Anika takes the long way home up soul mountain: A lesbian romance (Rosemont Duology Book 2) Read online

  PJ hates that he shares his room with Gerry, our youngest brother, who cares nothing for Buddha or incense or curry. But with only three bedrooms and an unfinished basement, PJ and Gerry are stuck together, just like Dutch and me.

  Gerry’s as different from PJ as I am from Dutch. That’s going to get more obvious as we all grow up, but at this particular moment in time, Gerry — whose full name, unfortunately for him, is “Geronimo,” for my mother’s grandfather — is a skinny, adorable kindergartener. The apple of my mother’s eye.

  Dutch is fourteen.

  I’m twelve.

  PJ’s ten.

  Noticing a pattern? Two years stair-stepping between each kid?

  Yeah, so Gerry’s six. We’re pretty sure he’s the accident kid. But I would’ve been more than happy to be an accident if I got treated the way Gerry does. He’s as small and cute as I am tall and awkward, as bony as PJ is round, and as insanely cute as Dutch is domineering.

  He’s the only one who earns a loud, smacking kiss from our mother every time he enters the kitchen, the only one who gets a second helping of bacon without having to ask for it. It means the rest of us are fascinated by him and ridiculously jealous of him at the same time.

  #

  And now we’ve come back to the present day — the Manchester airport, two pints and a full English breakfast later.

  My phone dings with an incoming text. It’s just a number with an Ohio area code, no name associated with it, so whoever it is must not be in my address book.

  I’m picking you up

  it reads.

  Who’s this?

  I type back.

  Gerry. What time you get in

  Gerry? I raise an eyebrow at the pronouncement. I’m surprised to be hearing from him. Hell, surprised he owns a cell phone, period. If he’s picking me up from Cleveland, I guess that means he’s back home again. I hope that’s a good thing. But forgive me if I’m just a little suspicious of his motives.

  I write him back anyway, telling him my flight details without any other comments or questions that might hint at my surprise. I haven’t seen my youngest brother in a couple of years. I don’t think I’ve even talked to him in at least a year.

  I get a fist-pound emoji for a response. Then nothing.

  I linger near the gate, gym bag carry-on hanging behind me at an almost vertical angle, like I’ve got a fucking sword strapped to my back.

  A line starts to form; I wander into it. Something knocks against my gym bag, and I turn my head automatically.

  Well, look who it is.

  Tinkerbell-sized Jane Lane. The girl who smiled at me on the Basel to Manchester flight. She’s getting into line behind me, which means she must be headed to Toronto, too.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t watching where I was going,” she says with an apologetic smile.

  American accent? Or Canadian? It’s certainly not Swiss, at any rate.

  “No worries,” I say with a shrug. They call zone three for boarding, and I turn my attention back to the front of the line.

  Chapter 3: Snakes on a plane.

  I hear that the actor Samuel L. Jackson (you know, the black dude with the Jheri curl from Pulp Fiction?) agreed to star in the movie Snakes on a Plane only if:

  (1) The movie continued to be titled Snakes on a Plane, and

  (2) He got to have a line of dialog saying, “I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!”

  No shit, true story. Google it or whatever.

  I can’t say I’ve ever seen the movie; it was a little before my time and my dad was overprotective with anything rated R, but I think the whole concept is perfect, right? I mean, what could be worse? You’re thirty-thousand feet above the Earth’s surface, trapped in a confined area, surrounded by aggressive, lethally poisonous creatures. What a fucking nightmare.

  Do I need to point out here that it sounds pretty much exactly like my upcoming trip to Ohio? I have to keep remembering that I’m doing it because it’s important, because it’s Mom and it’s cancer and I might not be a great daughter, but even a crappy daughter knows to go home when her mom gets cancer.

  Anyway, by the time I finally make it to Toronto, go through customs, go through TSA pre-check for the good ol’ US of A, and make it to my gate for the final flight to Cleveland, I’m whipped. I eat a sandwich, watch muted CBC, wait for my plane to board.

