Page 7 of Love Again

Shit.

I spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning brushes, pans, and rollers, even though I used the large mess sink at the station already. Then I clean myself and end up spending too much time pulling bits of reddish acrylic paint from my hair. I know this is all distraction. I have no one to discuss any of this with. Absolutely no one.

This is all on me. I created this mess. I never told my sisters about Colorado, never confided in them. It was never the right thing to do. I had left home under difficult circumstances. I wasn’t close to Claire, who was suddenly in charge when Mom and Dad died and Chloe disappeared. When I visited home, it was tense. Laurel was having boy trouble all the time and sleeping around. Claire was terrified Laurel would get pregnant, and then she did.

The last thing I thought I should do was bring up my love life. And they never asked.

When we found out we were both from Maine, Luke was the one who talked about coming to visit Echo Bay. He said he had a brother in the area.

Right.

At least he didn’t ask me about his letters and if I received them.

Towel-drying my hair, I walk into my bedroom, sink to my knees, and fish a shoebox out from under my bed.

After I left, Luke wrote to me twice a month, every month, for exactly two years. I never read a single letter—I never even opened them. At first, I couldn’t bear the pain of hearing his voice rising from the pages. Then it became easier to toss each new one in with the rest. Finally, I started having this irrational idea that if I opened them, the dreams of him would stop. Somehow, as crazy as it sounds, I felt the box of letters under my bed fueled those dreams.

And as much as I didn’t want to grieve him, I also didn’t want to lose him completely.

I hated that I conjured this weird superstition. I draw big lines through the Astrology section in the local paper at Weaver’s all the time. I hate that shit. And then I went and created my own world of fate and power.

I start to take the lid off the shoebox and then stop, kiss the top, and slide it back under the bed.

I sit in my room and listen to the ocean roar. It’s spring and the rivers are swollen. It’s a time for renewal. A time for growth. A time for tender things to come from the earth, and yet, I already feel defeated.

Then suddenly, I think of two people I can talk to. Two people I can trust, who won’t judge me or berate me or get their feelings hurt that I didn’t “confide” in them before.

This whole need to measure intimacy by information sharing annoys me. I don’t get it. It’s what leaves me outside the loop with my sisters. When Chloe came back into our lives, it seemed like she eased into these relationships so easily, and part of that was talking to us. It took a while, but then she was as close to Claire and Laurel as if she had never left.

I make two phone calls, then slip out of my robe and put on black skinny jeans, a white turtleneck, and a smart, black, waist-cut jacket. I blow-dry my hair, something I only do in winter, but when you’re headed to the big city, you’ve got to look the part.

After packing an over-night bag, I text all three of my sisters—Claire, Chloe, and Laurel—and explain that I’m heading to Boston.

I’m due for a visit anyway. My brother, Travis, and my adoptive father, Geo, are happy to have me drop in.

They’re uncomplicated. There’s no baggage. And most importantly: they love me.

Not that my sisters don’t. There’s a lot of hierarchy and pockets of betrayal in between glances that I can’t deal with right now.

΅

George, “Geo,” Hamilton is quiet, reserved, kind, and dedicated to a fault. After Mom and Dad were killed in a DUI crash, Geo became our legal guardian. He’d gone to school with Dad in New York, and they built their veterinary practice together in Echo Bay. They married around the same time, were each other’s best man, but Geo’s wife died very young, way before Chloe was born. Geo never talked about his wife. Even today, we don’t know her name.

By the time he inherited us, Chloe and Claire were off to college, I was a junior in high school, Laurel was fifteen, and Travis was twelve. Geo, Laurel, Travis, and I lived in the apartment above the clinic. We tried to keep The Inn at Echo Bay going and failed. Geo shuttered the property, and it sold eight years later to Finn Colton.

Looking back on the sacrifices Geo made for us—selling his own place, letting us continue to live where we had all grown up, dealing with Chloe’s disappearance, and helping first Claire, and now Travis, into vet school—seems like so much now that I’m an adult. And then there’s what I put him through.

The Title IV suit about being kicked off the soccer team, my propensity to argue, and my “smash-ups” which constituted a series of crashes on skis, a longboard, a two-stroke motorcycle, and trying to make my own zip line course, translated into many ER visits. I knew I’d crossed a line when I went parachuting at sixteen. When I saw his face as he exited his car, looking up into the sky, a hand over his eyes, I knew I had hurt him. I was barreling down in my first jump, the parachute billowing faithfully above.

Oh, he was pissed.

It looked an awful lot like the face Claire made when I bungee jumped off the bridge on graduation night and she thought I was trying to commit suicide.

The difference was that Geo just drove me home after quietly stripping the parachute instructor of any dignity and showing him how easily I had changed my birthdate on my license from sixteen to eighteen. Claire, on the other hand, told me I had to leave. She couldn’t handle me, vet school, Chloe disappearing, and the two younger ones if I was going to keep being a “daredevil.”

So, I left, and it was easy to blame her. I did blame her for a long time, until I figured there was a whole other reason I left.

I went to school in Colorado, training at the same time to be a smokejumper. When I graduated, it was a no-brainer. I signed up for the new program, and after a grueling interview and training period, I was in.