A Happy Catastrophe

by Dawson, Maddie

  “Don’t ever do this kind of thing again,” he says. “Okay?” His voice comes out all croaky. “Please?”

  She squeezes his hand. “I hope not, Patrick.”

  Which, for some reason, makes him smile so big. He squeezes her hand.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  MARNIE

  I have had nineteen separate talks with myself since I talked to Patrick on the phone. All designed to harden myself up. Which is what you have to do when you’ve gotten yourself all entangled with a man who can’t love.

  He’s been terrible, really. And I can’t afford to be hurt like this all the time. A dead woman has his heart, and no matter what he says, he’s not really interested in coming back to life, not on any kind of permanent basis. He doesn’t want children, or parties, or public displays of affection, or random conversations with people on the subway. He has to be dragged into any social interaction—and so what if he then likes them okay? So what if he’s now proven he can cope with parenthood on his own for weeks at a time? So the hell what? It proves nothing except that when he is cornered, when he is forced to endure something, he can do it. But oh, how he fights it. He doesn’t want to do anything outside of his comfort zone, anything the rest of the population thinks of as regular, ordinary life. And somehow that makes it worse, that he can do it, but won’t unless he’s made to.

  And—I may have to face the fact that although I got to have a little four-year-long adventure in Brooklyn, I may well belong here in Florida. Best Buds is doing fine without me. Kat was always the one who could keep the business part going, and Ariana is running the Frippery, according to all reports. They are fine.

  And . . . there are some advantages to being back at home. It’s definitely warm here, unlike March in New York. And Natalie is being nicer to me, and it’s great to be with my nieces again. Built-in access to children who know the best uses of an auntie. (When they get a little older, I’ll be the one who brings them gum. I know the auntie rules.)

  And my parents. They are working their way back to a happy marriage, it seems. I don’t want to say I see sparkles around them, because that would be a lie; I don’t see sparkles at all anymore. But when they’re together, it just feels right again, like something in the world is set back on its rightful perch. My mother is still bloomingly herself, not hiding from my father’s opinion of her or her purchases or her dinner choices, any of it. He’s stopped criticizing her. They have both stopped bickering, and I see them sometimes holding hands.

  At night, we three play a cutthroat game of triple solitaire to see who has to get up and do the dishes. My father usually loses—probably because he had a little surgery and can’t move his arms so fast, but my mother says it’s fine, we should let him do the dishes. He has about forty years of dishwashing responsibilities to catch up on.

  I could stay here in my old childhood room for a while, and then decide what to do. See what my heart really wants, where it wants to take me next.

  Maybe the lesson I got from Blix ends up being that you have to learn to listen to your own dear heart, go where it takes you.

  And another thing I now know is that I am not constitutionally able to be with a man who’s aloof. I need someone who loves me day in and day out, who isn’t hauling around a whole sack of reasons for not being with me. I need someone who wants a big, big life with me, who’s not trying to shrink life down to its smallest, most manageable component. I don’t want a life that is so small it could fit in your back pocket.

  “I’ll be back,” I say to my parents and to Natalie and the girls.

  Then, as I’m just about to go through security, my mother slips me Blix’s book of spells to take with me on the plane.

  I look at the book and sigh. “This doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’ve read every one of those spells and all of Blix’s notes, too, and I’m done here.”

  Her face looks very, very serious all of a sudden. “Listen to me. Don’t count out magic,” she says. She takes me by the shoulders and stares right into my eyes. “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you right now, but this could be your moment.”

  Believe me, it isn’t lost on me that my mother is the one pushing me toward magic, and that I’m the one looking at the book of spells like it’s something that isn’t going to fit in my carry-on bag.

  I take it anyway, and I read it again on the plane.

  Here’s my unbiased review of the book of spells, delivered at long last: it’s an entertaining read, with some remarkable concoctions, seemingly designed to test one’s determination and patience more than anything else. And Blix’s notes, sprinkled throughout the book? Well, they show a colorful, lovely, joyful, optimistic, and halfway-crazy woman who lived in the real world with all the rest of us, but who perhaps possessed an outsized dose of hope that I simply don’t share. No one does.

