“My hair isn’t good. I should at least wash that.”
“Put on your hat. You’re always wearing a hat.” I get out the cloth napkins and put them on the tray. I’m distracted suddenly by a dust mote that seems lit up in a sunbeam. My hairline is tingling just a little.
“And I should cut my toenails maybe.”
“Now you’re just toying with me.”
“Get up here!” yells Houndy from across the room. “We need more representation by testosterone. Don’t make me cope with these women by myself!”
Patrick says something about how he’s already eaten breakfast, and he really does have a lot of work to do. And also he’s waiting on a package. He’s lobbing excuses like they’re pebbles and he’s laughing while he does it, knowing that I understand that he can’t come. It’s not one of the days when Patrick can do stuff.
If I squint, I suddenly see little points of light everywhere. My head feels funny, like something is trying to signal me.
“I have to sit down,” I whisper to Lola, and she gives me an odd look. Houndy has taken the tray and gone on upstairs to the roof, and I hear the door slam behind him, feel how the whole building shakes, like it’s answering him.
“Are you dizzy?” she says.
“No . . .”
“Maybe you need some water instead of coffee. Here.” She turns to the sink and runs the tap.
“That’s . . . not . . .”
And then I know what it is.
Marnie. Patrick needs Marnie.
They are a match.
So much clicks into place—why it was essential for me to go to my niece’s Christmas party in Virginia even though my family drives me nuts, why I needed to meet Marnie, and why Noah hooked up with a woman that he isn’t going to keep loving . . . oh my God. As though we’ve all come together in some kind of elaborate dance. For Patrick and Marnie.
Patrick and Marnie. Old souls who need to find each other.
I love when it happens this way. Even now I feel my body, tired and creaky as it is, running with energy.
Lola is looking at me closely. “Oh boy,” she says. “I know what it means when you look like this. Something is happening.”
“Later I’ll tell you,” I say. “Right now I need to think.”
And she and I go up to the roof, and we look out over the city and soak up the early summer morning light while we eat. It is so beautiful here, and life is so full of possibilities, even though I’m not going to be here for much longer.
How can I bear to leave knowing there is so much undone? I have to trust the universe to make it all work out for them.
I watch the doorway, but Patrick does not come upstairs to the rooftop. He’s downstairs pounding away on his computer keyboard, trapped by his own demons. And Marnie—Marnie’s heart is being broken somewhere far away. I can feel it.
You are going to be okay, I beam to her. And then to them both: Be brave. Be brave.
There is so much fear to wade through before you get to love.
SIX
MARNIE
Natalie texts me two days into my honeymoon: Is honeymoon Noah behaving better than wedding Noah?
MUCH BETTER, I write back. #ALLGOOD. WHEW! THANK GOODNESS.
And then I look across the table at my handsome, tousled husband, who is sipping his Bloody Mary and gazing out through his Ray-Ban sunglasses at the turquoise sea just beyond the jungle. He looks like an ad for the tropics. We are having a perfectly normal late breakfast on the hotel restaurant’s deck after having perfectly normal honeymoon sex last night, and I’m glad to report that Noah looks tanned and well rested and not anxious at all. There is just one tiny little thing: underneath the table, his knee is bouncing up and down like it’s connected to an unseen metronome.
He feels me concentrating on him and looks at me. We both smile, and I turn back to my eggs quickly before I have to see his smile fading.
Jesus.
He is going to break up with me. He’s just waiting for the right moment.
Which is probably why I’ve had a headache practically the entire time we’ve been here. I feel that my smile must look like a rictus grin, something you’d see on a skeleton. No wonder the waiter put our food on the table and backed away fast.
“Noah,” I say, and then can’t quite recall what I meant to say after that.
“What?” he says.
Do you love me? And do you remember when you first started spending the night at my apartment how sometimes my old bed frame would crash onto the floor when we made love? We started having to drag the mattress to the living room before sex. You joked that moving the mattress was the most exciting foreplay you’d ever had, and I knew I wanted to keep you forever.
“Nothing, never mind.”
“Do you want to go on a hike this afternoon?” he says grimly.
So we do. We walk through the little town and out into the jungle. He walks along quietly, like a man walking to his doom, stopping every once in a while to look at birds through his pair of binoculars, or to solemnly hand me the bottled water he put in the backpack. When his long, lovely fingers brush mine, I have to squeeze my eyes tight so that I don’t cry.
I am stumbling along the path behind him, tears blinding me, when I hear a voice in my head saying, You’re going to be okay. Be brave.
That’s when I take a deep breath and I say to his back, “Noah. Tell me what’s the matter.”
And he turns and looks at me, and I see that my week-old marriage is about to die right there on a path in the Costa Rican jungle.
It isn’t that he’s gone crazy or is suffering from anxiety, or any of the things I have tried to tell myself. It’s worse than that. It really does turn out to be lawn mowers.
“Lawn mowers,” I say blankly.
Ahead of us on the path is a middle-aged couple in matching Bermuda shorts and powder-blue T-shirts. When she passed us, the woman told me that if you wear light blue, butterflies might land on you. She said this giggling, and the man had laughed, too, and then they’d set out on the path, arm in arm. I watch their retreating backs. She is oblivious to the fact that there is a butterfly riding on her back.
“Excuse me, sir,” I say in a low voice, only for Noah’s benefit, once they are out of earshot. “Sir, I know this may sound strange, but could I ask you your deepest feelings about the lawn mower in your garage? Are you in any way afraid of it, sir?”
“Shut up, Marnie,” Noah says.
“No, please, Noah. Tell me these fears you have, the ones you’ve just discovered in yourself on the day you got married to me.”
He scowls. “It’s the tyranny of lawn mowers, not the things themselves,” he says. “And it’s not just the lawn mowers. I don’t want any of it: the lawn, the household budgets, the electric bill, the daily conversation that goes: ‘How was your day, no, how was your day? Did you have a good day?’ I can’t do it.”
“The tyranny of lawn mowers and being asked, ‘How was your day,’” I say slowly. “You can’t do ‘How was your day.’” The sky is full of birds. Parrots are screaming around us.
You are going to be okay, Marnie.
He shrugs and looks off into the distance, ruggedly handsome and bored with me.