Page 9 of Later Bloom

“A lot can change in a year.”

“Okay.” Aubrey coughs a hesitant laugh as she hauls her suitcase to the stairs. “That’s enough cryptic comments for now, I think.”

A knowing, slanted smile passes over her aunt’s face. “Sorry. You’ll get into the habit when you’re older.”

Aubrey slows to a halt, a foot on the first step. “You know, maybe I will. I do do that sometimes, with Maggie. She’s called me a walking fortune cookie.”

“I find that people love to soothe the worries of what’s to come with vague inspirational bits. Then you can shape them into whatever you want them to mean.”

“Right.” Aubrey takes a beat, dragging her heavy suitcase along with a grunt. “You’re worried of what’s to come?”

“No, no, I just—well, I really do mean what I said. I’ve been where you are. Things went a certain way for me, a million times over, and every time I failed miserably at predicting where I’d be a year later.”

“Mm. It’d be presumptuous of me to make a prediction, then.”

“It would. But you wouldn’t be young if you didn’t.” Louise is looking up with piqued interest, a challenge of sorts.

What does she expect Aubrey to say next? That Louise is right, that surely life will surprise Aubrey in wild, unimaginable ways?

Being young is so easily shaped by the experiences of the older folks around her—not because they impart wisdom and lessons, but because people who’ve lived longer like to remind you of how little you know, especially when you dare to think you might actually have figured some things out about existing in a world everyone is experiencing for the first time. The truth universally accepted seems to be that you’ll understand when you’re older, and until then you’ll be wrong. Except there will always be older people, and things to be wrong about.

“I just think you might be disappointed,” Aubrey says finally. “A year is a year. Until yesterday I was in the same spot I’ve been for the last—ah, decade, it feels like. With the same friends, same bedsheets, same job, same everything. Sometimes nothing changes. It doesn’t make for a very fun story, but it’s just how it is. Moving away for a bit doesn’t change that.”

Louise bows her head solemnly, but her lips twitch in a smirk. “I see. But today you’re hours away from home, with a new job, a new everything. I’d be surprised if anything is the same at all by the time you leave.” Louise cuts herself off there, and something in her silence sounds almost like an if you ever.

“Okay,” Aubrey says simply, because she can’t think of anything else—of arguments or whether she should argue at all. She’s used to disagreeing, to coming up with ways to fight back and prove her point. It’s a familiar spot she crawls back to whenever she gets the chance. But Louise knows better. Worse, Louise has been such an intrinsic part of the blueprint for most of who Aubrey is now, even from a distance.

“I’ll see you in a bit,” Louise says, waving her on with a jut of her chin. “Get settled in, unpack some. We’ll go around and see the house in about an hour, yeah?”

“Sounds good.”

Then Louise adds, as an afterthought, “It’ll be so weird not getting to read your emails anymore. I reckon I’ll miss them. You’ve got this way of writing—well. I guess I’ve got the real thing here, now.” Aubrey laughs on her way upstairs.

The walls in the corridor off the staircase are a soft shade of yellow. When Aubrey opens the door to her entirely blue room, she finds the space flooded with light, casting long shadows from the window across battered old floors. The roof is slanted at an angle and the bed is made with a quilt she remembers seeing before, though she’s not sure when or where. There’s a small closet along the back wall and a dresser opposite the bed, which is a narrow double. Aubrey lingers on the mattress size only for a second. She doesn’t need that much space anyway. She’d slept in a twin bed until she moved out of her childhood home in her early twenties, and it was never an issue, though in her teens she often worried it would be, if ever she invited someone over for the night. It never ended up happening.

The window latch is a bit old but gives in after a few tugs, opening just enough to allow the cool summer air to filter into the stuffy room. Gauzy white curtains sway along with the wind. Aubrey sits down on the bed to shoot a quick text to Maggie, a hello and confirmation that she’s made it in one piece.

They haven’t spoken much since the reunion, and it feels like Aubrey’s lived a whole life since then. The tiny plane, the stale snacks, Louise’s rusty car. Aubrey forgot to check in on how the night had ended when Maggie wished her safe travels this morning. She does so now, with a picture of the view out of the bedroom window. The inn is visible, along with other houses in the neighbourhood. And trees—so many of them it feels like nothing exists beyond their leaves.

The air tastes like vacation, like transience. Aubrey’s afraid she’ll blink and the year will have gone by. It’s that sinking feeling when you know you’re staying somewhere just for a short while, and though you haven’t got much planned, it’s as if there isn’t enough time to get it all done. She breathes in deeply.

An odd feeling has settled deep in her stomach, an uneasiness she notices only now that she sits too aware of herself. It’s weird to think of home, to think of Maggie continuing on with her life today, tomorrow, the day after that. This morning she’d woken up in her own bed. Now she’s here. She pulls up social media to find familiar faces, old acquaintances sharing pictures of their weekend activities and growing families. It feels like cheating somehow, sitting here. Like she’s trying to put life on hold while everything else hurtles forward. It hits her now that this isn’t helping at all with falling behind. Fuck.

She lies back against the floral blanket and blinks up at the ceiling, painted in uneven strokes. It’s fine, she knows it’s fine, but part of her insists on the opposite, some kind of instinct against a danger coming from all sides and nowhere at once. As if nearly ten years of pressure, expectations, disappointments are catching up to her now that she’s dared to take a break from her own life. She thinks, fuck. How dare she run away. How dare she not try harder with what she already had.

A knock on the door, left ajar, snaps her out of it. She looks up to find Louise’s fist on the door frame. Her voice comes in from the hallway. “There’ll be towels in the linen closet, just down the hall, if ever you feel like taking a shower.”

“Thank you,” Aubrey offers in response. She drops her head again and says to the ceiling, “I should think that’s bound to happen at some point.”

Louise snorts. “Funny.” Her footsteps carry her back downstairs. Aubrey drags her bag over to the mattress and takes out her journal, which she sets on the bedside table. She feels a little better right away.

When they meet again downstairs, Aubrey thanks her aunt profusely for the room and the house and this opportunity, hoping it’ll soothe the twinge in her chest. “How is this the way you live now?” she motions then at a nearby window, overlooking the big white house next door. “Both of these places? In this shitshow of an economy?”

“Mm.” Louise shrugs, casually, but the smile she bites back betrays that she agrees. “There was this woman next door, Elise. Close friend of mine. I’ll tell you about her. Anyway—she was a widow and she had this house, and I went over all the time. We drank tea, and we talked, she convinced me to try crochet. A mess that was. She liked being on her own, so we had that in common.” Louise’s attention drifts away for a second, back within herself. She adds, in a rush, “When she died last year she basically passed the house down to me. She knew how much I loved it. It’s paid off and all. I thought of what I could do with it, I don’t know. Here we are now. I told you not to let it fool you. The roof leaks and the floors are very crooked, and there’s a lot of other problems I haven’t had time to get to yet. I did fix the mold thing though, so that’s good. Anyway, I might have to remortgage to get it all fixed. But it’s mine, even though it shouldn’t be mine, so.” When she breathes out something changes. Her shoulder drops. She takes a second to look up, Aubrey isn’t sure at what. Louise looks her age then, which is unusual. Somewhere in her fifties, but more tired and worried. She sighs, “God, I don’t know what I’ll do if this doesn’t work out.”

“It’ll work out.”

Louise looks over. Aubrey says again, “It’ll work out. Why wouldn’t it?”