Chapter 10
Growing up Maru had been the pride of her parents, especially her father. She’d been the pride of her school too. She didn’t understand that her ability to succeed was also due to special allowances. Extra time in the labs, pardons from school to go to special “smart kid” camps, invitations to participate in science fairs, grants for equipment. Learning came naturally to her, so it only seemed natural that all the other stuff should follow too.
It wasn’t until she was in the city that she experienced her first true block. Up until then the only real things she’d run into was her own lack of knowledge, and that was only a challenge, a puzzle to solve. She’d never had to compete against serious rivals. Big fish in a small pond.
At school in the city everyone was brainy like her. It was an elite program and it attracted the smartest and most determined students, and a lot of them had grown up in urban centers, grew up competing with the brightest and best. She wasn’t accustomed to that and quickly found herself floundering, suddenly reduced to regular, average.
No more extra attention.
Could she do this without it?
It was a startling realization. It was also an embarrassing realization. She wasn’t, at that time, the type to let it get her down. She worked furiously hard. Her memories from the first two years of her program are swampy at best; murky in the swirl of living for only a single purpose. She can’t exactly pinpoint when she stopped being driven by curiosity and passion, when she gave over completely to proving herself. At first it had seemed like a marvellous opportunity, like she was unlocking her highest potential.
By the time she was in her third year she had, to her mind, proven herself. But that didn’t seem to matter. It was you can’t do that without a permit or you have to wait six months to ten years to be approved by the board and you need a PHd to be allowed to do that thing we know you’re 100% capable of.
She’d built a yobadamn AI robot when she was seventeen years old in her childhood bedroom, and now she wasn’t allowed to make one because the University didn’t think she was “qualified” enough to enter the lab without faculty supervision.
The last two years of school felt like a painfully drawn out fight to be allowed to do her best. In the end it wore her down and she wasn’t sure she even cared anymore. In the end she just felt stupid. She’d never felt that way before.
So she’d retreated home, at the very least thinking she’d have the opportunity to do what she pleased. Though she had no idea what pleased her anymore.
She knew her reaction to Harvey telling her off yesterday was too emotional. She knew she was being reasonable, and that following the rules in the medical profession, of all things, was probably the exact place rules needed to be followed most. She had crossed the line.
The similarity of the incident to her past experience had caused her to flare up, she knows this too. She doesn’t know how to explain this to Harvey, not without divulging the full pathetic past.
She settles with apologizing, and having to allow Harvey to think she’s ridiculously stubborn and hot-tempered. Maybe that wouldn’t be so far from the truth, she can’t tell.
When she shows up to work she goes to his office before changing into her uniform. She has a sick feeling like he still might fire her.
“Harvey… I’m sorry about yesterday. I kinda of… have a thing about people telling me what I can’t do.” She finds she can only look at her shoes when she says it. Is she afraid of the matter-of-fact Harvey, or the kind Harvey?
He swivels around in his office chair to look at her, “yes, I’ve noticed that.”
“I really don’t want to put your practise in jeopardy. It won’t happen again.”
“No, I don’t think it will.”
Looking at him now, “are we okay?”
He sighs, “of course we are. You’re such a help here Maru, really it is lovely to have you back.”
“Thank you…” She’s not sure if she feels relief. Does she deserve this kindness? Does that matter?
“What is it? Do I have something on my face?” He rubs a hand along the corner of his mouth when she stares at him too long.
“No…” In truth she was contemplating telling him off for not scolding her harder, instead she changes the subject. “Are you going to tell me about the ‘house call’ you went on yesterday?”
“Uh…” Harvey’s ears go pink.
“Because you know that I know there wasn’t a house call…”
“It was a house call… just not exactly a professional one.”
“Oh?” She raises an eyebrow.
He brings his hand to his forehead, “yoba, that’s not what I meant. Well, yes it kind of is.”
“Who?” She asks plainly.
“Elliott.” Harvey breathes, face fully read, a smile he can’t stop pulling at his lips. He starts fanning himself with his clipboard. When he realizes he’s doing this he immediately drops his giddy expression and places the clipboard back on the desk.
They look at each other in silence for a moment before both bursting out laughing.
