After You (19 page)

“It won’t be the same. We’ve read it. We know what happens. There’s no such thing as starting all over again.”

“But we can pretend—”

“Right. We can pretend, but that won’t get us very far, will it?” She uses that rhetorical flourish owned by the British:
Will it?

“I don’t know.”

“Auntie Ellie, it’s no big deal.” Sophie looks at me with palpable curiosity, her hand patting mine in that comforting after-school-special way. She can’t figure out why I’m shaken up all of a sudden. “It’s over.”

35

T
wo postal surprises await when we get home after Sophie’s party. My parents’ wedding invitation has arrived. No matter that the bride is MIA, last heard from somewhere outside Machu Picchu. Red blooms, etched into the thick paper, sprout from the corners, the kind of image intended to celebrate a different sort of union: fresh, innocent love. My parents have already married and divorced, have reconciled and crushed each other so many times I have now lost count.

I am not sure what my dad is thinking in mailing an invitation at all, any invitation, since this form of combat warfare is not his usual style. When my mother retreats, his patterned reflex is to do the same. This time his pursuit is aggressive. He has just told one hundred fifty of their favorite people to make plans for fall nuptials regardless of whether my mother appears to be on board. Denial? Or maybe he’s attempting to shame her back from the mountains of Peru. A perverse form of emotional blackmail that she deserves. Either way, I hope it doesn’t backfire and that my poor father is not stuck at the top of an aisle waiting for a runaway bride. We will all accept the verdict long before he does.

The second: a huge box for Sophie airmailed from Phillip. Of course he didn’t forget her birthday. She squeals when she opens the Professional Deluxe Magic Kit, an all-in-one magician’s toolbox, with a collapsible hat, tapered card deck, a book with one hundred different sleight-of-hand tricks, and a follow-along DVD to teach her the moves. The scale of the gift dwarfs mine. I bought her the Harry Potter boxed set, all of the hardcovers nestled side by side into a cardboard treasure chest. The ultimate escape route—a box filled with countless hours of reading pleasure and a chance for Sophie to sample a fantasy world. My gift was courtesy of AmEx, a card whose tread is running thin now that my income has shrunk to zero. My dot-com savings are a comfort, no doubt, but they’ll take me only so far.

“OhmyGod, ohmyGod, ohmyGod. Look, Auntie Ellie, it’s absolutely brilliant. I have to call Uncle Phillip now. Can I call him now? Please, please, please,” Sophie says, jumping up and down the way she usually does when we are in the park and she has to pee and there isn’t a bathroom within a five-mile radius.

“Sure.” I grab the phone and start to dial, the number second nature. I am calling my own home, a place where, though it houses my letters, my photographs, the buttons and hairspray and old business suits that comprise the accoutrements of my life, I am no longer welcome. What if the test is positive? Would I be welcome then?

“Wait, Auntie Ellie. Is it okay to call?” Sophie’s face has sobered; she has descended from her magic high.

“Of course.”

“But you guys are getting divorced.” I flinch. I can’t help it. I repeat the word to myself as often as I can. Nonetheless, it still stings.
Divorce
.

“But he’s not divorcing you, Soph.”

“Will he still be my uncle?”

“Of course he will. He loves you, and that won’t change regardless of whether Phillip and I are still married.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yup.”

“But he used to love you, too, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did.”

“But he doesn’t now?”

“I guess you can say that.”

“Then how do I know he won’t stop loving me too?”

She’s the master of unassailable logic. I pause long enough that my answer loses credibility.

“Because you’re a kid. People never stop loving kids.” And without looking at her, I hand the phone off to Sophie so she can say all the words I used to say out loud to my husband:
I miss you. I love you. Thank you
.

While I’m pouring our breakfasts and wondering how I’ll manage to sneak out to Boots today to buy a plastic stick to urinate on and then likely cry over, regardless of my verdict, Sophie pads into the kitchen and throws her arms around my middle. She is warm from sleep.

“Good morning to you too,” I say, and kiss the top of her head. I’m not quite sure what this rush of affection is about; Sophie’s a loving kid, yes, but not a demonstrative one. She is, after all, half British.

