Here We Go Again, page 29
The early morning Dunkin’ employees take pity on them, and Rosemary washes her feet in the bathroom sink, then orders herself the largest iced coffee possible.
The van still smells like poop, but they drive with the windows down. As they finally cross the state border into Maine, they get to see the sunrise over the Atlantic out the passenger side of the car. Everything is beautiful and painful.
Except the Dunkin’ iced coffee. That tastes like actual shit.
LOGAN
Dunkin’ has the most magnificent coffee she’s ever tasted.
Rosemary is behind the wheel, and she oscillates between laughing at nothing and crying at everything. She seems a few mile markers away from a total mental breakdown.
But the sunrise is in her hair as it whips in the wind of the open windows. Logan wants to sleep, but she doesn’t. She watches Rosemary come into full light instead.
ROSEMARY
Bar Harbor, Maine.
At nine o’clock in the morning on July 12, they finally arrive. It only took them a month. She laughs at the thought.
And then she’s crying again, because this—this pretty little resort town in northern Maine—is where it all ends.
“Hang in there, Rosie,” Logan orders as she uses her phone to navigate them to a small, Cape Cod–style cottage by the sea. “You can sleep soon.”
Rosemary tries to keep it together until she pulls into a gravel driveway. There’s already a white van with the words Mount Desert Home Hospice painted on the side.
Rosemary turns off the engine for the last time. Then, she falls out of the van like a lifeless ball of clay. Somehow, Logan is already there by the driver’s-side door, waiting to catch her.
A burly white man with a full auburn beard wearing scrubs appears in front of them, pushing a gurney. He looks like he belongs on the cover of a romance novel about lobster fishermen. “I’m Nurse Addison,” he grunts by way of greeting. Rosemary has no idea if Addison is a first name or a last name.
“I’ll be overseeing Joseph’s medical care,” Nurse Addison explains as he effortlessly lifts Joe out of the Gay Mobile and onto the gurney. Rosemary is only vaguely aware of the fact that Logan is still holding her upright.
“And I’m Guillermo,” says an equally large man in bright floral scrubs. “Mr. St. Patin hired me to assist Nurse Addison until Mr. Delgado passes. Let’s get everyone into the house.”
The house in question looks like it hasn’t been touched since the eighties. Nurse Addison puts Joe into a hospital bed he’s set up in the living room, and Guillermo leads Logan and Rosemary upstairs to two bedrooms separated by a shared bathroom.
Separate bedrooms.
Logan deposits Rosemary into a drafty bedroom with maroon carpet and vomit-colored walls. The bed is rickety, sharp coils digging into her back, but she doesn’t even care because it’s a bed. Odie climbs up next to her and curls himself into a tight ball against her side. Logan turns to go find her own room.
Everything is beautiful and painful.
Rosemary stares at the ceiling as tears roll sideways down her temples. The shower whooshes to life on the other side of the wall.
Rosemary should shower, too. Rosemary should sleep.
Instead, she rolls over and studies the room. A dated dresser with a built-in vanity. A dormer window with a desk tucked into the nook. And on the desk, a typewriter. Joe’s old typewriter.
She drags her body over to the desk and sits down on the wobbly wooden chair. Out the window, she can see green trees. Sunshine. The ocean.
There’s a stack of aged printer paper, almost the same color as the walls, in one of the desk drawers. It takes a few minutes to figure out how, but eventually, she feeds a sheet of paper into the typewriter, her index finger punching an experimental key. The letter L appears on the paper with a forceful clack.
She hits another letter. Then another. A word appears, then a sentence, then a paragraph. In a delirium, Rosemary writes a random scene from her new novel. The old wizard who took the heroes on the quest is dying, and they’re rushing to get him to the nearest inn before it’s too late….
Half-asleep and practically unconscious, Rosemary types and types, feeds in new pages, and fills them up. She doesn’t know how to delete on the typewriter, how to go back, so she only goes forward, deeper and deeper into her own grief, thinly disguised in a fantasy world.
“Rosemary.” A calm voice. A soft hand on her shoulder. “You need sleep.”
