In the seven months I have lived in this half-shut seaside town, I have learned several new things about myself.

1. After weeks of trial and error, I now make a damn good pizza from scratch. I even taught the famously kitchen-shy Alexander Carr how to make a sloppy but delicious rendition himself. Alex swears it’s down to the identical waxed cotton aprons he bought for us, which have (according to him) transferred part of my cooking prowess to his hands.

2. Creeping existential dread does nothing for one’s creativity. Since the pandemic hit, the words that before passed unimpeded from thought to my fingers tracing familiar patterns on my keyboard have been dammed up. No, not dammed — that implies that they’re being stored somewhere, held back, ready to cascade in a wave of expression upon the page. Instead, it’s like they’ve been kidnapped, not even held for ransom, forgotten about. Who cared about them anyway? My days are spent engaging in mindless chat on an internet forum concerned with immigration to the US, talking about politics and the election and the minutiae of my life. I counsel people considering divorce to take control of their lives, to draw out the poison and be free. I argue about masks and social distancing, whether the Marxists are anything more than a few kooks stuck in philosophy and comparative literature departments dotted across the academic landscape. It’s not very meaningful and yet — it’s connecting with people, something I just haven’t had much of over the past five months. (I wrote “three,” not “five,” at first — the days and weeks blur and compress into each other in the nothingness and everythingness of the plague times.)

3. When faced with an ever-decreasing wedding guest list, I didn’t unspool, didn’t combust in a blaze of fury or gurgle in a pool of despond. No life would end if only my parents, Rachel and Matt were present when I promised to love and honor (not obey) Alexander St. Clair Carr for the rest of my life. But when I broke the news to my mother, she wanted to storm the State Department and demand the immediate withdrawal of the requirement that people entering from the UK quarantine outside in a “safe” country for fourteen days first. “Fuck that orange disaster!” my mother bellowed at me last week over speakerphone while I made pho from scratch for the first time (delicious — recommended). “Fuck him and that quisling shit Stephen Miller, keeping the closest thing I may ever have to a grandbaby from coming to America!” (I do appreciate my mother respecting my reproductive freedom with that statement.)

It was completely true that the Scottish contingent — Fenn, Cora and Andrew — were steadfast in wanting to keep away. “I’m sorry, my darlings, it’s simply impossible given how plaguey it still is over there,” Cora explained during last week’s Saturday Family Zoom, which she, Andrew and Fenn now pop into. Since it’s time for cocktails there when it’s barely a brunchable hour over here, both Carr women were sipping at large glasses of red wine.

“Mummy’s right,” Fenn chimed in, pushing up the dark green frames of her reading glasses. “Julian’s told me it’s absolutely wretched there in California right now, completely unsafe. People refusing to wear masks, pissing themselves in mobile phone shops when told to cover up. Just appalling.”

“What does that twat know anyway,” Alex grumbled, pushing a freshened up cup of tea into my hand and settling back down on the fake Danish Modern sofa I will be only too happy to place a curb alert ad for on Craigslist. (Just waiting to feel safe enough to test out floor samples again to locate a genuine replacement.)

I do enjoy Family Zoom, most of the time. What my mother had seeded in April in an attempt to keep connected to her overgrown, spoiled and difficult daughters for a half an hour a week has bloomed into a blowsy, sprawling garden of Carr and de Mornay grousing and teasing, cringeworthy family folklore and revelations mundane and profound. Every Saturday for 90 minutes, I am folded into the claustrophobic family embrace and feel petted, cocooned, rankled and amused in turn, watching as new alliances form across and between the houses. And each week, anecdotes and tall tales, both hoary and new, pass through the ether, drawing our clans in while they expand outwards.

And as a family we are expanding, beyond my own ever-nearing nuptials, whatever they may look like in a corona-tinged landscape. Did I mention Matt is now Rachel’s pre-ancé? She finally agreed to at least think about marriage, which she once described to me as an existential threat to her very identity.

“What fun’s a hot girl once she’s someone’s old woman?” she yelled at me over the nightclub din of my bachelorette party, a couple of weeks before Julian arrived in America. “I’ve probably got a good 15 years left in me. I plan to fuck my way through all of them.” (I continue to believe that my sister missed a trick when she passed on joining the cast of “ValleyWAGS,” a TLC clone of the Real Housewives franchise set in Sherman Oaks. If she had, I’m convinced the show might have made it past the pilot stage.)

