Authors: Mimsy Hale
“She… in her will, she left us instructions for this ridiculous scavenger hunt, which was just like her. We ended up at this kitschy little art shop in Williston, and she told us that we had to get something to remember her by, instead of her leaving us something.”
“Why’d you choose the paperweights?” Aiden asks, curiosity getting the better of him.
“Well, they’re the Tree of Life, and Grandma Doris spent her entire life in North Dakota, like she was rooted or something. And she always kind of reminded me of Grandmother Willow in
Pocahontas,
you know, talking in loose riddles and dishing out life advice like it was her sole purpose for existing,” Jake says. His tone betrays a fondness that his words do not.
“How much of her wisdom made it into your valedictory speech?”
Jake laughs. “None of it, actually. Although, I guess, in a way, she was in it. The thing I said about people wanting us to be only one thing—that’s how she was. I always felt like she was trying to categorize me.”
“God, you rehearsed that speech for weeks. Do you still remember it?”
“Bits and pieces, but not really. I still have a copy of it saved somewhere, though.”
“It was a kick-ass speech,” Aiden tells him, and quite uncharacteristically, Jake blows him a kiss.
Aiden catches it, and slowly lowers his hand back into his lap as he considers just how out of character Jake has been acting since… well, that’s the thing; he can no longer remember when the shift occurred. Perhaps it has been a gradual change, one that he’s only able to see now that he is looking back at the beginning.
“Texas,” Jake points out quietly, and Aiden just catches sight of the passing truck’s license plate. His thoughts turn once again to Hugh’s offer, and the prospect of moving to New York to be part of their new outfit. After a few moments pass, Jake breaks the silence by saying, “You’ve gone quiet.”
“I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
“What would say if I told you I was thinking about New York?” Aiden asks, crossing his hands in his lap and thumbing his index finger.
“I’d say tell me something I don’t know,” Jake replies at length, his tone over-bright. “And I’d say that you should go for it.”
“I should—wait, really?”
“What is there to keep you in Brunswick?”
“Well, I—I…” Aiden trails off, his thoughts short-circuiting before they make it to his mouth.
You,
he wants to say, though all at once he realizes that he has no idea what Jake’s plans are, beyond his long-held dream of “creating beautiful things.” “What are
you
gonna do? After we get back, I mean.”
Jake says nothing at first, and mostly dismisses the question with a simple shrug. “Now that we’re selling the house, I’m kind of… still figuring out that part.”
“Would you come to New York with me?” Aiden blurts, the words tumbling out before he can stop them. He quickly adds, “I mean, don’t get me wrong—I love those guys, but I’d go crazy if I had to live with them. I’m gonna need a good roommate.”
“I don’t know, Dan,” Jake says with a heavy sigh. “Honestly, I’m trying not to think too much about what’ll happen when we get back.”
“Why?”
“Being on the road like this, it’s kind of magical, don’t you think?”
“Of course.”
“I know it has to end, and I know it
will,
but… I just don’t want it to.”
“Me neither,” Aiden assures him. He reaches over and briefly covers Jake’s hand with his own, and they fall silent once more. Aiden knows what “I’ll think about it” means when Jake says it: The deal is as good as off the table. But there’s still time for them to figure everything out. He can sense that the right moment to tell Jake how he really feels is growing closer, as if he’s standing on train tracks that are just beginning to vibrate.
Before long, they jump out of the RV into a mostly empty strip mall parking lot. Aiden finds himself hanging back half a step, watching Jake’s long legs take the sidewalk in stride, and suddenly he thinks,
What will I do if he doesn’t come to New York?
The thought makes him swallow hard as he follows Jake past the Economart and Country Floral. Aiden has experienced their relationship at both extremes now, and he knows exactly which he prefers. Being without Jake would be like losing a vital piece of himself—had felt exactly like that his entire year abroad, in fact—but being without Jake’s heart, however veiled it might be, is unthinkable.
“I… it didn’t look like this last time,” Jake murmurs as they come to a stop outside a storefront.
