by Grace Palmer
Everything seemed to be annoying her lately. Her emotions, normally muted at most, had pinwheeled wildly over the last week and a half or so. She’d cried at a freaking dog commercial. Not even a sad one! Just a normal dog commercial, advertising some vegan keto organic dairy-free gluten-free sugar-free pet chow or something similarly ridiculous. And she’d bawled like a baby. Prior to that, she could count on two hands the number of times she’d cried in her life at all.
So that was strange. Even stranger was how her stomach turned itself inside out when one of the Cornell grad associates, Digby—honest to God, that was his name; nouveau-riche Connecticuters had no taste whatsoever—brought in a steaming platter of chicken fajitas for the team to eat while they worked. Eliza had sprinted to the bathroom.
She’d vomited until there was nothing left in her stomach, including the yogurt she’d had with her coffee that morning. The same yogurt she always had, every morning. As she threw up, she relived the taste, and she made a solemn vow then and there to get rid of every single yogurt in her refrigerator as soon as she got home and never, ever buy them again.
As she threw up, she connected the dots.
By the time she was done, she knew with a sickening horror that she was pregnant.
That was why she was having this panic attack. That was why she was curled up in a little ball on the pristine, blue-tiled floor of the bathroom of the Goldman Sachs Leveraged Finance Capital Markets department, crying hysterically.
Time seemed to go slowly while she panicked. She had hours for every passing second, or so it felt to Eliza. Enough time to examine the grout in the tile and look at the light fixtures ensconced in the ceiling above. Enough time to see the gleam from the bronze faucets on the sink and from the thrice-daily-cleaned porcelain toilets.
She had enough time to remember when she first met Clay.
He’d come on board to GS after a stint as a consultant at McKinsey. He was whip-smart and knew how to dress. Hermès ties, always thin and sharp. Shoes shined one hundred percent of the time. Not a hair out of place, ever.
It worked for her. It served her.
He’d asked Eliza out at the company Christmas party that year, barely three months after starting. That took guts. Clay was unruffled. She’d said yes.
Dinner at Tao the following week ensued. Far flashier than anything she would choose for herself, but Clay seemed to like it. He relished picking up the bill, though both knew that they made more or less the exact same amount. They’d gone from there to a cocktail bar, one of the dark and red-lit ones that seemed to be popping up all over the city these days. All the bartenders had waxed mustaches and the drinks contained four times the normal amount of alcohol at nine times the price. The bar had lots of shady corners to make out in, which was what they did.
Everything after that had fallen into place like they had planned it all in advance. Five dates before they slept together. Nine months before they moved in together. A year and a half before they were engaged.
The engagement was extravagant, as Eliza had known it would be. Helicopter ride over the city, touching down on the Goldman Sachs helicopter pad; Clay had called in a favor from the CEO to get permission. Dinner on the rooftop. White tablecloths. Champagne. A ring. Some words were spoken; Eliza said yes. It was a very big ring, and Clay really did dress well.
“I love you,” he’d said. His eyes were flat the whole time, like a shark’s.
“I love you,” she’d said. She squelched the voice in her head that asked her if she really meant that. Clay was right for her.
What they’d managed to avoid discussing during the whole courtship was the idea of children. The one time Eliza had sort-of-kind-of brought it up—she vaguely remembered showing Clay a picture of her nephew and niece, Holly’s kids—Clay had laughed and said, “Good luck to her with the little rug rats,” and changed the subject. She knew then and there that it wasn’t something he wanted her to bring up again.
But it was odd that he refused to explicitly say that he didn’t want to have children. Was it because he didn’t want kids in general, or because he didn’t want kids with her? For every second she spent weighing that question, she spent at least two refusing to acknowledge it during her waking hours.