Andrew and my dad, both attorneys, now have a separate ongoing correspondence after they discovered a shared love of Fellini and Glenmorangie, on top of their shared profession. Of differing stripes and vastly different political allegiances (Andrew is an avowed socialist, even if he does drive a Lambo, while my dad is creeping away from MAGA towards the lifeboats before the election, mumbling that he always hated the tweeting), they’d been looking forward to meeting for a socially-distanced tumbler or four at the end of October, maybe even more than the wedding itself.

And as much as I hate to admit Julian is right (even if the pee incident was in NorCal, not down here), things are truly awful in California, no matter how much happy talk we get from Newsom and Garcetti and Mayor McKeown. Up in Scotland, days can go by without a single COVID-related death in the entire country; we’re losing people by the dozens in the county every single day. Just three weeks ago one of my college classmates passed in a matter of days — not a friend, but you could find us milling about in the middle of a Venn diagram of our overlapping social circles. On a Wednesday, I’d watched her on Instagram, standing barefoot in her Savannah kitchen, zhoozhing tomatoes in a blender for gazpacho and singing Nina Simone. The next day she was coughing; by Tuesday she was gone.

To my astonishment, even Rachel has begun to relish our family time. Okay, “astonishment” may be an overstatement — Rachel has never willingly passed up a chance to dredge up my childhood mortifications and parade them before others. (You will not be surprised to learn that of all the de Mornays, only Rachel passed the smell test with Jocasta Cranford, who delighted in hearing of my many, many failings.) And Fenn and Cora lap up the stories like so much cream in a fancy saucer, while my mom and dad fill in details Rachel overlooks. Nothing like character assassination when your entire family is pointing the guns of memory at your person.

But unlike Rachel, my parents don’t know there are some doors to the past not to be propped open, some teleplays of their daughter’s adolescence never meant to be rebroadcast to more than the original studio audience. Rachel values discretion, having entrusted me with many of her own romantic secrets. The Hollywood almost-a-star is still the enduring shhhhhh between us. Rachel’s name was never linked to his back then thanks to his canny publicist, who quickly sussed that Mr. Hollywood’s star would get a little tarnished if it came out that he was fucking a teenager when he wasn’t acting the part of the loved-up family man the pages of Us Magazine would have its readers believe he was.

Rach was his dirty little secret for about six months, until he got possessive and she got bored with not being able to party with the lights on, so to speak. She knew she was tired of meeting him at the Four Seasons (when her shifts at Abercrombie permitted) for a “sesh,” as she called it, when even his regular sugar daddy dues (her words, not mine) no longer held much appeal. Besides, she’d banked enough in six months as Mr. Hollywood’s teenage dream to pay her tuition at Cal State Northridge, had she bothered to tell our parents they didn’t need to pony up.

Sorry, I digress. (But I stand by my words that if cable TV comes calling for Rachel de Mornay this time, she’ll be a bigger star than nearly anyone she’s represented.)

Cora and my mom have joined forces during Family Zoom, reveling in a collective moan about the difficulties of rearing daughters. How the curses their own mothers had placed on them — similar versions of “May you raise a daughter as ungrateful and unruly as I have!” had passed over the lips of Primrose St. Clair and Dorothy Sullivan on either side of the Atlantic — had come true, as if Fenn and Rachel and I were nowhere to be found, rather than moving images on computer screens quite visible to our mothers.

“I’d curse my Fennie, too, but I despair of ever getting another granddaughter,” Cora fretted over her glass of Pinot, fussing so ostentatiously with one side of her tawny bob that I couldn’t miss the massive emerald earring spearing her lobe. (Another gift from Andrew, undoubtedly.) “I’d even take an awful one from her if she’d simply do something about settling down.”

“No offense, Cora, but look who she’s ‘dating,’” my mom lobbed back, complete with air/scare quotes. “You may have known Julian longer than I have but, come on. I saw him suck the life out of Mel. I’m sure Alex has told you plenty of his own nightmare stories about what an asshole Julian is. Fenn, you can do better. Doesn’t your brother have any other single friends?”

Alex grinned. “None I’d submit to torture at the hands of my sister.”

“You’re awful,” Fenn huffed. “All of you. Jules is perfectly lovely with me, and he tells me it was simply that he and Mel were incompatible, as it turns out. And all of Alex’s male friends are taken, gay or gruesome. Not that I’m looking.”

In the upper right hand tile, I spied Rachel, clearly on mute, as her bright pink lips were moving quickly but none of what looked like a tirade came through my speakers. She was dressed down, well, for dressed down for Rachel, in an charcoal grey Issey Miyake jumpsuit, the same one I’d told her I was thinking about getting for myself. When I’d first spotted her in it last month on a Zoom, I whined that I’d called dibs, but she rightly pointed out that since I’d never actually used the word “dibs,” the drapey jersey piece was up for grabs. “You snoozed, loser,” she’d scoffed.