  When it does board, it ends up being one of those itsy-bitsy puddle-jumper planes, the kind where you don’t even get the dignity of walking down an enclosed ramp but have to walk out onto the tarmac and up a flight of stairs. It’s starting to drizzle by the time I’m climbing up the stairs, and I have to admit that I kind of glare at the propellers like they’ve offended me when I see them, because, God, the only thing I hate worse than fucking airports is leaving an airport in a fucking propeller plane.

  They’ve given us a “the plane’s super full so if you have a large carry on you’d better check it at the door” speech, so I give up my gym bag without even grumbling that much, leave it on a damp cart with a guy wearing a bright-orange safety vest and a gap-toothed grin.

  I follow the crowd and start looking for 8B, an aisle seat, and do you want to guess who’s sitting in 8A, the window? I’ll give you some options:

  (A) Samuel L. Jackson

  (B) Jane Lane (not the cartoon version, but the one who ran into my gym bag in the Manchester airport)

  (C) Peanut the poisonous cobra

  (D) All of the above

  If you said D, all of the above, you’re wrong. The correct answer is B, Jane Lane, and when I stop in front of my seat, she looks away from the window she’s gazing through and glances up at me.

  She kind of does a double-take. “Oh,” she says, and for the fourth time in this long-ass day, she smiles at me.

  I do my best to return her smile (and the one she just graced on me was actually like a real smile, and I don’t know how she manages it, given that I know how far she’s traveled), but like I said, I’m whipped, and so I’m sure my return smile makes me look like a gorilla baring its teeth.

  I settle into my seat, which is difficult when you’re scraping six-foot-four. My knees press against a tray table for the third time in this endless day, and just as I start to stretch one foot out into the aisle to give myself some relief, a heavyset guy holding a briefcase in front of him picks charges down the aisle towards his seat. I barely pull my foot back in time to avoid disaster.

  “I bet you’re ready to be finished with flying,” Jane Lane comments after watching me nearly trip the fat guy and tuck my knee back against the tray table. She looks downright cozy in her seat, being Tinkerbell-sized and all. Like a kid curled up in daddy’s armchair.

  I shrug like it’s no big deal, like my knees and back and neck aren’t all screaming at this point. “Yeah,” I say. “I bet you are, too. Weren’t you on my Basel-Manchester flight?”

  She nods. “And Manchester to Toronto. I thought we were never going to board that plane!”

  I chuckle — and it’s not quite so gorilla-like this time. It’s actually nice to have someone to chat with, given that I haven’t really spoken to anyone all day, unless you count exchanging texts with Dutch, Dad, and Gerry.

  Speaking of which.

  I pull out my phone, send Gerry a quick text:

  About to leave for Cleveland.

  See u in an hour or so

  and put my phone back in my pocket.

  “Is this your last flight for the day?” asks Jane.

  I nod. “Thank God, yes. You?”

  “Yes.” There’s a pause, the kind that always comes when two strangers strike up a conversation on a plane but don’t really have much to talk about. “Are you from Ohio?”

  “Yeah, south of Cleveland. But I haven’t lived there in a long time. Since high school.” (I leave out the fact that I moved back to Ohio for a few short-lived months nine years ago, because it’s not relevant and because I don’t want to have to
explain.)

  She cuts her eyes away, nods, seems to think about this. It looks like she hesitates for a second, but finally, she says, “Must be something big going on at home, for you to leave Switzerland in the middle of the basketball season.”

  Now I’m the one doing a double-take. She already knew I was a basketball player?

  “No shit — oh, sorry, I mean… you follow women’s basketball? Nobody follows basketball in Switzerland. Hell, I don’t follow basketball in Switzerland.”

