she says.
“Yes, but it’s cozy.” I take the book back.
“How is that cozy,” she asks.
“It’s a cozy mystery,” I say. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Oh-kay.” Her voice wrenches up into a wordless yip of surprise as Kimmy appears at her shoulder. Beside me, Cleo grabs for the edge of the bookshelf, as if for support.
“Why is everyone so jumpy?” Kim asks.
“Sabrina’s reading about the Donners again,” Cleo says.
“It’s fiction,” Sabrina says.
Cleo asks, “Where are Parth and Wyn? Are they finished?”
Kimmy shrugs. “I passed Parth by the fancy books.”
“What are the fancy books?” I ask.
“She means he’s looking for something the New York Times has described as ‘revelatory,’ ” Sabrina says.
“Actually . . .” Parth walks up with a paper bag already in hand. “I picked this because the Wall Street Journal gave it such a cranky review I needed to read it myself. It’s by this married couple who usually publish separately. One of them writes literary doorstop novels and the other writes romance.”
“What!” Kimmy snatches the book. “I know them!”
“Seriously?” Parth asks.
“I went to college with them in Michigan,” she says. “They weren’t together yet, though. Her books are really horny. Is this one horny?”
“The Wall Street Journal review didn’t touch on the horniness,” Parth says.
“Is Wyn done?” Sabrina asks.
“Checking out now,” Parth confirms
“What’d he get, a Steinbeck novel?” she asks.
Parth shrugs. “Dunno.”
There’s no way Wyn’s getting a Steinbeck novel. I’m surprised he’s buying a book, period, since we never have time to read on these trips and he’s cautious with his spending. But if he was going to get a book, it wouldn’t be about the American West. He would’ve felt like too much of a caricature.
Parth and Sabrina herd us toward the register. Cleo gets her mushroom book and I buy Death by Design, and then we step out onto the cobbled street. The sun is high in the sky, no trace of mist left, only dazzling blue. Across the street, Kimmy spots a flower cart in front of the florist and, with a squeal of delight, pulls Cleo after her.
“Parth and I are gonna grab more coffee.” Sabrina tilts her head toward the Warm Cup, the café next door with the awning-sheltered walk-up window. We’ve already been twice today. Once before the market, once after.
“Want anything?” she asks.
“I’m good, thanks,” I tell her.
“Wyn?”
He shakes his head. As they wander off, we stand in silence, avoiding gazes. “I meant to tell you,” he says finally. “I talked to Parth last night.”
“And?”
He clears his throat a little. “You’re right. We’ll have to tell them after this week.”
I’m not sure why that floods me with relief. The rest of my week is now guaranteed to be torturous. But at least Parth and Sabrina will get their perfect day.
Wyn gets a text. He’s not usually so attentive to his phone. While he’s checking it, I lean toward him a little, trying to peer into his paper Murder, She Read bag.
He stuffs his phone back into his pocket. “You can just ask.”
“Ask what?” I say.
His brow lifts. I stare back at him, impassive. Slowly, he slides his purchase from the bag and holds it out to me. It’s huge.
The Eames Way: The Life and Love Behind the Iconic Chair.
“This is a coffee-table book,” I say.
“Is it?” He leans over to look at it. “Shit. I thought it was an airplane.”
“Since when do you buy coffee-table books?” I ask.
“Is this some kind of trick question, Harriet?” he says. “You know these don’t require a special license, right?”
“Yes, but they require a coffee table,” I say. “And Gloria’s won’t have room for this.” Wyn’s mother is a pack rat. Not in a gross way, just in a sentimental one. Or rather his father was, and Gloria hasn’t changed much about the Connor family home since her husband passed.
The last time I was there, there was hardly an inch of space on the refrigerator. She had a printout of a group picture we’d all taken at the cottage on our first trip taped up there, right next to a Save the Date for one of Wyn’s cousins, who’d already gotten married, divorced, and remarried since then. His older sister Michael’s engineering degree sat on the mantel, right next to a framed one-page short story his younger sister, Lou, wrote when she was nine, beside a framed photo of Wyn’s high school soccer team.
Aside from the lack of space in his childhood home, this book had to have cost at least sixty dollars, and Wyn’s never been one to spend money. Not on himself, and not on anything whose value is primarily aesthetic. In our first apartment together, he used a tower of shoeboxes as a side table until he found a broken one on the street that he could fix.
He slides the coffee-table book out of my hand and drops it back into his bag. I’m still staring, puzzled, trying to make sense of all the tiny differences between the Wyn of five months ago and the Wyn in front of me, but he’s gone back to checking his phone.
Kimmy comes bounding up with a bundle of sunflowers. “Where are Parth and Sabrina?” she asks, shielding her eyes against the sun.
“Sabrina needed more coffee,” Wyn says. “And Parth needed more Sabrina.”