“Rachel,” my dad piped up. “Honey, your mic is off if you’re trying to say something.”

Who’s the snoozing loser now? I thought, shoving in my mouth a luscious section of peeled blood orange. The slightly bitter, delicately sweet juice swirled in my mouth.

Matt fumbled with the iPad to turn on the mic. “Sorry,” he mumbled, though I wasn’t sure if the apology was directed more to my sister than my father.

“Uggggghhhhhh, totally unnecessary,” my sister protested, getting closer to the camera, close enough that I could see that her 19-step K-beauty skin prep had pretty much wiped out her pores. There was a slightly rubbery cast to her skin, like she was an ethereal, oversexed, grown-up Kewpie doll. “Unless you guys want to hear how Matt fucked up my new home office. He was supposed to have central AC installed in the guesthouse, and not another window unit. A window unit! For 600 square feet! How am I supposed to work like that?”

Matt patted her gently tanned shoulder and shook his head with a wry, indulgent smile. “Whatever madame desires, I am but her humble servant. If she wants me to fan her with a palm frond, I can only obey.”

Now, whatever Rachel may say about Matt’s tendency towards a moderate podge about the midsection and the slow reveal of his scalp as his black hair retreats towards the crown of his head, she’s aware that both parties in their relationship scored a bit of a coup in their coupling. In Matt, Rachel’s found not only a humble servant, but also a step up professionally.

Before she met Matt at an industry party in the Hills a few years ago, my sister’s clientele had been mostly actors on the second or third rung of their careers, youngish men and women who had put in a few appearances as “Hot Guy #2” in straight-to-Netflix movies or played a teenage junkie on an iteration of Law & Order. She had something of a reputation as an agent who could launch a client from a nobody to at least a supporting role on a CW series. Right before lockdown, one of her clients inked a deal for the next Channing Tatum film as the best friend of the love interest — third rung, but a push (potentially) to something greater once the industry grinds back into gear, eventually.

Rachel can sniff out talent that just needs a little extra shove in front of the right people, and if there’s one thing I know about Rach it’s that she’s awfully good about shoving to get ahead. Where I’d been exploring the craggy contours of my poor self-esteem and perceived inadequacies as a child, Rachel bounded through life with the confidence that frankly seemed masculine to me at times. You remember that guy (and it’s always a guy) in college who seemed to have no problem saying exactly what was on his mind in class, the one who interrupted you mid-sentence to go off on his own tangent and never got slapped down because he just assumed that as a man, he could do it? That’s Rachel. I’m pretty sure that Trump was paraphrasing Rachel when he said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Rachel grabs life and opportunities by the pussy and the dick, and if people complain, who cares? Collateral damage on the way up, babes. You know what it’s like.

But a few years ago Rachel’s career had… I don’t want to say stalled. (I especially don’t want to say “stalled” if Rachel ever finds out I wrote this, which is not impossible given her past successes in finding where I’ve written about her in the past, even when it was password-protected and not squirrelled away on the internet, mostly-unread and totally unheralded.) To employ some of the management-speak I heard enough from Julian, she wasn’t being leveraged at her agency to optimize her know-how and explore her synchronicities fully. In other words, stalled.

Rachel’s plan to shove herself forward and upward didn’t involve shacking up with a journalist-turned-documentarian, but Matt provided Rachel with an entrée into more serious circles than social media influencers and YouTube stars. (Yes, it is true she turned down Jake Paul early on — “I don’t do non-actors and I especially don’t do douchecanoes.”) Even if she claimed to be “terminally yawned-out” by the dinner parties she’d allow Matt to take her too, gatherings where the chatter was about the environmental time bomb of Amazon deforestation or charter schools or the high human cost of fast fashion, she was meeting precisely the kind of people who could open studio doors for her clients.

And what did Matt get? Well, Rachel of course. It sort of goes without saying. Some men like to be to have their previous lives be turned into palimpsests by a ferocious, unapologetic, sexy bitch. Matt was one of them.

“Rach is a trip,” he told me over some paralytically strong mai tais at the Tonga Hut. It had been the first time he’d been allowed to meet anyone in the family; I was only permitted because I’d seen a pic of them together on JustJared at a premiere in Napa, and got curious.