She looks at the slew of pages in front of her. She looks at Logan behind her, hair wet, eyes tired.
“I can write a little longer,” she says.
Logan shakes her head. “The typewriter is loud. Please. Come to bed.”
She lets herself be led back to the rickety bed, lets Logan climb into the bed beside her, wrap her up in limbs that are better than any blanket.
With Odie against her stomach and Logan at her back, Rosemary finally falls asleep.
Bar Harbor, Maine
Chapter Thirty-Three
ROSEMARY
According to her phone, it’s 7:37 when she wakes up, but that tells her very little. She has no idea if it’s morning or evening, and the muted light coming in through the curtains isn’t helping.
There is a quilt over her body. This is a mattress beneath her. She’s alone in this bed, but she remembers falling asleep wrapped up in Logan’s arms. Maybe she dreamed that part.
The rest of the room comes into sleepy-eyed focus. The carpet and the puke-colored walls and the window. The desk with the typewriter and all her pages.
She climbs out of bed, out of the room, down the stairs. And oh. It’s evening. She’s facing a wall of windows that look out at the Atlantic Ocean during golden hour, and the view is so spectacular, she almost forgets everything else.
“Rosemary,” a hoarse voice says, and she turns away from the golden hues and calm water.
Joe.
He’s in a hospital bed in the middle of a living room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a giant stone fireplace, eclectic art, and outdated technology. He’s raised up just enough that he can see her standing there at the base of the stairs. His brown eyes are open and alert.
“Joe!” She catapults herself toward him, reaches for his papery hand. “You’re awake!”
He grunts and holds her hand back.
“I was shocked when he woke up before you.”
Rosemary turns and sees Logan sitting sideways on a threadbare reclining chair, her legs spilling over one arm. Rosemary didn’t dream it. Those legs were definitely wrapped around her in her sleep.
Their eyes meet, and Logan offers her a brief smile before her gaze drops down to the mug of tea in her hand. Rosemary becomes aware of clanking in the kitchen, and then one of the nurses—Guillermo, she thinks—comes into the living room with another mug of tea.
“Thank you,” Rosemary says when Guillermo wordlessly pushes the warm mug into her hands. “I’m Rosemary, by the way.”
Guillermo shoots Logan a look in her reclining chair. “I know” is his only response as he shifts to tidying the medical supplies beside Joe’s bed.
“Are you the hospice nurse?”
“No, that’s Nurse Addison,” Guillermo clarifies. Then, he gently adds: “I work for Mount Desert Home Hospice, but I provide wraparound palliative care. I’m here to make Joseph and you girls as comfortable as possible through the end.”
The lumberjack lobster fisherman appears out of nowhere again and extends a beefy hand toward Rosemary. “I’m Nurse Addison,” he says in that same gruff, romance hero kind of way. “I’ll come by three times a day to check on our patient.” Then Nurse Addison winks at Joe as he reaches for a tablet to record Joe’s vitals.
Joe blushes. Not dead yet, then.
Rosemary squeezes his hand tighter. “And how often do you come by?” she asks Guillermo.
“Always,” he answers. “Any time you need me. I can stay overnight so you girls can sleep if you want. Or I can take the day shift with him. I live ten minutes away, so I can be here whenever you need me. I’m here to take care of you, so you can take care of him. Being a caretaker is so very hard.”
Still half-delirious, Rosemary decides she’s a little bit in love with Guillermo.
“Speaking of, are you hungry?”
Rosemary’s stomach feels like the Grand Canyon. “Um, a little…”
Guillermo makes a tsk sound and heads back to the kitchen. “I’ll heat up some okra.”
“Ah, hell yes!” Logan hoots. “Give me all that auto mechanic shrimp!”
Nurse Addison slides his stylus back into the breast pocket of his scrubs. “Our Joe seems to be in good health, all things considered. The fentanyl seems to still be helping with pain management, but if it gets worse, I can give him some morphine when I come back in the morning. Does that sound okay, Joe?”
Joe blushes again. Nurse Addison squeezes Joe’s shoulder, and Joe positively melts.
Once the nurse is gone, Logan whistles. “You old horn dog.”
