9 Days and 9 Nights Page 10

  But that’s over now.

  Isn’t it?

  I take a deep breath, looking at the various warnings posted on the walls of the office. You may not skydive if you have a heart condition. You may not skydive if you are under the age of sixteen, or under the age of eighteen without the consent of a parent or guardian. You may not skydive if you are pregnant.

  “Yeah,” I say, lifting my chin in quiet defiance. “I think I want to go.”

  Which is how we wind up nine thousand feet in the air in matching gray jumpsuits like something out of an action movie, the roar of the engines all around us, physical as a cloud. I’m strapped to a cheerful green-eyed instructor named Rose who calls me love and promises we’re in this together—literally, in fact. “You nervous?” she asks as the airplane climbs.

  I wave my hand to say so-so, though the reality is it’s taking every particle of self-control in my body not to start shrieking and demand the pilot turn around immediately. “Um, it’s not the heights, really,” I yell over the cacophony. “It’s more the whole, like, surrendering all control and putting my life into the hands of the universe thing!”

  Rose grins at that. “Not the universe!” she promises. “Just me.”

  Gabe and his instructor jump first, there one second and gone a heartbeat later; they’re followed by Ian and Ralph, Ian blowing me a kiss before he goes. By the time it’s Imogen’s turn I can barely beat back the panic: God, what made me think I could do this? There are too many unknowns here. There are too many risks. Once upon a time, this might have been a thrill for me, an adventure, a lark. But not anymore.

  Finally it’s just Rose and me left in the hold, Rose looking at me carefully; I think she can tell that I’m about to chicken out. “You with me, love?” she asks.

  I hesitate. Jumping out of this airplane feels impossible. But so does turning around now. I swallow. “I’m with you,” I promise.

  “That’s a girl,” she says, smiling like maybe I’ve done something to be proud of. “Then let’s go.”

  So. We jump.

  At first all I can register is the racket, the rush of the air speeding by as we plummet through nothingness like the worst kind of dream: it’s too loud and terrifying to think of anything, my mind white with panic in the long moments before Rose pulls the ripcord and the parachute thumps open. I gasp at the snapback, then again at the endless view: suddenly it is so, so quiet.

  “You okay?” Rose asks, grinning like it’s just another day at the office—which, for her, I guess, it is.

  I manage a nod, then a hoarse, croaking “yes” that barely travels the distance between us, but the truth is I’m better than okay. I’m windburned and shaky but I’m not afraid anymore, I realize abruptly; I feel peaceful and euphoric and calm. For the first time in a year I’m not frantically calculating for every possible outcome. For the first time in a year I feel free.

  I stretch my arms out as we slip through the deep, endless blueness, keep my eyes wide open as we float down toward earth.

  That night Imogen wants to take us out in the village; she and I cram into the cottage’s tiny bathroom for hair and makeup, cranking some ancient Dixie Chicks up on her phone. It’s been a long time since we got ready together, filling in each other’s eyebrows and picking out each other’s clothes: “Here,” she instructs, pulling a screaming red dress with a low neckline and a short, flouncy skirt off a wire hanger and tossing it in my direction. “Wear this.”

  “Imogen . . .” I shake my head. “That’s, like, a little much for a night at your local, no?”

  Imogen makes a face. “It’s just a dress, Molly. And it’s going to look amazing on you.” She plugs a curling iron into the outlet above the sink, waves at me with it. “Now put it on and come here so I can give you party hair.”

  “You know, somehow I can’t picture you talking to Steve Jobs that way,” I grumble, but I do what she tells me, pulling the dress over my head before sitting down on the toilet seat and holding still as she gently separates my hair into thin sections, pinning them back with claw clips. “My mom sent me one of these at school,” I tell her, nodding up at the curling wand, “but every time I try to use it I wind up looking like a poodle.”

  “How is dear Diana Barlow these days?” Imogen asks, a hint of a smile in her voice. “Cannibalized the romantic histories of any close family members lately?”

