by Kate Ledger
“Tomorrow, noon, is the closing session,” Will said. “But I’ve got other things to do in town, and I can stay another day,” he suggested, “if Thursday afternoon will work better.”
“You were never one to care about the time,” she said, hoping to sound breezy, like she was making a joke, but it didn’t come off, and she regretted it instantly. Anyway, it wasn’t true. Back then, they’d stayed in bed for days, naked, phoning for takeout, as she was the one who made excuses to friends, lied, called into the office sick, coughing into the phone to impress her father’s secretary. She’d been the one laughing and wailing, “Don’t go, don’t go,” tugging him by the arm and wrestling him back onto the bed when he made a move to start the day. But the Will standing in front of her just smiled—that old smile, bright and admiring—and she was embarrassed all over again.
“Thursday would be fine,” she decided. At first she thought she would suggest he come up to her office, meet her on the twenty-first floor. She was about to explain that he needed to take the second bank of elevators, past the lobby and the security guard there, which would put him right in front of Frith’s glossy reception area. She knew if she pointed toward the doors, he would turn to look and she would have the opportunity to peer again at the scar on his jaw. But then she wasn’t sure she wanted him to see the posh interior of Frith, the columns in the reception area, her stately corner office with its view of the tops of trees that must have been as far away as Rockville. Instead she suggested, “Why not near where you’re staying?” She named a modest café, for which she would not have to make apologies. “Two thirty, does that work for you?” Middle of the afternoon would give her the chance to keep it brief.
“Oh, okay,” he agreed. “Thursday.” Then he sounded like a kid again—too eager, no filter. “How about I walk you to your car?”
“Thursday,” she insisted, smiling, and she hoped she sounded pleasant and not condescending, but she was eager to get away. It was just like before. He wanted too much. “We can catch up on everything at once. It’s nice to see you. Really.”
“Okay. Thursday.”
She turned quickly and left him standing there, and she didn’t look back because she was certain she’d find him staring after her as she departed. In the garage, she leaned on the elevator button, which was already lit. A woman in a pale pink linen suit stood with her. They nodded at each other, though Emily was lost in thoughts about Will. What felt exhilarating about seeing him, she realized, was suddenly touching that former time in her life. In the expression of his eyes, she felt her old self—her young self—handed to her, before all of the complications. But the fact of Will, his eagerness, his insistence on making plans, his desire to catch up, was overwhelming. She dreaded Thursday. She would plan how to compose herself for tea with him. For certain, she’d have her eye on her watch the whole time. Perhaps she’d find a way to cancel.
The woman in the pink suit leaned over a few inches. “What an incredible bag. May I ask where you got it?”
“It’s Marac,” Emily answered, glancing down at it. “His private collection.”
“I’ve been looking for something just like it.”
“It was a gift.”
Emily adjusted the purse strap on her shoulder. Breaking up with Will had been the first determined choice of her life, and choosing Simon had been the next one. She’d known at once that she and Simon were much more similar to each other, more suited for a life together, with ambitions in sync. And hadn’t they done just fine? Nearly two and a half decades had passed since she and Will had parted, and people respected her; they valued her opinion when it came to brand name recognition and reputation management. She knew she came across more aloof, even colder than she meant to, yet somehow, it was a way of being that had fostered her career. It turned out to be necessary, too, for the kind of resolve it took for a person to get on with life after—well, why go there? She did all she could not to think about Caleb. More than enough time had passed since then, and she’d never been one of those poor me types anyway. She’d been to that place where it felt like her core had been plowed raw, clawed apart, as if inside her rib cage were shapeless heaps of terrain. In that loss of sense and order, there also had been panic. Every moment had threatened the terror of a knock-down wave, where she’d lose the sense of which direction was up. She fought it. Instead of letting it take her down, she forced herself to keep her bearings. She moved on. And if there were one person in the world who would take interest in the missed opportunity for sentimentality it was Will Garth. As she walked toward her car, her pulse surged in a way that made her temples feel hollow. She dipped her hand into her purse, feeling a rush of certainty, and also relief, as her fingers closed fast around her keys.
The sun had slipped from sight by the time she pulled into the circular drive at home, but slate-blue daylight stretched on. From the illuminated windows along the north side of the house, she surmised Simon was still in his office. The cars belonging to the staff had departed, but she knew he would be at his desk. In the very beginning of their marriage, she’d been surprised by all the time Simon gave to his patients. He was attentive to them, no doubt about that. She’d supported his fervor, accepting the long evenings he was absent from the house, enduring phone calls that jarred them awake during the night, as if it were part of her role, too. He was needed. People were desperate for his assistance. Will might once have thought that she cared about financial security above all else, but what had mattered to her was a life that made sense. Photographs were, well, gratuitous. Health and healing were essential. The very fact of Simon’s work had humbled her. A good doctor, someone who could make a good diagnosis or even just hold a hand at the right moment, could change a person’s life.
