After You (23 page)

41

A
fter Sophie’s gone to bed, Greg suggests we have a drink outside in honor of the clear skies, and he pours harmless lemonade for both of us. Not much attention has been paid to the landscaping in the backyard, which is a rectangular patch of green that mirrors the shape of the house. Long and skinny. We lie on twin wooden chairs padded with waterproof pillows and keep them at the angles we find them, almost flat-backed. Lucy was likely the last one to sit out here, and I picture her relaxing on a rare sunny day last summer, feeling decadent for taking the time to do nothing but warm and darken her skin. A human surrender to the sun, and that reflexive inclination to face the heat straight on.

“Nice night,” Greg says, staring up at the cloudless sky, at the stars that are somehow still there though we haven’t seen them in a while.

“Perfect.” I rest my hand on my abdomen, and in my head I talk to the baby.
You feel that air? It’s kissing our skin. Appreciate nights like these. They don’t come often
.

“Ellie? We need to have a chat.” Greg sounds nervous, and I wonder if I should be too. But the chair is too comfortable, I am sinking into my cushion, and I feel far away from his words. There is the outside me and there is the inside me now, and I am reveling in the bubble of the inside me. I don’t even have to look at him, not with the sky stretched before us like a canvas.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“I don’t know how to say this.”

“Just say it. Like ripping off a Band-Aid.” My tone is casual, almost flippant. I feel invincible, as long as Sophie is safe in her bed, the baby safe in my belly. Nothing can touch me as long as those two things remain fact.

“I, um … well, here’s the ten-thousand-foot view: I sold the house.” Invincibility broken, so clean and fast that I don’t even get a moment’s satisfaction at his finance terminology—
ten-thousand-foot view
. My heart blinks, drops clear down into my stomach, and I grip the armrests to fight the vertigo. The strange part, though, is that I can’t say why. I hadn’t even known I loved this house. But I do, with a ferocity that frightens me.
You can’t sell Lucy’s house
.

“But. I mean. Why?”

“Don’t worry. It’s not like I’m going to throw you out or anything. You can stay with us for as long as you like. Even after we move. You know you’re always welcome. You’re family now.”

“Thanks, but I wasn’t even thinking about me. It’s just … it’s Lucy’s house.”

“No, Ellie. It’s
my
house.”

“I’m sorry, I know, I know it’s yours. But it’s her, this house, if you know what I mean. This house screams Lucy.”

I picture the white couch in the living room, so optimistic, a symbol that the world can be kept as clean as you like, as beautiful and ordered as you choose it to be. And then her office, the exact opposite, an embracing of wear and tear, of the shabby chic, of the fact that the relics of our lives—the diplomas, the books, the pictures—add up to something worth displaying, if only to ourselves.

“Exactly. I need to get the hell out of here. Enough of seeing Lucy everywhere. I’m just tired. I’m tired of missing her, and hating her, and then missing her all over again. It’s killing me. I found a Post-it note yesterday with her handwriting on it. At first I almost kept it; you don’t chuck out that sort of thing, anything to remember her by, you know? And then I thought,
What if it’s
his
number on it?
But it doesn’t matter, none of it matters.” His voice revs up and then gives out, broken. “No, none of it matters, not a whit, but it still feels like it does. Is it so wrong to not want to feel so much all the time?”

Greg squeezes his eyes shut, as if even looking at the stars is too much. His face says what Sophie said out loud less than a month ago, when she again woke up wet with the residue of her nightmares:
Please, make it stop. Please. Just. Make. It. Stop
.

“I’m sorry. I sometimes forget … I don’t know, that you’re not allowed to just miss her. That’s it’s more complicated than that.”

“But want to hear the sickest part? It’s like she gave me a gift before she died. It’s so much easier to be angry at her than to miss her. When I forget to be angry, it’s almost too much. And when I look at Sophie—” Greg’s voice breaks, and he drifts off into silence as he composes himself. When he speaks next, he is back in the conference room, cool and controlled. “There are just too many memories here, good and bad, for both of us.”

“You should go. A fresh start. We all deserve those once in a while.” But even as the words come out, I wonder if they’re true. Not the deserving part, but the possibility of starting over. Cleaning the slate. And whether we are all just missing the point when we reorient toward a new place we decide, sometimes arbitrarily, to call home.

“Ashford,” he says, when I ask where he’s found a new neighborhood. “It’s a tiny village. As picturesque as the English countryside gets. Sheep and cows, and everything is green and lush. But it’s only sixty miles from here, so Soph can still see Inderpal and go to sessions with Simon, if she wants to.”

“Sounds great, Greg.”