  “Not that I know of,” I report. “She’s good, though. She’s finishing up revisions for her new book, the one about the carnival family with all the incest. And actually, now that I say that out loud, I really hope it isn’t about anyone we know.” I pause. “Also, I think she might have a girlfriend.”

  Imogen almost yanks a hank of my hair clean out. “What?” she squawks. “Shit, sorry. But since when does your mom have girlfriends?”

  “I don’t know for sure!” I say. “I’ve never known her to date anybody, honestly, man or woman. I mean, I’m sure she did. But when I went and stayed with her in New York back in May after school ended somebody had sent flowers to her hotel room, and I know it wasn’t her publisher because of how she grabbed the card and put it in her jeans pocket like a big secretive weirdo. And then we had dinner with this woman Corina, who’s a publicist, who kept calling her Di and touched her on the back while we were walking to the table. And then when my mom was peeing, Corina told me like fifty times how dynamite she is.”

  “Wow,” Imogen says thoughtfully. “Get it, Diana.” She pauses for a moment. “I’ll be honest with you, Mols, if anybody’s mom was going to turn out to be a late-in-life lesbian, my money would have been on mine.”

  I think of Imogen’s mom, with her tarot cards and crystals and The Future Is Female tote bag, and laugh. “I don’t even know if it’s late in life, though!” I point out. “Once I started thinking about it, it actually occurred to me that she might have been dating that woman Joanne who was her assistant when we were in middle school.”

  “Joanne with the nose ring?” Imogen asks, twisting a few last pieces of hair around the iron. “She was hot.”

  She was, kind of, I remember now; she always smelled like juniper and secretly taught me how to put on mascara even though I was only in fourth grade. “We never really talked before this year,” I point out. “Me and my mom, I mean. Like, I don’t think that’s necessarily a thing I would have known about her.”

  Imogen considers that—she and her mom are preternaturally close, the kind of mother and daughter who know each other’s every thought and bodily function. It’s always seemed foreign to me, though lately it isn’t as unimaginable as it used to be. “Does it feel weird?” she asks.

  “Not really,” I tell her honestly. “I mean, probably it would feel way stranger if I’d actually grown up with a dad. But mostly I just want her to have somebody, you know? It’s gotta be kind of lonely, living out there all by herself.”

  “That’s a good point,” Imogen concedes, nudging at my back until I flip my head over and reaching for the can of hairspray on the shelf above the toilet; the massive cloud she aims in my direction smells chemical and sweet. “I guess maybe that’s one good thing that came out of this year, huh?” she asks. “You guys, like, actually have a mother-daughter relationship now.”

  I smile as I stand upright, thinking of it. “Yeah,” I say. “I think we kind of do.”

  Imogen nods, fluffing my hair a bit and turning me by my shoulders until I’m facing the mirror. “There you are,” she says, sounding satisfied. I stick my tongue out, hide a grin.

  I make Imogen wear a sparkly top and sky-high heels so I’m not the only one dressed up for what I’m assuming is going to be a dive bar; still, Ian’s eyes widen when we come out into the living room. “Wow,” he says quietly. “Hi.”

  “Good wow or bad wow?” I ask, smoothing the dress down. I don’t remember the last time I wore something this bright.

  “No no, good wow,” Ian says quickly. “Great wow, even. You just look . . . you know. Different.”

/>   “Yeah.” I feel different too, truthfully, exposed and eye-catching in a way that’s a little scary but not entirely bad. Still, I grab my cardigan before we leave the cottage, ignoring the face Imogen shoots in my direction.

  We’re headed to the one pub in the village—or at least, I think that’s where we’re going until we stop halfway down the main street, directly in front of what looks for all the world to be a functioning hardware store.

  “Imogen,” I say carefully, the cluster of us standing on the sidewalk like sheep in the twilight. The streets are blue and quiet, the shops all closed down for the night. “Like, clearly I’m not an expert on the drinking customs in Ireland, but—”

  Imogen laughs. “Yeah, yeah,” she says, pulling the door to the hardware store open. “Come on.”

