And again.
I didn’t have to be without him anymore. I’d tell him everything. He, of all people, would understand. It’d be like it was before, before his strange moods, his anger, his lies.
When he pulled away, I was aware of a rapid popping noise behind us. Jim looked stunned.
“How weird.”
He stood, moving to the guitars mounted on the wall. He widened his eyes, mystified. “All the strings just broke. Every single one.” He grinned. “It must be your effect on me.”
I smiled weakly.
My decision to tell Jim everything set off some gangster-movie escape scene from the funeral, wavered, and stalled the moment he took my hand and we rejoined his family.
There were so many uncles, cousins, women wearing black mink coats and stilettos with toothpick heels, swirls of blond hair like sugar garnishes on thirty-four-dollar desserts. We made our way outside, a glamorous black-clad procession up Madison Avenue into the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel.
“Last time I was here it was for Allegra de Fonso,” a woman told me.
The funeral service was long, filled with sniffling people quoting Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan, “Let It Be” by the Beatles. There was a speech from a red-eyed woman who couldn’t stop clearing her throat. Children snickered over an ancient man in the front row announcing too loudly, “It smells like cat piss,” before a nurse escorted him out. Jim smiled down at me and squeezed my hand. I found myself staring in wonder at a photo of the dead man: Great-Uncle Carl, memorialized in a laminated poster propped on a brass easel beside the casket. He had mottled red skin and an oblivious yellow smile. Had he ended up in some kind of Neverworld? I was closer to Great-Uncle Carl’s state than any of these people could imagine.
I had to tell Jim.
However, once the service ended and the crowd spilled onto the sidewalk—black Cadillac Escalades lined up eight deep, everyone shaking hands and muttering condolences and observations about Carl, how he “did it his way” and was a son of a gun—every time I was about to tell him “I need to talk to you,” some new person tapped his shoulder and gave him a bear hug, asking how he’d been, when his first musical was premiering on Broadway. Jim was amiable and kept trying to make his way back to me, but before he could, someone else would approach. When he finally rejoined me, he had two girls in tow. He knew them from grade school.
“Beatrice, meet Delphine and Luciana.”
I’d always recalled the girls as intimidating and otherworldly. Seeing them now, they weren’t as jaw-dropping as I’d remembered, though they had waist-length hair, which they tossed out of their eyes like ponies, and a bored manner that could be mistaken for expertise. Jim kept putting his arm around me as he talked, but after a while, as I stood listening to stories about Millicent, Castman, and Ripper—whether these were people, a law firm, or impossible-to-get-into nightclubs, I couldn’t tell—I began to feel like a giant old L-shaped couch that had been carried out to the sidewalk and left there.
The feeling continued when we piled into an Escalade. We were a large group. Jim was forced to sit in the back next to Luciana. I sat next to an elderly woman wearing red taffeta who reeked of alcohol.
“Here we go again to do what we do,” she mumbled.
We were dropped off at Jim’s great-aunt’s apartment on Park Avenue. Jim deposited me on a love seat by a porcelain pug and disappeared on a mission to find me a Coke. After forty-five minutes with no sign of him, I stood up and roamed the dense crowd, perusing bookshelves and photographs, slipping down crowded hallways as if I knew where I was going. I peered into the kitchen, where caterers were sweating over ovens and trays, and a guest bathroom where the wallpaper looked like twenty-four-karat gold. It was all coming back to me, how desolate I’d felt, adrift in a place I didn’t belong. I’d wanted nothing more than to be away from these people, back in Watch Hill, eating lasagna with my parents, hearing my dad talk about a new BBC David Attenborough program on Netflix.
Now, five years later, inside the Neverworld, I wasn’t nearly so sensitive, but I was still bothered by Jim’s absence. Where had he gone? He’d told me he’d gotten stuck talking to relatives, and I’d believed him.
The question gnawed at me.
I snooped in room after room, searching for him in bedrooms that resembled hotel rooms, offices that looked like libraries, an echoing marble gallery filled with aviation antiques behind glass. Jim was nowhere. Neither, worryingly, were the two girls. At one point, when I opened a closet filled with nothing but Japanese puzzles and board games, Jim’s father, Edgar, stepping out of an office, spotting me, and doubtlessly noticing how awkward I looked, beckoned me.
“Jessica,” he said to me, smiling warmly, slipping what appeared to be a small black flash drive attached to a rubber bracelet over his wrist. I caught a glimpse of a series of digital numbers flashing along the side before he pulled his shirtsleeve over it.
“Can I get you a drink, my dear?”
“No, thank you, Mr. Mason.”
“Edgar. Come meet my partner, Craig, and his daughter, Greta. Greta just returned from Sri Lanka, where she was a visiting neurosurgeon at the District Hospital in Colombo.”
Obviously, high-powered Craig and his neurosurgeon daughter didn’t want to be saddled talking to a mute high school freshman, so it was a matter of seconds before they turned to greet someone—“Bertrand? Is that you?”—and I slipped away.
I couldn’t call Jim. I didn’t have a purse with me, much less a phone. I could wait where he’d left me. Eventually he’d come back. Wouldn’t he?
Another hour went by. With each passing second my plan to confess, run away with him, began to grow stale and sag. When I was jostled for the third time by a woman toting a giant alligator handbag, and Mrs. Mason slipped past me with a cardboard smile, Martha’s words of warning suddenly leapt into my head.
We don’t know how we’re going to react. The past hooks you like a drug. The future jolts you like an electric chair. Reliving beautiful memories can be just as devastating as reliving the terrible ones. They’re addictive.
Maybe it was shock at being forgotten by Jim again, the nagging question of his lies about Vida Joshua, or the understanding that one of my friends had tried to destroy me, deliberately sticking me with the pin to send me to back to some other moment in time, doubtlessly believing I’d be too smitten with Jim to ever leave his side again, trapping me here forever.
I leapt to my feet, barging through the crowd. In the hallway I snatched my burgundy coat off the coatrack. It abruptly collapsed, sending piles of minks to the floor. I threw down my old coat, seized the fattest, most unwieldy fur I could find, and shrugged it on, hit by a wave of perfume. I ran down the hall, my heart pounding, pressing the down button for the elevator. It splintered under my finger. I wheeled around, shoved open the door to the stairs, and raced down each flight, lightbulbs in the lamps overhead shattering as I passed each landing. I charged out into the lobby, the doormen gawking.
How could I have forgotten where I was, and what I had to do?
Didn’t I want to live?
I sprinted outside. The wind was strong, too strong, the green awning chattering and flapping in the gale. I ran to the sidewalk, about to hail a cab, when I heard a girl’s shrill laughter. Wheeling around, I saw Jim.
He was perched on the wrought-iron railing in front of the building next door, Delphine and Luciana beside him. They were talking to a doorman, cracking up over his comical impression of someone, what looked like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. They were all howling so hard they couldn’t stop.
I stood there, frozen, willing Jim to look up and see me.
But he didn’t. Staring at his grinning face, I realized then. I saw it as plain as day. I hadn’t even crossed his mind.