The Last Dreamer (8 page)

“Look,” he said, leaning in closer. “I stopped doing media interviews a while ago because no matter what I said, the reporters always ended up talking about pretty-boy looks and bubblegum music. And the only reason I said yes to you was because I could really use the publicity about my blankets in the
Times
. But I saw the look on your face when I hummed my song—I didn’t do it to test you or anything, I was just humming. And the way you lit right up makes me think I can trust you with my past. You won’t trivialize my life, will you?”

She looked at him, at his beautiful brown eyes set deep in his appealingly weathered face. She would never have guessed that he carried so much resentment. She would never have guessed that his casual charm was a kind of self-protection. Now more than ever, she wanted to know his story. She wanted to uncover all that had made him who he was, and develop a portrait of him that was honest and profound.

“Of course not,” she said.

He looked at her, then smiled his charming, tight-lipped smile. “Okay then. I’ll do it. I’ll talk about the Dreamers. Hey, it’ll be fun.”

They agreed that they didn’t have enough time to continue the interview now, so they’d schedule another meeting. “I’ve got an idea,” Jeff added. “Why don’t we continue this up in Mount Kisco? You can see where we do our product development, and you’ll get a better feel for the business. And then we can talk some more.” He took his phone out of his breast pocket and made a few taps. “Except I have some meetings here in Manhattan coming up. Can we schedule it for
 . . .
next Thursday? Or is that too late for your deadline?”

Things were moving so fast that Iliana felt as though she were racing to keep up with her life. Another meeting
 . . .
and this time up in Westchester? She needed a moment to stop and think. The waiter returned and Jeff ordered coffee for them. Iliana excused herself to go to the ladies’ room.

Weaving among the tables, she felt wobbly on her legs. Clearly the wine had gotten to her. At the sink, she rummaged in her bag to find her lipstick. That was when she spied her cell phone, buried deep inside, and discovered that she had missed six calls and had two new voicemails.

She hadn’t heard the phone ring. Not once. Snapping to attention, she forced her shaking fingers to tap the right numbers. She hoped that Dara’s orthodontist had called to confirm an appointment, or some stranger had reached her by mistake. But then she heard the voice. The tipsy sensation she’d been feeling immediately drained out of her, like an air mattress that had been unplugged.

“Iliana, it’s Jodi. I have Dara here at my house. I ran into her when I picked up the boys. She felt too sick to stay for volleyball, and I think she has a fever. Where the hell are you? Call us.”

The second, earlier voicemail was from Dara. “Mom, why aren’t you answering your phone? My throat hurts and my head, and I think I’m gonna throw up. I just wanna go home. Where are you?”

Her heart racing, Iliana tried to call Jodi’s house, but her fingers were shaking and she couldn’t concentrate. Shit, how long ago had these calls come? Finally she finished dialing. “Jo, it’s Iliana. Is Dara okay?”

“She’s okay, she’s sleeping. Are you all right?”

“I’m in the city—”

“In the city?”

“I’m on my way home, I’ll be there in forty-five minutes, an hour max. Jo, thanks so much, I’ll be there soon, I’ll be right there.”

Grabbing her bag, she left the ladies’ room. Her palms and face were sweaty. Poor Dara, waiting for her, feeling so sick and scared. It hadn’t even occurred to her that either one of her kids would be looking for her, would need her while she was gallivanting with Jeff Downs. What was wrong with her? She was a jerk to have come here. She was a jerk to have started all this.

Jeff smiled as she returned. “Hey, I was just about to go in there and find you,” he joked. But as he looked at her, his expression changed. “Something wrong?”

“Just something at work. A problem
 . . .
I’m going to have to get home right away.” She wiped the corner of one eye with her finger so she didn’t have to look at him.

“Wouldn’t it be faster to go to the
Times
office? It’s just a few blocks away, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but
 . . .
I need to look at my notes. Jeff, I’ve really got to go,” she said, heading to the door.