The wooden façade is painted entirely black. The display in the front window is a selection of Ray Caesar paintings—surrealist images of women in various poses, some of them displaying animal characteristics, and others that are completely abstract. The silver lettering above the storefront reads,
Moiety: Fine Art for the Discerning Collector.
It’s the last place Aiden would expect to find in a small town like Williston, North Dakota. “Are you sure this is it?”
“Yeah,
Moiety,”
Jake says, gesturing at the sign. Aiden likes the way the word sounds when Jake says it. “It’s the same place; it just looks completely different. Before, it was… well, almost the exact opposite. All kitschy and bright.”
“Do you wanna go?” Aiden asks. He brushes his knuckles over Jake’s elbow, and the stiff canvas fabric of his jacket scratches against Aiden’s skin.
“No… no, we came all this way,” Jake answers with a sigh, and pulls the door open.
Moiety’s interior smells strongly of sage and sandalwood, and its lighting is surprisingly dim for an art gallery; spotlights set at intervals in the ceiling cast fuzzy circles of yellow on the floor between aisles of postcard-sized paintings. One wall is entirely taken up by a nighttime scene of winter-bare trees, and the glossy, dark stain of the floorboards makes Aiden think of his father’s cabin at Saint Mary Lake, where they’ll stay during their three nights and two days in Montana. A slow, echoing, piano-driven song is playing, and it lends an even darker atmosphere to the already dark store.
Moiety is a place entirely at odds with the other small stores in the strip mall; it sticks out like a bruised thumb. When Aiden says as much, they hear a dark chuckle from the back.
A tiny woman with frizzy, graying hair appears as if out of nowhere. Her thin-framed spectacles hang from a gold chain around her neck, and her bare toes peek out from beneath her floor-length black velvet dress.
“That’s because we’re the only place with a modicum of culture in this backward town,” she says, her voice thin and reedy. The scent of cigarette smoke hangs around her like a cloud as she approaches them, and she looks them over from head to foot. The crooked, toothy smile twisting her mouth sends a shiver down Aiden’s spine. “What can I help you gentlemen with today?”
“I was here a few years ago,” Jake begins. Aiden can see him drawing himself up a little straighter. “At least, I think I was. It looked completely different back then.”
The woman nods, her eyes narrowing and her smile growing wider. “Yes, it
was
very different. Why did you come? I took over from the old owners about a year ago, you see.”
Jake hesitates for a moment, seemingly thrown off by her odd pattern of speech. “I came to find something to remember my grandmother by, after she passed.”
“And what did you choose?” she asks, her gaze narrowing even further. She steps closer, her head tipped back so she can look Jake in the eye. “The old owners were unaware of how a place such as this should be run, you see. Very
unimaginative.”
She pauses to clear her throat and Jake says, “A paperweight with the Tree of Life on it.”
“Do you know what ‘moiety’ means?” she asks, suddenly turning her attention to Aiden. He shakes his head and feels as if he’s just failed a test for which he’s been studying all week. “The owners didn’t, either. So laughable, all of the things they
didn’t
know. But I’m here, now.
“It means, ‘one of two equal parts.’ You see? You see why they were so blind, why I had to take over?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, definitely,” Jake says, nodding fervently. “How could anyone
not
see?”
The woman throws up her hands with an air of exasperation, places one on Jake’s arm and fixes them with a gentler smile, one that almost looks kind. “You are welcome to browse. Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me, I have books to balance.”
Without another word, she disappears to the back of the store, passing through a heavy black curtain that sways in her wake.
“What the fuck?” Jake whispers, and Aiden instinctively steps closer to him. “Seriously, what the
fuck?”
“Is it just me, or—”
“It’s not just you. That was
really
creepy.”
“Do you wanna get out of here?”
“Can we stay, just for a couple minutes? I kind of…”
“What?”
Jake waves a hand and scans the store. “I had this idea that I’d get another paperweight here, one to remember our trip. If she even has any, amongst all the dead flowers and animal bones we’ll probably find.”
“Okay.”
They make a quick circuit of the store, and among the displays of dark, surrealist paintings they find shelves full of odd ornaments, a box of ornately jeweled pen and journal sets, and finally, by the cash register, the paperweights they’re looking for: heavy, glass objects in all sizes, nestled in black boxes lined with white silk.
