In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (21 page)

“Sweetie, that’s great,” Phoebe says. It’s been years since she’s read the play, but she remembers enough to envision Adam in the role, going from cocksure to confused, as the older couple play out their game.

“It would probably be really small distribution—just her passion project—but that’s pretty cool, right?” Adam earnest and excited.

“It’s amazing. Will you be able to do it if the show gets renewed?”

“They’d shoot in New England over the summer.” He pauses. “But if the show does get picked up, would you maybe want to get a place here? We need to move anyway.”

Probably true. TV stars, even stars on basic cable shows that haven’t aired yet, should live in nicer apartments than their shabby two-bedroom in Studio City.

“That might be fun, right?” Adam asks.

“Maybe.”

“Well, we’re probably getting ahead of ourselves,” Adam is saying.

Next to the jewelry box is a stack of sympathy cards her friends had sent, generic sentiments from people at her old high school and her acting workshops. There’s one beige card with a simple tree on the front, postmarked from Italy.

Phoebe—

I know that it’s been a while, but I was deeply saddened to hear about your brother. My thoughts are with you and your family.

—Oliver

It’s the first and only contact she’s had with Ollie since dropping him off at his father’s house three Thanksgivings ago, when her brother was here with Sharon Gallaher.

On the phone, there’s a commotion in the background, Adam briefly talking to someone else, words muffled.

“Okay, I gotta hop, Pheebs, love you.”

When he hangs up, she realizes she’s said nothing about her father and
Law & Order
, nothing about her stepmother’s coddling of him. Wonders why she didn’t tell Adam, hasn’t told him about calling Chase’s apartment or her sizzling hatred of Sharon Gallaher and all those other quiet things.

*   *   *

While Phoebe had lived in her father’s house only a year, her brother had more time here. All of high school and breaks from the University of Wisconsin, enough years to settle in and make his room a home. Yet when Phoebe tries to picture what’s on the walls or even the view from his bedroom window, she comes up blank. There might a long-abandoned guitar from his Jim Morrison phase in the corner, maybe a
Pulp Fiction
poster? She can’t even remember the color of his bedspread—blue or green, something nondescript boy?

She’s not sure what she expects to find when she opens the door to his room, but it’s certainly not Gennifer sitting on the bed (gray plaid spread) staring out the window.

“I’m sorry.” Gennifer stands, as if an explanation is needed. “I … sometimes I come in here.”

“That’s perfectly fine,” Phoebe says, understanding with absolute clarity.

When Chase died, her real mother blew in from halfway around the world, cried, hugged old friends, got bundles of cards and condolences. Then she was gone, back to Hong Kong, where her life hadn’t intersected regularly with her son’s for more than a decade.

Gennifer, who’d never had a shred of biological claim to Chase, had been the one who picked him up from track and cross-country practice all through high school, the one who sent him packages of homemade cookies while he was away at college.

Gennifer had been the one he’d been coming home to when he was having trouble with his girlfriend. She’d been the one who had to contact family members, pick a casket, and make sure her stepson was in the ground within three days, in accordance with her adopted religion. Gennifer is the one who has to babysit her near-catatonic husband. Who has to apologize for missing Chase, for sitting in a room in her own home.

Getting up, Gen starts to leave. While she still looks young, with her regular Botox and dyed hair, she has quietly slipped into middle age, forty-three, possibly too old to have her own children if that was something she ever desired.

Phoebe reaches for her arm. “Do you wanna go out to dinner? Somewhere nice, maybe?”

Her stepmother nods enthusiastically, and Phoebe feels crushingly guilty she’s never asked before.

Over the years, Gennifer and Phoebe have often lobbied for French or Mexican over her father and brother’s consistent vote for steakhouse dinners, but the two women agree on Gibson’s and manage to get a reservation for nine. Phoebe changes into a little black dress and puts on makeup for the first time in a long time, and Gennifer, graceful in a pencil skirt and silk shirt, drives them down Lake Shore Drive.

The all-male waitstaff smiles approvingly as they take their seats in a corner booth, split a porterhouse and creamed spinach, go through a bottle of red, and order another.