With a furtive glance towards the ladies room where my sister had sashayed a minute before, I poked at the pineapple wedge in my drink with a swizzle stick. “She’s a lot,” I said, which was about the most diplomatic thing I could think of after listening to her trash (in order) Christina Aguilera’s weight, Christina Aguilera’s makeup, Melania Trump’s plastic surgeon, Cherise for not returning immediately her favorite (she said) vintage Judith Leiber handbag in the shape of a doughnut, my mom for asking when she was going to settle down, people who could parallel park, people who couldn’t parallel park, Dr. Oz, the “However Many Brats and Counting” family (warranted), her new manicurist who didn’t have anywhere near as much celebrity gossip as her old one, and Matt’s insistence at going to a bar in the Valley. Oh, and me for not making up my mind about whether or not I was going to move to London after all to be with Alex, which I’d been mulling over during the week prior. (Since resolved, obviously.)

“She’s amazing,” Matt insisted. “I have never met a person who was quite so sure that the world is a better place with her in it, so it had better cough up. She doesn’t need me to tell her she’s fantastic, and when I do, she doesn’t act all coy about it and refuse the compliment. She doesn’t even take it as a compliment, it’s like…”

“It’s like ‘yeah, so what?’” I finished for him.

Matt chuckled and took another sip of his mai tai. “Yeah, exactly. I know I’m not her type, so I’m just riding the wave.”

It had been a wave he’d been riding on and off — primarily on — since mid-2017. She’d kicked him to the curb a couple of times, mostly as a show of dominance, for reasons that even the famously picky Jenn wouldn’t have considered capital offenses: the fashion crimes, of course (mostly t-shirt-related); the time he thought it would be funny to tell her he was bringing her a feast of his “people’s food,” and presented her with a fine selection of treats from Del Taco (in his defense, he said he was both half-Mexican and a nerd, which while true, did not help); and some incident involving getting a Kia Sorrento as a car rental on a vacation.

But since March of last year, he’d been riding at the crest of the wave, and it didn’t seem like Rachel felt like dislodging him any further. “He’s cute enough, he’s good in bed, and he knows everybody at Blumhouse,” she told me when I’d called to congratulate her on her non-engagement. “Plus he’s got enough in the bank that I don’t need to worry about a new job for a while.”

Like more than a few agents, COVID-19 has dried up opportunities for my sister’s clients, and given the choice between being laid off and furloughed, she chose a big fat severance check about three weeks ago. The new office in the guesthouse is to house her new business after her non-compete is up: repping voice actors, many of whom have worked remotely from home studios for years. Matt happens to know quite a few audiobook pros, and it was a natural move into a new market for Rach. She’s already looking to secure deals for some of her former clients — recurring players on Riverdale, a couple of the rising new scream queens — to read young adult novels, once she gets her agent’s licence squared away. While Rach may be decidedly slacky about things like remembering her sister’s birthday, or flaking out on Thanksgiving, when it comes to earning money, she’s (as my Grandpa Sullivan used to say) Johnny on the spot.

Back on the Family Zoom, Matt and my dad were trying to explain the necessity of central AC to the Scots when my mother broke in. “Mel, why is this conversation reminding me of Josh Brookes? Wasn’t there something about an air conditioner in his writing shed? Speaking of, Val Christian told me Cherise told her Josh was on the Rezoomion and you didn’t even mention it to me!”

I’m certain my mother meant nothing by it. I mean, it must have seemed to her just another chapter in the Big Big Book of Melissa, the one she may have written the first few chapters of, but she’s only been speed reading it since my early teens. I peered close at the box on the screen where my mother and father sat shoulder to shoulder, more tolerant of each other than they have been in a while, in increasing harmony as my father is necessarily distant from Julian. No, my mom didn’t look like she was trying to stir up trouble, and why would she? To her, Josh was my first love, my puppy love, a boyfriend worthy of her brilliant daughter.

At the mention of Josh’s name, my dad’s face illuminated. “Joshua K. Brookes, well, well, well,” he said with a wistful shake of the head. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. I bet that was a surprise to see him, baby. How’s he doing? Still cranking out those bestsellers?”

My shoulders seized and a crashing wave of frost-tipped fear ripped through me. No, no! Not here! I returned my mother’s smile, so much like my own when genuine, the same putty-pink lips, the same deep cupid’s bow (though my mom’s has feathered now with age). It may be nearly two decades since that dark and horrid boy-man tore up my ego and shoved it in his pocket, but it’s still too soon to do any of the telling of it to my parents. And as many times as I cast a glance at the clock or flip through the calendar, it will always be too soon.