“ I am pathetic.” Harvey laughs, wiping a tear out of his eye.
“You’re way too old to be like this,” she shakes her head in disapproval. “Was yesterday the beginning?”
“Yes. Well… I liked him ever since I read his book.”
“Two years ago?”
He goes even more red, “I didn’t think he would ever notice me.”
“But then he jumped into the water to save you and you got some hope, huh?”
“I suppose so.”
“I’m happy for you, Harvey.” Though in honesty she doesn’t really get it, she has always had trouble empathizing with intense emotions, especially romantic ones.
Jas comes by the farm sometimes to sulk. She’s taken to sitting in the apple tree outside Shane’s window and… he’s not sure really – wallowing? Drawing depressing pictures, reading emo YA novels, painting her nails black. She’s at that age. It freaks him out, seeing that formerly bright kid like this.
Ry tries to tell him it’s a normal phase of puberty. Doesn’t make him feel any better.
“Why does she come here though? If she’s just going to be anti-social. She’s like pissed if I try to talk to her.”
Ry just gives him the are-you-being-fucking-serious look.
“She’s not like me.” He says it more out of the necessity for it to be true, in reality he can’t tell where him and Jas overlap.
Ry frowns, perhaps detecting his distress, and takes another approach. “There’s not a lot of logic to the prepubescent mind, Shane. She’s probably outgrowing Marnie’s rules for her and feeling a bit stifled. She literally only has Vincent to talk to.”
“I don’t trust that kid.”
Ry rolls her eyes, “too bad.”
“I feel like I can’t do anything.” He would never express this earnest worry about another topic, but this is Jas. He’s terrified of her ending up like him.
“Support her interests.”
“She doesn’t seem to have any beyond sulking.”
“Try to show her some new ones.”
“Like what? All I know is animals and she lives on a yobadamn ranch.”
“Throw a gridball around, take her fishing.”
He’s sceptical, “she seems pretty girly…”
“Ah yes, because being feminine and being athletic are mutually exclusive, totally forgot.”
Point taken.
So he tries.
He feels incredibly awkward about it, but he tries.
“Uh Jas, you want to learn how to throw a gridball?”
“I know how to throw a gridball.” She says without looking up from whatever angst-ridden book she’s reading.
“Alright, show me.”
“No.” She turns the page of her book.
Okay… so that didn’t work.
“Want to go fishing?”
“No.”
A last, desperate effort. “Want to… go to the mall?”
That at least gets her to look at him. “The mall? With you? Is that a joke?”
“No.”
“I’d rather play gridball and fish at the same time than go to the mall.”
Alright, so he struck out.
“I think she hates me, Ry.” He says to her the next time their paths converge.
“She doesn’t hate you. At least not in an actual way.”
“Just in a fake way, then.”
“Just in a fake way.” Ry pats him on the head and then heads off to check on the pomegranate trees. He doesn’t feel any better. Mostly because he doesn’t think it is fake.
He’d fucked up with pretty much everyone in town. He knows he was an insufferable asshole, but he doesn’t know the extent to which he was because there’s so much fuzz clogging up his memories. He prefers it that way, most of the time. Makes it easier not to have to wince every time he encounters someone from town.
Something he’s only ever admitted to Ry is that he doesn’t really care that much. He knows that because he’s sober and balanced now he’s supposed to be nicer to people and a better citizen, but it’s not like his sober mind enjoys the people of Pelican town any more than he used to. He tries to be decent and not outright disrespectful, and he’d done his rounds in apologizing to the people, but does he actually give a shit if Lewis likes him? Or Pierre or Jodi?
No. He really doesn’t.
He’s glad that Ry and Emily accept him, know him well enough to see how he’s changed, and that’s enough. Apologizing to Gus had wracked him with nerves before he’d worked up the ability to do it because he knew he’d caused that man pain more than once, but to the rest of the town he’d just been unpleasant. He still thought of himself as unpleasant, so was that really worth getting worked up over? It was just him.
The only people he feels he actually wants to think well of him are Marnie and Jas.
Marnie was easy to get there, easier than he deserved. When he started going to AA and therapy and seriously dedicating himself to get better she was over the moon, as proud as if he’d been the first person to walk on it. It had often been stifling, when his thoughts had leaned towards thinking he was bound to fail, but he didn’t fail, or hadn’t yet.
