Live to Tell

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Desdemona is one of Caroline’s best friends, the daughter of a famously bisexual eighties rock star and his Tony-winning actress wife. She’s a good kid, even if her parents tend to cold-shoulder Marin and Garvey whenever they run into each other.

  “It’s because you guys are conservative Republicans,” Caroline once mentioned—as if that explained it.

  On some level, Marin supposes, it does. Garvey represents everything the right wing stands for, and Desdemona’s parents couldn’t be more left.

  Marin herself privately comes down somewhere in the middle, but it’s been years since she dared voice an opinion that could be construed as even vaguely liberal. It bothers her, sometimes, that people assume she shares Garvey’s politics. Pro–capital punishment, anti–gay marriage, pro-gun, anti-choice…

  Particularly that one. Anti-choice.

  It isn’t necessarily that she wishes she herself had done things differently years ago. She wouldn’t have anyway—even if a choice wasn’t absolutely out of the question, as far as Garvey was concerned. She had made up her mind to have the baby before she even told him.

  Had she opted not to, though, would she eventually have made peace with her decision? Or would she be enduring a private hell all these years later?

  Does it matter? She’s in hell anyway.

  You weren’t forced to give birth, Marin. It’s what you wanted. What Garvey wanted.

  Yes. They even agreed on what should happen after the child was born—until the moment when Marin held her baby in her arms.

  That was when she changed her mind.

  But it was too late.

  “Come on, that’s the place.” Caroline is tugging her toward yet another boutique.

  Marin’s head is pounding. “You don’t need a wool coat for a few more months, at least. Or boots, for that matter.”

  “Please, Mommy. I really, really, reeeeally want to look.”

  Caroline only calls her Mommy when she really, really, reeeeally wants something.

  Torn between the maternal desire to make her daughter happy and the selfish need to go home and take a handful of Advil, Marin relents. “One more store. But this is it.”

  “ThankyouMommyIloveyou!” Caroline is already pushing through the wide glass door.

  Marin follows, and is immediately assaulted by a blast of throbbing music.

  Great. This’ll do wonders for my headache.

  She looks around for a place to park herself while Caroline browses. No benches. No chairs. The store is modernist white from ceiling to floor, with strategically positioned track lighting and a soundtrack befitting a nightclub.

  Marin wanders around glancing at impossibly hip clothes while Caroline disappears into the dressing room with an armload of coats.

  “Can I help you?”

  She looks up to see a male sales clerk, wearing faded, beat-up, low-slung jeans and a disinterested expression. There’s something familiar about him, and her heart immediately skips a beat.

  Can it be…?

  Marin clears her throat. “No, I’m just…uh…looking.”

  He nods and turns to straighten a display.

  He’s the right age. He’s good-looking, with dark hair and eyes…

  And I feel like I’ve met him.

  She can’t place him, but she feels as though she knows him. In all the reading she’s done on this particular topic, in every firsthand account related by women who have been in her shoes, that inexplicable familiarity is the dead giveaway.

  The heart knows, one mother said, even when the brain does not.

  The quote has stuck with Marin. It resounds in her head whenever something like this happens. These encounters don’t occur on a daily basis, by any means—but frequently enough to keep her in a perpetual state of what-if.

  “Mom, can I get both of these?” Caroline emerges from the dressing room with two hangers. “I can’t decide, and they both look great, and—hey, Jackson, what are you doing here?”

  The young man Marin was just watching—the one her heart seems to remember—turns toward her daughter. “Hey, Caroline. How’s it going?”

  “Great! I didn’t know you worked here!” Caroline’s bright tone makes it obvious—to Marin, anyway—that her daughter did, indeed, know that. That he might even be the reason she absolutely had to have the coat Desdemona bought in this particular boutique.

  “Yeah. I’ve been working here all summer.”

  “Cool. Are you still at Juilliard?”

  “I graduated.”

  “Oh, right. I think I knew that.”

