After You (14 page)

24

L
ast night, Sophie refused to eat our healthy dinner of fish sticks and ketchup—two food groups covered: protein and vegetable—because the items were touching on the plate. When I insisted she eat it anyway, she used the line I had been waiting to hear since I arrived in London:

You are not my mother
.

The moment was less painful than I had imagined. She looked so fussy and cute, rejecting dinner in a reenactment of every childhood cliché, furious over something as silly as the meeting of ketchup and fish, that all I could do was indulge her fit. I switched her plate with mine and tried not to laugh.

Poor Greg is awaiting an even more hurtful statement, one he confessed he’s sure she’ll let slip at some point, the one he’s scared is true:
I wish it were you who died instead of Mummy
.

“I’m sorry for what I said last night,” Sophie says now, during our short break between
The Princess Diaries
and
The Princess Diaries II
. The rain, hard and blurring, drums hypnotically and lulls Sophie and me into spending this wonderful, miserable day on the couch. Our bodies melt into the leather, our limbs useless. We have accomplished nothing, comforted by the knowledge that this is nature’s way of saying we should, in fact, waste this Friday eating prawn-cocktail kettle crisps and watching G-rated movies, occasionally discussing the ingenious and brave person—a Brit, no doubt—who first took that great leap for mankind and united potato chips with shrimp flavoring.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I. Just. Yeah.” She cups her elbows in frustration, a tic I’ve noticed happens whenever she bumps up against her limited vocabulary. She knows what she wants to say, only she’s not yet armed with the words.

“Seriously, Soph, not a big deal. You were right. I’m not your mother. But so you know, just because I’m not your mom doesn’t mean I can’t tell you what to do.”

“I know.”

“Like in our book, right? Mary’s better off when she isn’t doing what she wants when she wants.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You’re still little.”

“I’m not
that
little. I am forty-two inches tall. That’s the twentieth percentile for height. Daddy measured me and then looked it up.”

“I meant you’re still young,” I say now.

“But you said little.”

“I meant young.”

“So why didn’t you say young?”

I hate when Sophie reminds me of why she has so few friends.

* * *

The doorbell rings at five o’clock. Sophie, antsy from being inside all day, jumps at the distraction, tail wagging.

“Can I get it?” she asks, already at the door, hand on the knob to swing it open. I am too lazy to join her, opting instead to move to the warm spot she just vacated.

“Check the peephole.”

“Can’t reach.”

“Stand on your tippie tippie toes. Who is it? The mailman?”

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” Sophie screams and jumps up and down, clapping her hands. For more than a childish moment, I think it’s Lucy through the hole in the door, that there’s been some gross misunderstanding and she’s home now, for good. She’ll sit us down and tell us a riveting story, something heartbreaking and funny and impossible, just like Lucy.

“Who is it?” I am standing now, moving toward the front hallway.

“Uncle Phillip!”

Of course, Uncle Phillip
.

Sophie swings the door open, and there is my husband, without a coat, arms full of bags, his sweater splotched by the rain. No, my dead friend is not standing next to him, and if I wasn’t so overcome with relief at seeing Phillip, I would slap myself for my ridiculous optimism. It’s like the start of a bad joke:
How many people does it take for Ellie to believe she will never see Lucy again?

Phillip—his familiar slope of shoulder, his woodsy smell, the way his hair curls in the rain—makes my heart hurt, and I’m overcome with homesickness and nostalgia and, yes, love too. I want to stick my nose in his neck, right under his ear, where there’s a gentle slope, where I’ve always fit. I want to kiss his perfect mouth, the mouth I’ve always thought of as mine.

“Soph-a-loaf,” Phillip says, dropping his luggage inside and scooping her up in a hug in one impressive move. He shakes his hair onto her, wet-dog style, and she giggles that old Sophie giggle. Right now she is eight again. “How did you get so big? Seriously, you are, like, a foot taller since the last time I saw you. And what’s that behind your ear?”

Phillip distracts Sophie and manages to pull a bouquet of fake flowers from his sleeve. He has just stepped off a seven-hour flight, and he’s already her one-man show. He used to entertain me like this too. When I was pregnant, he would croon to my belly in a spot-on Frank Sinatra imitation of “Fly Me to the Moon.”

“How’d you do that?” Sophie asks.

“A magician never tells his secrets,” he says, and finally catches my eye above her head.

“Hey,” I say, and move toward him.

I want to touch my husband’s face.

“Hey,” he says, flinching when I reach my hands to wipe a drop of water falling down his forehead. He eyes my pajamas and bare feet. I look a little too comfortable here, in this house that doesn’t belong to me. Hopefully, there aren’t crumbs on my top from the biscuits Sophie and I ate post-crisps. Once upon a time, Phillip used to feed me cookies after sex, so for a while there, the sweet tastes of chocolate and Phillip were one and the same.

I ignore his flinch, his concentrated focus on Sophie, and try to pretend like he hasn’t ignored my telephone calls and e-mails for the past month. I miss my husband more than I realized. I see that now, as I stare at him, at his wet head and at his goofy magic tricks. I see that now, when I look at his platinum wedding ring on his long, slim man finger and remember how much that sliver of metal signifies.

Pull a coin out of my ear
, I want to say.

Turn water into wine
.
Make the sun come out
.
Take me home
.
What I say instead: “It’s, um, good to see you.”

The restaurant in the lobby of Phillip’s hotel, the Royal Lancaster, is brightly lit and unforgiving. We can see too much of each other here, in our stiff-backed, wooden facing chairs. Through the windows, we can see Hyde Park, and its grassy vastness is menacing at night, its greens turned to black.

“Thank you for coming all the way here.” I smooth the napkin in my lap, line up my silverware, set my chopsticks on their porcelain holder, move my wineglass from the table’s edge. “It means a lot.”