“And there’s this amazing school, just up the road, where they have special gifted classes. Here’s the best part—” He pauses to build up the suspense, the silent equivalent
of drum roll, please
. “Tomorrow I’m going to announce to the partnership that I’m going part-time. I’ll work only a couple of days a week, virtually commute from a home office and be there when Soph gets home every day. I think she’ll love the countryside, getting out of the city. It’s not all that far from where we went for her birthday. It looks just like that, actually. She’ll practically have her own Secret Garden in the backyard.” He says it all at once, his practiced spiel for everyone who will ask in the weeks ahead where they are going. A practiced spiel that he’s in the process of refining for Sophie.

“I am so happy for you.” And I mean it, even though there are now tears dripping down my face. Even though I feel like someone has stepped on my chest and forced me to lose Lucy all over again. There is the loss, and there are the million side losses, and this house is one of those. “And I’m happy for Soph too.”

“It’s the right thing, Ellie. It is.” Greg announces it as if he is convincing himself and the universe at once. “It has to be.”

“I know. It will be.” I swat at my eyes with the backs of my hands.

“And the garden? It’s a proper one, not like this box but one with vegetables and herbs. I think Sophie will enjoy playing out there.”

“I’ll have to buy her a book so she can identify all the plants. She’s going to drive you crazy with all the scientific names. Just you wait.”

“L?” He says it just like Lucy did. Short and to the point.

“Yeah?”

“You’re going to make a great mum.”

“You think?”

“I know,” he says, and I finally turn to look at him, to see if he is saying what I think he is saying. But his eyes are closed again. “Please just tell me that it’s Phillip’s.”

So he knows. Of course he knows. I haven’t touched a cup of coffee or a glass of wine in almost twelve weeks.

“Yes. It is. Of course.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yes.”

“Have you told him?”

“No.”

“Are you leaving us?”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and now the tears come again, this time, loud and gulping, remorse-filled tears. “I lied to Sophie. I said I wasn’t going anywhere.”

“I see.”

“I’m a coward.”

Greg doesn’t say anything for a while. He just lets me cry. He’s a different man from the one he was four and a half months ago. He is resolute, less brittle. He can endure a woman’s tears.

“You’ll still be in her life, though, won’t you?”

I nod my head yes, because I can’t form words. Imagining my life without Sophie now is like how it once was imagining my life without Lucy, like how it would be to imagine my life without my left arm; unimaginable.

“You’ll visit, and she can visit you?”

“Of course.”

“Could we do all the holidays together? I want to give her a sense of family. I don’t want it to be just her and me against the world. That’s how I grew up, and it wasn’t good.” Greg is now a man with a plan; I imagine he has a list typed out somewhere, ways to get their lives back in control. Ways to be a better parent, to be both mother and father to Sophie. Action items.

“Please. Yes. We can be a transatlantic team. A transatlantic family. I may be leaving, but I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me.”

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay,” I say, both of us making vows to the sky.

Fifteen minutes later. We are still lying here, awake, looking straight ahead, as if the stars are a puzzle that we are capable of solving. The stillness of the night settling around us like a duvet.

“Ellie, you know you have to tell him. Soon. It’s not fair. All these secrets you women keep.”

“I will. I’m … I’ve just been … gathering my strength. I kind of wanted to wait until it looked like things were pretty safe; I didn’t want to jinx it. And now I’m just too scared. I don’t even know what to say. The last time I saw him, he asked me for a divorce. He’s going to freak out.”

“Are you kidding? Have you met Phillip? The man will be thrilled. He was so crushed before, when you lost the baby.”

“Oliver.”

“When you lost Oliver.” Greg repeats after me, without judgment, with understanding of why I need his name said. “He was calling here every day, talking to Lucy, even asking me, trying to figure out how to help you when he could barely handle it himself. He was a mess.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Now you do.”

42

F
or my thirty-fourth birthday, shortly after I lost Oliver, Phillip gave me the only gift that had a shot at cheering me up. He flew Lucy in for the weekend. She arrived on a Friday afternoon with an overnight bag and two bottles of wine she bought for us at duty-free; she was unwrinkled, looking not at all like she had just spent six hours on the plane. But that’s how Lucy was, someone who could spend the day in a tsunami and come out with her hair a little tousled, a natural I-just-had-great-sex look. She hugged me with the same ferocity that I hugged her, a mutual clinging, a reminder just by seeing each other’s faces of who we used to be, who we maybe still were.

“I’m here!” she said, in a
ta-dah
voice, as if she had done a magic trick just by showing up.

Phillip had booked us a day at the spa—again, another perfect gift—one of the fancy ones on Newbury Street where, after your massage, you got to spend hours slipping in and out of a terry-cloth robe, reveling in the release of the hot tub, the steam room, and the sauna. We deemed it the Day of Our Pore Opening.