  We follow her into the bright, empty shop, past a sleepy cat lounging on the counter beside an antique cash register; he eyes us imperiously as we edge down a narrow, crowded aisle full of flathead screws and garden hoses and socket wrenches. When we reach the very back of the store Imogen pulls open what I think is the door to the stockroom, but which actually reveals the tiny foyer of—

  “What is this place?” Ian asks, looking around in naked delight. The space is small and wood-paneled and dimly lit, black-and-white photos of Irish folk heroes covering the walls alongside a giant banner emblazoned with the green and gold of Kerry’s Gaelic football team. It’s packed to the rafters with what must be everyone in town, old men in caps alongside young couples, clumps of local girls in low-cut sweaters flicking through the glowing touchscreens of the jukebox and noisy dudes in jerseys clustered around the dartboard in the back. It’s hot inside, a narrow door propped open at the end of the hallway that leads to the restrooms and a damp, slightly fetid breeze coming through every now and then. “Is it like a speakeasy?”

  “Nope,” Imogen reports, “the store is totally real. Two brothers inherited the building like twenty years ago, and they couldn’t agree on what to do with it, and it was breaking up the whole family and causing all this drama at Sunday dinner every week. So finally they decided to do both.”

  I glance at Gabe, I can’t help it—two brothers and breaking up the family feels achingly familiar—but he’s peering up at the intricate woodwork on the ceiling, expression inscrutable. He’s not your responsibility anymore, I remind myself, turning purposefully away as he and Sadie get swallowed up by the crowd in the pub, his dark head just visible over the broad shoulder of a middle-aged woman in a Fair Isle cardigan.

  “What are you all drinking, hm?” Ian asks, one hand splayed low on my back as he cranes his neck to see the taps behind the bar. “I’ll get the first round.”

  “Whatever you’re having,” I tell him. He looks at Imogen, who asks for a cider, then catches the bartender’s attention with a subtle lift of his chin.

  “He’s very gentlemanly,” Imogen says, once Ian is out of earshot.

  I smile at her. “He is, right?” A thing I’ve always loved about Imogen is how generous she is with new people, how quick she is to like them. She is, unequivocally, the kind of friend to whom you can say, I am bringing two extra people to your Irish cottage, please say it’s okay, and when she says it’s okay she actually means it. Not everybody is like that.

  “He is,” Imogen agrees. Then, looking at me more closely, “What?”

  “What?” I echo. “Nothing.” A red-faced guy in his forties lumbers down off his barstool beside us, and I nudge Imogen into the empty space. “Here, sit.”

  Imogen does, but she’s frowning. “Not nothing,” she announces. “That’s your I’m not telling you the whole story face. Is there something secretly weird about him?”

  “About Ian? No! Ian is perfect.” I glance around to make sure nobody’s listening, but we’re protected by the clang and clatter all around us, the din of the crowded bar. Bass from the jukebox thuds in my brain stem; I’m expecting something stereotypically Irish, or at the very least Mumford and Sons, but I think this is actually the Weeknd. I can see Ian gabbing happily away with the bartender, the guy handing him a tasting glass of some dark beer to try. I love watching Ian in bars and restaurants; he always seems older than other people our age, no self-consciousness to him at all. “I just . . . okay. Do you think it’s strange that he and I still haven’t . . .” I trail off. “I mean, you know what I mean.”

  Imogen makes a face at me like, use your words, Molly. “Boned?” she supplies when I completely fail to fill in the blank myself.

  “Imogen!” I laugh, but it comes out more like a barking cough, as if I’m trying to force the panicky embarrassment out of my lungs like a ball of phlegm. “Yes. I mean, no, we haven’t. We’ve fooled around and stuff, but like—” I wave my hand vaguely. “Is that weird?”

  “I don’t think it’s weird at all,” Imogen assures me, sitting back on her barstool. “You’ve only been dating a few months, right? Why would that be weird?”

  “I don’t know.” I sigh. “I’m being stupid. I always figured how it worked was, like, once you did it with one of your boyfriends then you did it with all your boyfriends, right?”

  “I mean, that definitely doesn’t have to be how it works,” Imogen points out. “You aren’t actually required to have sex with anybody, no matter how many people you’ve dated.”