But Jas… Jas was a kid. A little kid when he’d been at his worst. He’d missed important days, he’d been drunk on others. And then when he’d gotten better, he’d left her. Sure, he was only a short distance away, but he figured it still probably hurt her, even though he’d needed to do it. How do you make a kid understand that?
He has no fucking clue. He doesn’t even know how to try and make it better. He thought she must like him at least a little bit to choose to come hide out at his place, but it was hard to tell. For a long time he’d opted to give her space, not crowd in on her when the horrible drunken image was still so fresh and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get away from it himself. But he’d been sober long enough now that he couldn’t use that as an excuse to push away anymore.
The what if would always be there, but he can try to make the distance between it and himself as great as possible.
“Oh hi… I didn’t know you were working here again.” Penny said with an embarrassment that bordered on mortification. She was the first person in that day, an unusually early appointment for them.
“Just started.” Maru said flatly, today was the beginning of her second week back.
“Right well… I have an appointment.” Penny states, rather redundantly. Maru has all the appointments for the entire month memorized, it’s not like there are many.
“Harvey will be out in a second.”
Penny nodded shyly and then retreated to one of the waiting room chairs. She perched herself on the very edge of it, legs folded carefully. Maru had the impression she was trying very hard not to display nervousness. When Harvey came through the door to call her she was up before he’d finished saying her name.
Maru continued with her work, not passing much of a thought to Penny. She was thinking about the evening previous, the first family dinner with Seb back that Alex had been there too. It had been oddly… fine.
Back in school Alex and Sebastian had always had something of a hostile relationship. Seb had been a gangly emo weirdo and Alex had been a meathead jock. As far as Maru knew there hadn’t been any bullying between them, but she remembers hearing Sam, Abigail and her brother’s snide remarks about those “vapid gorillas” on the gridball team, the sneering between the two parties at town festivals.
It hadn’t interested her at all back then, she’d been too consumed in her interest of how the natural world worked to care about social nuance, back then those somehow seeming to be separate entities. But it interested her now. Their polite “please pass the orange purple mushroom pasta” and “would you like some hot sauce?” The neutrality of washing the dishes in silence together.
She was shocked out of these thoughts when Penny bustled quickly through the door from the examination room and rushed for the exit. Penny didn’t look at her, seemed quite intent on not making any eye contact, but Maru thought she spotted the edge of red rimmed eyes.
A moment later Harvey joined her behind the counter with his clipboard held tight to his chest.
“I’m going to have to ask that I type this one up.”
She understands that it’s Penny who’s asked that Maru doesn’t see what the check-up was about. She nods and gets up from her seat at the computer, letting Harvey slide in.
“Why don’t you set up the examination room for Caroline?”
Maru doesn’t protest, doesn’t show on her face that she’s extremely curious as to what happened during that appointment. What would make Penny cry? Was she really sick? Was the amount of time she spent reading tiny print going to make her lose her eyesight completely?
When Harvey left to have lunch with Elliott and she was supposed to be having her own lunch she couldn’t resist the urge to find out. She knew she was on thin ice since she’d illegally given Ry stitches but this wasn’t illegal, as Harvey’s aide she had full access to his patients medical details as she was often the one handing out medications or assisting in operation. It was only extremely impolite and going directly against Penny’s desire.
When Harvey was halfway to the beach she locked the front door and slowly, pretending she felt no urgency, she walked to the desktop, sat down, and accessed Penny’s file, drawing up the latest input.
It was a pregnancy test. A yobadamn pregnancy test? Penny?
Maru was so startled by this that she forgot where on the form the results were written and spent way too long frantically searching.
Negative.
Maru’s body sighed a relief. Until she thought maybe that’s why Penny had been crying. Did Penny want a child? Maru was not ready for that idea.
Feeling panicked she quickly exited out of the file and without thinking turned the entire computer off. She got up, grabbed her jacket and ran out the door. She walked briskly up to the fountain near the old community center and began pacing around, much like Harvey used to do.