Only in her dreams did it come up. Eliza had always been a vivid dreamer, but not necessarily a logical one. Her dreams were chaotic and confusing and rarely made an ounce of sense. But when she woke up, she was always fairly certain what they had been about, and there was an image or two that stuck with her. The first time she had the kids-or-no-kids dream, it was an image of an empty bassinet at a yard sale. Not in a horror movie kind of way. Nothing creepy about it. Just the crib, unused, sitting there in a corner. An item that she wouldn’t ever need to touch, gathering dust in someone’s garage. Why would she need to buy it? She wouldn’t be having any kids, would she?
And so, with that resolution in mind, she’d put it out of mind as often as possible. She kept taking her birth control. She and Clay kept having fast, punctual sex whenever their schedules allowed. They set a wedding date twenty-three months into the future and immediately hired a wedding planner to offload all the work onto. Neither of them had time to plan a wedding. They had work to do.
Which, coincidentally, was what Eliza tried to tell herself now, as she lay on the floor of the GS bathroom and struggled to breathe. You have work to do. Get up. That mantra had gotten her through plenty of stuff before. It had gotten her through the NYC Marathon three years ago. Through rehab for a torn ACL, suffered when her sparring partner in a kickboxing class misheard the instruction to “Strike!” It had gotten her through all of Sara’s problems, during that stint when she’d been living in a crummy rent-controlled apartment in Queens and getting into far too much trouble and Eliza was the only family member around capable of helping her out. When she’d had to pick Sara up from jail or set a broken finger that she refused to go to the hospital for, Eliza didn’t panic; she didn’t freak out. She just signed the paper, paid the bail. And then she resumed her work. That was how Eliza operated.
But now, her mantra was failing her. The voices in her head were screaming at her to get off that disgusting floor—although it was not really so disgusting; God knows the cleaning staff were paid enough to keep it gleaming. But, clean or not, she could. Not. Move. Not a muscle in her body would budge. Not even her lungs, which were screaming for oxygen any way they could get it.
It was a five-alarm panic attack. Red alert! Red alert!
She needed something to break the spell. Anything. Anything at all. Her world was narrowing down to the grout on the floor she was staring at. Her exhales were steaming the tile. The grout was rigid and perforated with little dots …
The baby.
Your baby needs air.
She breathed.
5
Mae
Where had the day gone?
Since the moment she finally built up the willpower to extricate herself from Henry’s embrace and shoo him out of the house so she could start her chores and errands unmolested, Mae had been hustling nonstop. Sweep the foyer, vacuum the car, pop down to the Stop & Shop to scoop up a few things for dinner when Holly and the kids arrived that night. You could never be quite sure when folks were going to arrive on the island—the slow ferry only left every so often, and if you missed it, you’d just have to hold your horses and wait for the next one—so she opted to make a light salad with walnuts and cranberries that she could stash in the fridge until they got in, along with a roast that just needed maybe half an hour in the oven to be ready. She also snagged a box of frozen chicken nuggets, just in case Grady decided to put up a fuss. He’d been going through alternating phases of being a picky eater and devouring everything in sight, so Mae figured it was better to be safe than sorry. She was sure that Henry would have no problem wolfing down the nuggets if Grady was on one of his “good eater” kicks.
But at the store, she’d run into Mrs. O’Malley, who’d taught first gra
de to each of her three youngest children, and they’d spent almost half an hour in the bread aisle catching up. Mrs. O’Malley was a sweet old lady who could use the company. Her husband had passed away not too long ago. She seemed to be doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances.
“My son is staying at that inn of yours when he visits, you know!” Mrs. O’Malley had chirped.
Mae chuckled. “Oh, that inn isn’t mine, thank goodness. That’s my sister-in-law’s business. I don’t think I’d be quite able to handle that much chaos in my own home all the time!”