But after twenty-two years, she saw his work differently. All his ardor for medicine, and the virtue of it, seemed less of a marvel and more of a detail, Emily thought, looking toward the upper windows of the house. A detail in a life strewn with details. The reverence she’d once felt was tapped out, and she felt instead the functional weight of his job and an emptiness about the idea of heroism altogether. Simon’s attention to his work had given her the space over the years to grow into her own career, and the autonomy had turned out to be a necessary condition for professional success, but it also took him out of the fray. Never mind that he was down a single flight of stairs from the kitchen. If he had a list of calls to make or e-mails to answer, he might not come upstairs for another two hours, and she had to manage on her own.
What had changed this summer, Emily realized, slowly gathering her bag from the front seat, was that his absence from the house had a new consequence: It thrust her in Jamie’s path. When Jamie had turned thirteen last fall, they’d finally done away with babysitters. There had been strings of them, culled from Craigslist and from the bulletin boards of Goucher College, as well as occasional housekeepers and teenaged children of neighbors who met Jamie off the school bus and stayed through dinnertime. The babysitters and others (it was embarrassing to acknowledge, but it was true) were gentle buffers for the smooth functioning of a household. Everyone’s behavior became more chipper when someone from outside the family was around—at least everyone put on a good face. Lately, it seemed, Jamie had become even more caustic and more accusatory, and now that the babysitters were done with, there was nobody to shield Emily. Now every interaction between them went insidiously, irrevocably awry.
The desire returned to head straight to the gym. Hiding out at the gym, that’s what life had become. She eyed the dashboard clock and realized with dismay that she’d never make the evening spinning class. Not only was Fitness Galaxy her refuge, she had come to crave the bold rush of adrenaline in the darkened room of the late spinning session, the twenty-something-year-old instructor rising onto the pedals of the stationary bike, barking encouragement. Emily was capable of exerting long past the aching twangs of muscles, lengthening and stretching themselves, to the point that she felt all the mechanics o
f her limbs, the hinges and sockets of her joints, the swelling blood vessels alongside them. In those moments, she climbed beyond the grin-and-bear-it of her everyday motions. Breathing hard, sweat winging from the tips of her hair, her vision gone ragged, she welcomed the frenzy. The closest she could imagine to a religious experience, like those monks who starved or those worshippers who fainted, it was the feeling of being lost, slightly delirious, and then unburdened. She forgot her obligations to other people, and her frustrations. To get to that point, you had to push through discomfort and overcome it. But once you mastered that moment, the trancelike lightness enveloped your entire body. It was ironic, really. You pedaled and pedaled and went nowhere in spinning class, and somehow it could take you to a place you felt free.
No such luck tonight, though. Running into Will had made her late, and spinning class was going on without her. She grabbed her bag and trudged up the winding front steps. Jamie was probably upstairs, with the bedroom door shut tight. She’d always been a solitary kid, preferring to read a book than play with other children, but maybe it was time for her to start getting out, phoning some friends. Where were all her little friends this summer? Emily took a breath for resolve, her single goal to get through the night without losing her temper, retorting, criticizing or inciting more hostility. She had once expected that she’d be skilled at this stage of parenting, which involved reasoning and persuading, communicating with a person who could communicate back; that expectation had turned out to be wrong. She struggled, or she misspoke, or she held back when she had more to say. She offered idiotic advice when she feared that saying nothing demeaned her. Every day she found herself embroiled in conflict and every day wished she were better at parenting.
As she stepped into the dark entryway, she was startled by the apparent calm inside the house, and then, the sound of the phone, trilling through the rooms. She rested her keys in the crystal bowl on the sideboard, alert for Simon’s bounding steps coming up the stairs or Jamie’s tiptoeing creaks across the floorboards above her. There was no movement from anywhere, and the ringing continued. She trotted to the kitchen, grabbed for the cordless and exhaled a quick hello.
“Emily?” A woman’s voice.
“Ah, Lucille,” Emily answered, recognizing Simon’s mother at once.
When Emily had first started dating Simon, his parents seemed to like her. This thrilled Simon, though Emily was accustomed to winning over almost everybody. In time, as she began to sort out all the odd tensions, it became clear to her that his parents’ appreciation of her was limited, and their interest in him negligible. Lucille and Charles Bear had cultivated their own private world in the suburbs of Baltimore and, in retirement, had moved to Fort Lauderdale to live among a handful of similarly transplanted friends. There they played bridge with couples they knew they could beat and talked politics with people who didn’t challenge their opinions, but they prized, above everything else, their insularity. They sent occasional postcards, particularly Lucille, who enjoyed writing letters. Simon pored over the few clipped sentences with informative updates, parsing for hidden meanings, wondering obsessively, “What do you think she meant by holidays when she could have written Hanukkah ?” Emily had long recognized the truth about postcards: They were one-way missives that didn’t anticipate or require a response.
“I tried to reach Simon,” Lucille said.
“He’s still downstairs. I just got in myself.” Emily flicked on the lights in the kitchen, all tidy, even the polished little jars along the granite counter, in order of descending size. Yet something felt off, and she shifted the phone, venturing, “Everything all right?”
“It’s nothing, really. It’s Charles. A little mishap with the car is all.”