  Seeing her daughter’s flirty smile, Marin is seized by a new and terrible what-if…

  “Mom, this is Jackson,” Caroline tells her. “Remember? My friend Emily’s brother? He used to teach me guitar?”

  Guitar. Jackson. No wonder he looks familiar.

  Thank God, thank God…

  “Do you still play?” Jackson is asking Caroline, who shakes her head.

  Thank God it isn’t him.

  This time.

  But someday, it might be.

  What then?

  “We meet again.”

  Toweling off at the side of the pool, Lauren glances up to see a stranger standing behind her.

  “Playground,” he prods, at her blank stare.

  “Pardon? Oh—right!” She didn’t recognize him without the baseball cap, and the baby, and…his shirt. “You’re the new dad.”

  “New? Not exactly. My son is almost a year old.”

  “That’s pretty new from where I sit. But what I meant was, you’re the new dad in town.”

  “That’s me. Castle Lane. Puke green shutters.”

  Lauren grins and tries not to notice that he’s wearing only boardshorts, and that…well, wow. Did she actually think he was someone’s chubby hubby the other day? It couldn’t be farther from the truth. His tanned chest is solid muscle.

  “Where’s your son?” She looks around, expecting to see a baby carriage or port-a-playpen.

  “He’s with his mom. We share custody.”

  So he’s not chubby or a hubby.

  “Oh. Well that’s, uh…”

  “Difficult. Very difficult. That’s what it is.” He shrugs. “It was harder when I lived in the city, though. At least he’s only ten minutes away now.”

  “So your ex-wife lives up here?”

  “Actually, my ex-wife lives on the West Coast.”

  “And you share custody?”

  “No, I never had kids with Zoe—she’s my ex-wife, in L.A. But my son’s mom, Kendra, lives here in Westchester, over in Yorktown Heights. Confused yet?”

  “Very.”

  “Kendra and I were never married, thank God. That would have been more disastrous than my first marriage. We were dating, Kendra got pregnant, we had the baby together. By the way, since you now know everything about me except my name—I’m Sam Henning.”

  “Lauren Walsh.”

  They shake hands. She resists the urge to look around and make sure no one’s watching them. Like her children, or Beth, or…people she once called friends.

  It’s August. There are few familiar faces here.

  “So…is that it?” Sam asks.

  “Is what it?”

  “That’s all you’re going to tell me? Your name? When I just poured out my whole life story?”

  “I—you want to hear my life story?”

  “If you want to tell it.”

  Trying to decide whether he’s a sweet, fun guy or some kind of nutcase, she smiles. “Maybe some other time.”

  “Sure. Personally, I like to get it out there right from the start, you know? All my baggage. That way, if someone’s not interested, she’s free to move on.”

  Interested? Lauren raises an eyebrow.

  It’s been a while—okay, decades—since a man flirted with her. So long that she’s not even positive that’s what Sam Henning is doing.

  But it sure seems that way.

  “You know, you were pr
etty chatty the other day,” he observes. “Now you don’t have much to say.”

  That might be because they’re both standing here half dressed, without the buffer of kids and swings and sunglasses and anonymity.

  Plus, he no longer has a wife.

  He never even had a wife. Well, he has an ex-wife. And the mother of his child. But there doesn’t seem to be a current woman in his life, which makes him more than just some random playground dad.

  It makes him…

  Potentially…

  Oh hell, what do you even call it these days? Dating material? A love interest?

  “So you live in the big yellow Victorian house in my backyard, right?” he asks.

  “Well, I’m in the only yellow Victorian on our block, so… I guess so.”

  “You should cut through the yard and say hello sometime. That is, if poison ivy doesn’t bother you. My yard is full of it. And it turns into a marsh when it rains, so you’d need waders, but otherwise…”

  “Sounds inviting.”

  “Oh, it is.”

  She laughs.

  So does he, but he says, “I’m serious. Pop over. I get lonely, living alone.”