Toni Benson, Henry’s older sister, ran the Sweet Island Inn, down on the other end of the island. She’d bought an old, rundown former bed-and-breakfast and poured her heart and soul into it for almost eighteen months of long, long days. She’d done nearly all the renovating and redoing herself, or with Henry’s assistance, whenever she could coax him into lending a helping hand. She was a tough cookie, that much was certain. Finally, it had opened, about three years prior, and been an instant success. But even with all the praise and the steady flow of business the inn received, Mae just had no idea how Toni managed. She had seasonal help when bookings were heavy, but it was mostly just her, handling all the cooking, cleaning, map-making, and restaurant-recommending that the inn and its guests required. Not to mention the business end of things, which was a black box to Mae.
Once upon a time, she might’ve been up to the task. She’d formerly had a successful catering business, Mae’s Marvels, and it seemed like there was a lot of promise in the concept. But if running it at first had been hard enough, then running it after having her eldest, Eliza, was difficult, and running it once Holly was born was darn impossible. She’d shuttered the operation and hadn’t looked back once. She might have been sad about it, but being a mother was her pride and joy, her calling in life, and she didn’t regret a single moment she’d spent with her four children.
“Oh my goodness, is that the time already?” she yelped when she happened to see a clock hanging on the wall of the grocery store. “Mrs. O’Malley, you’ll have to excuse me. Holly and the kids are coming to stay with us for the weekend, and I am nowhere near ready!” She gave Mrs. O’Malley a kiss on the cheek—a flourish she’d learned from a distant French cousin and always been fond of—and hurried back home.
Now, Hurricane Mae was in full effect. She mopped the kitchen floor and each of the upstairs bathrooms, changed the linens in all three bedrooms, and dusted every single ledge and surface she could reach. She even fished her footstool out of the packed junk closet and did the top ledge of the mantle, the spot she always made Henry get because she wasn’t quite tall enough to reach it on her own.
Finally, the place was starting to resemble a home rather than a pigsty. She was exhausted. She let herself sink into an armchair and close her eyes for a moment. One of the windows was open facing the water. It let in a warm ocean’s breeze that tickled her nose with the sharp scent of salt. She let out a long sigh. Sixty-one years of age might not be quite too old to laugh around in bed with her husband on a lazy morning, but it sure felt too old to be running wild around her house like this. Her feet were aching already. She opened one eye and peeked at the wooden grandfather clock that stood on the far end of the room, catty-corner to the fireplace. It was almost three p.m. already. Holly and Pete were due in sometime around five, if all went according to plan on their drive up from Plymouth. A few more small things remained to tidy up and prepare, but the house was mostly in shape, thank goodness.
Mae bent over to pull her cell phone out of the side table drawer. She still didn’t know how to work the thing all that well, but she’d managed to pin Brent down long enough to make him explain the core features, and she got by just fine with that much. When she had her reading glasses settled into place and the phone powered on, she frowned. No voice mails or text messages from Henry. That was unusual. He always texted her just before the boat left shore. It was another running joke between them, that she was like an eighteenth-century woman seeing her husband off on a whaling voyage. Sometimes, when he was taking the boat out to a spot on this side of the island, she’d clamber up to the widow’s walk on the roof of their house and use binoculars to try and spot him. He’d mooned her once, and even from a mile away, she could make out the laughter when he turned back around and flashed a smile.
But today, radio silence. It would’ve been nice if he’d messaged her.
6
Sara
“Well, look at you all dolled up!” Gavin said. “You know, I don’t think I’ve seen you in anything but work whites since our first interview.”
Sara blushed. She was unwilling to admit even to herself how long she’d spent picking out her outfits for this trip, or how many friends she’d consulted via FaceTime on which heels to bring, which shirts were too low, whether rose gold or silver earrings sent the better message.
“Thanks,” she mumbled. “You look great, as always.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wanted to slap herself. Before, during, and after the wardrobe and packing processes, she’d given herself a long pep talk in the mirror, complete with finger pointing and lots of furious stares into her own eyes.
You will NOT act like a fool on this trip, Sara Benson. This is a professional trip and you will conduct yourself accordingly. You will not babble. You will not clam up. You will not behave like a high school teenager going to the movies with her crush. Got it? Kapisch?