Yoba, Penny, thinking she was pregnant! She knew it had to be Sam. Sam or Connell or possibly both. The idea of Penny with Sam and Connell at the same time made Maru collapse heavily into a bench. Then she got up and started pacing again.
It wasn’t that she was against Penny enjoying two men at a time, it was more the choice of men. She’d tried, and was mostly successful, in shoving the image of Penny stumbling down the beach with the two of them that night at the luau. Now it came flooding back to her and she felt guilt coming along with it too. Or maybe she didn’t like the idea of Penny with two guys at a time? Penny’s still eighteen in her head, like she was before Maru left and unwittingly drove a stake through the heart of their friendship. Even though Penny had very clearly told her she wasn’t her innocent teenage self anymore, Maru hadn’t accepted that.
Penny, her oldest supposed friend, had yelled at her that she wanted nothing to do with her that night on the beach. She’d called Maru a self-centered asshole, or basically had, and Maru had been so righteously put off by it that she’d never tried to make things right. Hadn’t allowed herself to think or care about her afterwards. Now Penny, bookish shy Penny, had thought she was pregnant, and Maru wasn’t able to talk to her about it.
She felt shitty. She felt really shitty.
She’s startled out of her thoughts by an eerie creek of a door and then a slam – Ry, coming out of the community center with an irritated look on her face.
Maru feels too distressed by her guilt to have a conversation with someone and wants to pretend she didn’t see her, wants to run back to the clinic and hide. Better yet, run to the woods and keep pacing around.
“You alright?” Ry asks as she approached.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Maru says too abruptly.
“You seem…” then Ry just shakes her head and bites her lip as she looks away. For some reason that makes Maru feel self-conscious. She doesn’t need to be under Ry’s scrutiny right now, she doesn’t need to now be wondering what it was Ry had been about to say.
“I just… saw something I shouldn’t have.” Maru finds herself saying, even though she doesn’t want to elaborate.
“Walk in on Harvey giving Elliott a physical?” Ry says casually. It had been less than a week and already everyone in town knew about them, much to Harvey’s chagrin.
“No, I’d rather have done that.” She says flatly.
“I bet.” Ry raises an eyebrow, unduly intrigued.
Maru blushes, realizing how Ry was choosing to take her thoughtless statement, was the farmer always this provocative?
“I didn’t mean… what I meant was…”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me. Patient confidentiality I’m assuming?”
Maru nods, relieved at being taken off the hook from answering, wondering since when in the hell her tongue got so tangled, that wasn’t like her.
“So, um, why were you in the community center?”
“Huh? Oh, Lewis gave me a key when Joja moved out of town.” She shrugs, clearly uninterested in talking about it even though her reply hardly answered the question.
Lewis had had this idea that if Joja left Pelican town they might be able to revive the old building, but then Joja had left, not due to any resurgence of local business, but because the economy dwindled so badly it wasn’t worth it for them to stay. They moved to a more bustling hub a couple towns away. The community center was left to decay. Why the hell a farmer would be hanging out in there was beyond Maru, but she decided not to press.
“You have to head back to work still?” Ry asks her, perhaps to change the subject.
“I should be getting back soon.”
“Too bad.” Ry says and she sounds like she genuinely does think it’s too bad before biding her farewell and making her way back to the farm.
Maru watches her go wondering what the hell she meant by too bad. What would she had said if Maru had been free?
Alex had been avoiding going to the gym while Evelyn was at mah-jong. He really didn’t want to run into that girl again and he also really didn’t want to run into Shane. He figured if he sat in on the games with his grandma there was only the most minimal time period in which he could run into either of them.
The old ladies loved having him around, though his grandma had started giving him these sad looks as she sorted her tiles. Something told him it wasn’t disappointment in how little he grasped the rules of the game.
Then one week she told him not to come.
“What do you mean don’t come?” He’d already picked her up from the home, they were in the car and halfway there. She could have told him before that she didn’t want to go, he thinks, and starts wondering if she’s losing her memory.
“I mean you need to stop coming to mah-jong and do something you actually like.” She says plainly.
He grips the steering wheel a little harder, “I like mah-jong. I thought everyone liked having me there too…”
“You don’t like it, you hardly pay attention. Do you know how disturbing it is, Alex? To see you so deep inside your head? It’s unnatural.”
