In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (12 page)

“Ollie, Ollie, Ollie.” She moved her hand from your shoulder to your thigh, the warmth of her palm seeping through the thin fabric of the sheets. “It’ll work out. You’ll see.”

And you trusted her.

So you helped pack her little dresses and movie posters into her Camry, and the two of you drove across the country. College didn’t start for you until mid-September, so you played house for a couple of months in her studio apartment. The afternoons were spent touring the different neighborhoods so Phoebe could learn the city. You went to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and drove into the Hollywood Hills with a star map from a street vendor; other than a few blondes who may have been models, you didn’t see any celebrities.

Just as in the gum commercials, Phoebe cried and clung to you long after the flight attendant at LAX announced it was time for your row to board when you had to go back.

“I love you, Oliver,” she mumbled into the fabric of your T-shirt.

“Phoebe.” You started to say you loved her, too, but stopped. For months you’d been telling her that, and you needed to say more. “I want to write your name in the sky.”

“Like the Tom Petty song?” She smiled, mascara streaks on her cheeks.

“Sure,” you said. But that hadn’t really been what you were thinking, it had just seemed the most relevant thing to say.

The first few months at Northwestern, you talked to Phoebe every night while your roommate would dramatically slam the door and head to the communal lounge. Phoebe rattled on about the auditions her low-budget modeling agency sent her on and all the almost-famous people she met at parties. You told her about your new friend Chris, who was nice but made you miss Braden, and about the introductory engineering classes you liked.

Without warning, one day you found a hardness in her voice.

“People here are so different than people in Chicago,” she said.

“Yeah,” you agreed. “College isn’t ETHS.”

“It’s not the same.” It wasn’t what she said but how she said it. When she told you she loved you at the end of the conversation, it didn’t have the conviction it had at the airport two months before.

And then Phoebe’s calls dwindled to twice a week, to once a month, to never. You left messages, but she didn’t return them. During the week of your midterm exams, her number was disconnected. You drove down to her father’s neighborhood and circled around, just to see if her car was there. It wasn’t, nor was it there the ten subsequent times you went back to check.

“It will be better in the long run,” your new friend Chris told you over beers bought with fake IDs claiming you were twenty-two and from Kansas.

“It will be better in the long run,” Braden told you when the two of you saw the
Eons & Empires
sequel over Christmas break.

“I never liked that girl much anyway,” Karen told you on the phone. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but it will be better in the long run.”

But they were all wrong; nothing about it was better. Not the ache you felt in your solar plexus every day you came home and your roommate smirked and told you, “No, she hasn’t called,” not the girls you dated at Northwestern or seeing Phoebe eating strawberry yogurt in a Dannon commercial. Not fucking your stepmother.

Years later, when you didn’t consciously dwell on being over her but occasionally it occurred to you that you didn’t think about her every day, Phoebe Fisher finally did reappear. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Braden was in town and wanted to hit some of the swanky bars on the Gold Coast, which was fine because your father was home and you didn’t feel comfortable being there with both him and Maura anymore.

It was one in the morning, and Braden was chatting up some Loyola senior when you saw her with Evie Saperstein. Her black hair was cropped close to her chin, and she was thinner, but she was most definitely Phoebe. And because you were twenty-six and not eighteen, you went over and set a hand on her shoulder.

“Hey, Phee,” you said, as if you hadn’t spent the last seven years wondering about her. “Long time, no see.”

The truly remarkable thing was how happy Phoebe Fisher was to see you. At her urging, you slid into the booth beside her, and the two of you talked until the bar closed and shards of gold light started to streak the sky.

Finally, you drove her home in her father’s car, and she took you upstairs, where you talked more in her gauzy white bedroom that looked the same as it had in high school. She told you about the commercial she did for a used-car dealership in Orange County, and you told her about your work with Advantage Electric and the undergrad courses they let graduate students teach at Northwestern. Then neither one of you spoke for a long time.

