I strode confidently into the living room in my old Speedos from when I worked as a lifeguard four years ago. To say they were snug would have been the fucking understatement of the century. I was shitting bricks with every step I took, hoping my junk wouldn’t sneak out. I couldn’t find my old swim cap, so I opted for an extra-large Magnum condom pulled securely over my head. The wrong head.
“I’m the Baltimore Bullet, Michael Phelps, baby. You ladies ready to see me get medal number eight?”
Troy seemed to understand the photo opportunity and quickly leaped up from the carpet, digging into his pocket for his phone.
I held up my hand to stop him. “Hold on. Let me get in position.”
Hallie and Troy couldn’t stop laughing as I laid on my belly and pretended to swim on the carpet while Troy took pictures of me in various swimming positions, freestyle, butterfly, breaststroke, which is a bit tricky. Finally, Hallie came over and joined me in the pictures. She pretended to swim in the “lane” next to me. I pretended to drown her when she got ahead. Then I pretended to be a surfboard while she stood on my back.
And that’s the picture Adaline decided to use for this frame. I’m laid out on the carpet of our old house, my arms and legs stretched out, pretending to be a surfboard while Hallie pretends to hang ten on my back. Her eyes are squinted, mouth wide open as she cackles with laughter. From bitch-face to this beauty in zero seconds, or the speed of Magnum.
Man, I think Adaline’s gunning for a raise.
* * *
I had planned to tell my mom about Hallie’s suicide note after Tessa and I were divorced and Rory and I were officially back together. But after everything blew up with Tessa and Rory at Wallace Park, that plan was also blown to bits. I don’t know if I’ve felt more guilt for keeping the letter from my mom or Rory. They would both be devastated by the news of Hallie’s affair with James, but there was nothing my mom could do with that knowledge other than use it as fuel for her anguish in the moments when she missed Hallie most. Rory, on the other hand, might lose her father forever.
I struggled for so many years with the burden of Hallie’s secret. And now I’m passing the weight of it on to the two people I love most in this world. It doesn’t seem like a very loving or fair thing to do. Though the uncomfortable truth can sometimes seem like the less humane option, in the long run comforting lies are far more destructive.
I stare into the mirror in my new bathroom in my new apartment. My gaze falls on the word tattooed across my chest: LOYALTY. For a long time, this tattoo was my reminder to hold tightly to the lies.
The truth is that lying is not humane, it’s just easy. Lying is an easy way of postponing consequences. It’s especially easy to lie in the name of a noble cause, like loyalty. I hid behind my loyalty to Hallie. My loyalty was the perfect shield, protecting me, Rory, and my mom from the truth. I regret using Hallie’s note this way. But most of all, I regret that it took losing Rory a second time for me to understand this.
I raise my gaze to look my reflection in the eye, then I make myself a few promises.
I promise I will never lie to the people I love.
I promise I will be loyal to people, not ghosts.
I promise I will find Rory and I’ll never lose her again.
I pull on a blue hoodie and head out into the rain to visit my mom. The one-hour drive to McMinnville gives me time to refine my approach. Rory still has Hallie’s suicide note in her possession, but I have pictures of it on my phone. I don’t know what I’ll do if my mom doesn’t believe the note is real, but I have to prepare for that possibility.
I climb the steps to the porch of the house where I spent most of my teen years. The house I’ve visited a handful of times since Hallie’s death. I reach for the doorknob, then I stop myself from turning it. Instead, I press the doorbell and wait. This isn’t my home anymore, and after today who knows when or if I’ll ever be welcomed back.
An excruciatingly long minute of silence passes before the sound of footsteps comes to me from inside the house. The door swings open and my mom’s eyes widen with surprise. Her dark-brown hair is cropped into a short pixie cut and the way her taupe cardigan hangs a bit loose tells me she’s lost about five or ten pounds since the last time I saw her, three months ago.