  So do I, she wants to say.

  But she doesn’t live alone, and she doesn’t want him to think she’s flirting.

  Is she?

  She’s pretty sure he is. Or maybe that’s just his personality.

  After all, what makes you think he’d even be interested in a worn-out mother of three with just as much baggage as he has—if not more?

  Sure, he’s acting interested…

  But maybe he wants something else from her.

  Like what? Your riches? Your body? Your three kids, dog, and rattletrap house?

  Puh-leeze.

  “I should go check on my daughter,” she tells him, wrapping the towel around her hips like a sarong.

  “Sadie? Or Lucy?”

  She looks up, startled. “How do you know their names?”

  “Yesterday…on the playground. Remember?”

  She does remember meeting him. But she doesn’t remember telling him the girls’ names. Maybe she did.

  Does it even matter?

  “It was good seeing you again,” she tells Sam, not quite sure she means it.

  “Interesting” might be a better word. “Unsettling” would be even more accurate.

  “You too, Lauren.”

  She definitely told him her own name. Yet there’s something about hearing him say it that makes her vaguely… Once again, “unsettled” is the right word.

  Most people don’t address others by name in conversation unless they know each other quite well. She doesn’t know Sam Henning at all.

  But maybe I’d like to, she admits to herself as she walks away.

  That, perhaps, is the most unsettling thought of all.

  Was Mike Fantoni always this good-looking? Elsa wonders, sitting across the round café table from him, nursing a cup of tea.

  Probably. She just never noticed before, too devastated by her loss to pay attention.

  Today, despite her coffee-fueled jitters, she can’t help but admire his square jaw peppered with a manly five o’clock shadow; his muscular build; his full head of dark, wavy hair worn a little longer than she recalls.

  She can’t help but note that he isn’t wearing a wedding ring. Did he ever?

  I don’t remember. It’s all a blur. It didn’t matter then.

  It doesn’t matter now, either, she reminds herself.

  But it’s strange that the details of their meetings in the past are all so fuzzy. For all she knows, this little Italian café was once an upscale trattoria. Maybe she and Mike sat here rubbing shoulders with Boston’s elite, sipping lattes and eating cannoli on china plates.

  Not likely, though. She suspects the place always appeared just as it is now. These booths, with white cotton batting peering through cracked red vinyl seats, couldn’t possibly have been installed in this century. The same goes for the individual jukeboxes that haven’t been updated since the soundtrack from Footloose—the original movie—was on top of the charts. And the thick cups faintly stained with lipstick in shades Elsa would never wear, and glass cases with congealed, rotating wedges of pie…

  “So what brings you into Boston?” Mike stirs a third packet of sugar into his second cup of black coffee—having ordered two at once, downing the first in the amount of time it took him and Elsa to exchange perfunctory pleasantries.

  “I wanted to see you,” she says simply.

  Mike raises an eyebrow, and she realizes he might have the wrong idea.

  “About Jeremy,” she clarifies. “I wanted to see you about Jeremy.”

  Is that a flicker of disappointment in his dark eyes?

  It’s gone before she can be sure.

  “And I wanted to ask you,” she goes on, “whether you’d found a way past those sealed records yet.”

  “I’m working on it.” He looks down at his coffee, stirring it even though the sugar has long dissolved.

  Elsa’s heart pounds.

  Pointedly, she asks, “Do you have new information, Mike?”

  “I wish I did.” He sets down the spoon and meets her gaze head-on. Now there’s no sign of the look that made her wonder if he’d been withholding something from her.

  She must have imagined it.

  “But I don’t want to go!” Sadie complains, bobbing in the pool on a purple foam noodle as Lauren, standing above her on the concrete deck, holds out a dry towel.

  “We can come back tomorrow.”

  Sadie shakes her head and leans over to examine a waterlogged dead bug in the slotted drain that runs along the pool’s edge.

