“Departures” is a supernatural thriller and love story published as a serial novel with new episodes dropping every Tuesday morning. Anyone can read or listen for free. Paid subscribers gain early access to new episodes. Watch the trailer or visit the table of contents to browse all the published episodes.
Previously…
In the last episode, June’s grieving parents reluctantly drove up to the Thorne family lake house in the mountains to celebrate July 4th. They were grappling with the fact that June was refusing any treatment and to varying degrees, blamed Wild for this. But after arriving and being reminded once again how much Wild loved his daughter, Will McGowen found himself defending Wild to the Thorne patriarch who made it clear he thought his son was worthless and undeserving of June.
Eileen was exhausted. She had always been a workaholic, but in the absence of the structure and routine of the life she had back in Seattle with Boots, she found she could work until the wee hours of the morning before she realized a new day was beginning.
Most career women were either retired or within spitting distance of retiring at her age, but Eileen had never been more invigorated by her work. Her job as in-house legal counsel at Thorne had rewarded her handsomely over the years and in return, she had given them her full diligence, often going above and beyond what might have been a cushy job in anyone else’s hands. But now, as Millie’s accomplice in secretly planning to tear the whole thing down, she felt a stew of emotions– excitement, guilt, and terror being the predominant ones. She wasn’t an idealist or a crusader. After Marvin’s death, all she had wanted was to escape into a comfortable, secure life and she had accomplished that. But that stopped being enough for some reason and here she was in her pajamas at five AM, hunched over a laptop hammering out separation agreements that targeted the majority of senior leadership across Thorne.
Her sleep had been shallow and unsatisfying, her dreams filled with a fevered scroll through figures, scenarios, and outcomes akin to playing three-dimensional chess so when her eyes popped open two hours before her alarm, she just got up and resumed working. When she started the project three months prior, she was just following the direction of Millie, her COO without a full understanding of the implications. But the deeper she got, the more morally ambivalent she became. Eileen had strong loyalties to Millie’s father and to Thorne in general, so she often found herself in the position of pumping the brakes and defending the status quo. On more than one occasion, Millie had expressed her exasperation. There was something deeper motivating this mission and it made Eileen uncomfortable. The Thornes had a complicated history and without even trying, she had become an integral part of it. She had Wild to thank for that.
When the sun began to leak through the blinds, she set the laptop on the bed beside her, got up and went into the small kitchen of the furnished apartment Thorne provided in one of its high-rise properties in Midtown. While she was waiting on her coffee she checked the messages on her phone. There was a one-word text from Wild. “Coffee?” it read. “You read my mind,” she responded, then added, “come over?”
This was all still very new and they didn’t have any kind of a routine which was strange for two people of a certain age whose routines had radically changed around the same time. They were in an awkward dance, but a dance nonetheless and she was enjoying it. When he knocked on the door thirty minutes later, she had showered, shaved her legs, brushed her teeth and gotten dressed before changing her mind, undressing again and putting on a silk robe.
“Good morning,” he said, leaning in to kiss her. “You been up for a while?”
“What gave it away?”
“You smell minty fresh. Here, I brought some breakfast.”
“Shall we dine on the balcony like grown-ups? I’ve not properly enjoyed my new city view.”
“Are there other options?” he asked.
“I can’t tell whether you’re being sexy or if you’re just afraid of heights.”
“Can I be both?”
“You are a funny man,” she said.
She set the bag of bagels down on the counter and tugged him by the hand toward the bedroom. Each time they made love it had improved. The first few times had been well-intentioned disasters between her self-consciousness about her aged body, his performance anxiety, and the fact that there were two other people in bed with them. She knew he was thinking about Boots, and she figured he knew she was thinking about June though they never talked about it openly. This time was different, more immediate. It helped to be in a neutral space. Her place felt like a hotel room. It was a space unburdened by either of their pasts. Afterward, they lay beside each other holding hands. He glanced over at the laptop sitting on the floor.
“You were working again this morning.”
“Yeah.”
“You know it’s Sunday, right?”
“Is it? I lost track.”
“How’s it going, you got everything all figured out?”
“You really want to talk about my work?”
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s not really your thing, is it? Also, it all makes me a little uncomfortable.”
He propped up on his elbow so he could look at her. “Well, now we really have to talk about it.”
She sighed and looked out the window. In the distance, way out beyond the sprawl of the city, she could see the otherworldly gray dome of Stone Mountain and had a flash of a memory. It was a picnic when Marvin was just a baby. Marvin’s father was there. The three of them lay on an old blanket, a family, but not a family. He would be gone within the year. She had been hard on him, fierce even because she was scared. Looking back, now old enough to be his mother, she understood he was little more than a boy when they had Marvin. She wondered if he was still alive and if he was, did he ever think about her and their boy who died. Surely his mother told him or tried to. He had just run away, maybe to California or Portland or anywhere a black man in the 1980s might escape feeling hopeless, like anything short of being Michael Jordan meant a life resigned to riding behind a trash truck or wasting away in a crack house.
“Hey, you okay?” Wild asked, reaching out to caress her face.