Light conversation about all kinds of things that have nothing to do with her father or brother or Sharon Gallaher or the wars. Things like Elizabeth Taylor films on the classic movie station and how, though they are insanely overpriced, classic Chanel handbags are exquisite.

“My roommate at Loyola had five,” Gen says. “They’d been her grandmother’s.”

“What was your major?” Phoebe asks, stunned she doesn’t already know this.

“Communications.” Gen chuckle-snorts. “I wanted to read the news on TV. Silly, right? I hardly ever watch the news now.”

“Did you ever try?”

“At the college news station, sure.” Gennifer looks at the last sip of Burgundy in her glass. “Then I had some entry-level thing set up with a local channel in Iowa, but a few months before I was supposed to leave, I started temping for your dad. And I … he hadn’t even asked me out—he was sooo proper about everything—but I just knew, you know? So I canceled on Iowa.”

Strange, Phoebe’s older now than Gennifer was when she decided to gamble on a divorced man with two kids who hadn’t even asked her out. Is that the fourteen years between them? A different generation, when love, or even the possibility of love, always trumped career?

“I’m glad you didn’t go,” Phoebe says, maybe the first time in seventeen years she’s acknowledged that her stepmother has made her life better than it might have otherwise been.

Gennifer tears up. “Aww, honey, you know you and your brother…”

“I know. Chase knew, too.”

One more glass of wine, and Phoebe can’t help but think of the other person who should have loved Chase, should have come to his funeral. And for the first time since Sharon Gallaher hung up on her four months ago, Phoebe says the girl’s name out loud.

“I don’t understand how she could not come,” she says.

Gennifer shakes her head. “From what he told me, they were breaking up.”

“But they were together for years.”

“People react to things in different ways.” It’s not enough, but Gennifer is too nice to say more, so Phoebe nods.

A waiter brings a giant slab of chocolate cake, tells them it’s from the gentlemen at the bar—two men in expensive suits, older than Phoebe but younger than Gennifer, with the transitory look of people in the city on business—who nod from across the room.

“It’s been so long since I’ve been out without Larry,” Gennifer says, pink flush on her cheeks. “How do we tell them that we’re taken?”

Adam in Vancouver, getting bruised and filming love scenes with the Jericho Jeans girl, calling when he can.

“We don’t tell them anything,” Phoebe says. “We just thank them on our way out.”

And they do.

*   *   *

Her father is still on the couch in the living room when they get back, and Phoebe sits next to him after a tipsy Gennifer kisses his cheek, slips off her heels, and stumbles upstairs. The channel that reruns classic sitcoms is on—Rose, Blanche, Dorothy, and Sophia are huddled around the kitchen table eating cheesecake while a laugh track punctuates their one-liners.

“You and Gen have fun?” her father asks.

“We did. You should take her out more.”

Her father bobs his head in agreement. “I will, I’m…” Slight shrug. “You know.”

It occurs to Phoebe that she’s seen this before, with Adam when the
Goners
pilot didn’t go. She’d had no idea what to do then either.

“I asked Adam about his hands,” she says. “He said they’re great and thanked you for asking.”

“He treat you well, princess?”

Phoebe rests her head on her father’s shoulder. “Yeah, Daddy, he does.”

“Good.”

They watch syndicated episodes of
The Golden Girls
and
Cheers
into the wee hours of the morning, and Phoebe realizes she hasn’t called Chase’s apartment in Manhattan since noon.

*   *   *

Two days later Phoebe meets a very pregnant Nicole for thousand-calorie salads and garlicky bread at Leona’s, where they talk about names for the new baby (a boy this time, to go with Nicole’s three-year-old daughter) and how Evie wants to start her own PR shop in LA.

Both Evie and Nicole had been at Chase’s funeral. Nic, bump barely showing under her long coat, had leaned on Dave’s arm as they navigated the uneven sod of the cemetery. Phoebe hadn’t called her, but Evie had come in from New York, shockingly demure in black boots and leather gloves, pale and visibly shaken. Only Sharon Gallaher, who’d shared Chase’s life, his bed, probably whatever dreams he’d had, hadn’t been in attendance.

“So how’s your TV star boyfriend?” Nicole asks across the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. “Are you guys serious?”