I wonder if she has a sixth sense about the hypothetical tadpole swimming in my belly, its primordial pull so strong it could throw me back across the Atlantic.

“Hi,” Sophie says, her voice low and shy, the right pitch, considering I haven’t yet had my coffee and am still debating whether I’ll allow myself a cup. “Guess what?”

“What?” I resist the urge to pick her up—she is too heavy for that—but I want to feel her arms around my neck.

“Guess.”

“You did a cool magic trick?”

“Nope.”

“You lost that tooth you’ve been playing with?”

“Nope.”

“You decided to give dreadlocks a try?”

“Nope. What are dreadlocks?” she asks, though her fingers are already on her head, smoothing out her unruly bedhead.

“A hairstyle. Like Bob Marley’s.”

“Mummy and I used to listen to Bob Marley.” Sophie surprises me by breaking out into “One Love,” with a matching dance, no less. The moves, a simple translation: a forefinger upright, a number one, and then crossing her hands at her heart. She looks exactly like Lucy when she does it—Lucy, who danced her way through our childhood, making me put on “shows” with her for our disinterested parents, full of Michael Jackson crotch thrusts and a subpar moon-walk. Sophie throws me back in time, and I wonder how I can be there, in Cambridge, giggling and skating backward on the bed, Lucy alive and trapped at nine, making so much noise that her mother yells at us to “pipe down,” and how I can be here, too, looking at Sophie, Lucy’s doppelgänger, barefoot in Lucy’s grown-up kitchen, not an Easy-Bake Oven in sight. Lucy gone and not gone all at once.

Me, age nine, echoing Lucy’s moves. Me, age thirty-five, echoing Lucy’s life.

“Marley rocks. So I give up. What am I guessing?”

“I did it.”

“Did what?”

“You really didn’t notice, Auntie Ellie? You’ve been acting so weird lately.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I slept all night.” She doesn’t make eye contact, looks at the kitchen tile, swallowing down the emotion of the accomplishment. The nights have been cruel to her, leaving a swath of blue under her eyes, like a brand.

“Oh, my God! You did it! I can’t believe I—Soph, you did it!” This time I do pick her up and dance her around the kitchen. She is heavy, slipping down my hip, but I don’t care. We belt out “One Love,” the first time I have sung before a cup of coffee in at least a decade—the first time I have sung out loud at all, come to think of it, for as long as I can remember. “You did it! You really did it?”

“I did.”

“I am so happy, I don’t know what to do with myself.”

“And guess what I dreamed about instead?”

“What?”

“Mary and Colin and Dickon in the Secret Garden. They didn’t call me a Lesbian Librarian or make fun of me or anything. Instead, they let me play with them.”

“Really?”

“Yup. They even let me feed the lamb.”

36

T
he last time I shopped for pregnancy tests, Phillip was with me, and we chose based on which was the most expensive kit.

“Only the best for my baby,” he had said.

I didn’t know if he meant me or the potential inside me, but either way I laughed. When we got home, he came into the bathroom—he wanted to be part of things every step of the way—and he made us do a fertility dance during the three-minute wait time to make it go faster. The made-up ritual involved some chicken moves, and when my elbow smashed against the sink, he kissed the exact right spot. The test was positive, and for the first time in our lives we both cried tears of happiness.

Today, standing alone before the display in the pharmacy, I choose the cheapest option. A generic brand with a white box and zero promises.

“Stephen, put that back right now,” says a woman whose back is to me, but I recognize the voice, the blond bun shimmering under the fluorescent lighting, the familiar Transformer noises. Stephen’s mother, the zoo bitch.

I start to walk away, quickly, quietly, to avoid a confrontation. Part of me wants to step on her expensive-looking shoes and punch her La Mer-pampered face; the other part of me is shocked to discover I feel sorry for her. I recognize the defeated hang of her neck, the resigned tone, the exhaustion coming off her in waves; she is a woman who is one hair away from losing her shit.

“I said put that back or when we get home you’re having another time-out. And for God’s sake will you quit making those noises for five minutes?” Her voice now totters on the edge of disassembling. She’s trying hard not to cry. “Mummy and Daddy just need to pick up a few things. Please. Just. Stop. It. Stephen James Devereaux, I beg of you. Stop it!”