She came to visit me in my hotel room after I found out Tessa lied about being pregnant. I begged her not to come. I didn’t think I could face her knowing that I wasn’t ready to tell her about Hallie’s letter. But she’s a mother above all else and she refused to stay put.
“Hugh, what are you doing here?” she says, pulling her sweater tightly closed to shield against the stiff winter air.
“Is that how you greet your only son?”
She purses her lips as she opens the door for me to come inside. “Get in here. It’s freezing out there.”
I plant a kiss on her forehead as I step over the threshold. “I missed you.”
She shuts the door and leads me through the living room toward the kitchen at the rear of the house. “Oh, bologna. You don’t miss me. Something’s wrong. What is it this time? Did Tessa drive her car over a cliff?”
“Mom, that’s not nice.”
She rolls her eyes as she reaches into the refrigerator and pulls out two bottles of Barley Legal oatmeal stout. Her favorite. She hands me the bottles and I open up the drawer to the left of the dishwasher to get the opener. Then I hand one of the beers back to her.
“Well, it’s also not very nice to lie about being pregnant. Or threaten to kill yourself if your husband leaves you.”
We clink bottles. “Touché. I can’t argue with that.”
“I should hope not,” she replies then takes a long pull from her stout. “So why are you really here?”
I take a long draw on my beer then set it down on the granite counter. “I think you should sit down for this.”
She eyes me skeptically as I beckon her to the living room to sit on the sofa. As she takes a seat, I glance around the living room, hyperaware that Hallie is watching me from at least six different framed photos in this room. Once we’re both settled on the sofa, I take a deep breath and slip my phone out of my pocket. Then I look into my mother’s kind blue eyes, the same eyes Hallie and I inherited from her, as I prepare to annihilate her heart.
“Mom, there’s something I’ve been keeping from you.”
She looks confused and leery of the serious tone of this confession. “Houston, what did you do?”
Shit. She only calls me Houston when she’s upset with me. This is not setting a good tone for this conversation.
I let out a deep sigh. “I did something very bad. Awful. Maybe even unforgivable. But I need you to understand that I did it because I thought it was the only way to protect you and… and Rory.”
Her eyes widen at the mention of Rory’s name. “What happened to Rory?”
“Nothing,” I reply quickly. “I mean, physically she’s fine. Not sure I can say the same for her emotional state.”
“Houston, I am not going to ask you again. What did you do?”
I feel like fifteen-year-old Houston, sitting on the sofa as I confessed to shoplifting a video game when my mom insisted I tell her how I got the money to buy it. But keeping a secret isn’t illegal. Maybe it should be illegal to hurt someone the way I’ve hurt Rory, and the way I’m about to hurt my mom.
I swallow my fear as I reach forward and take her hand in mine. “Mom, I’ve been keeping a secret from you… about Hallie.”
She narrows her eyes at me and I squeeze her hand to reassure her as I continue.
I draw in a deep breath and spit out the next sentence in one exhalation. “Hallie was having an affair with Rory’s dad before she killed herself. She left a suicide note explaining the whole thing.”
In an instant, the flame in my mom’s eyes burns out and the muscles in her face slacken. “She left a note?”
Of all the things I just confessed, I expected her to comment on the affair first. But I s
uppose it’s her motherly instinct that makes her want to know if there’s a piece of her daughter left.
“Yes. She left it to me and she asked me not to show it to anyone. Not even you.”
She covers her mouth and her eyebrows knit together with grief as tears well up in her eyes. “Where is it?”
I let go of her hand so I can grab my phone and open up the photos app. “It’s in here. I took pictures of the letter, but I gave the actual letter to Rory because… because of what it said about her dad. I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t want to keep it from you for this long, but I thought I was honoring Hallie’s last wishes. I know now that I should have shown you the note right away. I’m so, so sorry.”
She stares at my phone as I hand it to her, but she doesn’t take it. “I can’t.” She shakes her head as she rises from the sofa and heads for the kitchen.
