Page 47 of Big & Lily

Lily screws up her face like I asked her to eat worms. “What? What kind of question is that? No! Dane?” Another handful of ferns. She’s going to clear the forest at this rate. “I mean, he’s handsome, and entertaining, and not so bad in—well, never mind that. But that was a one-off. Believe me.”

I think about Dane, trying to catch Lily’s eye so many times this morning. She wasn’t playing it cool. She was trying to ghost him in plain sight. “How does he feel about that?”

She shrugs. She knows he doesn’t think it was a one-off.

“You should tell him.”

“He’ll figure it out.”

She’s doing that same thing that got us to Alaska in the first place. Walking away from the hard thing.

“I wouldn’t be so sure. I think he’s smitten.”

Lily shoots me another incredulous glare. “What? Don’t be ridiculous. It was a one-night stand. Stop asking stupid questions.” Her head goes back into her arms and knees, and she says something that is muffled and windswept but unmissable. “Besides, I love Eric.”

My eyes burn from all the sadness that comes with that statement. I tuck my chin on Lily’s shoulder.

“I also hate him. I hate him very fucking much,” she growls.

“You still haven’t told me what happened with Eric. Aside from the obvious. What did he say?” The time had finally come to get this out in the open. “What was his rationale for doing something so stupid? Not that it will change anything.”

“Can we not, Big?”

“Can we not what? I don’t understand why you’re holding back right now.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t what?” I’m starting to feel like this is aWho’s on First?situation. “You know my vivid imagination and my excellent ability to catastrophize. Not telling me is making me think the very worst things.” Suddenly I wonder if this is one of those very worst things. My heart thumps in my chest. Did we come out here to escape something more than facing a confrontation? That’s the problem with a vivid imagination. It runs away with you.

“Christ, Big. You’re just going to have to drop it. I’m not in the mood for a therapy session with you about why my husband cheated on me. And now I’ve fucked up with Dane. Just leave it at that.”

It’s uncharacteristic, to say the least. Lily has spent a lifetime vomiting the intimate details of her life all over me. She’s read diary entries out loud, made me smell her breath and her armpits before dates, described her periods, reported on bowel movements. The demise of her marriage is bigger than all that, but I’d think it, more than anything, warrants a hashing through.

“Okay, then,” I say, giving up that line of questioning, for now. “What’s the plan?”

“Plan?”

“With Dane. There are seven of us on this trip. We are sharing some tight quarters—planes, trains, and automobiles and all that. There’s no avoiding him, if that’s your game.”

“I’m going to use you as cover.”

“Oh, so now you want me to run interference?”

“Come on, we can just stick together. That’s what you want anyway.”

“I’m not so sure anymore...”

“Hey. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry I locked you out of the cabin. That was a shitty thing to do. You can get me back. Shove me off a cliff, sacrifice me to a polar bear. Then we can call it even.”

It was shitty, what Lily did. Inconsiderate. Selfish. Really, really dumb. But if she hadn’t locked me out, I wouldn’t have had that evening with Brick, and that evening with Brick, once I got past the mortification of playing the drunken fool, has got me thinking about some things differently.

“I’m not sacrificing you to a polar bear. My luck, I’ll be the one who’d end up being eaten. Here’s the deal. We only have a few days left here. Let’s try to make the best of it. Let’s accept Alaska’s gifts.”

“Alaska’s what?”

“Never mind. What I’m saying is let’s have fun, like you’ve been saying, and take advantage of the time we have here. In a few days we’ll be back in Jersey.”

“We could stay,” Lily says, smiling wryly. “We could stay here and open a Sweet Dreams Two.”