Wait—
Mummy and Daddy?
I whirl around, wanting to see the object of Lucy’s affections, the man who broke Greg’s heart, and almost Sophie’s. There he is, hair long, past his ears, brown and shaggy; funky glasses; too tight European jeans.

And, of course, I was right. The Parisian reporter, the one who had the nerve to keep asking, again and again, the voice in my head,
But who are you?

How dare you?
I want to say now, want to slap him for preying upon—for destroying—a family. Surely, had there been no Paris, there would have been no mews
accident
. Surely, this man and Lucy’s death are tied in that bizarre cosmic way: A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, there is a tornado in California. Surely, had there been no René, I would be back home, working on my curriculum for next semester. Phillip would be home in a couple of hours, and we’d take in pizza for dinner, half eggplant for me, half olives for him. If there was a test to be bought, to be taken, we’d be buying it, taking it, together.

And what does it mean that as soon as Lucy is gone, conveniently out of the picture and now not even on the cover of the
Daily Mail
—the country has moved on to a missing five-year-old with a bowl cut and one front tooth—René surrenders his Parisian fantasy and returns to his family life? I notice that his face has a scar, a faint line from his bottom lip leading out to his jaw, and I wonder if Lucy felt ownership over that scar, the way I feel ownership of the small birthmark on Phillip’s left hip. And then I see the blond woman again and remember that Lucy was claiming what didn’t belong to her, and if it ever did, if even for a moment, it wasn’t for very long. Suddenly it seems that everything about Lucy was fleeting.

I look at him one last time; I want to be able to conjure up his face again the next time I wonder about those parts of Lucy I didn’t know or understand. But he sees me; of course he sees me.

“Ellie?” he asks, and with the word his wife’s head jerks up.

I can’t face them, and I feel the flush of shame and rage. Shame for Lucy’s overreaching, as if her actions are one and the same as mine; rage for my Sophie—how dare they hurt her, all of them, in their different, perverse ways.

So I do what any normal person would do. I drop my basket and I run.

René catches up with me two blocks later, on Notting Hill Gate, the only part of the neighborhood designed for practicality—a main street of chain restaurants, pharmacies, coffee shops, and supermarkets right near the tube, where bustling bodies check off to-do lists on the way to and from work. He takes firm hold of my upper arm, a finger and forefinger around the new extra flesh that mocks me in the mirror, and leads us into the doorway of a hardware store. The cataract skies are misting in that way that they do in London, where the rain particles defy gravity and stand still, bouncing on the nothingness of air. We are no better shielded under the awning.

“Please,” he says, when I shrug off his hand—
how dare he touch me?
—with more force than I need to free myself of his grasp. “Please, may I talk to you?”

René is looking at me with such intensity, I can’t help but look away. I examine the drills on display in the window, the industrial-strength oven cleaner, fifty percent off. What do I have to say to this man?

“A cup of tea? Look, there’s a Starbucks right there. Please, just one cup of tea.” His accent is lighter than I imagined, and his desperation is palpable. Though he may be reunited with his family, he has not let Lucy go. I can feel it in the way he held my arm.

“Why?”

“Because,” he says. “You know. Because for Lucy.”

I nod, too tired to speak, shocked at how my world has gone from a satiric portrayal of suburban malaise to the drama of a soap opera in what feels like minutes. He leads again, this time without touching my arm, and I follow him the half block to the fourth Starbucks I have counted in Notting Hill.

“So,” he says, once he has bought our drinks and two packets of shortbread cookies and brought them to a table by the front window. “I … I don’t even know where to start. I’m sorry about Stephen at school. And I’m sorry about bothering you back when, you know, it first happened. I’m just—”

His voice breaks, and he runs his fingers through his hair. A practiced gesture once, maybe, but now a reflexive one. He takes off his glasses and breathes into each lens.

“I’m just … I’m sorry. And I can’t believe I didn’t realize it was you. The famous Ellie. Who else could you have been? You just looked so different from how Lucy described.”

“She talked about me?”

“Of course. All the time. You were sisters. I mean, I knew you weren’t related, but she had said you two looked alike. That you were practically, um, what’s that expression? Where two babies stick together?”