I direct my gratitude to the invisible speck on my fork that I flick away with my nail. I have trouble looking at Phillip. The familiarity of his face gives me vertigo. How many times have I looked at his eyes, his mouth, his lips, the angles of his cheeks, studied his terrain, like memorizing the states on a map? The tiny line on the left side of his nose, a scar from a long-ago scratch from our neighbor’s cat. The beauty mark high on his forehead, just under his hairline. The faintest trace of a dimple, more a shadow than an indentation, that flashes when he smiles. I can’t imagine ever loving another man’s face the way I love Phillip’s. I remember, when we were newlyweds, I would look at it with awe, the gaze of a mother at her newborn.

“We needed to talk in person, and … well, you weren’t coming home anytime soon.” His voice is stern, and he is fidget-free. Maybe he practiced on the plane.

“I’ve been trying to talk to you for weeks. You haven’t been taking my calls. Or responding to my e-mails or my faxes. My next step was going to be smoke signals.” I keep my voice light, borderline flirty.

“I respond well to skywriting.”

“Yeah, priced it out. Way too expensive.”

“I have an idea,” he says, his tone different from mine. His is laced with sarcasm, angry and tired. “You could have just showed up. Like I did.”

“I wanted to. I did. But—Sophie.”

“She seems great.”

“She’s hanging in there. But things have been really rough on her. So, my parents picked a wedding date.”

“I heard.”

“Yeah, three months from today, actually. I’ll come home for that, of course.”

“Of course. You’ll come home for
that
.”

“Can you believe my parents are getting married again?” I ignore his cutting tone and keep mine steady, chipper even.

“They’re gluttons for punishment. They must be crazy.”

“Phillip?”

“What.” A flat statement. No inflection of curiosity.

“Please don’t hate me.”

Phillip doesn’t answer. He lets my remark hang there, his silence revealing its pathetic offering. We once promised to love and to cherish, and now what I feel entitled to ask of him is only this: a desperate plea that he not indulge in its opposite.

We drink a lot of wine. A bottle finished quickly, the fault of nerves and the quiet service, men in white tunics and elaborate belts who match the Thai-themed decor and refill my glass without my noticing. We order a second, another red, and only halfway through this one, once it saturates our blood and numbs our defenses, do we begin to have a normal conversation, back and forth, interrupting each other to carry the conversation forward as we’ve always done. Awkwardness cedes to comfort, to natural rhythms we both had thought were long forgotten. Discussion about
us
or
the future
is cast aside in favor of simple small talk and attempts to entertain the other. We rise to the occasion, our favorite audience back across the table, an opportunity for the subtle performances for which we are famous.

A potent reminder of why we got married in the first place: We’ve always made each other laugh.

When was the last time my husband and I sat across from each other in a restaurant, just the two of us, the sole purpose being to spend time together? I can’t remember.

Phillip tells a silly story from work—his secretary wearing her skirt backward for an entire day and him spending just as long gathering the nerve to tell her. He agonized—which was worse, to tell or not to tell? He still doesn’t know. I side with him in his not telling, though both seem unfairly cruel in their own way.

He asks about my broken arm, and I take him through the names scribbled on the plaster. I introduce him to Claire, who has signed in neat pink cursive and who, in less than one month of dating Mikey, has moved into his studio on Nottingham Court.

“They’ve gone from strangers to soul mates in five dates or less. I can’t believe it,” I say to Phillip, and point to Mikey’s immature doodlings. An M ♥ C contained within an even larger heart with an arrow. “They’re like sixteen-year-olds.”

“I know. He said it’s love at first sight. He sounds really happy.” Phillip is right. When my brother actually finds a moment to call me, his words bleed together, manic and breathless. Everything in him moves a half step quicker now. That’s what love does to my brother. He acts like he overindulged in Red Bull. “Funny that she’s Sophie’s teacher.”

“Yeah, Claire is the best. Sophie will have someone else next year, though. School just got out a little while ago. They run till mid-July here.”

“And who’s this?” Phillip asks, pointing to SIMON, his block letters making his name command attention. I’m not sure we’re ready to talk more about Sophie’s coming school year, a conversation too loaded right now, too tied up in our own future. Simon seems like a safer option.

“Sophie’s therapist. I think he’s helping, but who knows? She seems to really like him. I swear she flirts with him.”

“Aw, I thought I was the only one she flirted with.”

“Sorry, you’ve got some competition now.”

Phillip smiles at me, and for just a second I think we both forget everything, and we are just PhillipandEllie again, living our lives, sharing a delicious pad thai, spearing vegetables off the other’s plate.

We continue our aimless, harmless chatter, letting it spin its comforting cocoon. Phillip tells me a neighborhood teenager backed into our car and left behind a small dent. Nothing major, though, nothing that can’t be fixed. I tell him about how Sophie and I are reading
The Secret Garden
, which he, too, read once, back in college, when I told him it was one of my favorites. “A little too saccharine,” he had said of the book. “But I think it’s cute that you like it.”

I don’t tell Phillip about Lucy’s grand plans, about digging through her draft e-mail. Her secrets aren’t mine to share.

The check comes too early. It’s unclear where we are going with this evening. I hope I’m allowed upstairs, at the very least to sleep in the same bed as my husband, to be given just a little longer with his face, but that’s far from guaranteed. He’s still wary of me, treading carefully. We jump-rope around conversational land mines.

We have not touched, not once.

And though I don’t want to talk about our relationship, don’t want to face our continental divide, I do want to touch him and have him touch me. I want to be held, too, maybe more than anything else. I want to lie in Phillip’s bed, feel my back against his chest, sit in the chair made by his knees. To lean against him until our edges blur.