  “No, of course not.” I shake my head quickly. “I know that. But I didn’t think it would be this huge deal to me, either.” I shrug. “I’m just waiting for the perfect moment, you know? I want to make sure I don’t screw everything up like I did last time.”

  “I mean, sure,” Imogen agrees, though she doesn’t actually sound convinced. “I get that. But I also think if you’re with the right person then the whole perfection thing doesn’t really matter, right? Like, you can just be yourself, past screw-ups and all.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” I counter immediately. “I can be myself with Ian, I just—”

  “Can you?” Imogen interrupts. “I’m not saying that as a dig, I’m just asking sincerely.”

  “Yes,” I insist. “I just—”

  I break off abruptly as Ian reappears with our drinks, edging through the crowd with three pint glasses balanced in his clever hands. “You guys okay?” he asks, eyes cutting back and forth between us like he suspects he just missed some kind of punch line.

  I smile. “We’re great,” I promise, popping up on tiptoes to peck him on the jaw.

  Imogen takes my lead, launching into a story about the night she and a bunch of the ag students living in the convent sang karaoke here all night regardless of the fact that karaoke is not one of this bar’s offerings, and the next hour speeds by in a warm, colorful blur. We feed euros into the jukebox and order every variation of fried potato on the menu; I keep waiting for Gabe and Sadie to wander back over and join us, but they never do.

  Soon Imogen’s boyfriend Seamus shows up, though, an all-smiles Irish boy who looks like he might possibly be a long-lost Weasley brother: “Molly from America!” he says, enveloping me in a bear hug that smells like cigarettes and whiskey. “My girl’s been talking about you nonstop since she found out you were coming.”

  That makes me smile, and I bump my shoulder against Imogen’s. “I mean, the feeling is pretty mutual,” I tell him. She nudges me with her hip in return.

  Eventually I sneak through the crowd and run to the bathroom; it’s pretty disgusting in there, two dingy stalls and grimy tile, a sink not much bigger than a souvenir postcard. I’m just washing my hands when I hear a wet, familiar-sounding sniffle from the stall next to mine. “Sadie?” I ask, tilting my head to the side.

  “Um,” comes Sadie’s voice, then another snotty inhale. “Yeah. Hey, Molly.”

  I frown. “You okay in there?”

  “Yeah!” she replies, voice fake as a wax model in Madame Tussauds and just about that convincing. “I’m great.”

  “You sure?” I tap my fingernails lightly against the scarred-up stall door, listening a moment.
I wait. Finally the lock snicks open.

  “Hi,” Sadie says thickly. In the greenish glow of the fluorescent light above the sink I can see she’s been crying, her clear skin blotchy and red.

  “Hi,” I say, offering her a hesitant smile. On one hand, I was literally just complaining about how annoying I find this person. On the other, I am certainly no stranger to the secret public cry. “You wanna talk about it?”

  “I just said I’m fine, Molly.”

  Her voice is harsh and irritated, and I blink in surprise. This isn’t a side of her I’ve seen before, sunny, crunchy Sadie with her unflappable wilderness-guide cheer, and it must register on my face because she sighs loudly. “I’m sorry,” she amends, finger-combing the tangles out of her long yellow hair, twisting it into a rope over one shoulder. “You’re trying to be nice to me, I shouldn’t snap at you like that. I just had another stupid fight with Gabe, is all. It’s not a big deal.”

  My heart does something complicated inside my chest, painful. “Another?” I ask cautiously. “You guys fight a lot?”

  “Constantly,” Sadie says. She hops up on the edge of the minuscule sink, apparently unconcerned by the general filth all around us. She’s wearing a pair of loose jeans cuffed to her ankles; her feet are tan and unpainted inside her Birkenstocks. “I mean, we didn’t use to. But the last few months, all the time.”

  I’m quiet for a beat, trying to picture it. Gabe and I annoyed each other sometimes when we were together, sure, but we never really argued; he was always way too affable for that. Of course, Patrick liked to point out that it was easy to be everyone’s best friend as long as you were getting your way all the time, if life presqueezed your lemonade for you. I wonder if that’s the difference now.