Here We Go Again, page 32
“When…?”
Under the window—her window—is a white desk, and on that white desk is her typewriter next to a stack of new paper. In front of the desk is—“Shit, is that a Herman Miller desk chair? How?”
Rosemary tries to take in the transformation as a whole, but it feels like she’s stepped through a wardrobe into her version of Narnia, which includes office supplies and house plants, clean lines and cool tones, Odie already curled up on the bed, and Logan in the middle of it all, a burst of chaos in a room of precision and order.
Logan has paint in her hair and on her overalls and a little bit on her cheek, too. Her knees are red and ruddy, and she’s sweaty and exhausted-looking and smiling.
“Surprise!” Logan says.
“How?” Rosemary asks again. And, “Why?”
“I can answer some of those questions!” Logan balances excitedly on the balls of her feet. Rosemary notices the weathered toolbelt secured around her waist and the wild glint in her hazel eyes.
“What.” Logan sweeps her arms widely. “I revamped your room into a Rosemary-approved writing space. Because you said you want to stay.”
Stay. Rosemary looks at the desk, the typewriter, the plants…
“As for where I got everything,” Logan continues, “well, believe it or not, these floors were under the heinous carpet when I started peeling it up. The paint I got from Lowe’s, along with most of the furniture.”
“Is there a Lowe’s in Bar Harbor?”
“No clue.” Logan hops in place. “I got all this stuff at the Lowe’s in Burlington, Vermont.”
“You drove to Vermont?”
“Yes, but not for the Lowe’s. I went to see my mom. And it turns out, my mom is kind of a dickhead.”
“Of course she is,” Rosemary replies, half in shock. So that is where Logan went during her day away. “You didn’t need to go to Vermont to learn that.”
Logan stares at her for a heartbeat, then bursts out laughing. “I thought you might say something like that. But I did need to go to Vermont. I-I needed to confront my bullshit mommy issues.” Logan brushes the unwashed hair out of her eyes. “And wouldn’t you know it? Sophie leaving was never about me at all. It was about her being a selfish twat.”
“I did know that. No decent person would ever leave you.”
Logan looks at Rosemary the way she looks at shrimp po’boys, and Rosemary feels a tug in her chest. Oh, she loves her. She loves her so, so much. It had been easy to push those feelings aside for the last few days and focus on Joe, but now it all comes back to life inside her. She told Logan she loved her on that porch, and Logan told her she needed to think about it.
“I was eleven, Rosie. How could I ever understand it wasn’t about me?” Logan shakes her head like she’s easily shaking away the memories that haunted her for so long. “Vermont was illuminating, to say the least, but you asked when I did all of this, and the thing is, I’ve been working on it since I got back. I haven’t really slept much.”
“Logan!”
“I know, I know! Definitely an ADHD manic productivity binge.” She waves her hands around like she’s not still manic. “But I had this whole epiphany, and I don’t want to keep using what Sophie did as a reason to never care, because I do care. I’ve always cared about you. And I love you, and I made you a writing room. So that’s why, I guess.”
Rosemary still doesn’t understand what’s happening, but she takes a step closer to this frantic chaos tornado with blue paint on her cheek. “You… you love me?”
“I did and I do and I always will,” Logan says plainly.
Rosemary disintegrates into stardust and swoon at those words.
“I should have said that two days ago. I should have said that twenty years ago,” Logan rants. “I loved you when we were girls. Even when I was too young to understand what love is, my heart still loved you on instinct. Loving you was like breathing. My body just knew what to do, even when my brain was still a primordial hormone soup.”
Rosemary temporarily forgets how to breathe.
“And when I kissed you in that garden—” Logan touches two fingers to her bottom lip as if she can still feel that kiss there. “It was the best moment in my first fourteen years on this earth, but I didn’t know how to trust that good things could happen to me, so I acted like it was a joke.”
Rosemary inhales a staggering breath. “Logan,” she manages, “you don’t have to explain. We were teenagers. We both had soup brains.”