  Lauren sighs and darts yet another glance toward the lap lanes, where Sam Henning is still swimming back and forth. No wonder he’s so muscular. He’s been at it for almost an hour.

  Yes, she’s been keeping track.

  No, she can’t figure out why on earth he seems interested in her, but he does. Every once in a while, he takes a short break at the end of the pool to adjust his goggles, and she’s caught him looking at her.

  She turns her attention back to her daughter. “Sades, we have to be somewhere in twenty minutes.”

  “Where?”

  Conscious of a cluster of moms—and their perfect, obedient children—observing the exchange from their usual encampment by the stairs, Lauren keeps her voice at a reasonable level. “Just come on.”

  “Where do we have to be?”

  Lauren lowers her voice even more. “You have…an appointment.”

  “What?”

  “An appointment. You have an appointment.”

  “Where?”

  “At the doctor.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “Just… come on!”

  “Not yet.”

  Lauren sighs and shakes her head in exasperation.

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  She turns to see a woman in sunglasses and a black bathing suit sitting at the edge of the pool, dunking her feet into the water.

  “You’re thinking, ‘What did I ever do to deserve this,’ right?”

  Lauren laughs. “How’d you guess?”

  “Because I was thinking the same thing myself a little while ago, before he fell asleep.” She indicates the sleeping baby on her lap. “I’m sure you heard him screaming at the top of his lungs. He hates the water.”

  “Right now I wish my daughter did.” Lauren watches Sadie splash her way along the edge.

  “She’s your youngest, right?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  The woman laughs. “No—your son told me. Ryan, right? He’s such a sweet kid.”

  “Are we talking about the same Ryan?”

  “Over there—the one who’s on the diving board ladder?”

  Lauren turns her head. “That’s my Ryan. But…sweet?”

  “Really, he was.”

  “No, I’m just kidding. He can be sweet. Bu
t he’s going through a phase. Kind of like her.” Again, she focuses her attention on Sadie. “You have two minutes, Sadie Walsh. Do you hear me?”

  “Can I have five?”

  “You can have three.”

  “Four.”

  “God help me,” Lauren mutters, shaking her head.

  “What about Lucy and Ryan?”

  “They’re staying here. We’ll pick them up later.”

  “That’s no fair, Mommy!”

  “Sadie…you’re down to two minutes.” She folds her arms.

  “It’s too bad you have to leave on such a beautiful day,” the woman with the baby tells her. “I was hoping I could pick your brain a little.”

  “You were?”

  “Your son told me your daughter used to be deathly afraid of the water, too. How’d you get her over it?”

  “Well, she was older at the time. I mean, I don’t think you have to worry. It’s not like your son needs to learn to swim anytime soon, so…”

  “No, it’s not just that. He’s terrified of water. All water. Even the bathtub. That’s why I haven’t been coming to the pool all summer, as much as I love it myself. I’m Jessica Wolfe, by the way.”

  “I’m Lauren.”

  She smiles. “Lauren Walsh. I know. Your son told me.”

  Wow, Ryan certainly was chatty. What else did he tell her?

  Remembering her conversation with him about losing friends and making new ones, Lauren wonders if her son was trying to network on her behalf. If that’s the case, it’s pretty sweet—and a welcome effort, because Jessica seems a lot more down-to-earth than some of the other moms around here.

  “Are you new in town?” Lauren asks.

  “Not that new. But I haven’t been out much. First I was pregnant for, like, a year—that’s what it felt like, anyway—and I was sick as a dog with morning sickness 24–7, the whole pregnancy. Then I had him, and trying to get used to being a mom was so insane. I couldn’t get my act together. So I’ve kind of been, you know—hibernating.”

  Do I ever know.

  “It’s hard when the kids are little,” Lauren agrees. And even harder when they’re older, and your husband dumps you for another woman.

  “So where do you live?” Jessica asks her.

  “We’re over on Elm.”

  “Oh, I love the big old houses there. I was hoping we could buy one of those, but we wound up in a development.”