Georgie, All Along (78)

It’s Olivia Fanning.

And her brother Evan is standing right behind her.





Chapter 18


Levi


Of course I’ve seen them since that night.

I remember every time it’s happened, more frequently in those early days, when all of us were still learning the new normal. Two weeks after, still raw and rattled and barely aware of what I was doing most days, I’d seen Evan from a distance when I was waiting for Carlos’s truck to get serviced—his arm in the sling I was responsible for, his head tilted down as he walked across the parking lot of a squat strip mall across the way. Two months after, I’d seen Olivia and my mother inside of a CVS, where I’d gone to pick up the prescription for antidepressants my then-new-to-me therapist had written for me. Olivia hadn’t seen me, but my mother had, and one look at her—the flinty, barely interested gaze she’d slid over me—had told me that of all my family, she’d probably miss me least of all. My dad at least felt something toward me, even if it was mostly anger, or maybe something worse.

There’d been other times, too, unavoidable around the county, but most of them had been the sort where everyone tried to pretend they didn’t notice each other. Once, almost a year to the day after that night at my parents’ house, I’d been hauling wood scrap for placement into Carlos’s off-site storage unit over the winter, and I’d looked up from the bed of my truck to see Evan standing there, his hands in his pockets and his jaw set with nervous tension. “Hey, Lee,” he’d said, and I’d been about as mean as I ever had, hardly letting him get more than those two words out. “Get gone,” I’d said to him, barely moving my mouth, every muscle in my body tight with shame and frustration and a sadness I couldn’t admit to back then. “We got nothing to say to each other.”

I didn’t bother looking at his face to see whether I’d hurt him, but that spring, when I’d been out in Carlos’s boat, I’d passed him and my father on theirs, and the way he’d looked right through me suggested I’d succeeded in making sure he wouldn’t try to reach out again. I’d told myself I’d done the right thing. I’d protected him.

But as soon as I see my brother and sister show up on that dance floor with Georgie, I know down deep that tonight isn’t going to be like those other times.

Maybe I’ve known it for a few weeks now—not that it’d be here at The Bend, which is the first place where I ever got into a real fistfight, and also the place where I once threw a full plastic pitcher of beer at Barnett Gandry’s face for calling me a “stupid rich prick”—but that it’d be somewhere, and that it’d be soon.

It’s Georgie who’s put the idea in my mind, though she’s never said a word about it. In all this going back we do together—horror movies and dock jumping, spray painting at the school, a second trip we took together out to Sott’s Mill—Georgie stays well away from the stuff with my family, even though she spends a few days a week around at least some of them. It’s the one place she won’t go back to, the one place I told her never to go back to, and maybe if she meant less to me, I’d say that was just fine.

I’d say that’s the way I wanted it to stay.

But she doesn’t mean less to me.

And I want her to stay.

I don’t suppose I have any illusions about the likelihood of it—of Georgie settling down here with me. I know she’s seen a lot out there in the world; I still hear her sometimes, in the quiet of my mind, say that scoffing Oh, God no to my question about whether she was moving back here for good.

But I hear other things, too—her funny chatter with Hank when she thinks I’m not listening, her sleepy sighs when I pull her close to me in bed, her bright laughter when she talks to her parents. I hear her big, expansive brain whirring with the ideas she says out loud—what she’s going to do over at Bel’s, whether I should get one of those robot vacuums, why it’s roundabout time for her dad to think about putting some additional accessibility features in their house. Sometimes I think I hear the ones she doesn’t say, too, and all of them have to do with the two people who right now look thrilled to see her out on that dance floor.

I know that if I want to have any hope at all of her staying, I can’t go on asking her to keep two parts of the life she does have here separate. I know I’ve got to make them fit, if I want her to fit with me.

“Are you all right?” says a voice next to me, and I realize that I caught sight of my siblings right at the moment Harry was asking me a question about sediment runoff. Who knows how long I’ve been sitting here like a block of stone.

I clear my throat, nod toward the dance floor. “Georgie’s run into some of her colleagues there.”

I sound deranged, referring to my brother and sister this way.

Even from here, I can see she’s not comfortable—before, she was laughing and dancing, more ray of sunshine than mysterious moonbeam. But now she’s neither, all her light switched off. She’s gone still; when Olivia gives her a quick hug she seems surprised and stiff, momentarily relieved when Olivia turns her delighted attention to Bel, but only until my brother leans in for a hug, too.

Right when the music changes to something slow.

He keeps a hand on her hip, as if he’s making a suggestion. As if he’s about to hold her close.