“I do have to explain,” she insists emphatically, “because I need you to know that I spent ten years seeing you on every street corner, wondering when you would come home to me. The day I saw you at teacher training, I should’ve told you the truth: I’d been waiting for you.”
Rosemary wants to laugh. “Waiting for me? We kissed one time.”
“Twice, actually. But it was never just about the kiss. You were half my heart.”
She can’t look directly at Logan, can’t handle the intensity of those hazel eyes. But there’s nowhere else in this room she can look that doesn’t overwhelm her with feelings. “You made me a writing room,” Rosemary says softly.
“You deserve it,” Logan insists with more affection than Rosemary can handle, too. “You are the most passionate, bravest person I’ve ever met. When you love something, you love it wholly and unapologetically. When Joe asked us to take this trip, you didn’t even hesitate. I want to be more like that.”
Rosemary finally bridges the gulf between them. “I can’t believe you did this for me.”
“Oh!” Logan flails again. “There’s one more thing!”
Logan rushes over to the desk and picks up a white, two-inch plastic binder, just like the one Rosemary prepared for this trip. Logan hands her the binder. “What’s this?”
“I could never plan an itinerary like you, and I could never paint you like Remy painted Joe, but…” Logan trails off as Rosemary opens the binder. There’s a title page with the words All the Things I Love About Rosemary Hale written across the center. Rosemary’s head swims and swirls as she reads the labels on the binder dividers.
Her Personality.
Our History.
The Way She Makes Me Feel: Part I.
The Way She Makes Me Feel: Part II.
Her Ass (and Other Attractive Features).
Logan finally finishes her thought. “But I wanted to find a way to show you how much I care about you. And I figured someone should make a binder for you.”
Eventually, Rosemary will read every word on every page of this binder, but right now, she allows it to drop to the floor with a thunk, and she rushes to Logan, throws her arms around her. Holds her and is held.
“I care about you so fucking much,” Rosemary says with every ounce of certainty she has. “And I love you too.”
“Yeah?” Logan asks, like she still doesn’t know, like she still doesn’t get it. As if Rosemary could ever stop caring about this glorious disaster of a woman.
“I did and I do and I always will.”
Logan chokes on a sob, and Rosemary reaches up to wipe away her tears. Then Rosemary stands on her tiptoes and kisses Logan without caution or hesitation. Because even if this ends in hurt, Logan is so fucking worth it.
* * *
The next morning, Joe sees them through the open window, kissing on the front porch while they drink their coffee and watch the sunrise.
“I take it the HGTV Hail Mary worked?” he asks haggardly as they come back inside. He’s alert again, even as his mouth twists in familiar agony.
Logan grins at her, and Rosemary reflexively grins back. Joe is dying, and they’re so in love, and it’s beautiful and painful all at once. “It did,” Rosemary confirms. “I love my new writing room.”
Joe exhales and allows his tired eyes to close. “Finally. Now I can die happy.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
LOGAN
The end finally comes. Rosemary is still on her walk with Odie, Guillermo is tinkering in the kitchen, and Logan is holding Joe’s hand. Tonight is the night. She can feel it.
He hasn’t had water in three days and his chest barely moves with each shallow, ragged breath. Over the weeks, Logan has learned you can only say goodbye so many times, so she presses her forehead to his and says, “Let go, Joe. You can let go now.”
He coughs like he wants to argue, but he hasn’t said real words in over twenty-four hours. “We’re going to be okay. I promise. You can let go.” She kisses his wrinkled temple. “Rosemary and I are going to be okay. You’ve given us so much, Joe. You raised us right. Trust that we are going to be okay and let go.”
She starts to cry. Guillermo goes quiet in the kitchen. Then, she hears his receding footsteps and the sound of the patio door opening and closing.
Logan is alone with Joe now. “You win, you crusty old hag. I’m in love with Rosemary, and she’s in love with me, and we’re going to figure out how to be happy. Here, I think. In this cottage. If she’ll let me stay with her.”