  Her smile turns shy. “Well, not quite nobody. I follow women’s basketball. When I first moved out there, I was channel surfing one night and came across a game. It reminded me of home — and I was so homesick. So I started watching and… I guess you could say I’ve become a die-hard fan over the last few years. Which, actually — ”

  A staticky voice crackles to life overhead, cutting her off. They start talking about the safety demonstration, please pay attention to the stewardess, blah blah blah, put your devices into airplane mode.

  I pull my phone out to switch it off and see that Gerry’s texted me back.

  Stuck at the restaurant, can’t

  leave

  reads his reply.

  Probably going to be an hour

  late. At least.

  I want to chuck my phone down the aisle in frustration.

  “Should I get a rental car?” I’d asked Dutch when we were putting all this together.

  “No, no, no, of course not,” she’d assured me. “We’ll all be home, and Mom’s not driving her car right now anyway, so I’m sure you’ll — Nathan! Put that down! — I’m sure you’ll have no trouble getting around.”

  “Because I don’t want to be stuck in Marcine for an indefinite length of time without a — ”

  “Will you stop it? It’ll be fine.”

  Oh, it’ll be fine. Sure. Mom just has cancer, the bad kind, but no big fucking deal. And the fact that Dad’s flipping out? He’ll be fine. And that that PJ’s probably coping by reverting into workaholic mode? Also just fine, Dutch. Fine like the fact that you’re managing Mom and Dad, and let’s not forget that our junkie baby brother Gerry is home for some reason, don’t know what that’s about but I’m sure it’s fine.

  And you know what else is fine? The fact that Gerry’s going to leave me stranded at the Cleveland airport for at least an extra hour.

  Why didn’t I trust my gut and book a rental car? Maybe I can still get one when we arrive.

  I’ve had it with these motherfucking siblings in this motherfucking family!

  The announcement overhead finishes up; the plane lurches backward.

  Jane Lane takes in my face, which is apparently pretty all screwed up in frustration, because she gives a concerned brow-furrow and asks, “Are you okay?”

  Chapter 4: In case of emergency, keep the person next to you busy.

  I straighten up, adjust my face back into Polite Stranger Mode, pull the edge of my foot further away from the aisle as the stewardess bustles past. “Yeah, fine. What were you saying before the announcement? Die-hard women’s basketball fan…?”

  The furrowed brow melts a bit. “Well, yes, actually. I even…” she blushes, leans forward, fishes through a purse at her feet practically as big as she is. She pulls out a hardback book, flashes the cover in my direction. “I got this just before I left yesterday. Ordered it specifically so I could read it on this trip. Have you seen it yet?”

  Had I seen it yet. What a question. She’s holding up a book titled Only One Shot, and there on the cover, looking very Head Coach-y, is the girl I’ve called my best friend since we met at the age of eighteen as freshmen basketball players at Rosemont University — Alexis Woods. Had I seen the book? Hell, I’m in that book. I lived that fucking book.

  But I don’t say that. I only nod. Polite Stranger Mode and all.

  “She mentions you in here a few times, you know,” Jane says. She looks down for a moment before looking back up, laughs nervously. “I hope it doesn’t weird you out that I recognized you right away when we were getting on the plane back in Basel.”

  Instead of answering, I kind of lift an eyebrow. I guess I know why she’s been shooting smiles my way all day.

  The plane’s engines rev, and we jolt forward. False alarm, though; pilot’s just moving us down the runway, and we stop again a moment later. But next to me, poor Jane Lane is pressed back against her seat, gripping the book in her lap, mouth tighter than it really should be.

  “Don’t like flying?” I ask.

  She loosens up on the book a little. “It’s not that I don’t like flying. I actually don’t mind it so much on the big transatlantic jets. Except for the takeoff. I hate all takeoffs. And these little propeller planes…” She lets out a long-suffering sigh. “On top of that, it looks like it’s going to storm outside.”

  I follow her gaze out the window. Rain beads on plastic, and the wet tarmac reflects back kaleidoscope of orange, red, and blue lights. But it’s barely drizzling — “storm” is pretty much a gigantic fucking overstatement of the situation.