“Sorry, I’m tired I guess– a little spacey. I’ve been burning it at both ends with this thing. Do you really want to hear about it?”
“I do.”
They had never really talked about any of this head on because it made her uncomfortable and she sensed, for all his seeming detachment, it would make him uncomfortable too. She sat up, gathered the sheet so she could cover herself and leaned against the headboard. He retrieved their coffees from the kitchen and came back to sit beside her.
“I’m not sure why we’re doing what we’re doing to be honest. There’s kind of a weird, manic energy around it with Millie. It’s not good business. It feels destructive and dangerous, like playing God with too many people’s lives.”
He didn’t say anything, but he nodded so she continued.
“Maybe Millie has her own reasons for wanting this, but I think a whole lot of why she’s doing it is to please you.”
“I hope that’s not true. Millie’s no shrinking violet. She’s got her own mind.”
“True, but you can’t deny your, whatever you want to call it, gives you a mythical presence and you’re also her favorite uncle.”
“I’m her only uncle.”
“Tell me, what will this do for you, if we pull it off as Millie wants to, if we completely dissolve the legacy company and reshape it into this employee equity model? Does it assuage some guilt for you?”
“I’m not sure, but I think this is about more than my guilt.”
“Is it? I’m not so sure, Wild. I feel like guilt is a major organ in your body and maybe you can’t live without it.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Would you not do that, please.”
“Do what?”
“That zen master, no-dog-in-this-fight bullshit. It’s okay to have an opinion, even if it’s an unpopular one. Shit, I’m a black woman sitting here arguing against what could be the first ever real act of reparations by an American corporation.”
“Well, why is that? What is your problem with doing this?”
“I don’t know exactly and that bothers me. I care about you, and I’ve seen how you suffer with your lot, but I feel like this is performative, like it won’t make any real difference beyond some symbolic absolution for your family. I don’t like waste. I like good business, and this doesn’t feel like good business.”
Wild didn’t say anything and she felt him retreating. She realized how little she really knew him. They had skipped over all that. She didn’t want to fight with him, but she wasn’t one to withhold her opinions.
“See, I knew you didn’t really want to talk about this,” she said.
“I want you to keep talking about it. I’m just quiet because I’m thinking about what you’ve said.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I think maybe you’re right about me, but maybe that’s not a reason not to do it. Maybe it’s bigger than me, bigger than you.”
“I don’t think on that scale. What I see is a whole lot of disruption and money getting shuffled around. You’re not going to defeat capitalism or remove the stain of slavery by taking the Thorne family crest off the door and donating a lot of cash to the NAACP. I don’t think it will change anything. That bothers you doesn’t it, that I think that way?”
He didn’t say anything, only sat staring down at the coffee cup in his hands.
“I’m a black woman. I should be grateful to our white savior, right?”
Her anger had come up so quickly it surprised her. She threw back the sheet and moved off the bed to grab her robe.
“You think that’s what I’m trying to be?” he asked. He hadn’t moved to get up.
“Yeah, maybe a little bit. I think maybe your condition combined with your privilege has warped things for you.” She tied her robe and turned to face him. “What do you see when you look at me?”
“I see a powerful woman who’s made a successful life.”
“And there’s no part of you that sees a black woman who lost a baby and needed someone to save her.”
He looked away. She couldn’t continue to push him. There was no point. It was like scolding a child. She was resigned to having to apologize and then they would be awkward for a while, but then he spoke, and his voice was hard.
“Your turn. Look at me and tell me what you see.”
She looked into his eyes and took a deep breath. She wanted this to go differently. She didn’t want to do what she had done before with Boots. She wanted to be better than that. She took another breath and unclenched her fists.
“I see a man I don’t really know the way I’d like to. I see a man who’s trying very hard to change things maybe he can’t change. And yes, I see a white man whose family probably owned my family a long time ago. And that makes me angry and sad.”
“It makes me angry and sad too.”
He held out his hand to her. She took it and he pulled her into his lap. He held her and she held him, and they sat that way in silence for a few minutes until he spoke again.
“So, what’s the right thing to do?” he asked.
“I think we just did it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s love and understanding, that’s all that really matters. We play these roles of man and woman, black and white but really all that matters is love and understanding. No amount of money can buy it.”
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She ignored it and kissed him. There was a tenderness and yielding quality to that kiss that had been missing from every other kiss in her life.
“Can we agree at least that the money does change things? It does make a difference if it’s used the right way. I don’t know what that way is, but maybe together we can figure that out. Forget whatever Millie’s been directing you to do. Forget about me and my family. If you could remake things, how would you do it?”
She was about to answer when her phone began buzzing again, like an incessant bumblebee trapped behind a pane of glass. She reached over and picked it up.
“Who is it?” Wild asked.
“Speak of the devil,” she said. “It’s your brother-in-law. He never calls me. I need to answer it.”
She got up and crossed into the other room before swiping to answer and putting the phone to her ear. “Hello, Gerry.”
“Eileen, what in the actual fuck are you trying to do to my company?”
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