He doesn’t move in his hospital bed.
“Isn’t that what you wanted, you manipulative diva? You wanted me and Rosemary to live in this cottage like you and Remy did? Make a new life here, next to the ocean and among the trees?”
Tears dribble all the way down her chin. “That’s what you wanted, and now you can give up the damn ghost, okay? We’re going to be fine. We’re going to move into this house, and I’m going to sub for the local school district, and Rosemary is going to write her novel and sell it and make tons of money so I never have to work again. We’ll take hikes with Odie and we’ll swim in the ocean and we’ll travel. We’ll travel the whole fucking world. Is that what you need to hear?”
She can’t catch her breath. She lets out a sob, but there’s still something sharp in her throat. “I’ll be healthy, okay? I’ll always take my meds and I’ll find a therapist. I’ll eat vegetables, and I’ll let Rosemary love me. I’ll become okay with the painful parts, and we’ll be okay.”
It’s a stabbing feeling, like a trowel digging down into her esophagus. She’s choking on the pain of this—her true last goodbye.
“We’ll be okay.” She buries her face in the crook of his neck. “I promise we will be okay. You can let go.”
ROSEMARY
When she and Odie arrive back at the cottage from their walk, the sun is starting to set. Inside, she finds Logan tucked into Joe’s side, sobbing. She thinks it’s happened, and she’s surprised to discover her first feeling is relief. That his suffering has finally ended.
Joe isn’t dead, though. Not yet.
Rosemary goes to his bedside and wraps her arms around Logan. “Tonight is the night,” she says. It’s not a question. It’s a certainty deep in the pit of her stomach.
“Tonight is the night,” Logan repeats through her tears.
They wait.
Nurse Addison comes by every four hours to administer more morphine. Guillermo makes thirty cups of tea. They put on baseball, they put on music, and they wait as the world goes dark.
Rosemary falls asleep for a few hours, and when she wakes up, Logan is still sitting upright in her chair on the opposite side of the bed, still holding Joe’s hand.
“Do you remember the first day of freshman year, the first time you walked into his classroom?” Logan asks her.
His brightly colored scarf, the rainbow flag, the way he said, “Welcome, my children,” as if they were his, instantly. His to teach and to protect. His to love, no matter what.
“I do remember, yes.”
They spend the rest of the night telling stories about Joe and sharing memories. Reading Romeo and Juliet as a class. Debate tournaments out of town, hours in a district van while Joe curated the playlists, the first time they saw him eat Taco Bell and realized he really was human after all.
Eating lunch in his classroom. A safe space where they didn’t feel judged.
The emails and the phone calls after they graduated. The feeling of always having an adult who believed in them.
At four in the morning, Joe wakes himself up with a terrible coughing fit. They try to turn him onto his side to clear a pathway to his lungs. They squeeze droplets of water into his mouth from the pink sponge. Tonight is the night, and they try to make him comfortable.
They adjust the bed so he’s sitting up a little. He’s facing the wall of windows and even from here, they can all see the stars.
Joe doesn’t sleep again, but he’s not awake, either. His eyes stay open, but they’re not really his eyes.
The sky begins to shift from black to purple, from purple to dark blue. Joe manages to lift his hand off the bed just enough to point to the windows.
“It’s almost morning,” Rosemary says.
Joe makes a choking sound and points again. Rosemary knows it probably means nothing—he’s not really here—but she has to make sense of these last moments. “The ocean? The patio? The sunrise? What, Joe?”
He uses his last ounce of energy to jab his finger once more.
“I think he wants us to take him outside so he can watch the sunrise,” Logan translates.
“But we can’t.”
But they do.
Logan moves all the furniture out of the way. They unlock the brakes on his bed and guide it slowly and carefully toward the sliding glass door. Guillermo helps them seesaw the bed over the raised tracks of the sliding glass door, and out onto the patio.