I follow closely behind her. “What do you mean? You don’t want to read it?”
“Not right now. I just… I’ve finally learned to accept it. If I read that, it will just set me back.”
This is not the reaction I expected from my mother. “Mom, did you know about any of this?” I ask, holding up the phone to indicate the contents of the letter.
Her lips tremble as she presses them together and nods her head. “He came to confess to me right after you and Rory broke up.”
“He came here? When? In August or… Not the first time we broke up?” My eyes widen as she nods. “Five and a half years ago?”
She nods again, crossing her arms over her chest as she leans back against the kitchen counter. “I wanted to kill him, but I couldn’t. He was beside himself with remorse and basically begging me to do with him as I pleased.” She wipes the tears from her face and stands up a little straighter. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if he was telling me the truth, that the affair began after she turned eighteen, but I knew there was no way to prove it now that she was gone. All I knew was that the man who stood before me was broken. He wasn’t like your dad. He was truly sickened by what he had done.” She glances at the phone in my hand then looks me in the eye. “Does the letter say when the affair began?”
I nod. “After her eighteenth birthday.” I run my fingers through my hair, unable to comprehend how she’s so calm about this. “Why aren’t you more angry about this? If not with me for keeping the letter from you, then with him. She’s gone because of him.”
She sighs with exasperation. “You’re right, she’s gone. But it’s not because of him.”
“What do you mean? It says so right here. She was disgusted with herself. She couldn’t live with what she’d done to Rory.”
She closes her eyes, pressing her fingertips to her temples. “No, Hugh. She’s gone because she didn’t know how to cope with her feelings. Your father and I weren’t the best examples of a loving relationship. She didn’t know how to deal with what she was feeling. That’s the only reason she’s gone. No one made her do what she did. She made that choice on her own.”
I clench my jaw as her words penetrate me, grow inside me, until I’m so full I can’t stop the tears from coming.
“We have to let her go,” she continues, her voice serene yet firm. “We have to let her go peacefully and with love. And we have to forgive him, and ourselves, for not knowing. It’s the only way to move on.”
“You can’t tell me you forgave him.”
She sniffs, wiping away more moisture from her cheeks. “It took a couple of years, but yes. Hallie would have wanted me to. She loved him.”
“She was a kid,” I reply, narrowing my eyes in disbelief. “She didn’t know what love was.”
“Are you trying to tell me it’s impossible for an eighteen-year-old to be in love? Isn’t that how old Rory was when you two were together?” She sighs with frustration. “Love makes people crazy. If it wasn’t love that drove her to the brink, then it was something else. But I’d rather believe it was love.”
“I refuse to believe she loved that—”
My mom’s expression is sober as she looks me in the eye. “Hugh, I found the old phone she used to contact him. There were tons of emails and messages, many of them unsent.”
A flame of anger flickers inside me. “She wasn’t in love. She was obsessed.”
“Is there really a difference?”
“Yes. He didn’t love her back.”
“How do you know that?”
This question coming from my mother’s lips stops me cold. I’ve never once considered that James may have loved Hallie. It never even crossed my mind. Yet, he did get divorced soon after Hallie’s death. Is it possible his grief tore his marriage apart?
I shook my head, unable to process this idea. “I messed everything up with Rory.”
“What happened?”
“After what happened with Tessa, I went to Rory’s apartment and gave her the letter, and she was… well, devastated doesn’t begin to describe it. Now she never wants to see me again.”
“Oh, that poor girl. Losing her best friend and you and now finding out about the affair like this. I’ll go talk to her. Just give me her new address.”
“I don’t have it. She moved to California yesterday.”
“California? Why?”
I tuck my phone into my pocket and pick up the beer I set down on the counter earlier. “She moved there with another guy. She’s not returning any of my calls.”
“Well, what are you doing here? Go to California and get her back.”