How could anyone understand us, what we have, Scheherazade? In my mind’s eye, Josh was combing my hair, teasing out the knots with patience; my hair was always a tangle after an afternoon in the writing shed. His beautiful face beamed back at me, no tinge of rancor in his tone, not a drop of sourness. I’d pleased him with my body again, pleased him with the way I let go of my own thoughts and lived only in his own. And if no one can understand us, it’s best to tell no one. They’re just not smart enough to see it for what it is. It’s love, right? Good.

“Joshua K. Brookes? Do you know him, Melissa?” Cora’s bright but slightly slushy voice (glass two of Cabernet) sliced through that loathsome memory. “Fennie and I absolutely adored Darker Stars. We read it in book club last year. Do you remember, sweetie? Mary Mackinnon made those dreadful Eccles cakes and you didn’t even pretend they were edible.”

“Know him?” my dad crowed, his eyes creasing at their corners in warm recollection. “Josh practically lived in this house for a year in a half. He was Mel’s first boyfriend. And her first love, right, baby?”

“Right, Daddy,” I said mechanically. Even though Alex was plucking at my fingers, trying to get my attention, I looked instead to Rachel. In her box on my screen, her perfectly sculpted (and definitely microbladed, according to Cherise) eyebrows tilting towards her nose as her mouth screwed tight into a scowl.

And even though in real life Alex was asking me a question, I turned not to face him, but rather watched him ask me in the white-bordered pane on the screen in which we figured. “Why did you never tell me about this famous author in your deep, dark past, sweetest?” he teased, running his index finger along my jawline. “Did he steal some storyline from you and you never forgave him?” Alex’s laugh was light and free, drifting like a kite on a mild May day, untroubled by the little black cloud that loomed outside of his line of sight.

“Something like that,” I mumbled. “Dunno, it was a long time ago.” I watched as my skin blushed salmon pink, then near crimson in a crushing amalgam of embarrassment and horror and (yes) remembered desire.

Fenn tipped her head back to drain back the dregs of her wine, then thrust her glass out of view, only for it to appear in front of Andrew’s face. “More, Andrew. I want to hear this. Josh Brookes, Mel? Why did you never say anything when I asked you if you’d read First Flush? Oh!” Fenn gasped, pulling an ink-stained hand to her mouth. “Is First Flush about you? Are you Emily Finn?”

“Fuck no,” Rachel butted in. Over her shoulders hunched Matt, who was now kneading the knots out of her biceps. “Matt! Too hard.” She reached a perfectly marigold-yellow manicured hand to swat a little too hard at her non-fiancé’s beefy grip. “At least, I never thought she was any of those girls. Maybe Claire a little, but Mel’s a lot more frigid than Claire.”

Wait, what? “Hey!” I shrieked.

My sister’s gentle smirk slithered under my skin and poked at me viciously. “Everyone’s sexuality is different, Mel. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I am not frigid. Just because I’m not a sl–“

“GIRLS!” My mother’s piercing tone was precisely the one she’d used on us over the dinner table at every one of my ages from 2 to 22, when I’d finally moved out of the family home. “Stop this. Stop this now,” she snipped.

All three Carrs appeared to be on the verge of apoplectic collapse in amusement that their family wasn’t being the more unreasonable for a change. Andrew scratched his head in utter confusion as he reappeared on camera with a glass of wine he held out for Fenn, who was gasping for air. I jabbed her brother in the ribs with my elbow. “Ow!” Alex shouted between barks of laughter, rubbing his side.

“Fuckin’ madhouse,” Andrew puzzled in his Glaswegian burr. “Mel, lass, ye sure ye want to marry into this lot? I have hope for Alex, but these two hens…” Andrew rolled his eyes to the heavens in loving exasperation. (I can only hope that with his money sloshing about Balcraigie these days, he spots no ominous and spreading damp when he regards the chamfered ceiling in the great hall.)

Rachel’s smirk had mellowed into a grin of satisfaction — my work is done. And it should have been: the sidetrack into my sexual desires (or lack thereof) staved off a closer inquisition for the rest of the Zoom. Fenn had moved on to needling Alex about whether it was true that Minty and Tom Gregory (not really a wankstain after all) were now dating, a tidbit of (true) gossip that had floated my way via Miranda a few weeks before.

Thank me later, whore, read the text from Rachel on my phone as Alex assured his mother that Tom would make an excellent stepfather to her granddaughter, but two months into a relationship was a bit early to fixate on such concerns.