“I would rather die than get old,” I remember Lucy saying, while she stared at the mirror and poked at her skin. Stretching it hard across her cheekbones and letting it relax back to its normal state.

“Stop being ridiculous. You’re beautiful, and, as much as it pains me to admit it, you’ll always be beautiful.”

“No, I really won’t. Did you see those girls in here earlier? How old were they? Twenty-two? Did you see their asses? My ass will never look like that again.”

“My ass has never looked like that.”

“And their skin. It glowed.”

“They just had facials.”

“I just had a facial. Seriously, L, every day I’m getting a little less attractive, and Greg, the bastard, is getting more attractive. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true: Men have it easier. And it’s not fair. Maybe the answer is to die young.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. There is more to life than whether you look twenty-two.” I remember it occurred to me for the first time that there was a price to be paid for beauty like Lucy’s; I had never before seen the downside, except for maybe the fact that it made other people always assume you were better—smarter, nicer, more spectacular—than you actually were. I could think of worse things than high expectations and the benefit of the doubt. But seeing Lucy look in the mirror, the way she poked at the burgeoning crow’s-feet around her eyes—which I had noticed but acted as if I hadn’t—I realized it must be hard to let go of something that everyone has always patted you on the head for. Something that was ninety percent out of your control.

What happens after beautiful? Sad, ballooned lips and plastic-surgery scars? Desperate attempts to reclaim what was only one draft of you, though somehow the defining draft?

“Is there? Really? Can you imagine even ten years from now, being right here, with a new crop of young girls, and seeing how they’ll look at me? They’ll feel sorry for me that I can’t leave the house without a tub of cover-up under my eyes and a scarf because of my stupid neck. Have you seen these lines? I have started the descent. And eventually people are going to stop seeing me at all.” Her eyes brimmed with tears, and she blinked them away, embarrassed that something as trivial as necklines could trigger such passion, particularly in light of the circumstances. I had just lost a baby. “I know, I know. I’m awful, and small-minded, and my values are all screwed up. I know what you’re going to say. I grew up in Cambridge too.”

She grinned at me, trying to erase her tears:
Of course I don’t mean it. I don’t really care about necklines
.

“I wasn’t going to say anything. I can list a hundred things I hate about myself that are only going to get worse. I get it,” I said, and just like that a list pooled, almost written in the air. The line between my eyebrows; my hips and ass, which hadn’t yet had a chance to recover from pregnancy; the line on my belly, where they cut Oliver out. The flaws all felt heavy, like guilt, like an inevitable disappointment. “But there is such a thing as aging with dignity. There is no shame in getting old.”

“But maybe I just don’t want to do it. Maybe I’ll die young and glamorous like Marilyn Monroe.” She put her hand to her forehead, her familiar
I know I’m being melodramatic
gesture, turning her statement into something silly.

“She OD’d. That’s not glamorous.”

“When you think of Marilyn Monroe, what do you think of?”

“Her holding down that white dress.”

“Exactly. Not her taking enough barbiturates to kill a small town. You think of her white dress.”

“So?”

“So I wouldn’t mind being remembered for something as simple and as beautiful as a white dress.”

Lucy got what she wanted. Because of the diabolical nature of the Internet, a new form of indelibility has arisen: Lucy Stafford will be remembered for being the rich Notting Hill mother and journalist who got stabbed in a mews less than a mile from her multimillion-dollar home. The photograph that accompanies every article—now almost an emblem—was taken moments before her wedding ceremony; it’s a reflection shot, two Lucys, one looking at the other, as she puts on her earrings in the mirror. I have no idea where they got the picture from—probably one of the nannies—but it’s the one she will be remembered for and the one Sophie will see a couple of years from now, when she learns the magical powers of the search engine.

Lucy would be happy with the picture. She looks beautiful and alive. She’s wearing white.

We, of course, the ones who loved her—who can still imagine her at the age of nine, decapitating her Barbies’ heads to string them along some fishing wire, who can imagine her at the age of twenty-four, talking through chipped white plasterboard in our “two”-bedroom apartment in New York, who can imagine her at twenty-seven, exhausted and teary after childbirth, who can imagine her at thirty-four, tracing the lines on her face in a mirror, who can imagine her at thirty-five, dancing to Bob Marley with her daughter in this kitchen—when we think of her, we will think of all these different versions. When you spend a lifetime with someone and then they are gone,
whoosh, just like that
, all the incarnations bend time and stay suspended in a line, not simply stuck in what came last. Still and constant, memories an unfolded map, like the timeline in Sophie’s history textbook. Memories we will cling to and origami, until they fade out, colorless. Until one day we, too, are left to Google for a hit of that spectacular woman we once knew, the image we find superseding all others. The final draft; Lucy in a white dress.