  So I decide to do Jane Lane a solid, distract her from her nerves.

  “I’ve read the whole thing,” I say, nodding at Only One Shot sitting in her lap. “It’s not bad. Alex made me read the early draft when she got it back from the guy who did all the actual writing. She can’t write worth a fuh… flip herself. Plus she wanted me to okay the parts that I’m in.”

  My plan to distract her works. Jane Lane half-turns in her seat, dark eyes twinkling with curiosity, rainstorm forgotten. She pushes some brown hair behind one ear, revealing an earful of silver studs and loops, just like the original Jane Lane had.

  “So is it true?” she asks. “All the stuff about her coming to games drunk her junior year?”

  I snort. “No, it’s not true.”

  She looks disappointed. Deflates.

  I grin. “The truth is it was way worse than what she admits to in the book.”

  This gets her attention. She sits up straight again, the twinkle’s back. It makes me want to laugh — which is nice because I haven’t felt much like laughing since the moment Dad called to tell me Momma has cancer.

  I open my mouth to say something more — basically to throw Alex under the bus (Alex wouldn’t mind, and what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her) — but the plane revs again, accelerates down the runway, and poor Jane Lane, she’s not even holding onto the book anymore, she’s clinging to both armrests, dark eyes staring straight ahead, unblinking, and it looks like she’s either going to barf or scream at any second.

  And… liftoff. Out the window, Toronto falls away, a million streetlights and taillights and empty office buildings shrinking against the black, expansive maw of the Earth. We bank left, and the horizon line tilts into a disorienting angle, revealing sepia-colored cloud bottoms tinted with the last rays of the sinking sun.

  It’s pretty, really. I’ve always liked taking off at night.

  Not that my seat mate sees any of this nighttime beauty. She’s still got her eyes glued to the seat in front of her, still balances Alex’s book in her lap while she hangs onto the armrests.

  It’s sort of hard to watch, and I want to pat her on the shoulder, give her arm a squeeze, remind her to breathe, or something, but it seems like a weird thing to do given that she’s a stranger, so I just lean my head back and wait, stretching out my jaw a few times as I try to pop my ears.

  When the plane starts to level off five or six minutes later, Jane turns to me and says, “Takeoffs are the scariest part.”

  I shrug. “I dunno. I’ve always kind of liked them.”

  The plane shudders and dips — hard enough that I feel my body moving down while all my innards seem to move up. We’re climbing again a moment later.

  “It’s a good thing you’re here to keep me occupied,” Jane Lane says through clenched teeth. “Otherwise I’d be a total wreck. Or — more of a total wreck.” She lets go of an armrest long enough to tap the book that she so
mehow managed to keep on her lap this whole time. “Not to sound creepy, but it doesn’t surprise me that you’d like takeoffs. Based on what I know about you — from the book, I mean — it seems to fit.”

  A laugh finally escapes my throat. “I’m not as bad as Alex makes me out to be, you know.”

  The plane shivers, bounces again. Something in the overhead compartment above us rolls, pops hard against a plastic surface. Another bump and drop come a moment later, followed by the high-pitched ding-ding telling us all to keep our seat belts on. As if we needed the reminder.

  I don’t mind turbulence, but this flight’s starting to feel like the stewardess should’ve been holding one of those You must be at least this high to enjoy this ride signs when we boarded. And I know I qualify, but I don’t know about Jane Lane.

  “Jesus,” she murmurs under her breath. The way the word comes out, I can’t say for sure if it’s intended as a curse or a prayer.

  I turn my head in her direction, determined to get back to distracting her. “So you know my name, obviously. What’s yours?”

  She looks at me like she’s completely forgotten I was there, a blank expression on her face. It’s like I’ve asked her for the solution to a complicated physics equation instead of her name. Then she comes back to life again. “Amy,” she says. “Amy Ellis.”