He called to the waiter to put the check on his house account, and quickly they were out on the street. He held her arm lightly as they walked. Almost in a complete state of panic, she showed him her garage ticket and let him lead her up the right block. As they waited for her car, she tapped her toes inside her shoes and gritted her teeth.

“Guess this really has you worried,” he said. “Hey, it’s just a job.”

She nodded. Her head was pounding. Finally her car arrived.

“Look, this was a great conversation—before, you know, all this happened,” he said, offering his hand. She put hers into it, and he gave it an affectionate pat with his other one. “Call me when this is all over, okay?”

“Thanks for lunch,” she said, pulling away and sliding into the car. She didn’t even want to look at him.

“I hope we’ll get together again. I hope you’ll come to Mount Kisco next Thursday.”

“Yeah, thanks,” she said. She put the car in gear and was stepping on the gas before her door was even completely closed.

Chapter 8

“Relax. She’s sleeping,” Jodi said, pointing toward the family room. “I think I was as freaked out as she was. Seriously, what were you doing in the city again?”

Iliana rushed past Jodi and into the family room, where Dara was asleep on the sofa. She kneeled down and gently shook her daughter’s shoulder, warm beneath her volleyball shirt.

“Mom, where were you?” Dara said, her eyes squinting open. “I called you like a million times.”

“I think my phone’s broken. I’m sorry. Let’s get you home.”

Jodi walked into the room with Dara’s coat and backpack. “Your phone isn’t working? Is it the battery?”

“I don’t know,” Iliana said as she helped Dara up.

“Or probably not, since you eventually got our messages. That’s so strange—it stopped working but then it started again?”

“I don’t know, Jo,” Iliana said. “I’ll look at it later.” She took Dara’s coat and held it out.

“It was so weird, Mom, because you’re
always
around,” Dara said, putting an arm through the sleeve. “And then you weren’t home and you weren’t answering your cell phone. I was so scared.”

“But I told you there was nothing to worry about, didn’t I?” Jodi said, playfully tugging Dara’s ponytail. “I told you that by the time we dropped the boys off at basketball and got back here, we’d hear from her. Didn’t I tell you that?” She turned to Iliana. “I didn’t give her Tylenol or anything because I wanted to check with you first. And then by the time I heard from you, she was already sleeping.”

Iliana walked Dara out to the car and helped her climb in, then came back up the front walk, where Jodi was standing, holding the backpack. “Thanks, Jodi, I really appreciate this,” she said, taking it from her. “Go back inside, it’s cold and you don’t even have a coat on.”

Jodi shivered and crossed her arms over her chest. “What were you doing in the city anyway?” she asked.

“It was for a job. A possible job . . . that I was thinking of doing,” Iliana said.

“A job in the city? I thought you liked freelancing. You’re going to leave your kids to commute to the city?”

“No, no, it’s over. I’m not going to do it. I mean, I’m not even going to get the job. But I wouldn’t take it anyway. It’s over. No more.”

Jodi smiled. “Well, that’s a relief. I kept picturing you in some horrible car accident. I couldn’t imagine why else you weren’t answering. I almost called Marc—”

“You called Marc?”

“I was about to, but I didn’t have his number. I thought about waking Dara to ask her for it, but then you called and everything was fine.”

Iliana let out a breath. “Good. I wouldn’t have wanted . . . you know, to scare him.”

“Yeah, well, you scared
me
.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” She looked at the car. “I should get her home.”

“Yeah, go ahead. And don’t worry, I’ll bring Matt home after practice today.”

Iliana nodded and climbed into the car.

“And go get your phone fixed!” Jodi called. “I
never
want to go through this again!”

Later that night, Iliana came downstairs and curled her body against Marc’s on the family room sofa, pulling his arm around her shoulder. She wanted to be held and comforted, reassured that she wasn’t a bad mom for not being right there when her daughter needed her. There was a time early in their marriage when she knew Marc would have done exactly that. He wouldn’t have even had to know precisely what was bothering her; he would have sensed that she needed his love, and he would have given it to her easily. But that had been a long time ago. Tonight he just kept watching the market wrap-up on the Bloomberg TV channel.

