He shook his head. “You’re my family.”
After the wedding, they all went for drinks at the Bristol Lounge. Later, she and Brian walked home through the Common and the Public Garden, and she’d never felt better in her life.
As they waited out a light to cross Beacon Street, however, Rachel saw two dead girls standing in the middle of the overpass that led to the Esplanade. The one in the faded red T-shirt and the jean shorts was Esther. The one in the pale yellow dress was Widdy. The two girls stepped up onto the overpass guardrail. Traffic streamed off Storrow Drive and flowed below them as they dove headfirst from the rail and vanished before they hit the pavement.
She didn’t tell Brian. She made it back to the apartment without another hitch and they drank some champagne. They made love and had some more champagne and lay in bed and watched a harvest moon rise over the city.
She saw the two girls fall from the overpass and vanish. She catalogued all the people who had vanished from her life, not just the big ones, but the small, everyday ones, and she experienced a sudden grasp of what she feared most out in the world—that they’d all vanish on her one day, everyone. She’d turn a corner and the wide avenues would be empty, the cars abandoned. Everyone would have snuck out some galactic back door while she paused to blink, and she would be the only person alive.
It was an absurd thought, something a child with a martyr complex would marinate in. Yet it felt elemental to understanding the core of her fears. She looked at her newly minted husband. His blinking lids had grown heavy with sex and champagne and the gravity of the day. She knew in that moment that she’d married him for entirely different reasons than she’d married Sebastian. She’d married Sebastian because subconsciously she’d known that if he ever left her, she wouldn’t give much of a shit. But she married Brian because although he left her in small ways—enough that she could trust the imperfection of that model—he’d never leave her in the big ones.
“What’re you thinking about?” Brian asked. “You seem sad.”
“I’m not,” she lied. “I’m happy,” she said, because it was also true.
It was eighteen months before she left the apartment again.
12
THE NECKLACE
The weekend before he left for London, fast approaching their second wedding anniversary, Brian and Rachel rode the elevator down from the fifteenth floor and left their building. It was raining—it had done nothing but rain that week—but the rain wasn’t heavy, more like a mist she’d barely notice until the wet found her bones, similar to the weather the night they’d met. Brian took her hand and led her up to Mass Ave. He wouldn’t tell her where they were going, only that she was ready for it. She could handle it.
Rachel had left the condo a dozen times over the last six months, but she had done so when the environment was at its most controllable—early mornings and weekday evenings, often in the coldest weather. She went to the supermarket but, as before, only in the early morning hours of a weekday, and she always stayed in on weekends.
But here she was, out and about in Back Bay late on a Saturday morning. Despite the weather, Mass Ave was crowded. So were the cross streets, Newbury in particular. The Masshole fans of Red Sox Nation were out in force, the team trying to squeeze in at least one home game in a week when the rest had been rained out. So Mass Ave was teeming with red or blue T-shirts and red or blue ball caps and the people who wore them: studly young frat-boy types in jeans and flip-flops already hitting the bars; middle-aged men and women with competing beer guts; kids darting in and out of the fray along the sidewalks, a quartet of them sword fighting with toy bats. Cars sat in traffic so long the drivers turned off the engines. Horns beeped and horns bayed and jaywalkers weaved through it all, one guy shouting, “Ti-tle town, ti-tle town!” every time he slapped a trunk. Beyond the sports fans—obnoxious or otherwise—were the yuppies and buppies and the urban hipsters so recently graduated from Berklee College of Music or BU to a daunting lack of prospects. Farther down Newbury would be the trophy wives with their duck lips and their purse dogs, sighing at every slip in customer service before demanding to see someone’s manager. It had been so long since Rachel had risked entering a crowd that she’d somehow forgotten how overwhelming it could be.
“Breathe,” Brian said. “Just breathe.”
“Exhaust fumes?” she said as they crossed Mass Ave.
“Sure. Builds character.”
It was when they reached the far sidewalk that she realized what he had in mind. He turned them toward the Hynes Convention Center subway stop.
“Whoa.” She clamped her free hand over his wrist.
He turned with the tug, looked into her face. Smiled. “You can do this.”
“No, I can not.”
“You can,” he said softly. “Look at me, honey. Look at me.”
She looked into his eyes. There was a part of Brian that could inspire or grate, depending on her mood, a can-do attitude that bordered on evangelical. He preferred music and movies and books that, in one way or another, reaffirmed the status quo or at least the idea that good things come to good people. But he was no na?f, either. He held enough empathy and wisdom in those blue eyes for a man twice his age. Brian saw the bad in the world, he just chose to believe he could dodge it through force of will.
“You win,” he’d said more times than she could count, “by refusing to lose.”
To which she’d replied, more than once, “You lose by refusing to lose too.”
But she needed that part of him now, that mix of Vince Lombardi and self-help guru, that relentlessly upbeat (sometimes just relentless) attitude that her cynical self would have deemed far too predictably American were her husband not Canadian. She needed Brian to out-Brian himself now, and he did.
He held up their entwined hands. “I will not let go.”
“Shit.” She heard the suppressed hysteria in her voice even as she smiled, even as she knew she was going to do it.
“I will not,” he repeated, “let go.”
And the next thing she knew, she was on the escalator. No modern wide escalator, this. The escalator at Hynes was narrow, black, and steep. Definitely not up to current code. She feared that if she leaned forward for any reason, she’d bring herself, Brian, and everyone in front of them tumbling to the bottom. She kept her chin and head up, spine straight, as they descended. The lights dimmed until the descent felt like part of some primitive ritual, one of fertility perhaps or birth. Behind her were strangers. In front of her were strangers. Faces and motives shrouded in the dim light. Hearts beating like the tick of a bomb.
“How you doing?” Brian asked.