And soon enough we were wrapping enough, five boxes on two continents, pop pop pop disappearing until Matt signed off for good with a brisk wave. Alex reached forward to gently press the lid of my laptop closed, then leaned back on the bronze leather of the sofa where I’d collapsed, trying to recover from the weekly exhaustion of chatting with my fractious kin. He snaked his arm behind my back to pull me closer to his side, close enough I could hear his stomach squeak out an early cry for lunch. It was shaping up to be a hot one outside — even the beach is no break for a heatwave — and I squirmed slightly from the warmth that passed from his body to mine.

“Too hot, Al,” I protested, and pushed at his thigh of his jeans with one hand to rise up, but he pulled me back.

“Nope,” he countered, tugging me only closer to press kiss after kiss on my cheeks. “You stay right here and sweat through it.” Another kiss, this time on the crown of my head before he tucked it beneath his chin. And though I did feel too warm there, my cheek flush with his neck, breathing in the twinge of soap that clung to his butter-soft white tee, I also felt safe.

It’s time, you know, adult Melissa said to me. You need to start now.

My breath hitched before it flowed in time with Alex’s, the in-out, in-out a perfect and unconscious rhythm we shared. We were two bodies that had been too much with each other the past five months, and yet I still, still, could not sate myself of his, could not have enough of the being-ness of my own gathered into his. Sometimes I wake at 4:30 am with a start from a dream, another dream of that haunted house, the nightmare castle: where am I? Am I locked inside? But beside me, this man, the very one who’d wanted to free me all along, ever since I’d set him free so many years before. This man would help me stay free. Any monsters that remain? Why, we could defeat them together.

Did you know, sweetest, that I happen to enjoy killing monsters?

The air conditioner kicked in with a mighty woosh, settling down into the dull hum of nearly white noise. At nearly noon, the sun tried valiantly to burst through the blinds but could not find its way fully between the shuttered slats, instead filtering thin lines of sunlight on the floor. Life beyond myself was static in this room; no noise from the street rose to our fourth floor apartment. I’d chosen this unit from two I’d looked at in the building — nearly identical, but for the floor level. I’d balked initially at having neighbors upstairs, until the agent led me to the bedroom balcony, which neatly nestled between boughs of a eucalyptus tree. In the Adirondack chair I’ve placed there, I pretend I’m back in the treehouse in my parents’ backyard. I’m ten years old and the world is open and green and untried by me.

Alex propped his legs on the olive tweed ottoman I’d had delivered only a couple of days before the Before Times ended. It didn’t match the blue velvet loveseat opposite in the slightest, but it was a near-replica of one my Papa and Maman had in their dumpy Culver City ranch house, down to the six wide buttons in the center and the contrasting goldenrod cord trim picking out the lines of the footrest.

Start now. He needs to know, Adult Melissa insisted.

But where do I begin? What if he runs away? What if he thinks I’m to blame? What if he hates me for waiting this long to say this truth? Little Melissa wondered and panicked.

You just start.

Here goes. “Alex.” My voice sounded dim to me, like I was listening to myself through the keyhole in my haunted house.

“Hm? Are you really too hot? Because I like this.” He didn’t protest as I shifted myself down to rest my head in the warmth of his lap. “No, I love this. How could I not, beautiful?”

“Al,” I pushed on. “You never talk much about Charity Ryan.”

His hand paused where he’d started drawing my long braid back and forth across my lips. “Charity Ryan? What’s there to say? She was my first girlfriend. I lost my virginity to her in one of the theatre dressing rooms. You know all this, Mel.”

I blew at the tickly and scraggly split ends of my braid and batted it to one side. “But what was she like, Al? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of her. All I know is you beat up a rugby player who groped her. And the virginity thing.”

His deep brown gaze bore down on me, unsparing. “What’s this really about, Mel?”

“Humor me,” I insisted.

Alex tempered his sigh with a soft smile. “She was funny. Really funny. She did the best impression of our physics teacher, Mr. Keating, down to the way he said the word ‘querulous,’ which he said frequently. She taught me some really filthy jokes. And she was tall. And strong. She beat me in an arm-wrestling match once, in front of half the lower sixth. Remember Mark, Mark Hollander? You met him at my wedding, I think. She beat him, too, right after she was done with me.”

I did remember Mark Hollander — he’d called Julian “a right cunt” to his face and the two of them had laughed like it was a fantastic joke, a term of endearment. But back at the hotel that night, Julian couldn’t stop grousing about how it had been Mark’s fault Myfanwy Jones got kicked out of school, and along with Myfanwy went the regular blow jobs he’d been getting from her. (Well, he didn’t supply the latter detail, that had been straight from Alex’s lips.)