“Mishap?” Emily was picturing Lucille, a tiny woman with expertly teased and dyed black hair, and that flawless, ageless skin.
“A great big nothing,” Lucille reassured. “He’s fine. They want to look him over, but he’s fine. I figured I should call to let you know.”
She felt her pulse quickening. “I don’t understand.”
“Really, there’s nothing to tell.”
Emily put the story together quickly: The car was totaled, but the dog that had bounded into the street had survived unscathed. Charles, driving alone, had swerved into a telephone pole. An ambulance had taken him to the hospital, Lucille reported, but he was fine. She said it over and over. Fine.
There was no emergency, Emily determined, but her mouth had gone dry just the same. Ten years earlier, her father’s assistant had called to say that Al St. Bern had been rushed by ambulance to the hospital, but that they’d got to him too late. He was already dead. The assistant had little information at the time, but he didn’t need to utter the word “suicide” for Emily to know exactly what had transpired. (Later, the coroner pronounced death had come from a mixture of pills and drinks that had stopped the heart. It appeared accidental, but Emily knew better.) At the time of her father’s death, she’d hung up the phone, feeling stunned, but also distant and immune, as she sifted through the decisions she faced. Her sister, Aileen, traveling somewhere in Peru, was unreachable, and their mother was dead by then. Their father had been such a complex figure, abject mourning wasn’t Emily’s first response. Moreover, she was still putting behind her the fact of having lost Caleb. She’d experienced about as much feeling as a person could bear; she didn’t have room to take on more. As a matter of necessity—her own necessity—which needed not to dwell where there was nothing to be gained, she insisted that she and Simon forge ahead with their plans for the evening. They already had a babysitter for Jamie, who was three, and they were expected at a cocktail party at another physician’s home. Even if she’d been able to figure out what to do—travel to New York? stay home and cry? make phone calls?—she explained to Simon, there was nobody to do it for.
“Nothing hurts him,” Lucille repeated. The more his mother said it, the more she underscored that she was calling out of a sense of obligation rather than need. “The hospital admitted him because they’re being cautious. Because of his age, they say. He broke a rib, but he’s fine. He just wants to go home. We’re in a room. Private. It’s very nice. We just have to wait is all.”
“I’m so sorry. You must be shaken up,” Emily responded with compassion. She meant it, but she also intended to make Lucille at least a little self-conscious about being so miserly with information. “Anything we can do for you from here?”
Lucille didn’t seem to take note. “We just have to wait,” she said. “It’s a very nice hospital. The doctors have been very nice.”
“Simon’s not upstairs yet,” Emily said. “Let me go down to get him.” Then, through the phone, she heard other voices in muffled tones, and she could tell Lucille was distracted. She couldn’t make out any words.
“The nurse just came in,” Lucille announced, “so gotta go. Just wanted to let you know.”
“Wait—” Emily pleaded, scrounging for a pen. Phone number? Hospital?
“No worries. Everything’s under control.” Lucille hung up.
Emily stared at the phone a moment, then reset it in its cradle on the wall. Don’t make a big deal about it; that was the message. The clock read seven twenty. Charles was fine. Simon would be relieved there was nothing for them to do but wait for Lucille’s update. She imagined he was still calling patients and sending e-mails, and her reasoning was simply practical: No point in interrupting him. He’d be upstairs shortly. In the refrigerator, she found a foil-covered casserole that the housekeeper, Lorraine, had made for them. Green beans, it seemed. Or was that asparagus? It was hard to tell. She was picking at it with a fork when she heard a noise upstairs, then the sound of something hitting the ground, clattering like metal.
“Jamie?” she called up the kitchen stairs.
A door opened. “It’s nothing,” Jamie’s voice called back. “Forget about it.” The door shut again.
Emily craned her neck. “What’s going on?”
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br /> The door opened again. “Nothing,” Jamie called downstairs, then, “Just a bowl. Nothing broken.” The door shut again.
It was the abrupt shutting noise that prompted her to head upstairs. She worried about her daughter, who seemed so disgruntled and so out of step with the world. It was strange with a child. You could see the changes that would help them, and you could give advice, but just the act of opening your mouth turned out to be a violation of the highest order. She’d put her foot in it the very day Jamie had arrived home from camp.
“You must not have wanted to be there,” Emily had pointed out. She’d said it gently, as matter-of-factly as she could. She didn’t mean to accuse, but rather to voice what seemed obvious, in case the idea might be useful to Jamie. It certainly helped Emily, at least to fathom what might be going on. What Jamie had done seemed like sheer stupidity. Threatening a hunger strike, of all things. In proximity of other teenagers, such utterances went over like jokes about bombs in the airport. But what was at stake, really? As Jamie told it, she’d only wanted to finish a craft project that was half done, but nobody listened to her explanation about the knife and nobody cared. Hardly grounds for a protest, Emily thought. But after Jamie skipped her fourth meal in a row, the camp directors were swift and resolute. They made the phone call home. And no, they wouldn’t put her on a train. Simon had to drive to Connecticut alone on Sunday evening to gather Jamie, not even a little emaciated, and bring her home.