Setting your glasses on the bedside table, you went in to kiss her. Phoebe stopped you and began to offer the apology that you’d desperately needed eons and empires ago. But you didn’t want to hear it anymore. It couldn’t change all that time you had stayed in the Chicago suburbs while everyone else left.

“Shhhh.” You traced her collarbone with your fingers. “Things happen; I could never hate you.”

Making love to Phoebe after so many years of wanting to make love to her—all of her body parts alien yet familiar—everything seemed meaningful and slow motion. The only light was the eerie orange glow of Chicago from the south-facing window, and you wondered if the two of you were real at all or if you were ghosts haunting a glitch in the space-time continuum.

You fell asleep, her bare, pale back against your chest.

And you were happy in the time warp, until the next morning, when she told you she was only in town a few days.

“I didn’t even bring a coat.” She melted in velvety laughter, very different than her old giggle. “That’s how long I’ve been gone.”

She was still spooned into you, and you spun her around, had sex with her again, less gentle than before. Maybe you
did
hate her, just a little.

Afterward, Phoebe walked you downstairs to the kitchen, where her father and stepmother, who looked exactly as you remembered, were eating breakfast at the island.

“Oliver.” Her father nodded, and Gennifer asked if you still took your coffee with cream and sugar, as if their daughter bringing her old boyfriend down from her bedroom on Thanksgiving Day was a completely normal occurrence.

Phoebe’s kid brother, who had grown into his features and looked
nothing
like you remembered, gave you a huge hug and asked about your life with authentic interest. Next to him was a girl in a slim skirt and heels. With her blue eyes and black hair, she could have been the Fisher siblings’ younger, less exotic cousin. But from the way she leaned into Chase, you knew they were lovers. You suspected that the girl, who introduced herself as “Sharon Gallaher only one G,” cared more about Chase than he for her. It was subtle, the way her body tilted into his while he faced straight ahead reading the
Tribune
’s business section. Feeling an instant kinship with Sharon, you wanted to warn her what it felt like to love and lose a Fisher.

*   *   *

By the time Phoebe drops you home, it’s nearly one, and Maura and your sister are bringing holiday dishes (dishes that had been your mother’s, even though she never used them) to the dining room table.

“Nice of you to join us,” your father says, which is so ironic you briefly forget to feel guilty about Maura.

“Fun night?” Karen jokes, setting down a plate of sliced turkey and licking gravy from her thumb. “I ask because your shirt is on inside out.”

From the kitchen you can feel Maura’s colorless eyes on you. Not once during the entire meal do you look directly at her.

Three days later—when your encounter with Phoebe feels like a fever dream, your father is back in the sky, and you still haven’t talked to your stepmother—you’re in your bedroom trying to grade student papers when the outline of Maura’s slippers appears through the slit of light under your door.

“Ollie?” she whispers. “Are you awake?”

It occurs to you that you don’t want to deal with avoiding Maura anymore, that she’s your father’s anchor to Evanston, not yours. That you don’t care about thrust and hydrostatic lock and helping other people jet off to faraway places nearly as much as you thought you did. That maybe you
are
sick of the gray Chicago sky and of unconsciously waiting for everyone else’s return.

Holding your breath until Maura is gone, you take the backpack from the back of your closet, fill it with a week’s worth of jeans and T-shirts, and call a cab to the airport for 6:00
A.M.

“What airline?” the middle-aged driver asks as he makes the turnoff to O’Hare.

United offers free standby tickets to pilots’ families, but you can’t run away from home on your father’s airline.

“Maybe Delta?”

“Sure ’bout that?” the driver asks, and you tell him you are. Domestic or international, he wants to know, and you desperately wish you’d had an occasion to get a passport at some point in the past twenty-six years.

The terminal is busy, swarms of travelers scurrying to make early morning flights; other than a guy in a Bears sweatshirt, they could be people from anywhere going anywhere. You line up for a ticket agent, studying the electronic board above the counter listing times and gates for departing flights. Anchorage, Atlanta, Cleveland, Rapid City, Seattle—all the different varieties of the country. Places you never go because you’ve been stuck in a permanent holding pattern in Illinois.

