Here We Go Again, page 33
“Thank you for taking care of things,” Logan says in a low whisper. “Thank you for always being organized. But right now, I need you to be with me.”
Rosemary hugs Logan back.
“There is no way around the pain,” Logan tells. “We’ve got to go through it. Please go through it with me.”
They’re on the kitchen floor, and Rosemary isn’t sure how they got here, but they’re holding each other while they sob.
“It has to hurt,” Logan is saying. “Joe meant too much for us to pretend it doesn’t hurt.”
Rosemary doesn’t need to tackle the to-do list right now.
In this moment, on this kitchen floor, all she has to do is feel this excruciating pain.
LOGAN
After two planes, a train from Boston to Portland, a bus ride from Portland to Bangor, and an awkwardly silent hour-long drive in Nurse Addison’s van from Bangor to Bar Harbor, Remy arrives at the cottage by the sea at five in the morning the day after Joe’s death.
Logan and Rosemary are already awake to greet him.
His linen shirt is unwrinkled, and Rosemary cries into his chest when she sees him.
Remy cries too, until he sees the nude painting on the wall, and a smile breaks through the tears. “As it should be.”
The cottage feels strange without Guillermo and Nurse Addison and Joe and all the medical equipment. Logan can’t stand being inside, so the three of them drink coffee with chicory on the patio and watch the sunrise.
“Did he tell you about the cottage?” Remy asks.
“Yes,” Logan says, her eyes fixed on the purples beneath Rosemary’s eyes, the reds of her cheeks from another night of crying. But Logan was there, under the quilt just big enough for two, her arms wrapped around Rosemary. “We’ve decided to stay here. At least for a while.”
Remy takes a long sip of coffee. “I decided it was all worth it,” he tells her. “In the end.” Logan doesn’t understand.
Rosemary blinks away more tears and looks at Remy. “I decided that too.”
* * *
The next day, the crunch of gravel beneath tires signals another arrival. It’s her dad, and he’s out of his rental car before it’s shut off, launching himself at Logan and pulling her into a tight hug.
It’s been almost ten weeks since she’s seen him, and she doesn’t realize how much she missed him until his arms wrap around her. She lets herself collapse against him because she doesn’t have to be strong for her dad. She doesn’t have to take care of him. She just gets to be comforted.
“You’re different, Chicken,” Antonio says one evening as he takes a sip of his beer.
Logan kicks her feet up on the railing of the patio. “How so?”
Her dad glances out at the water. Sunset isn’t quite as magnificent as sunrise, but Logan still measures the days by witnessing both. It’s Wednesday. Her dad has been here for two days, and they managed to give a face lift to the upstairs bathroom in that time. Logan installed the new plumbing. Her dad picked out the new vanity. He accepted this is how she needs to process Joe’s death. By fixing up the place he loved.
“You just seem… settled,” Antonio tries. “Settled in your body. Like your feet are planted here. Less Chicken-like.”
Logan holds her sweaty beer bottle in both hands. “I saw Mom.”
“Yikes. How did that go?”
“Fucking awful. But also… good, in a sense. It was never really about me, was it?”
“No, Chicken. It was always about her.”
The label on her bottle begins to peel, and she picks at it. “I’m thinking about… maybe… staying here?” There is no maybe about it, but she doesn’t know how to tell her dad she’s choosing to leave him like Sophie did. “In Bar Harbor? For… I don’t know. For a bit.”
“I figured,” he says. “You don’t update a bathroom for nothing.”
“That would mean… moving out…”
“Yes, it would.”
She rips off a slice of label, the wet paper sticking to her fingers. “How would you feel about that…?”
“Thank Shay fucking Mitchell,” her dad says, and Logan chokes on an unexpected laugh. “It’s about goddamn time. That’s how I feel about it.”
“But I—” Tears sting her eyes, and she grabs the arm of her chair, forcing herself to stay in this pain. “I always felt like, if I left you, it would… it would be like I’m Mom.”
