Here We Go Again, page 31
Sophie struggles to look natural in her own home. “Then why are you here?”
The walls of the opulent foyer are lined with photos of her half-siblings, and Logan can’t stop staring at the two statuesque teens with her olive complexion and her sharklike eyes and her pouty mouth, assuming she’d had access to orthodontia. Her siblings are carbon copies of her, but with a different socioeconomic status. She presses her finger to a photo of them on a sailboat. “I don’t even know how old they are,” she says.
Yiannis answers. “John just turned twenty, and he’s a sophomore at Amherst. Phoebe is eighteen and graduated from high school in June. She’s off to MIT here in a few weeks.”
Two perfect, academic superstars. Logan drops her hand from the frame.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Yiannis offers. “We have sparkling water, seltzer water, tonic water, wine—”
“Why are you here, Logan?” her mom interrupts. And Logan sees herself in her mother’s utter lack of tact.
“I just want to talk, Mom.”
Sophie blinks erratically like she’s still searching for a way out.
“And wine sounds great.”
* * *
Like every Greek dad she’s ever met, Yiannis foists as much food on her as she can stomach. And Logan can stomach quite a lot. The “snack” he prepares to accompany the wine includes freshly made spanakopita, cold slices of lamb, Greek lasagna, pita with tzatziki, and baklava for dessert. Logan ravenously eats all of it, letting the food soak up the caffeine while Yiannis makes small talk.
How’s your dad?
How’s teaching?
Are you still living in Vista Summit?
What brought you to New England?
Do you want to hear more about your wunderkind half-siblings, who are richer, prettier, smarter, neurotypical versions of you?
Sophie simply studies Logan like she’s some fascinating new species on display at the zoo until Yiannis is convinced that Logan is truly full. Then, he gives himself a generous pour of the retsina and makes a clumsy excuse to leave the kitchen.
Sophie and Logan are alone with only a breakfast bar between them.
“Oh, just ask me!” Sophie practically shouts into the silence.
Logan slowly sets down her wine. “Okay… why did you leave, Sophie?”
Her mother bursts into tears. “I’m sorry.” She chokes through a dramatic sob, reaching for a cloth napkin. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Logan finds herself entirely unmoved by her mother’s crying. She didn’t come here to assuage her mother’s guilt about abandoning her. “I don’t need you to be sorry,” she says. “I just want to know why.”
Sophie blots at her eye makeup. “Because I wasn’t happy!”
“Being my mom?”
“What? No!” She comes around the breakfast counter and sits on the stool next to Logan. “I was unhappy with your dad. We wanted different things out of life. Your dad was content with a small life in Vista Summit, with the same small Greek community we grew up in, with doing the same thing every day, with never leaving. I needed more.”
“And you found your big life in Burlington, Vermont?” Logan seethes. She didn’t come here to be angry with her mom, either, but she finds the emotion readily available to her.
“Yiannis and I traveled!” Sophie explains. “We’ve seen the world together! We spent six months sailing around the Aegean, homeschooling the children on deck. You haven’t seen Naxos until you’ve seen it in early spring.”
“I’ve never seen Naxos at all. Or anywhere else in Greece.” She feels her bitterness grow, and she realizes it was never hope that drove her here. It was fury. “So, I was part of that small life you hated?”
“Of course not!” Sophie puts a hand on Logan’s thigh. “It had nothing to do with you!”
Logan yanks her thigh away and laughs. “Of course it had something to do with me. You left me. You made me believe I was easy to leave!”
She fumbles through some half-baked lie. “I-I tried to take you with me, but your father wouldn’t let me!”
“Yeah, I’m sure you fought really hard for me. Tell me, Sophie. Did my dad stop you from ever visiting? From flying me out to see you? From taking me on one of your family trips?”
Logan already knows the answer to these questions, but she revels in the way each one lands on her mother’s facial expression like an emotional slap. Antonio Maletis spent years trying to protect Logan from the truth about her mother: that Sophie Haralambopoulous was selfish and self-centered, reckless with the feelings of others, and terrified of ever looking inward.
