Page 85 of High Season
TWENTY-EIGHT
2024
There is something uniquely depressing about a budget airport hotel.
Josie’s room is on the ground floor. The space is anonymous and plain. A sheen of misted plastic tacked to the lower portion of the window in a faint nod to privacy. A beige carpet. A bathroom with a plastic shower stall. A desk placed against the window, as if anyone would want to gaze onto the blurred concrete concourse beyond.
Josie washes beneath a slow stream of water, using up all the tiny bottles supplied to clean off the scent of her journey. Calvin’s car to the station. A crammed train carriage that left a stale, sweating smell on her skin.
Calvin had held her tight on the platform, as if he didn’t want to let her go.
“You sure about this?” he asked.
“As I’ll ever be,” Josie said, and in the reflection of his sunglasses she could see how unsure she looked. How different, and yet the same, as the version of herself who had arrived here a little over a week ago. The optimism of her new beginning already broken.
After her shower, she switches on the television. She sits on the bed, and flicks through channels she would never normally watch.
She imagines the people who have occupied this space before her, none of them staying longer than a night, nobody sleeping easily. Couples sneaking in bottles of prosecco to toast their first holiday. Harassed businessmen hanging up their suits above the chipped mirror. The slightly dazed people who stay here after a flight away from a place, a person, a world that they can never go back to. Who stretch out on this bed and know that tomorrow everything will feel new, and strange, and different.
Josie has been in so many cheap hotels, caught so many early-morning flights. She has sat watching television on beds exactly like this. She barely feels it anymore, the sense that she is leaving one life behind and moving on to another. It is easier to long for the next stage than to mourn the part that has just ended.
Her fingers stray to her phone. She slides her thumb against the screen and pulls up a picture she took on what would be her first and last date with Nic. They had been waiting for their food to arrive, already with that gloss of tipsiness, a starriness on their faces, white-toothed grins. She flicks her thumb again, and there she is with Gabby, a selfie on the dance floor. A picture of Gabby perched in Calvin’s lap. A group shot of the four of them that Calvin had cajoled a stranger into taking.
She exits her gallery and scrolls into her conversation with her aunt instead. Her mother’s sister, Beverly, a woman that Josie has only met a handful of times since she first left the UK as a child. It’s clear that Beverly regrets telling Josie that she could ask for helpanytimein a stream of uncharacteristic emotion at Patricia’s funeral. Her messages are filled with tense questions about how long Josie plans to stay for, warnings about how Beverly’s partner won’t put up with any press at their front door. Josie promises not to be any trouble, says Beverly will hardly know she’s there. Like always, Josie feels that she is apologizing for something that she cannot control, for being someone she is not.
Josie hopes she’ll only need to rely on her aunt for a few weeks. She wouldn’t have thought of her at all, if she wasn’t so desperate. But she needs to leave France if she has any shot of throwing the media off her scent.
She finds herself tapping back into the gallery. Zooming in on the picture of her and Nic. Something in his eyes sends an ache through her chest. She barely knows him, of course. But god, she can imagine it. She wants so badly to let herself reach out toward him. To lean into something that feels like it could be good for the first time in years.
Her phone buzzes in her hand. A message from Calvin.
We miss you already x
She won’t let herself cry. She can’t. It would be too much of a cliché, to spend the night sobbing in a shitty airport motel. It would be too depressing to bear.
Just out of curiosity, she tells herself, she opens up a browser, checks to see if there are any trains still running. There are two, if she goes quickly. Two choices. Two chances to change everything Josie thinks that she knows about herself.
Her thumb hovers over the screen.
If there is one thing that Josie thinks she is good at, it’s goodbyes. Or, to be more precise,notsaying goodbye. Leaving people behind without a backward glance. Letting each person, each place leave only the tiniest mark on her, an almost imperceptible dent in the fabric of her being rather than a great gouge.
But a slow chipping away of herself is still a hollowing, a lack of history. A numbness that Josie has let grow inside her for years.
Perhaps it’s time to start filling that hole.
She taps on the button to buy a ticket.
Perhaps, Josie thinks, perhaps she isn’t quite so good at goodbyes after all.
Josie takes a taxi from the train station, the road skimming the coast, the sea falling in and out of view, long shadows as the moon rises in the sky.
She does not have a plan, exactly. She understands, still, that she will have to leave eventually, back to England, or Paris, or some as-yet-undecided place. But she also has an impossible-to-resist feeling of something unresolved, an itch that she must scratch.
Josie is so used to leaving things broken behind her. For once, she wants to put them back together. She wants to see Nic, even if only one last time. She wants to say goodbye. She wants to say sorry. She wants to say that she wishes things could have been different, but knows that they can’t. She wants to tell him that she’ll be back, but doesn’t know if she’d be telling the truth.
She wants to do the right thing.
The dive shop is closed by the time Josie arrives, the shutters pulled down, the lights turned out. Upstairs, one solitary window glows. Josie pulls out her phone. Types out a message.