“Oh, my Chicken.” Her dad gets up from his chair and comes to kneel in front of her. “You are nothing like your mother. And you’ve got to get the hell out of my house.”
She laughs again, and the sound settles in her chest. “Thanks, Dad.”
He reaches up and gives her a noogie, like they’re both twelve. She shoves him away and sloshes a bit of her beer onto the patio. “Oh, I see. My childish behavior comes from you.”
“Oh yes. You’ve always been exactly like your dad.”
“Dinner’s ready,” Rosemary says, poking her head out the sliding door. She hasn’t cried in seven hours. Logan is keeping track.
Rosemary smiles wanly at Logan, then pops back inside.
“You love her? Like, for realsies?” Antonio gestures to Rosemary’s receding figure through the glass.
Logan sighs. “For realsies.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
ROSEMARY
On a Thursday, they have a funeral.
They don’t call it that, though.
No, Joe left clear instructions for his “Death Party,” just like he always had a clear vision for his death trip. Rosemary doesn’t fight this one.
Logan carries camp chairs and a portable speaker, and Rosemary has a bag of s’mores fixings in one arm and his ashes in the other, as they walk down the trail to the beach.
Antonio builds up a bonfire, and Remy makes sure everyone has a whiskey-seven for the toast. Nurse Addison is there too, with Guillermo. Logan holds her whiskey-seven the highest as she says, “To Joe’s next great adventure.”
She starts crying, and then they’re all crying around a bonfire on the beach.
“Some party,” Antonio announces after honking his nose into a handkerchief.
For a long time, the six of them sit in silence, staring at the flames. Sipping their cheap beers. Thinking about Joe. Rosemary thinks about how only Joe could bring together such an odd assortment of people.
That’s what he did. He brought people together.
* * *
Only Rosemary and Logan spread his ashes. They wade out into the water, hands linked, the ashes inside the wooden box from the funeral home. The waves lap against her calves, then her knees, until she’s submerged all the way up to her waist. Everything goes numb from the cold, but Joe wanted to swim in the Atlantic one last time. Logan’s hand is still in hers.
Logan extends the box toward Rosemary and she pulls off the lid. It’s so strange to think a man like Joe could be reduced to nothing more than a pile of dust inside a plastic bag. But he’s more than his remains. He’s in every mile they drove to get here, in every word Rosemary writes, every click of her typewriter keys. In the cottage Logan is fixing up with her own restless hands.
Joe lives in every student he’s ever taught. As expansive and incontrovertible as the ocean.
Rosemary lets go of Logan’s hand long enough to reach for a pinch of ashes. She feels the legacy of Joe against her palm before she sprinkles the ashes into the water. Logan does the same. Just a pinch, taken away by the waves.
Tears blur her vision as bit by bit she releases him.
“This isn’t Joe,” Logan says, staring at the ashes swirling around their legs. Rosemary knows she’s crying too.
“It isn’t all of Joe,” Rosemary corrects. Because it is part of him. The part of him who wanted to return to this place where he lived with the love of his life. The part of Joe who loved this cottage and these trees. The Joe who loved Rosemary and Logan best of all and wanted them to be as happy here as he was once.
Rosemary takes the plastic bag—just a trace of ashes circling the bottom remains—and tips it over, the rest spilling out in a streaming ribbon.
It doesn’t feel like an ending. It feels like a middle, continuous and unending, like the crash of these waves. Again and again, they pound against the shore.
“Goodbye, Joe,” Logan says quietly. Dipping her hands into the water, she washes the last of him from her fingers. The final ashes dissolve and float away and are carried out with the tide. Again, and again.
Logan takes a deep breath, and Rosemary watches her lungs expand with air through her tropical shirt. The one with flamingos on it. She wades closer, and when Rosemary kisses her, Logan tastes like tears and sunlight and salt water. Part of Joe will always live in Logan, too. In the way she teaches and touches the lives of her students. In how much she cares. In her fight and in her compassion. Rosemary kisses her as the waves lap around her thighs.
“I love you,” Rosemary whispers against Logan’s wet throat.