“Joe.” Rosemary scoots even closer to his bed. “How are you?”
Joe licks his chapped lips, and Rosemary reaches for a small pink sponge and tries to wet his mouth. “I’m…,” Joe starts, then stops. He starts somewhere else entirely. “We made it to Maine, Rosie.”
She leans in and kisses his forehead. “We made it.”
* * *
The first few days in Bar Harbor fall into an easy rhythm. Nurse Addison arrives at the cottage at five in the morning sharp, when the view through the front windows is still moonlight and mystery. His arrival wakes up either Rosemary or Logan—whoever fell asleep beside Joe’s bed the night before. If it’s Rosemary, she asks Nurse Addison a dozen questions about Joe’s condition, but Nurse Addison’s answer is always the same: “He’s still alive.”
He’s not here to cure Joe. He’s here to make him comfortable.
Nurse Addison leaves and Guillermo arrives to make coffee and change Joe’s diaper, his catheter. He gives him a spot bath, if he wants it, and rubs his feet when they start turning gray from lack of blood flow. As he completes these tasks, Rosemary drinks her coffee on the front porch while the sun rises over the Atlantic Ocean. Logan often joins her out there in the cold, her perpetually bare legs covered in goose bumps.
After coffee, Logan takes Odie for a walk, and in the evening Rosemary does, and in-between, that dog weasels his way onto the hospital bed with Joe, even though there’s no room for him.
Logan reads Joe Mary Oliver poems and his favorite novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rosemary writes at her window upstairs, and then brings the pages downstairs to read them aloud to Joe after each session. Forward and forward and forward she presses into the story. She might write the whole thing before he’s gone.
For some reason, baseball is always playing on the old, wood-paneled TV, even though none of them care about sports. Guillermo feeds them Remy’s food, and when they start running out of that, he brings them his mother’s homemade tamales and his father’s pozole. Rosemary has no idea if this is part of his job, or if he does it simply because he cares.
Sometimes, Rosemary falls asleep in the reclining chair and wakes up to find someone put a blanket over her.
Rosemary writes and Logan reads and Joe sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.
No one says anything about their long-term plan, but Rosemary knows that both she and Logan are here until the end.
LOGAN
“Who is that handsome son of a bitch?” she asks when she gets home from a morning walk with Odie to discover Joe sitting up, eyes wide open. Rosemary’s feeding him reheated grits. He smiles, and Logan feels her heart stretch out in her chest, like its waking from a weeklong hibernation.
“More like decaying son of a bitch,” Joe manages, and his smile turns into a gas grimace.
Rosemary sets aside the grits. “Someone is in very good spirits this morning.”
“It sounds like the perfect morning to open your present from Remy, then.” Logan snatches up the gift-wrapped frame from the corner of the living room.
“Yes!” Rosemary beams. It’s clear she’s turned the optimism up to eleven, for Joe’s sake. “Great idea!”
“Let’s see what your lover gave you!”
Joe doesn’t have the dexterity to tear the paper, so Rosemary helps as Logan holds it up in front of him. The paper falls away, then the Bubble Wrap, and then they’re all staring at another nude painting of Joseph Delgado.
At first glance, it’s just like the one from before: Joe, in a bathtub, looking boldly at the artist. But this isn’t twenty-five-year-old Joe. It’s sixty-four-year-old Joe. This is the same Joe that’s in the hospital bed in front of her. The Joe who is dying. And he’s absolutely beautiful.
Remy has rendered him magnificent, like an ancient redwood tree, the wrinkles around his eyes as deep as grooves in the bark.
No, he’s the Grand Canyon: lines and cracks and crevices cut into a mesmerizing pattern by time and nature. The soft, vulnerable skin drooping from his forearms. The sag of his barrel chest, the puckered skin around his stomach, his thin legs awkwardly folded into the tub. Every part of him looks majestic and perfect, and Logan is crying.
This is love. Love is seeing perfection in every flaw. Seeing every flaw as a miracle because it belongs to the person you care about most. Love is saying, yes, still. Even after all these years.
Every brush stroke contains awe and reverence, a love letter to a gay man who grew old, and the miracle of Joseph Delgado. Remy painted Joe with wonder.