“I think so,” Phoebe says. “But I sorta feel like I’m holding him back.”

“Well, he obviously doesn’t see it that way,” Nicole says. “How about you? What are you looking for?”

Calling Chase’s apartment, trying to remember his bedroom and what he looked like in it. Adopting a dog and the cushion of quiet. Wishing she knew how to fix her father.

“Remember how you made a million flash cards to help Evie study for the SATs?”

Nicole tilts her head in the mom way she was doing even before the babies. “You want to go back to school?”

Phoebe nods, says the tests are being offered a few times next month.

“Yeah.” Nicole smiles. “I’d be honored to help you.”

*   *   *

Coming through the garage to the kitchen, Phoebe hangs her father’s car keys on the holder Chase made in sixth-grade woodshop, notices a stack of outgoing mail on the counter underneath. The top envelope is addressed to the management office of the Madison Plaza in New York City.

Flicker of recognition: her brother’s building.

Ripping it open, Phoebe finds a check written in Gennifer’s curly script.

And Phoebe is calling her stepmother’s name, making her way through the kitchen to the living room, where her father is watching Sam Waterston deliver closing arguments to the jury on television.

“Where’s Gennifer?” Phoebe asks.

Her father looks up, eyes briefly focusing in concern.

“She got back from the gym a little while ago. She might be in the shower. Everything okay?”

Out of the room and up the stairs before he finishes.

“Gen,” she calls, throwing open the door to the master suite, where her stepmother is fastening a lacy bra that matches her panties, towel swaddled around her head.

“Why are you sending checks to Chase’s apartment?” Phoebe demands. “Are you paying that girl’s rent?”

That girl, Sharon, who’d said “Thank you” and then seemingly vanished. Sharon, who may have known that her brother was sick, could have stopped him from getting on the plane.

“No,” Gennifer says, but looks at the Oriental rug under the sleigh bed. “The building manager said she moved out a few days before Chase died.”

“Then why are you still sending money?”

“All of your brother’s things are there—”

“You’re paying four grand a month so Chase’s stuff can sit in storage? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

It certainly isn’t a great use of cash, but Phoebe’s anger isn’t really about the money. Chase probably left enough to pay the rent for years, and even if her father never looks at another chest film again, it’s unlikely he and Gennifer will starve or have to start driving domestic cars. It’s something about the principle. About Dad watching daytime television and Gen sitting in Chase’s room when she thinks no one knows. About Phoebe still calling his apartment and trying to piece together the puzzle of who her brother had become.

“Why not just have them donate everything?” Phoebe asks.

Gennifer sighs. “You’ve seen your dad; he can’t deal with it yet. But there might be things there you guys want, things to remember him by.”

And with the most direction she’s had in months, Phoebe volunteers to go and sort things out.

*   *   *

New York is still cold in late April, and Phoebe shifts her weight from foot to foot, hands jammed into her pockets as she waits in the JFK taxi line.

“Eight Twenty-ninth Street,” she tells the driver, and has to root around in her coat pocket for the scrap of paper with her brother’s address when he asks if she means east or west. “East.”

“Between Madison and Fifth?” the driver asks, over a grating news announcer giving traffic reports from the radio.

“I guess.” Slight embarrassment that she doesn’t know. From her cab window, she notices the spire of the Empire State Building.

When Phoebe was a kid, her family had gone to New York, stayed at the Marriott Marquis (before her mother worked for the Four Seasons), seen
Cats
, and taken the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. “How long would it take you to fall?” her brother, maybe seven, had asked.

Phoebe’s father stopped trying to adjust the viewfinder for her. “That’s a good question,” he’d said. “How long do you guys think it would take?”

“Five minutes?” Phoebe had offered without consideration, realized the answer was wrong immediately by the way her father shook his head.

“Fifteen seconds,” Chase had tried.

“It’s about ten seconds to the ground.” Her father had smiled. “Good answer.”

*   *   *

At her brother’s building—which also juts up stories upon stories into the sky—a uniformed man with the name tag
RODNEY
holds open the door, and the building manager, whom she’d spoken to yesterday, comes out to shake her hand.