“Siamese twins?”

“Ah, yes. She said you were Siamese.”

“Lucy said that? We don’t—we didn’t—look alike.”

“Non
, I see. She never felt quite good enough to be your friend, you know? She’d say that all the time. Especially after, you know. After. Us.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

He leaves my words hanging. Sips his tea and stares at me some more, as if just looking can give him answers to questions he has not yet asked.

“Is she all right?” he asks, his tone urgent again.

“Who?”

“Sophie. I need to know if she’s all right. It would kill Lucy—” He stops, examines his hands. “It would have hurt her to know she wasn’t.”

“She’s all right. She’s tougher than she looks.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“Yeah.”

“You should know that it was real. Our relationship. I loved her.”

“I know.”

“I mean, now that she’s gone I can almost make believe it never happened. Like she was a dream or something. Like that whole time wasn’t, you know, real. But it was.” He looks out the window, and his wife is right there, steering Stephen down the road, pharmacy bags in both of her hands and tears streaking her face. She doesn’t see us, and he looks away. Neither of us wants to watch the collateral damage. The life out there, trekking in the rain, fighting a ghost she can’t compete against, looks like an alternative destiny. “I guess that’s why I wanted to talk to you. To remind me that she existed. I have no one else to do that for me.”

René looks older than Greg, maybe forty-five, and his eyes are tired with grief. He wears a weariness that makes him look the part of the widower too.

“I wanted to go to the funeral,” he says now. He holds a stirrer like a cigarette, then breaks it in half with two fingers, and then in half yet again. “I felt horrible that I couldn’t go. Can you imagine? Not being able to go to the funeral of the woman you love? I bring flowers to her grave, but,
non
, it’s not enough.”

Since the funeral, I have not been back to the cemetery. I should go, I realize now, if it means one more way to honor Lucy. I’m grateful suddenly to this man in front of me, her lover, who has made sure that her grave doesn’t sit unadorned. I bet he brings her tulips, her favorite, in simple and elegant bouquets.

“How was it? The funeral? Would she have liked it? I mean, would she have been happy with it?”

“Not really. We just weren’t, you know, ready. Prepared, I mean. None of us knew what to say. It was too much.” I think of the little boy I saw playing in the private garden that day, and I think of his red plastic shovel. “The food was good.”

“Good. She would have liked that.” He closes his eyes for a minute, and I am not sure where he goes. Maybe to Lucy, maybe to the funeral he wasn’t welcome at. “I know you probably think I’m a horrible person.”

“I don’t think you’re a horrible person. I don’t even know you. I just can’t understand. I mean, how could she have? How could she have left Sophie? An affair, okay, I get that. But leaving? Moving to Paris?” I feel on the verge of tears again. But not for me: for Sophie. She got left behind not once but twice.

“It’s not that far.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I know.”

We look out the window again, at the gray that shades the city daily and can make this place feel hard and cold and lonely too.

“Have you ever just wanted to start your life over? That’s how Lucy and I felt. We just wanted a second chance. A clean slate. Until Lucy, I felt like I was just getting through the days. After Lucy—” He stops, takes a breath, picks up a new stirrer to fiddle with. “I felt alive. Like there was a whole other world out there. And then the job in Paris came up, and the timing seemed so perfect. We always talked about running away.”

For a moment, I let myself believe that there is another universe where they get to see their story through, where they reach for more happiness, maybe more love, than they had each thought they deserved. For a moment, I’m even willing to sacrifice Sophie and Greg, leave them to pick up the shards, for Lucy to live in Paris with this man. To be silly and madly and shamelessly in love. To attain that elusive dream of a do-over. Heartbreaking to think she had her life taken at the exact moment when she thought it was just getting started.

“Thank you for bringing her flowers,” I say.

“She wanted to tell you. About me. She said she tried a million times but was always too scared.”

“Lucy wasn’t scared of anything, least of all me.”

“She was. She was scared of telling you. She thought that by leaving Sophie, she’d be losing you.”

“That makes no sense.”

“She said you’d never understand. She said it was the one thing.”

“The one thing?”

“Yes,
je ne sais pas
, the one thing—the only thing—you could never understand.”