“I don’t know her new address. And I can’t just go there and drag her back to Oregon, caveman-style. I need a plan.”
She grabs her beer off the counter and takes a swig as she thinks of a response. “Well, I’m terrible at planning, but I’ll help in any way I can.”
“Thanks.” I take the beer from her hand and set both our drinks on the counter so I can give her a proper hug. “I’m sorry I didn’t show you the letter earlier.”
“If that’s the way Hallie wanted it, then I can’t fault you for it. In fact, I’m not sure I’d have wanted to hear it from you anyway. I might never have forgiven him if I knew you’d been dragged into this.”
I kiss the top of her head before I let her go. “I guess all that’s left to do now is to try and get Rory back.” I smile as I realize there’s only one person other than me who knows Rory well enough to help me formulate a plan. “I’ll come back soon, Mom. I have someone else I have to see today.”
* * *
I’m a bit confused and annoyed when I arrive at Kenny’s apartment in Killingsworth and find him and one of his friends struggling to load a refrigerator onto a U-Haul truck. Kenny is standing on the steel ramp holding the dolly with the fridge tipping backward toward him while his skinny blond friend is attempting to push it up the ramp.
“Push harder!” Kenny shouts at his friend, who proceeds to laugh so hard they drop the fridge back into its upright position.
“I’m sorry!” the blond guy shrieks with laughter. “You said push harder. It’s just… too funny. I’m sorry.”
Kenny grunts with frustration before he spots me crossing the street toward him. “Oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God.”
“You guys need some help?” I ask.
The blond guy spins around and gasps. “Who is that?”
Kenny smacks the guy’s arm. “He’s taken.”
“God, you never share.”
I clear my throat. “You need a hand?”
“Yes, please,” Kenny replies.
I grab the handle of the dolly. “Just push the top back a little so we can tilt it.”
They help me tilt the fridge toward me, and I haul the appliance into the truck myself. Once I’ve moved it safely into place, I undo the straps and slide the dolly out. Then I push the fridge against the inner wall of the truck and head down the ramp.
“That was hot,” the blond guy remarks.
I wipe the dust off my hands onto my jeans and reach my hand out to him. “I’m Houston.”
 
; The guy looks at my hand as if I’ve offered him a snake.
Kenny rolls his eyes as he nudges his friend out of the way. “To what do we owe the pleasure of your company, Houston?”
“Actually, I have a favor to ask of you.”
“Go on.”
I flash him a modest smile, hoping to raise my chances of getting a yes out of him. “I need you to help me get Rory back.”
Kenny turns to his friend. “John, go inside and take a break. I’ll be in in a minute.” When John is gone, Kenny purses his lips at me. “You wrecked Rory. How do I know you’re not going to hurt her again?”
“Because I’m done being a lying dirtbag.”
Kenny narrows his eyes at me. “Sounds like you’ve been rehearsing. Okay, what do you plan to do if you get her back?”
I’m stumped by this question, but I know he won’t accept I don’t know as an answer. “I’m… going to ask her to marry me.”
“That’s it?” He doesn’t look impressed.
I take a deep breath to calm my nerves. I suddenly feel as if my entire future rides on the next words out of my mouth. This is the most important pitch of my life.
“I’m going to spend the rest of my life loving her and proving to her that my love is real by making her every wish come true.”
Kenny covers his mouth and lets out a soft oh. “Curse you for being straight.”
“So does that mean you’ll help me? Because I’m fucking dying here. I need your help.”
He’s silent for a moment as he considers my request, then he stands up straight and salutes me like a soldier. “Private Kenny Rhodes reporting for duty on Operation Gay Agenda.”
I laugh. “So what’s the agenda, Private?”
He looks at me like I’m stupid. “You just said it. You’re going to make her every wish come true.”
“Well, that’s over the span of our lifetimes. I can’t make her every wish come true in the next few weeks or months or however long Operation Gay Agenda takes. There has to be an end in sight. And I need a clear objective.”