Across the terminal a tall airline pilot strides by in a navy blue uniform. It’s not your father, even at this distance you can tell, but something about the man reminds you of him—confidence.

After twenty minutes in the queue, a uniformed clerk smiles at you, asks, “What can I help you with today, sir?”

“What’s the farthest place from here I can go right now?”

Her brow crinkles, and she asks if you’re kidding.

Taking out a credit card, you smile with all the authority you didn’t have in the Piper Saratoga when you were seven. “Yes, I’m ready for a change.”

4   we don’t get today

NEW YORK CITY
8:46
A.M
. EST

A stitch in her side.

Sharon Gallaher doesn’t actually enjoy running, but she adores Chase Fisher. And she loves that even after a year together, he still asks her to go jogging in the mornings before work, as if his routine would suffer if she weren’t beside him.

Well, almost beside him.

Ten minutes into their run, when she was out of breath and he’d barely broken a sweat, she told him to go ahead. A quick kiss and he blazed off with all the speed he’d been holding back. That happens most mornings, too, and she’s touched that he still asks for permission, that they still do all these things together like the couples in books and TV shows she always assumed she’d never be a part of when she was reading all those books and watching all those shows alone in junior high and high school.

Chase is out of sight, a good two or three blocks away, so it’s probably a fine time to stop and pant and wait for him to come back through Washington Square Park. Then the two of them can shuffle back to the apartment on Bleecker she shares with her roommate from NYU.

Well, roommate for a few more weeks.

Three nights ago, over Chinese takeout at his new apartment on Twenty-ninth Street, Chase asked if Sharon wanted to move in. Pouncing on him, she’d agreed, and they’d rolled around on the chocolate leather couch, making cracks about how she could pay her share of the rent with blowjobs and back rubs.

Her roommate, Kristen, had been complaining about Chase staying over so often and his stuff’s gradual takeover of their cramped bathroom, so Sharon hadn’t thought she’d care. Still, Kristen got petulant yesterday when Sharon said she wouldn’t be renewing her portion of the lease.

“I never thought you’d get serious with some finance guy,” she’d said. “You always talked about marrying an artist or another writer when we were in school.”

“College was a long time ago,” Sharon had said, and she feels that way now back among the students at the park. All lumpy backpacks and hooded sweatshirts, they’re getting out of their 7:30
A.M.
classes, milling around the central fountain, talking about professors, papers, and off-campus parties—everyone still buzzing with the excitement of an untarnished new school year.

Though Sharon only finished her master’s and got the job at
Living
magazine last spring, it seems decades ago that she was one of these kids, and she finds herself slightly embarrassed to still be loitering by the arch.

She decides she’s happy to be moving in with Chase. Even if his new neighborhood is a bit sterile, the apartment is on the thirty-fifth floor and has a view of the Chrysler Building. And there’s no law that aspiring writers have to live in crumbling walk-ups below Fourteenth Street. Sharon still fully intends to be the first person from her grad school class to sell a novel (no matter what Kristen might think).

She decides she’s happy dressing up each morning and heading to the
Living
offices at Rockefeller Center with the other commuters. Even if the magazine is mostly bright photos of celebrities and a lot of her duties are more secretarial than editorial, it’s still kind of fun, and there’s a lot of downtime when she can work on her book. Plus Chase’s friends, and especially their girlfriends, think it’s cool she knows which famous people eat at which restaurants.

Maybe she’s simply happy in general?

Shoelaces on her left sneaker undone.

Hunching over to tie them, she doesn’t see the impact of the plane two miles south. She hears it, though, as well as everyone’s collective gasp.

SOMEWHERE OVER THE PACIFIC OCEAN
FORTY-SIX MINUTES PAST SOME HOUR

“He needs to get out.” Phoebe is shaking Adam’s shoulder, dragging him back from the cusp of sleep.

Even before he’s fully aware of what’s going on, Adam unhooks his seat belt and stutter-steps into the aisle. Phoebe follows, and the man in the window seat manages to exit the narrow row without tripping over their bags, no longer stowed neatly under their seatbacks.