“She was really into some old band called the Field Mice, I remember that,” he continued, stroking my hair but staring across the room at the framed map of Providence I’d propped up beside the doorway to the kitchen, waiting to be hung. “She had music on cassette tapes, and I had a cassette player when everyone else only had CD players. That’s how I got to know her, when she showed up at my room with Mark with a tape and a glass bottle of Irn-Bru as a bribe to borrow my Walkman for a day or two. She kept it for a week, bothered her about it every day in Mr. Keating’s class but she never seemed to remember it. Terrible for my reputation, you know.”

“How’s that?” I reached up to rub his three-day not-really-a-beard that was in dire need of a shave.

“Ah, you know. All these girls in the lower sixth thought I was this brooding Heathcliff-type, especially the ones doing English for A-levels. I s’pose I’d landed like a cuckoo in Jules’ room and I looked a bit wild back then and I was in over my head when it came to girls. I wasn’t exactly the outgoing, suave, debonair ladykiller you’re marrying.”

“I would find that hard to believe, Al, if I hadn’t met you when you were only a few years older.”

“Hush, woman. When I met you, I was at the height of my powers. A paragon of virility and animal magnetism.”

“You were hiding behind a sofa from Miranda, reading a copy of the Sunday Times magazine and drinking out of a flask.” (I earned another swat from the tail of my braid for that one, even though it was completely true.)

“Anyway, my love, I was doing well by feeling overwhelmed and in over my head all the time, because the girls all took my insecurity for being so self-assured, I didn’t need to use many words. Even though the reason why I didn’t use many words was that I was fucking useless at knowing how to speak with a girl who wasn’t my sister, and you know Fenn and me, we yell at each other a lot. I didn’t think girls would fancy me yelling at them, so I stayed quiet. And then fucking Charity Ryan blew my cover.”

“How?” I imagined an adolescent Alex, more gangly and even less broad than when I’d met him, glowering his way through a green, green campus, blue and white striped tie slightly askew, kicking at leaves and desperately ducking the attentions of the teenage girls who were trying to seduce a clueless boy.

“How many pupils were in your year? Roughly speaking?”

“600? Something like that.” I wasn’t sure where this was going, but it was far more pleasant than the path I intended to lead Al down when he was done.

“Imagine 120, and that’s the lower and the upper sixth form. Not even half of those are boarders, and they’ve all known each other for years, all have family who seem to know each other. And here you are, dropped in like a parcel from a faraway planet, with your long hair and your crap clothes and your fucking cassette Walkman, for fuck’s sake, and your accent is a bit odd and you’ve never sat in a classroom before, except to take standardized exams. You don’t know shite about ‘normal’ behavior, and the only exposure you’ve had to that is from fucking Eastenders and naff old sitcoms your mum makes you watch sometimes.

“I decided quickly I needed to just watch and pay attention for a while, pick it up as I went along. Jules said I needed a lot of help, and to watch him. I will give that gobshite one thing, he saw something in me when I couldn’t. He dragged me to the barber, helped me figure out how to dress better on the weekends, even on the no budget I had. Would have been happy to shut up and take notes until Jules said I was ready. I really did think he knew everything back then, you know. I loved him, Mel. Like you did.”

“Oh, Al,” I whispered.

“Ach, you know what he’s like, sweetest. But I’m missing the point. I’d been paying attention, letting Jules introduce me to everyone he thought I should meet, like Mark Hollander, but he said when it came to girls, stay quiet. ‘Don’t fuck it up, Carr,’ he said. ‘They think they want you, but if you want to make it last, you need to be smoother. And smell better.’ But god damn, Charity Ryan. She made me speak. Thought I could get my Walkman back if I just mumbled something like, ‘Give it back, Ryan.’ And she’d laugh in my face, say, ‘Try again, Carr. Use some more words.’ And walked away, laughing at me with a glance over her shoulder and a flick of her long braid. First time I ever felt like I wanted to kiss a girl. Kiss her to shut her up. It was awful.”

“A long braid?” I teased, fanning the end of my own over the bridge of his nose and over his lips. This time last year, he was tan from the hot sun of London, of all places, but here he was, paler than he was after a winter in Pitlochry, with the Southern California beach all of five blocks away.

He blew the strands away from his pout. “Mmmm, but brown, not your gingery color. And one day I’d had enough, just snapped at lunch. Called her a thief, a tease, a right fucking cunt and I was getting louder and louder the next thing I knew, I was sitting in the head’s office with Uncle B on speakerphone. Obviously the head didn’t know what he was for with Uncle B, who said something like, ‘Good on ye, old boy,’ instead of telling me how disappointed he was. I got detention, prolly deserved it.