“Awh.” She clutches her heart. “They’re so cute. Terrifying, but cute.”
I catch Wyn peeking into the bag again, sort of smiling to himself.
In my chest, a metric ton drops onto the proverbial seesaw.
Oh my god.
The beard, the slight softening of his body, the sixty-dollar coffee-table book. All of the texting.
Is he . . . nesting?
Is he dating someone?
The seesaw jolts back in the other direction. A burst of cold air-conditioning and roasted espresso beans wafts toward us as Sabrina and Parth emerge from the coffee shop’s lesser-used interior. “I don’t know about y’all,” Sabrina says after a loud slurp on her paper straw, “but I could use some popovers.”
Ordinarily, the thought would make my mouth water.
Right now, the idea of dumping fried egg and jam into my seething stomach is worse than hearing puce a thousand times in rapid succession.
I smile so hard my molars twinge. “Sounds great.”
“Awh. Sunflowers. Sab loves those.” Parth leans over to smell them.
Kimmy thrusts the bundle toward him. “These are for you and Sabrina.”
“They’re just a sample,” Cleo puts in. “We went ahead and ordered some bouquets for Saturday. I know you want it to be simple, but it’s not a wedding without flowers.”
Sabrina goes from eyeing the bouquet like it might be some kind of Trojan horse, sneakily stuffed with tiny mushroom encyclopedias, to clapping her hands together on a gasp. “Cleo! You didn’t have to do that.” She hooks an arm around Cleo’s head, pulling her in for a hug. “They’re gorgeous.”
“You’re gorgeous,” Cleo says, starting down the street, the rest of us following like baby ducks.
“No, you guys,” Parth says, “I’m gorgeous.”
Wyn hangs back beside me, asks tersely, “What just happened in there?”
“In where?” I say.
“Your brain,” he says.
“Body shots,” I say. “My brain is full of body shots.”
“Both a surgeon and a medical anomaly,” he says.
“What can I say,” I reply flatly. “I’m—”
“I know.” He waves his arm in a circle. “Vast.”
My stomach lurches at the years-old inside joke. “I was going to say hungover.”
10
Happy Place
Mattingly, Vermont
A new apartment for our senior year, the first floor of a peeling white Victorian at the edge of town. Windows that rattle whenever the wind blows, a half-collapsed porch where Sabrina and I intend to spend the fall sipping brandy-spiked hot cider, and a patch of side yard where I promise to help Cleo plant a vegetable garden: broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi—things that can withstand the frost that will arrive in a few short months.
Wyn was supposed to be in New York right now, sharing a loft with Parth, making his way in a new city while his best friend studies law at Fordham. If he hadn’t failed that math class a second time or overlooked his history gen ed requirement, everything might be different.
Instead, he’s living with us. To save money, Cleo and I share the biggest room. Sabrina gets the next one. Wyn has the shoebox originally intended for me.
The morning after move-in day, Parth has donuts delivered for us. The note reads, If you don’t all come to grad school in New York next year, I will be pressing charges.
Realistically, I’ll have to go to whatever medical school will take me. Likewise, Sabrina will have to choose her next city based on her own law school admission, and Cleo will do the same with an MFA program. But the idea is alluring—all of us together in a new city—even as I’m unsure how I’ll survive one year as Wyn Connor’s roommate.
Our whole first week in the place, we manage not to be alone together. Finally, though, we bump into each other early one morning in the stuffy kitchen. The sun’s started to come up, and he’s making coffee. He fills a mug with the Montana state flag printed on one side and passes it to me. “I want you to know I understood what you said,” he murmurs. “Back in Maine.”
His voice, still husky with sleep, pulls all the tiny hairs on the back of my neck to eager attention. His closeness, here in the quiet morning, is overpowering.
“I don’t want you to worry about this year,” he tells me. “I won’t make things weird.”
I manage something that sounds sort of like “Oh . . . good” and sort of like someone with both stage fright and strep throat has taken a crack at public yodeling.
And then he’s nodding curtly, letting himself out the back door to cut our grass before the day gets too hot, and once again, I’m left waiting for a spell to break.
He’s true to his word all year. A couple of times a week, he goes out with women the rest of us never meet. Then, in winter, he starts seeing one woman, again and again, a dancer named Alison. She’s beautiful. She’s nice. But she never stops by for longer than a few minutes before the two of them leave for the night. I try to be happy for him. That’s what a friend would do.
You’re not my friend, Harriet sometimes replays in my mind.
He struggles with his math class, so I volunteer to help him. On Tuesdays, we study late into the night in Mattingly’s dusty golden library. He moans, groans, says his brain wasn’t made for this kind of thing.
“What’s it made for, then?” I ask, and he says, “Tumbleweeds. They like to just roll through.” I’ve noticed that he does that, talks himself down, self-deprecates, and he does it like it’s a joke he’s in on, but I think he might mean it, and I hate it.