  End of story.

  By the time I get off the plane, tired and full of salty airline pretzels, Coca-Cola, and shortbread cookies, and limping along under the cloud of a big headache, I am tired and sad.

  But then I get to the baggage claim area, and to my astonishment, there are Patrick and Fritzie, both of them jumping up and down, being ridiculous. I’d texted him my flight time, but I never thought he’d show up for it. Much less bring Fritzie! She’s doing her straight-up-and-down jumps, like she’s spring-loaded from the ground, and he’s standing right behind her, smiling and imitating her. They look like a matched set of something. Salt and pepper shakers, maybe. Father and daughter.

  “We came to meet you!” yells Fritzie. “I was just here today already, because I wanted to fly on an airplane, but then we left, and when we were at home, Patrick said we should come back to get you as a surprise, so you wouldn’t have to take an Uber! We were just going to text you to tell you in case you were about to call Uber yourself! And then I said, ‘Here she is!’”

  I hold myself tight when he sweeps me up in a big hug, and rocks me back and forth, and says close into my ear, “Oh my God, she never stops talking for one second.” He’s laughing his deep Patricky chuckle that I haven’t heard in about forever, while Fritzie grasps my hand and pats my arm. It feels like it’s been so very long since I’ve seen these two characters, and at first I can barely handle looking at them. It hurts, like staring at the sun. And then I just want to slow down time and walk around them and look at the myriad ways they aren’t the same people I left behind. She’s got hardly any hair and looks like she’s grown about five inches taller and maybe ten times more sure of herself, and he’s all mushy and clearly has had the bejesus scared out of him, as my mother used to say.

  I am so mad at him, even though he keeps smiling and taking my hand and saying funny things. It turns out that Fritzie wasn’t trying to get to Italy to see Tessa, they both tell me, talking a mile a minute. It was me.

  Me.

  “I was going to Florida! I wanted to go to Florida!” she says while we’re waiting for my bag to come along on the baggage carousel, and then, “Look at me, Marnie, how I’ve learned to do a cartwheel even better than before.” She holds her arms in midair and is about to flip herself over, but Patrick catches her arm and, laughing, tells her maybe not in the baggage claim area. At home. Cartwheels coming up at home.

  “Anyway, Marnie, Patrick wanted you back so much, and you know how I knew it? Because he was sad about you and also he was smelling your pillow all the time! Every time I’d go into your room, he would have your pillow over his head—”

  I look at him.

  “Wait a minute!” says Patrick. “I did not!”

  “You did that. You know you did!” She is jumping up and down again. “Anyway, he wasn’t doing anything right to get you to come back home! And so I decided that I would come and tell you myself!”

  “But that wasn’t so smart, and you’ll never do anything like that again,” he says.

  She smiles at me and takes my hand while he goes off to grab my suitcase. “It was a little bit smart,” she whispers. “Beca
use here you are.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  PATRICK

  It’s nearly eleven o’clock at night by the time Patrick’s heart stops beating at metronome speed. She’s here now, back with him, and he’s got a lot of work to do with her. He can tell by the way she looks sort of muted—surprised and muted, both. Like she’s holding back 93 percent of her personality. So unlike her. Did he break her? Maybe he broke her. He vacillates between hope and despair that he has the skills to fix this. Him, and his bad personality.

  For the last hour, after eating delivery pizza in the kitchen, the three of them have been lying on what used to be his and Marnie’s bed—and every now and then the thought flickers through his brain that he might be consigned back to the futon tonight, the futon he folded up. They’ve been talking very, very carefully about everything that went on while they were apart: all the gentle, easy-to-talk-about things, that is. Patrick keeps steering the conversation away from minefields. Marnie’s suitcase is still packed, on the floor, and she’s propped up on the pillows while Fritzie lies alongside her, scratching Bedford’s exposed belly. Bedford is exhausted after his welcoming dog-love dance, when he zipped through the apartment like he couldn’t contain his joy in one place, in what Marnie called a “perfect puppy blowout.”