And the worst part is, in trying to avoid ever feeling the pain of her abandonment again, Logan became just like her mom.
“I was eleven years old, and you left me! You made me feel like I was too much and not enough. You made me believe no one would ever stick around for me.”
Sophie’s bottom lip quivers.
“Oh, stop that! You’re not the victim here, and the least you can do after twenty years of pretending I don’t exist is to listen to me!”
Her mom’s pouting stops instantly, almost like it was never real in the first place.
“When I started my period in seventh grade, I used leaves as pads because I was too embarrassed to talk to Dad about it. My ninth-grade English teacher had to teach me how to use a tampon. And it’s fine! I didn’t need a mom. I had Dad, and I had Joe, and they were more than enough. But sometimes, I wanted you. When I kissed my best friend the summer after eighth grade, I wanted to talk to you about it, but you weren’t there, and since then, I’ve never been able to trust that anyone will stay.”
Sophie blinks again. “Who’s Joe?” Like that was her only takeaway from Logan’s speech.
“He’s someone who chose me, and he’s dying. But because I’m so afraid of being abandoned, I can barely acknowledge what’s happening. And then there’s Rosemary”—just her name is a vicious tear through her blooming heart—“and for some deranged reason, she loves me, but I don’t know how to let her love me. I don’t know how to let anyone get close because I’m afraid they will hurt me like you did.”
“Well.” Sophie presses her lips together in a thin, mean line. In that gesture, Logan doesn’t see herself at all. “I guess I’m to blame for every single problem in your life. You’re welcome. Now you don’t have to accept any responsibility for your actions. You can just say it’s all my fault for being such an awful mom!”
That comment reverberates through Logan’s chest. She hasn’t used her mom as an excuse—she knows that. But she hasn’t let herself heal from what happened, either—has refused therapy and help—and maybe in some ways, that’s the same thing. She let this woman’s cruelty control her entire life, but the truth is, Logan’s been in control the entire time. She doesn’t need to understand why her mom left in order to let herself be loved; that’s a choice she can make. And she’s finally ready to make it.
The French doors open and two girls step inside from the back patio. “Mom? Is everything okay? We heard yelling,” asks the girl who Logan places as Phoebe. Only this Phoebe doesn’t look like a perfect Greek daughter ordered from a catalogue. Real-life Phoebe’s dark hair is shaved on one side, with purple streaks through the rest. Nose ring, ankle tattoo, a crop top and a pair of high-waisted shorts, her hand threaded through the other girl’s. This Phoebe looks exactly like Logan at eighteen.
“Everything is fine,” Sophie responds with a calculated air of nonchalance. Heaven forbid her new daughter knows about the old one.
Logan turns to her sister. “She’s a real fucking piece of work, isn’t she?”
Phoebe rolls her eyes. “You have no idea.”
Sophie loses some of her cool. “Phoebe! Go to your room!”
“You queer?” Logan asks bluntly, gesturing to the hand-holding between these two girls.
“Duh,” Phoebe says with a Gen-Z monotone. She appraises her older sister with a critical stare. “Are you?”
Logan is wearing overalls with a sports bra and her dino tropical shirt over the top like a coat. “Duh.”
Phoebe cocks her head to the side. “You’re my sister, aren’t you? The one no one ever talks about?”
Despite all the evidence of Sophie’s coldness and callousness, this still hurts. “Yeah. I’m that sister.”
Logan grabs a fistful of baklava for the road and shoves it into the front pocket of her overalls like it’s a Joey pouch for future emotional eating. “It’s nice to finally meet you,” she says to her sister. “You seem cool. Maybe we can chat sometime.”
She doesn’t say anything else to Sophie.
She’s already gotten all that she’s going to get from this reunion.
* * *
When she gets back out to the Gay Mobile, she feels amped up, restless, torn between needing to sob and wanting to hysterically laugh. She finally confronted her mother after all these years, and her mother just… sucked.