She’d answered her own question with a firm “Yes!” that had echoed around her tiny East Village studio apartment. For a second or two, she even believed that she meant it.
Gavin’s presence, of course, rendered that entire speech moot the second he strolled up to her at their terminal at JFK airport. He was wearing what she’d come to think of as the Gavin Uniform. She’d considered in idle moments whether Congress should pass a law banning anyone else from wearing the same. No one else could really do it justice like he could. Brown leather Clarks boots, left unlaced; dark denim jeans, slim enough to be flattering but not so skinny as to fall into hipster territory; and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose his forearms. It was casual, it was handsome, it was perfect.
The crowd around them buzzed and flowed. Sara ripped her eyes off her boss—her firmly forbidden, totally off-limits boss—and looked around them. She’d always loved airports. There was a sense of possibility that few other places could match. Like, if she was just one or two percent more spontaneous, she’d switch her ticket to somewhere unexpected and exciting and jet off on the adventure of a lifetime. She’d done something kind of like that, once, with a fun and reckless sort-of-boyfriend during her first year in the city. They’d shown up to LaGuardia with a backpack each. She was wearing a bikini under her sweater and had brought both mittens and sunscreen stashed away in various pockets. Ready for whatever. They ended up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, by dint of a random number draw, and spent three days jumping off rocks into the lake and eating potatoes in every form imaginable. That was a good memory.
This was a leap of faith of a whole different variety. More of an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” situation, actually. Because if being near Gavin at Lonesome Dove—a public establishment constantly buzzing with the cream of Manhattan’s foodie elite crop—was already stressful, then flying solo with him on a quote-unquote “business trip” might be the straw that broke the Benson’s back.
One step at a time, she counseled herself. This will be over before you know it. Drama-free. Just a nice bonding trip with the boss. No sweat. No pressure.
For a second, she even believed that, too.
Gavin smiled at her again. But, before she was forced to shove her foot even farther in her mouth than it already was, the airline employee announced boarding for their flight and they were promptly whisked onboard.
Sara had never flown first class before. It was a nice change of pace from her norm. Champagne before takeoff was a relief on her fr
ayed nerves. It also was helpful in washing down the half of a Xanax that she’d bummed off Benny before leaving the restaurant yesterday. Between that and the roar of the airplane as they hurtled down the runway and took off, she dozed off before she could stop it.
She woke up with a start when they landed, a little bumpily.
“First-time pilot, I bet,” Gavin grumbled. “Hack job on the landing.”
“I’m sure he’s trying his best,” Sara said. She sounded just like her mother, jeez.
“Aren’t we all?”
“Definitely. I’m trying my best not to look like an idiot on this trip,” she blurted.
Gavin turned in his seat to look at her. Sara could do nothing but laugh. She might as well throw the rest of her caution to the wind, because they hadn’t even landed in Boston yet and she was already breaking her self-promise not to act like a fool.
It was weird; she’d never been much of a lovestruck type before. She’d been the one to break up with every boyfriend she’d ever had. She just got bored of them. People in general didn’t intimidate her, ruffle her feathers, or throw her off the beat of the drummer that she marched to. Except for Gavin. But, somehow or another, he’d worked out the magic formula to get under her skin and throw a monkey wrench in her inner workings. She was curious what exactly that formula might consist of. There was the obvious, of course: the Gavin Uniform, those forearms, that mysterious cologne. She’d tried to find it once in a Macy’s men’s cosmetics section out of self-destructive curiosity, but she’d gone through thirty or forty different samples and couldn’t find the right one. But underlying all those obvious attractors was just some ineffable Gavin-ness. She was too smart to believe that she was falling all over herself for him simply because he was both attractive and off-limits. She knew that was a deadly combo if ever there was one. But that timeless trap was for girls way ditzier than her. She—Sara Alexandra Benson—would never make such a foolish mistake.