“So now you’re mad at me for thinking?”
“Well at least I still have the comfort of you being slow on the draw.” She says sarcastically.
“Okay, so you’re mad at me for thinking, and you think I’m stupid and bad at mah-jong, anything else?”
She narrows her eyes at him, “I think you need to stop avoiding things.”
Yoba, did she know about the gym girl?
Looking back out the car window, “you need to do things you like, for yourself, not just me. We’ve had this conversation already and I just… think you should want more for yourself.”
They drive the rest of the way in silence. At first Alex has incredibly foolish thoughts like I’ll show her I like mah-jong, I’ll become the best mah-jong player senior ladies club has ever seen! When he gets there he silently pulls his gym bag out of the back and heads for the change rooms.
The girl isn’t there, and he’s relieved. He knows if he sees her he’ll have to pretend he lost her number, and then she’ll blush and give it to him again, and they’ll end up going out for dinner sometime and he’ll get attached to her but in a strictly non-romantic kind of way, she’ll want more, and then he’ll agree because he’s afraid to lose her friendship and spend his nights lying next to her naked body, staring at the ceiling and wondering what was so great about ‘having a life’.
Nobody talks to him in the gym and he enjoys the slow strain of working his body. He had been missing coming here, they had better equipment than his own and the weight room in the town spa combined. The flush of increased blood-flow and endorphins helps clear his head and he feels his annoyance at his grandma’s concern start to ebb off. Slightly.
Afterwards he ends up seeing one of the people he was trying to avoid, but realizes he doesn’t mind so much.
“Thinking of joining a modern dance class for pre-teens then?”
Shane whips around to stare at him. He’d been inspecting the board of notices with intense scrutiny before Alex had snuck up on him. Shane’s surprised face fades and he drags his eyes up and down Alex in a way that makes him remember the arrogance of his youth, how he would have interpreted that look. Now he just feels unsure, and wracks a nervous hand through his still-damp hair.
“Think there’s any chance they won’t call the cops if I go for it?” Shane says looking back at the notice board.
“I think they should call the cops on you just for thinking about it.” Alex says, leaning against the wall and watching Shane’s face.
“I’m that dangerous, huh?”
Shane looks him in the eye and Alex finds himself unable to answer.
“It’s for Jas.” Shane elaborates, breaking eye contact. “I think she needs… more.”
Alex wants to laugh, but not in a mocking way. He imagines Shane giving Jas the same talk his grandma had just given him in the car. When it’s not directed at him he realizes how kind of a worry it is.
He’s in the middle of trying to tell Shane that’s nice without sounding condescending then he feels a hand on his shoulder. The hand belongs to Evelyn. Her group has just left the class and all the old ladies say hi to Alex and they slowly walk past him to the exit. He nods at them, acutely aware of Shane’s smirk when that elicits school-girl giggling from the group.
“Hello Evelyn,” Shane says, catching Alex off guard with his amicable tone.
“Ah Shane, don’t you look well.” Evelyn reaches out and takes Shane’s hand to pat in grandmotherly fashion. He looks embarrassed and at a loss for words. “I hear you’re taking care of all those animals up there on the farm now?”
“Uh, yes ma’am.” Shane says awkwardly, like a boy. Alex had never witnessed him use a tone of respect with anyone before.
“No surprise, you were always good with little creatures when you were a kid.”
“You remember that, huh?” He seems genuinely surprised, but Alex isn’t – his grandma always remembers the good in people.
“It’s only the short-term I have trouble remembering. Now do me a favour and look after my grandson too, I’m worried about him.”
“Grandma!” Alex feels himself turning pink.
“What? I can’t do it anymore, and wouldn’t you prefer this strapping young lad anyhow?”
Alex’s brain short-circuits. His grandma had always been a little mischievous but he hadn’t seen it since George died. He was mixed with a sense of gladness and embarrassment that did not compute.
“Don’t worry Evelyn, I think our boy here is doing alright.” Shane’s looking at him with an amused softness he doesn’t know how to take.
Our boy.
“Oh sure,” and Evelyn winks at Shane like they have a secret conspiracy.