“And when I got back to my room, there was my Walkman, sitting on my bed with a note from Charity shoved inside: ‘I liked your words, Carr.’ Jesus, what a tease. I wanted her even though I had no idea what to do with her if I got her, like a housecat who’d never been outside catching a mole. Jules told me she was gagging for it, and I didn’t even know what that meant. Fuck me, I was so naive. So the next day in physics, I told her she was all right, but the Field Mice were a load of old tosh and fuck them and if she ever wanted to borrow my Walkman again, it had better not be for a load of poncey English twee shite like that. Her face lit up so bright, like a million stars exploding. Thought she might break her face with that smile.”

Alex was leaning into his memory now, half of him with me stretched across his lap on the sofa, the rest with his awkward, lanky sixteen-year-old self of blurry recollection. “Yeah, Charity Ryan. Thought I’d never get over her, and then you showed up, lovely.” He touched two fingers to his lips then pressed them to my forehead. “And I hope you don’t get tired of my crap one day like she did.”

“Doubt it,” I promised him, rubbing at my eyes. Do you really need to tell him?

“I like your attitude, de Mornay,” he said with a tweak to my nose. “Fancy another cuppa?”

I nodded and stretched my arms up, up to take his face in my hands. “Love you, Al.”

From the sofa, I peered into the kitchen, watching Alex pull two teabags from the cobalt blue canister he’d swiped from his mother’s kitchen when we were last at Balcraigie. He gave both a thoughtful shake before dropping them — pip pip — into waiting mugs. The hiss of the kettle as it approached the roll of a boil was a gentle counterpoint to his distracted humming.

We are so safe here, so safe and so quiet.

“Al?” To myself, I sounded smaller and younger and more timid than even the everyday Melissa of the now.

With a flourish of his wrist, Alex filled both mugs before turning to rifle through the cabinets. “Hm? Where’d you put those chocolate biscuits, Mel?”

“Left of the stove. Alex, I…” I rummaged through the inventory of my thoughts for the words to begin, much like Alex was pulling cans of beans off shelves in search of those elusive biscuits, both of us discarding what didn’t match what either of us sought.

“Yes, sweetest?” The biscuits located, he’d turned back to the serious business of the making of tea, clattering a teaspoon in each mug in turn, meticulously fishing from both the steaming teabags that would have bobbed inside, pouring in a drizzle of cream.

“I need to talk to you about something,” I started, reaching for the mug he pushed towards me.

He’d stopped on his way back to the sofa to twist open the blinds, and the nearly-midday sun thrust through the slats, glazing his blue-black hair so that it seemed to glow white as it followed the coils of his curls. “I take it this isn’t about Charity Ryan.”

“No.” The tea was too hot for more than the dipping in of a biscuit, but I took a scorching sip anyway.

“Thought as much. Hence, tea.” I’d learned early on from Minty that when the shit was even thinking about the fan, tea did much to quiet the soul. “Tell me about… Josh, right?”

“Yeah.” The A/C clicked off, and the drum and bass from our upstairs neighbors filtered through the ceiling. “But you have to promise to listen to me. And not interrupt me. And know that what I’m going to tell you isn’t going to be everything all at once, and it might sound weird and I might sound weak and you might get angry,” I babbled.

Alex’s breathing and mine, in sync once more. In-out, upwards-downwards, slip-slip-slip. He wound his hand in mine, grounding me in him. At last, in what should have been silence: “Okay.”

Breathe out. “I should have told you before.”

“You’re telling me now.”

“Where do I start?”

“You start wherever you want, sweetest.”

The problem was, I didn’t really want to start anywhere. Under every pebble and stone of my memory lurked some loathsome serpent emblazoned with Josh’s name.

“Okay. I’ll start where it started to go wrong.”

***

I’m breaking this here — it’s often so taxing to work myself up to writing about Josh, to dig down through the strata and thrust up the filth of the past. It is enough to know that what I told Alex last week, what I continue to tell him, did not break him, did not summon the blackness to darken again his little grey cloud. He was furious, oh! He was so angry I thought the walls would burst with his fury.

“That is not love, Mel,” he stormed, as if I didn’t know. “Love doesn’t hold you down. Love doesn’t shut you up. Love doesn’t force itself.”

The stories push past my lips now without fear. I tell them to myself in the shower in whispers, I tell them to Al late at night before bed. I tell them again to Rachel. I do not need Alex to give them voice, but I borrow from his strength, steal from his goodness, cloak myself in his bravery. And for now, that is enough.

There’s a wedding to plan, after all.