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But all the pent-up words—the stories, the one-liners, the memories—come pouring out of me as I sit beside Greer and demolish what’s left of the pretzels.
I talk and Greer feeds me. Refills my whiskey. Orders room service when we decide we’re hungry for dinner but too lazy to get dressed and go downstairs.
I laugh, a little buzzed, when I tell the story about my dad leaving Lizzie and me on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, North Carolina after she and I got in a fistfight over a Gameboy in the backseat. How I cried like a baby. But Lizzie crossed her arms and called Dad a bastard. He came right back to get us. But the lesson stuck.
I tell Greer about Lizzie and me growing apart in high school. I was obsessed with getting good grades so I could get into Duke, our dad’s alma mater, and work on Wall Street like he did.
“I don’t know why I thought my dad was so cool back then,” I say ruefully. “Luckily I grew up and saw him for what he is.”
“The man who worked his ass off to give you and your sister a really nice life?”
I tilt my head. “Not without holding it over our heads. He did right by me in a lot of ways, and I appreciate everything he gave us. But he really is a bastard.”
Greer folds an herbed french fry into her mouth. “How so?”
“Perfect example.” I wipe my hands, greasy thanks to the turkey burger from heaven, on a cloth napkin. “He’s never talked to me about Lizzie’s death. He hugged me once, I think, at the funeral. But since then, nothing but a handshake. If I try to bring her up, he cuts me off.”
Greer stares at me. “Brutal. I’m so sorry, Brooks.”
“I am too,” I say a little gruffly. “I get that he doesn’t have the tools to properly mourn his daughter. Still doesn’t sit right. Feels like . . . I don’t know, like he’s neglecting me. Neglecting her.”
“That hurts.”
“It does.”
“I wonder where you got your warm and fuzzy side from, then?”
I laugh and she laughs, and suddenly the world is right again. Even if the story I’m telling is all kinds of wrong.
She asks how Lizzie died. My stomach churns and my throat gets tight. I tell Greer anyway. That I went my way to school at Duke, and my sister went hers to the University of Virginia. Wrong friends. Wrong guy. A sorority trip to Myrtle Beach gone awry. She had a whole cocktail of shit in her blood when she passed: cocaine, alcohol.
Most surprisingly, antidepressants showed up too.
“I remember reading the toxicology report and thinking Christ, I had no idea,” I say. “I was so wrapped up in my own bullshit I didn’t even know my sister was depressed. Much less depressed enough to need medication.”
Greer is on her side now, hands tucked underneath her ear on the pillow. “You’re really hard on yourself, aren’t you?”
“How can I not be?” I scoff. “I fucked up. So badly, Greer.”
She puts a hand on my forearm. Glides it back and forth. Back and forth. The tender, steady motion soothing the fierce hurt inside me. “You were very, very young. And it sounds like you didn’t have the best role models for open and empathetic communication. If you grow up in a house where no one talks about anything real, much less feelings, that’s what you think is normal. You don’t learn how to express yourself, and neither does anyone else.”
I sip my whiskey. My therapist has said the same thing. Many times. I’ve tried to internalize the message. I’ll probably be trying for the rest of my life. It just always felt like a waste of time.
But now, I want to try harder.
What if Greer is right?
What if what happened to Lizzie isn’t anyone’s fault?
What if I choose to believe tragedy is real, but so are second chances?
“You must’ve been so lonely,” Greer is saying, fingers curling around my forearm and giving it a squeeze.
I meet her eyes. “I was. But I’m not now.”
Chapter Nineteen
GREER
We don’t make it to the symposium. Or the spa.
Instead, we spend two glorious days in bed, in the shower, or down at the restaurant for quick but insanely delicious meals. Sunday it rains. Brooks lights a fire in his room (yes, there’s a wood-burning fireplace in his suite, and yes, I moved my stuff in at his request) and we try every position he can think of, with the lights off and the fire crackling and the rain drumming on the roof over our heads.
We drink coffee in bed. Eat Blue Mountain Farm’s ridiculously delicious blackberry bread pudding for lunch. Get high and spend hours doing puzzles we pilfer from the lounge downstairs.