She reaches out for Logan’s hand again. And again and again. Rosemary tugs them along, deeper into the surf, until the waves lap around her shoulders. She counts to three, and as a wave rolls in, she plunges beneath it, feeling the cool water envelop her.
When she pops up again, she’s laughing. She can’t help it. Even better, Logan is smiling fully back at her.
Rosemary shifts her body so she’s floating on the top of the water. “Race you?” she smirks, stroking her arms in preparation for the coming wave. Logan does that competitive grimace Rosemary loves so much. They both kick their legs as the wave approaches, and when it comes, Rosemary feels herself buoyed above the wave, floating on the crest all the way back to the sand.
Of course, she wins.
“Best two out of three,” Logan argues as she spits salt water out of her mouth.
They wade back out into the depths, and they ride the waves back to shore. It’s beautiful and it hurts like hell when they land on the scratchy sand, and Rosemary feels completely and utterly out of control.
They go again and again.
Next Summer
Bar Harbor, Maine to Vista Summit, Washington
LOGAN
“What is that?”
“What?”
Logan points to the offensive object in question. “That. Is that a binder?”
Rosemary clutches the binder-shaped thing tightly to her chest. “No.”
“I can see it, Rosie. That’s a fucking three-ring, two-inch son of a bitch. We agreed this trip would be spontaneous!”
“It’s just research,” she says, slipping the binder into the passenger seat. As if that settles things. “Just some information about possible routes and interesting stops and clean hotels and places to get gas and—”
Logan frowns, but she’s not actually upset. She can’t wait to see what Rosemary has planned for them. Still, Rosemary tries to reassure her. “We can have structured spontaneity!”
“You packed the laminating machine, too, didn’t you? And gx… oh God, not the label maker!”
“You love my label maker.” She comes in close, and there’s that vanilla and peppermint, now mixed with salt water and something woodsy Logan associates with the cottage by the sea. Tree bark after rain and spring flowers in bloom. Cedar and soil. Something impossible not to love.
Rosemary presses herself up on her tiptoes and kisses Logan’s cheek. “You just focus on your part of the packing, Pear.”
Logan puffs out her cheeks, set to argue, but the air goes out of her at that term of affection. Pear. Rosemary started calling her that sometime after Joe’s funeral.
Rosemary is very aware of the effect of this word. Logan is always Pear when the garbage needs to be dragged to the curb for pickup or when the grass is looking a little long or when there’s a particularly nasty spider in the shower. She is never Pear when her dirty towel is left on the bathroom floor or when she brings home mountains of student work to be graded and takes over the entire kitchen table. She’s definitely not Pear when she blasts music from Joe’s old record player and sings along too loudly during Rosemary’s writing time.
But sometimes, she is Pear when they are curled up under the single quilt they share, trying to stay warm through Maine’s winter. Sometimes she’s Pear when they shower together or when Logan does that thing with her tongue Rosemary really likes. Sometimes, she is absent-mindedly Pear in the produce section at Hannaford, when Rosemary needs help reaching something on a high shelf. And sometimes, she is Pear when they’re hiking in Acadia or camping in Nova Scotia or taking weekend trips to Portland or Providence, when Rosemary is so overcome with awe, she forgets to guard any part of her heart.
And in those moments—in most moments with Rosemary—Logan forgets to guard her heart, too.
There are still mornings when Logan wakes up convinced it will all be yanked away. There have been arguments that she was sure would be their last. Sunrises that felt too good to be true. So many instances when Logan was too much—too loud, too chaotic, too messy—that she was waiting for Rosemary to walk out the door.
But Rosemary never does. Every day, Rosemary proves she’s too stubborn to break a promise. She never walks away, and Logan is learning not to push thanks to the inner child work she’s doing with her new therapist.
Logan hunches over to lift the giant cooler and waddles toward the open side door of the van to slide the cooler onto the floor of the Gay Mobile. Odie takes this as his signal to load up. He barks twice, then jumps onto the back seat, sitting upright like he expects Logan to fasten his seat belt.
