Page 38 of Fly with Me

You gonna tell me about the woman who wants to be your fake girlfriend?

“It’s not fair that since your voice is a figment of my imagination you know what’s going on in my head.”

A privilege of being mostly dead, I guess.

“Jake.” Her eyes went misty.

Stop crying and tell me about her. It’s boring here.

Olive dabbed her eyes with her napkin, before realizing it had some of the pepper grease on it. She ran to the sink and flushed her eyeballs to stop the burning. “God, why did you have to like the spicy sub. Damn it.”

Murphy’s Law strikes again.

“Bastard.” She almost smiled then. He’d be dying laughing if he saw her do all that. Such a typical Olive move.

Face a mess, and eyes probably still fire-engine red, she sat back beside her brother. Her feet rested on the bottom wheel beneath the hospital bed.

“Stella’s a pilot, so of course you’d love her. And before you ask, no, it doesn’t make me want to get on more planes. Yeah, she wants me to be her fake girlfriend, and that’s so fucking weird. But Jesus, she’s spectacular.”

Spectacular, eh?

“Yeah. And her dad’s sick, and she wants to do this for him. She’s super driven. Type A like you. Really smart and funny, sometimes unintentionally. She’s flying all day today, so we’re going to talk tomorrow night. I’m going to give her a final answer about the whole ‘fake girlfriends’ thing then. I sound like an idiot saying that aloud.”

Is this one more way to put off your own stuff?

“What do you mean? I don’t have any of my own stuff.” Olive had spoken without thinking. “I mean, I’m working my way through the national parks you hadn’t been to yet. I only have so much leave after what happened last year, and—”

You didn’t take the flight back from Orlando.

Olive scowled.

She hadn’t even confessed that humiliating truth to Derek. The truth of her canceling her flight and renting a car because even though she’d succeeded once she couldn’t quite believe she’d be able to get on that next plane again, Valium or no.

The Jake in her mind did not seem ready to let up.

What do you mean you don’t have stuff?

What did she mean when that had fallen out of her mouth like self-pitying word vomit?

How could she explain without seeming like even more of a wreck? She couldn’t tell him that nothing mattered in the last year. She couldn’t figure out the way to explain that she was going through his list, but none of it brought her an ounce of joy.

She’d tried. She’d been trying. She’d tried so hard to do exactly what Jake would have done. The parks were beautiful, and it felt right to be doing something to honor his life since so much of his current situation felt like her fault.

Damn it, he’d made his list, and she’d check off everything since he couldn’t.

But in this, she also felt like she was failing. Lately, she felt like she was doing nothing but failing. With every passive-aggressive email from her mother’s lawyer. Every realization of how long it had been since she’d spoken to her father. It was crystal clear that she was the bad guy. It had always been pretty clear that Jake was Mom’s favorite child and Heather was Dad’s, given that she’d joined the family business. But before the accident… the Murphys had always been a unit. Now the remaining ones were united against her.

A tiny curl of anger simmered in her chest.

She stood and paced beside the too quiet and too still hospital bed.

“Look, I’m trying. I’m doing the best I can. Don’t you know this year has sucked? I miss you. And you’re gone. I miss our family being an actual fucking family. I-I feel so…” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word alone. He was technically right beside her. “And so what if I said I didn’t have stuff. I’m trying to do your stuff. I ran the half-marathon, didn’t I? That’s what you wanted. And I did it.” A childish urge to stamp her foot came over her.

What I wanted?

She was getting into a fight with her brother. Her brother who was in a persistent vegetative state. Super normal.

Olive looked away from Jake’s face. Her race medal now hung on a hook from the large bulletin board beside his bed. His was back on the hook beside it now too. The rest of the board was covered by family photos and cards that Heather and her mother had assembled from the “before times” when they’d all gotten together for the tiniest reasons. Jake would find out Fiona took her first steps and then invite everyone to his house for a dinner to celebrate. Olive got a promotion at work—cookout at Jake’s to celebrate. Derek was almost always there too, dragged along with Olive since childhood sometimes staring at Jake in a way that Olive thought maybe someday… That bulletin board seemed like a lie now. All those hours that used to be filled with family events were now spent doing the things on his list. Yet it didn’t help.