“Is she asleep?” he finally asked, switching to CNBC.

She nodded. “They both are.”

“Then why do you look so jumpy? You’re not getting sick, too, are you?”

“No,” she said. “Just having a hard time calming down. Long day.”

“You think your phone’s broken?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was just buried in my bag so I didn’t hear it. I’ll take it to the phone store tomorrow if it acts up again.” She snuggled in closer.

“You think it’s a virus?”

“My phone? Oh, you mean Dara. Yeah, probably. There’s a lot going around at school. I’ll keep her home tomorrow and see if the fever goes down. If not, I’ll take her over to the doctor.”

“Good thing the cocktail party got changed to next Tuesday. You probably wouldn’t want to leave the kids alone tomorrow night.”

“Cocktail party?”

He looked at her. “The one to celebrate the new Cleveland office. I told you about it when I saw you in Midtown. We talked about it the other night, too. What, did you forget?”

“No, it just slipped my mind for a second. I’m thinking about Dara. Relax, okay?”

Marc settled back on the couch. “It’s also a send-off for Keith Rein, he’s moving to Cleveland to run things. His fiancée’s going with him. It’s a huge promotion—they threw a ton of money at him to get them to relocate.” He looked at her sideways. “What do you think we’d do if I got an offer to relocate?”

Iliana caught her breath. “Why? Do they want you to relocate?”

“No, no. I’m just wondering. What do you think? What would we do?”

She looked down at her hands in her lap. She wanted to say she would go wherever his career took them. She wanted to say the kids were resilient and would adjust, and that she’d adjust, too. She knew that’s what he wanted to hear. He wanted to know she was behind him, and he could count on her no matter what. But the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. She just couldn’t mindlessly agree to follow him anywhere. She would want to know where they were going and for how long, and what the move might mean for her. She’d want to know that she could be happy in her own right, and not be expected to be happy simply because he was. She was a person, too. She wasn’t his employee, she was his partner. She had to have an equal voice.

She looked down. “It’s hard, you know, to talk in hypotheticals . . .”

“You mean you wouldn’t go?”

“I don’t know—”

“You wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to make our kids’ future more secure?”

“Marc, why are you attacking me? I forget about the cocktail party for one second and you act like it’s a federal offense, and now we’re fighting about a job you never even had.”

“Forget it, okay? I was just asking,” he said, turning off the TV and going upstairs.

Later that night, she climbed into bed and soon found herself stroking Marc’s chest and kissing his neck. She desperately wanted to connect with him. She felt bad that they had fought once again. She couldn’t shake the feeling that by pursuing Jeff Downs and neglecting Dara in the process, she had played Russian roulette with her marriage and family. It made her feel like a stranger in her own home, something she had never felt before. She thought that being close—even just physically close—with Marc tonight would make her feel safe again. She desperately wanted to feel safe.

“Of course I’d go with you no matter what,” she whispered, even though it was a lie.

He rolled toward her and lifted her T-shirt, and she took his face and kissed his mouth, deeply and forcefully. She wanted the lovemaking to be as tender as it was last week, but something had changed in her, causing her body to betray her. She was restless and aggressive, pressing her legs against him, shifting and turning, and when he tried to kiss her arms or her neck, she kept pulling his face back up to hers.

Finally he pushed himself up on an elbow. “
What
is going on with you?” he said.

“Nothing,” she whispered.

“Then why are you acting like this?”

She rolled away from him, onto her side. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just feel so bad that my phone didn’t work.”

Dara’s fever was down the next morning, but her throat was sore and her nose stuffed, so Iliana devoted every ounce of her being to taking care of her daughter, trying to make up for being unreachable the day before. She carried Dara’s comforter and pillow—as well as Fluffy, the worn-out plush kitten she’d been sleeping with since she was three—down to the family room sofa, and happily studied the movies available on demand, renting
Frozen
when Dara saw it on the list and nodded. She brought over a big cup of apple juice with a bendy straw, and gently covered Dara’s pink-pajama-clad body with the comforter when she fell asleep. She scooted out for a quick trip to school to drop off Matthew’s forgotten violin again, enduring another scolding from the school secretary. She was annoyed that she had been too distracted that morning to check that Matthew was carrying it—but more than that, she was glad that she had been available to answer the phone when he called and to bring him what he needed.