  “So,” says Fritzie. “Now that we’re in a family meeting, I’ve been thinking, and I’ve decided we should all three get married to each other. What do you think, guys? Let’s have a vote.”

  Patrick clears his throat. “Marnie and I will take it from here, Fritzie. It’s time for you to go to bed.”

  “But we should talk about this!” Fritzie says. “I know how to make a whole bunch of things happen, so I want to be in the talking.”

  “Nope, not tonight. To bed, Fritz,” he says.

  She rolls around on the bed, pretending she’s gone unconscious, and Bedford stands up over her and starts licking her face, and she laughs and kicks and waggles her head back and forth. Marnie has to get up to keep her glass of wine from being knocked over.

  “Come on, come on,” Patrick says. “It’s late. We’ll hang out tomorrow.”

  He can feel Marnie watching him as he scoops Fritzie up into his arms and carries her into her room.

  “Marnie!” Fritzie calls over his shoulder. “Tell him you want me to stay up and do some more talking! Insist on it!”

  Marnie laughs, and hearing that sound again hits him so hard right between his ribs, right at the solar plexus, that for a moment it takes everything for him not to fall to the floor. He tucks Fritzie into bed, kisses her good night, and turns out the light.

  “Don’t make her mad, Patrick,” she whispers to him.

  “You’re off duty now, sport,” he says. “Go to sleep.”

  And then he stops outside the door and closes his eyes for just a moment before he goes back to Marnie, who is no longer in the bedroom. Of course.

  He finds her in the kitchen folding up the pizza box for the recycling bin.

  “That was some exemplary bedtime maneuvering,” she says.

  “Yeah, she’s a weasel.”

  “No.” She laughs. “I meant you. You were kind of . . . parent-like.”

  “Yep. That’s me. I’m thinking of starting a parenting podcast called The Most Clueless Dad Ever, where I explain that children like it when you make them go to bed. Did you know?” He’s smiling his teasing smile. “Kids like boundaries. Boundary after boundary after boundary. You gotta become a regular boundary factory these days to have a happy kid.”

  “Uh-huh. This said by a man whose kid just today tried to get on a plane by herself.”

  “Yep. Exactly. That’s what makes it real. I’ve been in the trenches, baby! Another podcast episode would feature the news that if your child cuts all her hair off, you need to ask yourself if it’s a fashion statement or a cry for more boundaries.”

  “Interesting.”

  “And if they take off for the airport one morning when you put them on the bus to school . . .” He moves toward her, cautiously. She’s not exactly inviting him to hold her. But who could blame her?

  “Yes?” she says. “What does that signify? Boundaries again?”

  “That,” he says, “was the culmination of the fun Let’s Test Patrick’s Sanity program we had going on around here for about a month.”

  “She is certainly . . .”

  He waits, but she doesn’t seem interested in finishing that sentence. She turns and puts the forks and knives in the sink.

  “Yes,” he says. “She certainly is. She’s all of it: brave and smart and kind and loving and generous and funny as hell, and she’s going to need about forty years of therapy, I think, to recover from this childhood. And lots of loving kindness. And stability. Loads and loads of stability. Bedtimes and you and me both here. Probably we’ll need to keep a close watch on the scissors as time goes on. And the computer. And the credit cards. Probably more stuff I haven’t thought of yet.”

  “Really,” says Marnie.

  “So, um, how would you say this is going?” he says.

  “This?”

  “Marnie, I’m dying. I’m falling at your feet. I sent you the stupidest texts in the world this morning—which seems like a lifetime ago now—all because I thought I could be clever and funny and maybe you’d remember what you used to love about me. But now I know that I don’t want to text you anymore. I want to look at you face-to-face, and I want to hold you, and hear your voice telling me every single thing you’re thinking and feeling and everything about your parents and your sister and all your matchmaking projects, and I don’t want to keep talking nonsense, so please stop me, and you start. Tell me how you feel. Start there and just keep going. Please.”

  “Well, first of all, I don’t have matchmaking projects anymore,” she says slowly. “That turns out to be a bit of a mistake, I think it’s safe to say. All that Blix-thinking-I-was-magic stuff.”