“Wow,” Rosemary whispers, also with wonder. “It’s you, Joe.”
Joe laughs, then coughs, then cries. The Joe in this painting isn’t staring at viewers with the cocksureness of his younger self. He’s staring at them with a desperate plea in those brown eyes. Live, he seems to beg. Live as much as you can.
Logan clears her throat. “You look like that Johnny Cash song. ‘Hurt.’ ”
“I look like Johnny Cash?” Joe wheezes.
“No, you look the way that song feels,” she tries to explain. “Like a nice, long cry.”
Rosemary snatches up the painting and flies out of her chair. She moves like a woman on a mission, marching over to the wall beside the TV. She removes a painting of a lighthouse and on the bare nail behind it, she hangs the nude portrait of Joe. She adjusts it, then steps back to study it for a second. Rosemary looks pleased with herself, and the sight of her makes Logan’s newly awoken heart ache.
Logan wishes she could find a way to paint all of Rosemary’s perfect flaws, all the things Logan was wrong about.
Rosemary’s not rigid. She simply knows what her brain needs. She’s not controlling. She’s organized and thoughtful, and she always wants things to be perfect for the people she loves. She’s not condescending. She’s just usually right, always the smartest person in the room. And she’s not that scared little girl who lost her dad. She’s the bravest person Logan has ever met. Brave enough to try to be her best self. Brave enough to care.
She cares about Logan. Or she did, back in Ocean Springs. She couldn’t hide that at all. The way Rosemary nuzzled herself into Logan each night, like a perfect baby spoon. The way Rosemary would tilt her head up toward Logan without even realizing it, asking for a kiss. The way her eyes softened when Logan touched her, like she couldn’t quite believe she was letting herself lose control with someone else.
Logan loved being that someone.
She thinks she could get back to that, if she could find a way to show Rosemary how much she cares.
ROSEMARY
She adjusts the painting of her naked former English teacher one more time.
There. It’s perfect.
Rosemary takes a step back and appreciates the sight of it on the wall, on display, where it belongs.
“Girls,” Joe says from the hospital bed. “Come here. I need to tell you something.”
Rosemary turns around and catches Logan staring at her intently. Their eyes meet across the dated living room, and for a second, she lets herself enjoy the alchemy of those hazel eyes. Slowly, Rosemary crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed next to Odie.
“Something to, uh, confess…” Joe carries on.
“Oh, please, Joe, don’t divulge your sins to us,” Logan whines. “Twenty years of idolizing you, and it might destroy me if I find out you don’t recycle or you voted for Reagan.”
Joe laughs. “Don’t worry, I’m going to hell with my sins. This is… this is about the cottage.”
Rosemary takes in the scuffed hardwood floors, and the Formica kitchen countertops and ancient appliances. The big windows and the front porch with a view. “What about the cottage?”
Joe asks for his water, and he takes a long drink through his bendy straw before he can continue. “I-I couldn’t part with this house, even after I left Remy and Maine. Remy moved out shortly after I did—the neighbors told me—but I didn’t want to sell. I convinced myself that I kept it because it was a good investment—” He coughs for a moment, and Logan helps him drink more water. “But the truth is, I just couldn’t stand the idea of parting with it.”
Rosemary looks at the nude painting on the wall and understands. Thirty years did nothing to dull the love Remy and Joe had for each other, and he kept this house like keeping a shoebox of old letters, a memento of that love.
“And it was a good investment,” Joe continues. “I own this house outright. The mortgage is paid off, and home values have increased considerably since I bought it.”
“I can only imagine,” Logan says slowly. Rosemary doesn’t have to imagine. She looked up this cottage on Zillow the day after they arrived. Three bedrooms and an ocean view in a resort town near Acadia National Park? It’s worth just under a million, even with all the updates it needs.
“Do you need us to help you sell it?” Logan asks. “Clean it out for you? Whatever you need, we’ll do it.”
“Yes, of course we will,” Rosemary adds. “We’ll help take care of the house.”
Joe’s shoulders relax against his pillows. “I’m glad to hear that, girls. Because it’s yours.”
