“I can’t. I don’t—”
“Shush. Yes, you can. Everything is going to be fine,” I tell him. “Whether you know it or not, you were sent here, and now that you’re here, you can stay with me while I go. It might take a few days, but it’s coming soon. And, sweetheart, this is going to be good for you. Something elemental about life that you need to know.”
His beautiful face looks so uncertain. I almost want to reach over and pinch his cheeks between my fingers like I did when he was small. “But—when?” he says. “I mean, what’s going to happen?”
“Well, that’s what we don’t know. I thought it would be by now. But it hasn’t. I think I must have been waiting for you. The universe has sent you.”
His shoulders slump. I close my eyes and surround him in white light so that I can forgive him for being his mother’s son. He’s a child, a novice, what J.K. Rowling would label a muggle. Unsuitable for the task at hand, but maybe he’ll get there.
“Here. Let’s begin with this. Walk me inside the house,” I say.
“Okay,” he says and manages to support my arm as we slowly walk up the stairs. It’s funny how I’d come down these steps all alone—slowly, but still—but now I have to lean on him to get back up. I stop when I need to, which is about a million times, because this may be my last look at this beautiful scene, at my life here that I have loved with all my heart.
“Do you—do you think you’re going to suffer?” he says.
“Oh, my darling, I have decided not to suffer,” I tell him. “Suffering is optional.”
We get to the top of the steps, and he opens the big wooden door. I see our reflection briefly in the pane of glass as it catches us in the sunlight when it swings open. The smells of breakfast, of the parquet floors, the curtains blowing. The wind chimes tinkle above us, a comfort.
“It’s really going to be all right,” I tell him. “I’m not scared, and I don’t want you to be scared either.”
SIXTEEN
MARNIE
Summer has turned to September, which in Jacksonville means it’s Summer 2.0. The days are still bright and hot, the nights are filled with the electric sounds of buzzing insects and flashes of heat lightning, the air is still as humid as the inside of a dog’s mouth, and—yes, I’m still living with my parents and hanging out with Natalie and Brian and the baby.
And now there’s Jeremy.
We go running on the beach; we play cards with my parents; we cruise around in his car like we did in high school. It’s like when we were teenagers, except for the stunning fact that we’re adults so we also have sex now.
There is something so sweet and uncomplicated about these days—being with a guy who speaks your same language, who knows all the old jokes, who loved you even when you had braces and hair tinted green from chlorine.
We know the smell of each other’s houses. Which cabinet holds the drinking glasses and which drawer has the flatware. He already likes my family. I already like his mom.
Sometimes these days it’s already noon before I think of Noah.
Another good thing is that Jeremy has asked me to work with him in his office, which has happily put aside forever the talk of me having to be a dining room manager at the Crab & Clam House. So now three days a week—the days I’m not helping Natalie with the baby—I put on a skirt and blouse and little heels and go play receptionist, sitting there in his tastefully appointed office talking on the telephone and ushering in his patients.
His patients tell me they all love him because apparently he’s simply magic with his hands, as one woman put it. He makes back pain and knee pain vanish.
I felt a little pang of jealousy when she said that, which for me is a sure sign that I’m falling for him. After all, he’s in that exam room looking at women’s bodies, and not only that, thinking about how their muscles and tendons could be made to feel better. And I get to be the one he sleeps with!
I feel a little bit of a thrill when I see him do all the things he used to do—the way he flips his hair out of his eyes, that nose-wrinkling thing, and how sometimes he rubs his hands together when he’s anticipating something wonderful. He has never really appreciated deep, long kisses—but he’s the master of divine mini-kisses, all along my jawline, a whole trail of kisses.
What can I say? I know it’s way too soon to make any huge pronouncements—I’m not crazy or anything—but, as Natalie keeps pointing out to me, he and I seem more and more like a couple every single day.
And she ought to know. We visit her and Brian in the evenings after work, and we’ve become a lovely foursome: two ordinary, happy couples in the family room, with the guys making sports conversation and Natalie and I sitting with them, cuddling the baby. The four of us pass the baby around like she’s a big platter of happiness we all share.
I tell you, it’s as though I’ve walked through a door called Normalcy, the door I was always trying to find.
Most nights when we leave Natalie and Brian’s, we go back to his house, and we talk to his mom for a little while, and then, because he’s the best son in the world, he helps her get settled upstairs in bed with her cigarettes, her heating pad and her paperback book and her glass of club soda with lime and her sleeping pill. I wait for him downstairs because Mrs. Sanders is kind of shy, and since her husband died, she likes things done a certain way.
Once we are sure she’s asleep, we tiptoe up to his room and get into bed. (Yes, there are Star Wars sheets.) It’s a little bit like being a kid again, because we have to whisper since his mom’s room is right next to his. Jeremy says she is probably quite aware that we’re having sex in his room, but he says there’s no need to “rub her nose in it” as he put it, since she doesn’t approve of sex before marriage. He’s always having to remind me not to make any sex noises at all, clamping his hand against my mouth, and many nights, to tell you the truth, it seems more trouble than it’s worth so we simply lie there chastely holding hands while we read our books before we turn in. In the mornings, I have to make sure to leave before she gets up.
But it’s worth it. He and I haven’t hit our sexual stride yet, but we will. He gives wonderful back rubs, and between those and all the soft little kisses, I’m quite turned on by him. And every couple has something to work on.
“It’ll be so much better when I get my own place,” he says. “I just have to approach my mother with that idea very delicately, but I’ll do it. And maybe sometime we could get a hotel room if you want.”
Late at night, sometimes I lie awake and watch his calm, unlined face as he sleeps. He might have been my snarky best friend back when we were teenagers, but now we’ve both been a bit humbled by life (“HBL” he calls it) and so here we are, milder and gentler versions of our old selves, waiting to see what life will serve up to us.
I’m aware that he’s the counterpoint to Noah, that he’ll never wake me up in the middle of the night to go stand in line for a Lady Gaga concert. That he doesn’t even know his car is hopelessly uncool, or that his hairstyle wouldn’t meet California standards. He’ll never get drunk at a restaurant and start doing the samba around the tables until we get kicked out, as Noah did when we first met. He’ll never throw out a case of seltzer water because the one I bought wasn’t a brand name, which is also a Noah move.
But he wants kids. He loves his mother. He loves me. And he appreciates my mother’s meatloaf.
And I am watching myself fall in love with him.