Cold Comfort: Sunday, July 14, 2024 – Agatha (2)

Dear Diary,

I wasn’t sure whether to keep going in this book or start a new one already, but I’ll probably be writing about Loon Lake for quite a while, and I don’t want to ruin two fancy blank books for it. I’ll keep going until I’m ready to stop, or until this one’s full, and then have the ceremonial fire.

That’s a joke. It’ll just be me and the matches, either in the fire pit out back or the fireplace, depending on the weather and the season, but I’ll make sure all of it goes up. The covers don’t matter, but I don’t want to leave any scraps. And maybe the physical activity will help clue my brain into the fact that I am indeed ready to move on from something.

We’re home. He ended up driving, so starting in Hancock he complained about the tiny airplanes and the lack of available flights, rather than concentrating on how his rental contract could be shifted for a return downstate instead of here. And it helped him get a lot of his frustrations out, at least, before he got around to Alyssa.

First, she tricked him, but the longer he talked, the more it got to “she tricked him into telling the truth.” Yes, of course she can come home any time she wants to! Except for Aaron it means home home, to stay. The place where she can hole up and be protected from the world.

And it’s true. Any of his kids can come home any time they want. It’s just that Ken and Jim don’t really want. This is the house where the child died, after all. It’s where she lived, but that’s harder to remember these days.

And the thing is, Alyssa’s always been the one most likely to come home. She’s the one I could message if Aaron was having a particularly bad week, and then I’d hear from him at dinner that she’d texted him to ask if it was okay for her to pop in for the weekend. And of course he always said yes, and I don’t think he’s ever figured out that it’s a tag-team thing to get her to show up when he needs her most.

Well then, diary: I’m not sure he’s figured out that he needs her, probably more than she needs him. I’m also not sure he’d realize we do what we do out of love, and not as a sort of trick. The way she “tricked” him into basically admitting that he’ll love her no matter what.

He tried to talk himself out of that for the rest of the drive, off and on. He’d punch between radio stations and turn it up, then turn it down to reiterate an argument, then turn it back up again. At one point he told me to Google Truman’s brother, which I did, because otherwise he’d stop, turn the car over to me, and find it himself. So basically I repeated what Alyssa already told us. It’s not good, but maybe it could be worse. Annabeth acted coldly, in her right mind. Truman’s brother clearly had something wrong with him, and I’d bet that both Truman and Alyssa will be on their guard against it. I could see them choosing never to have children.

Not that I said that to Aaron. He doesn’t want to think this is more than a touch of summer madness on her part, and it will be good for him (for all of us) to let him figure out how to live with it incrementally: for the rest of the summer. Just for this winter. Until he has to realize that no, it’s not actually incremental, after all.

I’ll be hearing about it for a while, but it’s new. It’s something different for us to talk about, or for him to worry about, or for us to live with, I guess. Something new for us to make it through together, even if maybe this one will feel a bit sneaky until he gets over himself enough to contact her again.

He’s threatened not to. That she’ll have to come crawling back if she wants to come at all. Conditional home, I guess, but I’m not going to point that out to him. He’ll get over it, because he’ll miss her, and he needs her. That doesn’t mean she has to take him back in a flash. I won’t try to talk her out of it if she does, but I won’t fault her if she doesn’t. She’s allowed to have feelings about his angry departure, and he needs to take responsibility for his actions.

Look at me all emotionally intelligent about other peoples’ problems. Let’s keep working on expanding that to my own life, shall we, diary?

I’m glad to be home. I don’t really want to fully take Aaron’s side in this, two against one, but it’s nice to be two again. It’s nice to be in my own bed, with my own pillows (yes, diary, that’s plural) and fresh sheets. Aaron’s in his office, making some phone calls because these past couple days interrupted his business as usual, and soon he’ll be done with that and we’ll talk about dinner, or maybe he’ll want a shower first, and we’ll get back to being us. One step at a time. One day at a time. But today I’m home, and it is home, and that’s good.

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Cold Comfort: Sunday, July 14, 2024 – Alyssa (2), coming September 2