  “Please,” he whispers. “The toaster can hear you. It would be devastated to hear you’re not matchmaking anymore.”

  To his surprise, she laughs. And then their eyes meet. The way her eyes linger on his makes him shiver.

  Emboldened, he says, “I was kind of wondering if we might move this discussion to the bathtub. This is presumptuous of me, perhaps, but I don’t know if you recall that our establishment here features a gigantic, claw-footed tub that I’ve taken the liberty of outfitting with some bubble bath and about a hundred tea light candles. I recall we’ve had some of our best staff meetings in there. Would you consider it too forward if I suggested we adjourn to there?”

  She looks a little hesitant, he thinks, but then she swallows and says, “Well. I guess so. Especially if your tub is all that you say it is. Really, claw feet?”

  “Really claw feet,” he says. “Much like my own.” He sticks out one foot, which he only recently groomed, so he knows the toenails are exemplary. “And not to try to make a whole bunch of decisions in one night . . .” he says, “but since you’ve agreed to the tub thing, I was also sort of hoping after that you might marry me.”

  She looks wary but amused, which is not exactly what he was hoping for, but it’s not the worst thing either. “Hmm,” she says. “A fascinating question, but even in the best of cases—which this is totally not—I think it might be too late tonight to get an officiant over here.”

  “That probably wasn’t the most romantic proposal anybody ever offered,” he says. “I really should have thought of something more elegant.”

  “Noooo,” she says. “I thought it was very Patricky, actually. Completely out of left field and without much context.”

  “Ha ha,” he says. He goes tentatively toward her and holds out his hands, and she comes into his arms. It’s awkward at first, and then he pulls her closer, and after a beat of hesitation, she responds, and so he kisses her soft, warm, familiar mouth, and then reaches up to touch her hair. And then, at last, he closes his eyes.

  When he can speak again, h
e says, “Um, why isn’t this the best of cases?”

  “Well, obviously because this proposal is coming from you missing me so much. Which may be simply a temporary state.” She whispers in his ear, “It’s not really real.”

  “It is real. It’s not temporary. I’m a beaten man. I know that I can’t go on without you.”

  “Maybe I don’t want a beaten man,” she says lightly.

  “Okay, rephrasing. I’m a changed man.”

  “What’s gotten into you, Patrick? What changed you?” She pulls back and looks at him closely. “Really. What happened? Are you just sick of doing childcare? Are you lonely at last?”

  “Could we adjourn to the tub? It’s kind of a long story. I’m going to need to have my clothes off for this one.”

  “You are, huh?” she says.

  She goes with him, and he helps her unbutton and unsnap and unzip everything, which she allows—but he can tell she’s still holding back. She doesn’t lean into him. She keeps her eyes open, fastened on the ceiling. He loses his breath at the sight of her naked in front of him, has to take a deep breath. Maybe the bath wasn’t such a great idea. He may wreck everything by jumping on her. And it’s too soon for that. Her wariness hasn’t gone away, and he doesn’t blame her, but he also has no freaking idea how to shift the mood, except maybe he needs to stop being so jokey and tell her everything. So he does.

  It starts like a rickety train going up a mountain. He tells her he loves her. And then he tells her the rest: how the horror of the fire never left him; how he would wake up in the middle of the night hearing Anneliese screaming; how in some kind of really screwed up way, the more he let himself fall in love with Marnie the louder those screams became. How scared he was that he was a man who wouldn’t ever be able to love.

  Real, true words. And now he has to get to the hard part.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  MARNIE

  Rule Number One of Seeing a Man You’re Broken Up With: do not agree to take a bath with him.

  That should be obvious, I know. Probably the dating rule books don’t even mention it as a caution. Any ninny would know that you need to keep your clothes on so you have your wits about you. Bad enough that he’s looking at you and looking at you, and that you know him well enough to read all that love on his face. And on his body. It takes everything to keep reminding yourself that what he’s feeling is love now, not love he’ll remember next time when he’s unhappy, or when his dead girlfriend rises up in his head and marches him back to the spaceship.