At lunchtime, she made a pot of Lipton noodle soup and called Dara into the kitchen. Watching her daughter crumble two saltines into the bowl and then slowly sip from a wide spoon, she thought about the day before. She was lucky it hadn’t all been worse. Dara—or Matthew, for that matter—could have been really sick, appendicitis- or pneumonia-type sick. There could have been a bus accident or a school emergency—a gas leak or a power outage—and her kids would have been abandoned. Dara could have tried to walk home if Jodi hadn’t been there to get her, in the freezing cold through busy intersections that she had no experience crossing by herself. She could have been hit by a car, she could have been killed or seriously hurt, and there Iliana was, giggling over some stupid M&M’s idea she had when she was twelve. Gushing over this little private baby-world she made for Matt when he was an infant, gushing that Matt had taught her the meaning of life. Was this how she treated the people who gave meaning to her life—abandoning them just when they might need her most?

And she had betrayed Marc, too. He had told her on their first real date, after they met on the train, that he wasn’t sure he wanted children, because he was scared of screwing them up the way his parents screwed up him and his brother. They never knew what they’d come home to—broken dishes on the kitchen floor, a telephone ripped out of the wall, evenings waiting for a dinner that never got made. “Our children will always have dinner,” she assured him months later, when they started to talk about marriage. “Meat loaf or baked chicken and broccoli, rice on the side, a tall glass of milk, ice cream for dessert. Our kids will always know what to expect,” she promised.

And they
would
,
from now on, Iliana told herself as she picked up Dara’s soup bowl and wiped away the cracker crumbs. The pretending and the sneaking around were over. She was not going to visit Jeff in Mount Kisco, she was not going to even get in touch with him, and he had no way to reach her either. She would no longer tell Jodi lies about phones breaking and jobs that didn’t exist. Her life would be an open book. They could talk about the kids, the laundry, the upcoming orchestra concert, Chelsea’s annoying favors. Regular stuff like that.

Dara went upstairs to take a nap, and Iliana followed behind, carrying up her bedding and Fluffy. She tucked Dara in and made sure she was comfortable. Then she went back downstairs and sat at the dining room table, looking at the dark computer screen. She knew what she had to do. It was the one thing that would confirm she had broken completely with her crazy pursuit of the past two weeks, the one thing that would show she was truly sorry for taking her family for granted.

She woke up the computer and typed:

Hi, Stuart,

Unfortunately, the article I emailed you about isn’t going to work out. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Iliana

She took in a deep breath and pressed the “Send” button. Off it went.

Lacing her fingers together, she rested her chin on them, her elbows on the table. The thing was, she knew the article would have been extraordinary—far better than any article about mattress or appliance stores. It had been evolving in her head for the last week or so, simmering on the back burner while Jeff Downs displayed his blankets and Jodi reviewed Chelsea’s lease, while Dara played volleyball and Matthew ran out of the car without his violin, while Marc envied his colleague’s promotion and obsessed about the Seattle contract. And ultimately she knew it could be something far more important than a profile of a man who found a second career peddling blankets. It was a story about promise and disillusionment, about growing up and believing in dreams, and getting hurt and getting smart. It was about a guy who soared to the stratosphere, and the millions of girls like her who found a way to navigate the agony of adolescence by hitching a ride. And she was on the brink of learning and of telling the world what it means—what you gain and what you lose and what you’re left with—when you rise so quickly and fall so far.

It would have been a story that people read and thought about and talked about. It would have been a story that people loved. It would have been a story with impact. It would have been a story that only a true writer could write.

She got up and loaded the lunch dishes into the dishwasher, then straightened the cushions on the sofa where Dara had been resting. She gathered some used tissues that were on the coffee table and took them to the trashcan in the kitchen. She sprayed some Lysol in the family room. No need for all of them to catch Dara’s virus.