Aiden watches as Jake picks a globe from the back of the shelf. It’s clear as crystal, no bubbles or imperfections; suspended within is a black frosted silhouette of the United States.
“How perfect is this?” Jake whispers, holding it out to Aiden.
“Pretty perfect,” he murmurs.
Jake takes the paperweight in its box to the cash register while Aiden scans the rest of the display. Most of the paperweights look like something he could find at Nightshade, the single “alternative” store in Brunswick, where the vast majority of their high school’s goth and emo population shopped for their accessories. One catches Aiden’s eye: a perfect likeness of a human skull. His eyes linger, and he can’t help but shiver. Then he turns his attention to the paperweight sitting to its left: an oval, containing a single bougainvillea blossom.
Immediately, he thinks of Jake’s mother and how, on his first visit to Jake’s house after they met in the street, he noticed the basket of bougainvillea hanging from a hook on their porch. The basket hung there for months after the car accident, the bright pink flowers slowly turning brown and curling in on themselves.
Just as Aiden resolves to buy this paperweight for Jake, the old woman reappears. She is silent as she rings up Jake’s purchase, pulls a glossy black bag from behind the register and gently sets the paperweight inside.
Jake thanks her and turns to Aiden, raising his eyebrows in clear relief.
“I’ll meet you outside,” Aiden says with a nod in the woman’s direction; Jake briefly squeezes his arm as he passes by. He seems not to notice the box in Aiden’s hands.
Cautiously, he approaches the register. The woman’s dark eyes bore into him with an intensity that makes the hair on his arms stand on end.
“Just this, please,” he says, attempting to break the tension.
“Where did you find this?” she asks as she takes the paperweight from him. “I told them to take all of it with them, you see. But they didn’t listen, and there was so much waste. Why did you choose this?”
Because it’s the least depressing thing in this entire store,
Aiden thinks, but bites his tongue. “My friend’s mom, she always loved bougainvillea.”
“She’s dead.”
“Yes, ma’am, when he was seven.”
“And his father, too,” she says, shaking her head.
Aiden blinks and gapes at her for a moment. “How did you—”
“Oh, he’s all torn up, that one. You can see it from a mile away.”
“I beg your pardon?” Aiden asks, more confused by the second.
The woman sighs with that same air of exasperation, and leans over the counter to grab Aiden’s hand with a force he wouldn’t have thought possible. “How can you love someone like that?”
“How can I… what?” he asks weakly.
“He’s
broken,”
the woman says.
Aiden pauses, carefully considering his response as a wave of indignation crests over him, hot and furious. “With hope,” he says. The woman scoffs and releases his hand. “With
faith,
”
he goes on, but she just ignores him and continues ringing up his purchase. Frustrated, he leans over the counter and looks her straight in the eye. “With
everything that I am.”
She regards him coldly for a moment more, and then shrugs as if to indicate that she is finished with him. He pays, takes his black bag and walks away from the counter, anger and defensiveness putting a terrible weight in his step.
Who the hell does she think she is? She doesn’t know me, and she
certainly
doesn’t know the man I love.
In the second that his palm settles flat against the door, he hears the woman ask, “That heart of yours. Did he steal it or did you give it?” He half turns back toward her, and she’s standing at the end of the aisle nearest the back, looking at him with an almost-kind smile. “I know that they’ll come back someday, you see. So I have to keep it everything it can be.”
Dropping his gaze, Aiden says, “He stole it first, but I’ll give it over and over again if he’ll let me.”
The expected reproachful response that has him already bristling never comes; when he looks back up, the woman is gone. Mentally shaking himself, he passes through the door and into the bright, cold sunshine outside. Jake pushes off the wall he’s leaning against and stubs his cigarette out on the pavement. Aiden feels the anger drain out of him all at once, and it leaves him almost dizzy; Jake seems to sense this, and takes his hand. He leads Aiden away from the store with a concerned glance.
“Are you okay?” he asks when they’re halfway back to the RV.
“Just… really, really creeped out,” Aiden says.