Page 13 of High Season

NINE

It rains on the day that Josie Jackson returns to the C?te d’Azur.

“Madness,” says Calvin. “It doesn’t rain for weeks, and then this . On today of all days.”

He dashes from the car to the house, swearing loudly, a suitcase flailing from each hand.

The dirt drive, which Josie remembers being baked hard by sun, a trail of orange dust always marking her legs, has turned to mud.

Calvin splashes through puddles that look, in the cooling evening light, the color of blood.

The air is thick. The rain is hot. Josie turns her face skyward. She closes her eyes and stretches her arms out, as if she cannot get enough of the feel of water against her skin. As if she has never been caught in a rainstorm before. As if she cannot bear to go inside.

“It looks like shit in here,” Josie says, as the door shuts behind her.

Calvin drops a suitcase on the floor.

“Thanks,” he says. “There’s fresh towels upstairs. I thought you might want to take a shower.”

“A shower?”

“I had one put in. A couple of years ago. After…”

He tilts his head, letting the words fall into the silence.

“After Mum died?” Josie fills in for him.

He ducks his head and Josie sees the dart of sadness still within him. She knows. She feels it, too, except her sadness is tinged with regret. Guilt.

“After I took over the house,” he says instead.

He holds out one of the bags toward her. It feels light. Too light to contain almost everything Josie owns.

“Am I in…” She pauses. “Am I in my old bedroom?”

It’s all so ancient and so new, all at the same time. So much time has passed. There are so many things that they don’t know about each other.

“It’s your bedroom,” her brother says. “That hasn’t changed.”

The shower is slow and creaking, in spite of its relative newness.

The water is a thin, lackluster stream, which takes forever to heat up, but is scalding when it does.

Still, Josie stands beneath it for a long time.

She washes her hair with a slim, damp sliver of soap.

She lets her body grow pink, slightly singed.

Her fingers crumple into a soft concertina of skin.

When Josie finally steps out, the room is full of steam. Her lungs ache with the heat of each inhale. She feels clean and warm in a way that she hasn’t in a while, right down to her bones.

She pulls her damp hair back into a ponytail.

She hasn’t had it cut for months and her roots are growing out, brown bleeding into the yellow blond.

She should really get it redone, and soon.

Before too many people have time to notice her.

She has already agonized over this for weeks, catching sight of herself in full-length mirrors and wondering if there is anything left of the old Josie.

The short, freckled girl from twenty years ago. Anything that people might recognize.

She wipes condensation from the small mirror that she has looked in a hundred times before and lets this version of herself stare back, scrutinize. She is different now, she tells herself. She is an entirely new person.

She gets changed in the bathroom, the tiles slippery with moisture, a suitcase sprawled open on the floor.

She can’t stand to go to her bed room. Not yet.

Later, when she is tired enough to collapse into bed without thinking too much.

When she can pretend that this is somewhere new, someplace she has never been before.

A place that might eventually feel like home.

“I thought you might want a beer,” Calvin says when Josie walks down the stairs that lead into the kitchen. A pan of tomato sauce is bubbling on the ancient stovetop, and her brother is ladling wet tendrils of pasta into bowls.

“Sit,” he says. “Make yourself at home.”

Josie traces the knots of the table, places where the wood has collected a thick scuzz of age, softened varnish and decades of spilled drinks, hot mugs scorching its surface.

She touches a cigarette burn that her father made years ago, the orange butt smoldering against the thinning varnish.

Thinks of her mother, sitting here with her head in her hands, on the day that he left them.

Calvin sets the plates down in front of them, the sauce a vivid and unnatural red, a heap of pale cheese wilting on top.

“Looks good,” Josie lies.

Calvin sits opposite her and shovels a forkful into his mouth.

“So, what have you been doing for work lately?” Josie asks.

“This and that.”

Calvin’s fork continues to move rhythmically from his plate to his mouth, scooping up more pasta before he’s even finished chewing.

“Up at the house?”

She doesn’t need to say which house. His fork stills.

“Jo,” he says. “I haven’t been to the house in years.”

“You didn’t want to?”

He snorts.

“Not really a case of whether I wanted to or not. It’s not like they’d let me anywhere near the place.”

“They had Mum in their house, though,” Josie says. “Mum worked for them right up until…” she trails off. The look on Calvin’s face tells her all she needs to know.

“Didn’t she?” she says, her voice wavering. “She worked there until she died, didn’t she?”

“Is that what she told you?” Calvin asks.

Josie doesn’t answer. He sighs. His chair scrapes back against the stone floor as he stands and gathers up his plate.

“’Course she did,” he says. “She always wanted to protect you. Never wanted to give you anything else to worry about.”

He drops his plate in the sink, letting it clatter against the cracked porcelain. For a moment he stays there, his hands resting against the countertop. Then he straightens.

“Look,” he says. “It’s been a long day. I might go to bed. But help yourself to whatever you want. Beer. Stuff out of the fridge. Whatever.”

For a moment, Josie sees her brother as she used to know him. Limbs too long for his body, skin too pale for the summer heat. A perpetual streak of sunburn on the bridge of his nose.

“A lot happened,” he says. “After you left.”

The rain outside is heavy now, beating down on the roof, a wall of sound against the vast quiet of the house.

“It never went back to how it was,” he says. “Don’t expect things to be the same as they used to be. Everything’s different now.”