She climbs into the driver’s seat but doesn’t start the van. Logan has to do something with herself before she sits still for the seven-hour drive back to Bar Harbor.
What she really wants to do is call Rosemary. She wants to cry to Rosemary and laugh with Rosemary and hear Rosemary matter-of-factly say something like, “So your mom is a bitch. What else is new?”
But she can’t call Rosemary. She has no right to, not until she’s ready to figure out exactly what she needs to say to make things right. Katharine fucking Hepburn, how can she ever make it right?
She holds her phone in her agitated hands and scrolls past Rosemary’s contact repeatedly, until she spots a different contact a few names below that. New Science Teacher, winky face.
Logan jumps out of the Gay Mobile and presses the call button as she marches toward the park. Rhiannon Schaffer answers on the second ring. Logan is immediately word-vomiting into the phone. “I am so, so sorry for the way I treated you. I was an asshole. Worse than an asshole. I was Satan’s asshole after he’s eaten Taco Bell. And I’m not calling to ask for forgiveness or anything!”
There’s a sound of protest on the other end of the line, but she plows on both in the conversation and in her walk to the park. “I acted like our relationship didn’t mean anything because I was scared, but that doesn’t make it okay.” She takes a deep breath as her lungs strain from the exercise. “I should’ve worked through my attachment shit before we started hooking up, and before I hurt you, and I’m just really sorry.”
“Who is this?” Rhiannon asks innocently.
“Ouch. Okay, I deserve that.”
The call is silent for a minute, and Logan wonders if there’s a chance Rhiannon truly doesn’t remember her. Logan finds a bench and sits down under a slice of shade.
“Whatever.” Rhiannon huffs. “Thanks for the apology, asshole.”
Logan smiles into the phone. “You’re welcome.”
“And you didn’t really hurt me. I knew what I was getting myself into with you.”
She winces. “Right. The apathetic asshole who doesn’t care about anyone or anything.”
Rhiannon groans. “I really said that to you, didn’t I? I—I’m sorry, too. That was a shit thing to say, and it isn’t true anyway. No one cares about their students as much as you do,” she says genuinely. Logan looks up at the sun cutting through the branches on a maple tree. “You care about being a good teacher. You care about nineties pop country a little too much. You care about your dad. And everyone in Vista Summit knows how much you care about Joe Delgado.”
She lets this list wash over her as she takes a bite of baklava from her overalls’ front pocket.
“I was just bitter because you didn’t care about me,” she finally confesses, and Logan feels the hurt in her voice through the phone.
“For what it’s worth, that wasn’t about you. I didn’t let myself care about anyone.”
“I know.” A tenuous silence stretches between them before Rhiannon suddenly says, “I want you to know that I had a lot of sex this summer. With some incredibly hot people. People who were way hotter than you.”
“I’m very happy for you.”
“Thanks. Now. Please never call me again.”
Rhiannon hangs up, and Logan stares at her black phone screen. She sees her wild-eyed reflection staring up at her, and all at once, she knows what she needs to do to make things right.
She needs to show Rosemary how much she cares.
Chapter Thirty-Six
ROSEMARY
Rosemary didn’t think she could ever wish for Joe’s death, but that was before she learned what death is. Its recursive nature, its prolonged process. Its pattern.
Joe continues to decline. Logan returns in the middle of the night from her mysterious adventure, and she tells Rosemary to go upstairs for a proper night’s sleep. But Rosemary is too afraid to leave Joe’s side.
Nurse Addison comes by the next day and tells them it’s the end, that they should say their last goodbyes. So they do. They observe nighttime bedside vigils, Rosemary leaning against Logan’s shoulder saying, “This is it. Tonight’s the night.” Holding his hand until morning. Holding each other’s hands despite everything.
Then small miracles. His vitals get better. He wakes up and his breathing steadies. He holds down water or Jell-O or mashed potatoes. He goes a day without needing morphine. He smiles. He tells a joke. His brown eyes come into focus. He says, “my girls,” and squeezes their hands back.
