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Chapter 7
Oliver
I watched Holland go, the night draining of color as her car rolled out the exit ramp, leaving me standing alone in a darkened parking garage. If I let myself get all metaphysical, I could compare the vast empty concrete space and the cool empty night around me to the state of my soul. A week ago, I might have let myself wallow in that for a bit, but right now I actually didn’t want to. I wanted to hold on to the glimmer of life I’d felt sitting at Holland’s side, watching her face light up as she saw the possibilities in her own design, as she understood how fucking brilliant her idea truly was. Seeing that light come into her had done something to me, made me want something I hadn’t wanted in almost a year—to connect. To actually feel a connection to another person, to share an experience, to know you’re sitting next to someone who understands exactly the same thing you do in a particular moment, even if the moment is fleeting.
Turning to approach my own car, I felt the darkness creeping back in around the edges of Holland’s momentary flash. I pulled open the driver’s door and sat for a long minute, shaking my head as I realized the truth. Wanting that connection was ridiculous. For one thing, she clearly wanted little to do with me, and I couldn’t blame her. I’d spent most of the past week in a bar trying to talk myself out of coming here, looking for her. That was a battle I’d obviously lost. For another thing, I already knew exactly how it would turn out. It had taken me twenty-six years to learn that humans were meant to be solitary creatures. We come into the world alone and vulnerable, and if we don’t learn to understand that fact as kids, then we’ve got painful lessons ahead. I’d spent most of my life completely sheltered from that truth, and I didn’t feel gratitude toward those who had kept it from me. We’re all alone, and finding strength and comfort in solitude might not make you happy, but at least you couldn’t get hurt. I was getting good at solitude. Or I had been. Until I’d met Holland.
The 405 freeway was as irritatingly packed as ever through West LA, people lighting up their brakes for no apparent reason around almost every curve. I took the inside lane and found my way through, swerving as necessary between other cars and finally pulling off the exit at Mulholland Drive and slowing around the curves on Nichols Canyon. When the gates to my driveway opened, I pulled through and sat in the Mercedes for a few minutes, staring up at the house in front of me. The house I’d inherited ten weeks ago. From people I thought were my parents. Now it felt odd, living in a house at once so familiar and suddenly so foreign.
The house was lit up as always, the solar torches lining the walkway to the front door glowing above creeping flowers and casting shadows on the roses that lined the walls of the property against the street. I closed my eyes hard. I didn’t want to look at the roses. I could hardly see them without seeing Sonja out there, sun visor over her thick hair, her hands gloved as she tended to her favorite plants.
Dammit. I sucked in a ragged breath, putting the key into the door and punching in the alarm code. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to feel any of this. I didn’t want to miss them. And more than that, I didn’t want to hate them. But I didn’t know how to stop doing either one. I leaned, or maybe fell, against the door as it shut behind me, and I stared around the foyer with its soaring ceiling and Spanish tile. I was trapped between worlds. Every aspect of my life was at once false and way too comfortable.
When everything around you is as reliable as sand shifting beneath your feet, what the hell do you have to hold on to? I stalked down the long hallway, ignoring the photographs of myself staring out from the wall, the team pictures, the family portraits, the graduation photos. All pictures of a guy who had no fucking idea about anything. Glaring at the closed doors to the master bedroom, I turned and fell onto the bed in my own room. In my old room. The room that had belonged to someone else. I drifted to sleep with an old familiar image in my mind—a hand on my cheek, a bear in my hands. And a car door slamming as someone left. I’d had this floating fragment of memory—was it a memory?—for as long as I could remember. Someone leaving. Always leaving.
—
For the week after I’d seen Holland again, I stayed in the house, wallowing in my confusion like a hermit, draining Adam’s liquor cabinet and sleeping next to the pool in the backyard as I had in the days immediately after the funeral. After learning the truth. I hadn’t answered the phone—not that it rang often, and I didn’t go anywhere. Mindless European soccer games blared at me from the massive flat screen in the front room, and the Bluetooth speakers by the pool shot out beats much more jovial and giddy than I ever remembered feeling. Had I been a part of all this at some time? The longer I stayed here, inert, letting the world move forward without me, the harder it was to believe I’d ever done anything else.
Adam’s and Sonja’s relatives had stopped coming by weeks ago, and the freezer was still full of frozen casseroles. The neighbors, who weren’t that neighborly, anyway, quit checking in. Everyone who’d been part of the false life Adam and Sonja had constructed had finally gotten the idea that I wasn’t going to just put the mask back on and continue blundering blindly through a world that didn’t even really exist. And they’d given up. Thankfully.
Holland’s face danced behind my eyes sometimes as I let the sun blast down on me, and I batted it mentally away. Pretty unsuccessfully, if you wanted the truth. She didn’t need to know how often I actually called her image up on purpose; that I’d spent hours obsessing about the way her shirt had pulled across her breasts that first time we’d met. She definitely didn’t need to know I’d read her personnel file like it was the next Patterson bestseller, or that her image was particularly hard to defeat when I was in the shower, or in bed. I couldn’t explain the fascination to myself, just allowed the idea of her to keep me company. Ideas didn’t take back every promise they’d ever made or suddenly pull your world out from beneath your feet.
And ideas didn’t call. Which was why I thought I might be hallucinating when she actually did.