“Odie!” Rosemary snaps her fingers. “Bed.”
Odie gives her his otter-eyed look of innocence before he resettles himself in a dog bed Rosemary’s propped up to keep the seats clean.
Logan grabs the rest of Rosemary’s luggage—her personal cooler of bottled iced coffees and LaCroix, two rolling suitcases, a reusable grocery bag of snacks, her silk pillow, a white-noise machine, a literal hat box—and loads it into the trunk. She reaches for a black suitcase, and then almost falls forward from the weight of it. “What the hell is this?”
“My typewriter,” Rosemary says like it’s obvious. “Just in case the mood strikes and I need to write something down.”
“You couldn’t do that on your laptop? Or the notes app on your phone?”
Rosemary deposits one bag into the truck. It’s full of towels. “You know I prefer to write on my typewriter. It stops me from editing as I go. Keeps me moving forward.”
Logan does know. She knows the sound of clacking typewriter keys as well as she knows the sound of the ocean, the sound of Odie snoring at the foot of the bed. The typewriter keeps Rosemary pushing forward into the unknown.
And Logan almost throws out her lower back loading it into the van because it also connects them both to Joe.
They have a road trip emergency kit and a basket of muffins from Nurse Addison and a small vial of what remains of Joseph Delgado, those few ashes they didn’t send out to sea. It’s 3,265 miles on the direct route between Bar Harbor and Vista Summit, but they have no intention of taking the direct route.
Maybe they’ll swing through Vermont. Yannis has reached out a few times and tried to lure Logan back with the promise of cheese. They’ll probably go to Massachusetts to visit her siblings, John and Phoebe, whom she’s been getting to know. Phoebe wants to take them to her girlfriend’s show in Boston (she’s a bassist, of course), and John wants to take them to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst.
They’ll definitely head down to Ocean Springs to check in on Remy. Rosemary wants to see the Outer Banks and Logan wants to see the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they both want to discover all the things they don’t yet know they need to see.
They have six weeks before Logan has to be back in Bar Harbor for teacher training days at Mount Desert Island High School.
They have six weeks before they have to return to the real world. Six weeks of adventure and freedom and seeing cool shit. Six weeks to get lost together.
Logan slams the back door of the van and prays that the Gay Mobile can handle another cross-country trip. She walks around and finds Rosemary still standing by the passenger door, clacking her pale pink nails against her phone screen. Some things never change. “I’m so sorry, princess,” Logan teases. “Is all my packing disrupting your crucial screen time?”
“Sorry, sorry,” Rosemary mutters, even as she’s still typing furiously. “It’s my critique partner. They just emailed me their notes on the current manuscript, and I want to make sure I reply before we’re officially on vacation.”
Logan smiles. Some things do change, though. Like Rosemary saying sorry when her hyperfixated brain makes her a less-than-attentive partner. Or Rosemary using that miraculous brain to write the first draft of an adult fantasy novel in six months, entirely on Joe’s typewriter.
Like Rosemary willingly taking six weeks off from book revisions and prepping query letters to take a trip back home to see their parents.
Though Logan isn’t sure that Vista Summit really is home anymore. They went back for a Celebration of Life for Joe at the high school when they packed up the rest of their things and drove the Toyota Corolla to Maine. They flew back for a week at Christmas. The rest of the year was spent at the cottage by the sea.
But Bar Harbor isn’t really home, either. At least, it’s not their forever home. Logan’s not really sure where they’ll end up long-term.
Rosemary finishes her email and slides her phone into the pocket of her dress. “Okay, sorry. I’m here. I’m present. Hi.”
Logan slides across the gravel in her Vans. “Oh, hi.” Her arms snake around Rosemary’s waist and pull that familiar scent as close as possible. Their mouths meet in the middle and this. This is definitely home. This waist and this mouth and these moments.
“I actually made a playlist for this trip.” Rosemary sounds exceptionally proud of herself as she effortlessly boosts herself into the passenger seat and starts fiddling with the aux hookup.