But he never actually gets better better. He’s still in pain, his lungs are still full of fluid, his whole life is still confined to one bed.
He’s never going to get better. They’re all here trying to help him let go. But Joseph Delgado is strong and stubborn until the bitter end.
One night, after Guillermo has gone home, it’s just her and Logan. “What do you think he’s waiting for?” Logan asks.
Rosemary clutches his hand tighter. “I think he’s scared.”
“Of death?”
“Of finally surrendering control.”
Two days later, Rosemary watches Nurse Addison take his vitals, and then shouts, in a fit of tears and rage, “You can go, okay! I give you permission, you proud, proud man. You can go!” She sobs into his chest for hours.
That same day, Logan asks Guillermo while he prepares dinner: “What percentage of your patients die?”
“All of them,” he answers plainly. “That is my job.”
“How do you deal with it? Watching all those people die?”
“It’s an honor,” he says, “to be there for someone at the end.”
The next morning, when Guillermo arrives at the same time as Nurse Addison, he has a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in its original Spanish tucked under his arm. He doesn’t make coffee or tea; he sits by Joe’s bed and reads him Márquez the way he was meant to be read, and Joe is alert enough that he weeps. Even Nurse Addison stays to listen, comes back again and again for more chapters, while Rosemary prays for the end.
* * *
“Logan is up to something,” Rosemary tells Joe the next morning as she sits beside him with her coffee. His eyes are glassy from the morphine, but they’re open.
Logan is banging around upstairs, and Rosemary glances at the ceiling. “I’m not sure what she’s up to, but it’s something.”
The banging started as soon as Logan returned from her unexplained day away. Given Joe’s health, Rosemary moved her suitcases and the typewriter downstairs so she could always be with him, but Logan keeps disappearing upstairs for hours at a time, emerging for meals and to check on Joe, occasionally going on mysterious errands and returning with mysterious bags.
Rosemary asked her what she was doing, but Logan simply said she needed to take care of some things. And Rosemary has been too preoccupied with Joe to press beyond that cagey response.
“You know what she’s doing, don’t you?” Rosemary asks a barely conscious Joe. And she swears the man smirks at her.
Joe is awake and alert for most of the day, so Rosemary takes Odie for an extra-long walk that evening, two miles down the beach, then up the access stairs and two miles back through town. They both need the exercise and fresh air.
When they return to the cottage, she finds Joe asleep with Guillermo next to him watching baseball. There’s a stack of empty cardboard boxes by the front door, and there’s a toolbox on the kitchen table. “What’s going on?”
Before Guillermo can answer her, she hears Logan shout from upstairs, “Rosie? Are you home? Get up here!”
Something thumps upstairs, like Logan is dragging something heavy across the floor. Maybe a dead body. Or the baggage containing all her abandonment issues.
“Rosie!” Logan calls out again before Rosemary can speculate any further. She unhooks Odie’s leash and he bounds up the stairs after the sound of Logan’s voice. Rosemary follows.
Logan’s wails aren’t coming from her own bedroom, but from Rosemary’s, the one she hasn’t entered in over a week. Odie whimpers at the closed door. Rosemary pushes inside her bedroom, except… it’s not her room. Not the version of this room she’s slept in for the last few weeks. Nothing is where she left it.
“What…?” she starts, but she can’t fully form the question, her eyes fluttering around the room, unable to focus on any one thing.
The maroon carpet is gone, and in its place are light oak floors, rubbed smooth with age. The vomit-colored walls are somehow a calming blue. The rickety bed is now a thick-looking mattress with a minimalist white headboard. The quilt is still there over crisp white sheets. The ancient dresser has been cleaned, and the top is lined with plants. She spots a pot of mint, an aloe plant, birds of paradise, camellias. A philodendron like the one she has back home. A cactus with yellow flowers. Prickly pear.
“Where…?”
She is paralyzed in the doorway. A cream rug on the floor, framed photos and prints of the places they’ve been this summer on the walls, drawers with label-maker stickers on the front and the label maker itself sitting on top next to her laminating machine.