They position Joe so he has a full view of the sun beginning to rise over the ocean. Rosemary grabs his Pendleton blanket and positions it over his legs. Logan drags out the record player and cues up Van Morrison. “Someone Like You.” As apt as ever.
They grab two chairs. Logan on the left, Rosemary on the right, each holding one hand. Odie is always there, curled up at Joe’s feet.
The orange rims the horizon, lighting up the clouds, turning the purple and blues into textured bruises. It gets lighter. More orange, the smallest dusting of yellow. The blues are now violet, the purples now a luscious pink.
Rosemary watches Joe watch the sunrise, and for a moment, she does see him in those brown eyes. He opens his mouth. “So many colors,” she thinks she hears him say. But that’s probably not possible. Joe closes his eyes.
“So many colors,” Rosemary says.
The sky continues to lighten. She counts the distance between Joe’s breaths, then stops. For the last few minutes, she closes her eyes and chooses to remember the version of Joe from the first day of ninth grade, Joe from the original bathtub painting, Joe from the Grand Canyon, so full of awe.
His grip loosens in her hand. She chooses to remember the feeling of him squeezing back.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
LOGAN
That’s how Joe dies.
So many close calls, and then it’s like flipping a coin. One minute he’s watching the sunrise.
Flip. And he’s gone.
Odie starts whimpering at the foot of his bed.
The sun keeps rising, keeps spilling its lush colors across the sky, but Joe isn’t here to see it anymore.
Most people die in beige rooms. But Joe… he dies in technicolor.
He dies as the sun rises over the Atlantic on the patio at the cottage by the sea. He dies on his own terms, and Logan feels the tension go out of her like the tide. She’s awash with relief. He’s not in pain. He’s not suffering. He finally let go.
But the tide comes back in, like it always does, and Logan is suddenly filled with anger and grief and heartbreak. The frantic, restless need to push, to run away, to do something reckless. To do anything to escape the incoming hurt.
She looks at Rosemary quietly crying on the other side of Joe’s body. Logan wants to go to her, to wrap her arms around her so they can ride out this pain together. She wants to run, wants to be as far away from this moment as possible.
She releases Joe’s hand and grips the arms of her chair. She holds on as tight as she can, like if she just never let go of this chair, she can weather this new storm.
Her grip slackens. She could outrun this pain.
She stands up.
She looks down the beach, at the infinite escape disappearing in the distance.
She turns to Rosemary, and she goes to her, and she wraps her arms around her. And they weather the storm together.
ROSEMARY
Death is a to-do list.
After weeks of dying, Joe is now dead, present tense, and Rosemary is overwhelmed by all the things they need to do. She can’t just sit here crying in Logan’s arms. She’s already wasted too much time.
How much time? She has no concept of it, but the sun is at a forty-five-degree angle overhead, and every muscle in her body aches. There’s no time for this.
They need to call Nurse Addison so he can come declare the time of death.
They need to call the funeral home to come pick up the body.
They need to choose an urn because Joe wants—wanted—to be cremated.
There will be paperwork to sign, and Rosemary needs to sign it.
There are things to do, and Rosemary starts to get them done. She puts her feelings aside and takes control of the death.
She has to call Remy.
She has to call Joe’s brother in Houston.
She has to call her mom, and Logan’s dad.
She has to write an obituary for the Vista Summit newspaper.
She needs to write a Facebook post for all his friends.
She needs to write an Instagram post for all his former students.
She needs to keep doing things and keep in control.
There goes his body. Here is the catalogue of urns. They’re almost as expensive as coffins. She points to the cheapest one, a wooden box. It looks almost like a binder.
She must keep going, keep moving, forward and forward and…
“Stop, Rosie. Please stop.”
Logan’s arms are around her again. They’re standing in the kitchen, but Rosemary can’t remember why she came in here. Logan squeezes her so tight, feeling floods her numb body. Terrible, painful feelings.
