But before I could repeat myself, we were encircled by a mob of people. As she always does, the senator pulled out her dimpled smile and professionally whitened teeth, shook hands, and murmured how kind they all were for their support. Eventually, the crowd parted much like I imagined that the Red Sea once did, and we made our way past.
“I was saying that there’s a snag in the stem cell bill,” I told her once we were in the clear.
“Which is what?”
“Well, there are two snags actually,” I replied and thought of the New York Times exposé. Maureen had sent me an e-mail saying that the Mississippi contingent started leaking Sally all of the dirt in their “folder of secrets.” I’d worked for Dupris long enough to know that, undoubtedly, her secrets were best kept that way. I cleared my throat. “The first issue is Senator Tompkins. He’s the last signature that we need. But he wants to go in for a deal.”
“Of course.” She sighed. “Harry always plays hard to get. What is it?”
“He wants you to back off your education push. He doesn’t think that it’s going to be effective, and his voters aren’t loving it. In exchange, he’ll support the research.”
“No way,” she said, as we crossed Fifty-seventh Street. “Find someone else to give us that last vote.”
“There is no one else, Senator.” I pulled out my pad from underneath the crook in my elbow. “Maureen and I have spent every waking second talking to lobbyists, aides, even assistants to aides. Tompkins is it. No one else is moving from their position, and he’s the only one who is flexible.”
“I’m not letting him put me in a position to have to choose,” she said. “It’s like Sophie’s Choice—how can he ask me to drop one for the other?”
“Because this is how it’s done.” I sighed at her melodrama. “You know that.” I hated it when she pretended to be so pious as to not recognize the negotiation tactics that played themselves out on the Hill every day. And it’s not like she hadn’t done this very thing before herself. In fact, she’d had me orchestrate this very thing before.
“Well, I won’t back off education. In fact, I’m going to bolster my campaign for it. You tell him that.”
A wave of nausea overtook me, and I had to pause to regain my breath. “Senator, with all due respect, the stem cell bill can make a difference, a tangible difference in voters’ lives. By backing this, you could conceivably save hundreds of thousands of people. What could be more worthy than that?”
She flipped her hand to the side. “Education is where I’m at, Natalie. Andrews wants it; I want it.” A bus blew by us with an ad for Susanna’s not-for-profit on the side, complete with her picture. Dupris watched it pass. “Isn’t that Councilman Taylor’s wife?” She snorted. “I can’t believe she showed her face in the town again. I wonder what happened to her?”
“What happened to her is that you made me apologize to her at the Christmas party. Or have you forgotten?” I muttered. “And what further happened to her is that she turned out to be a decent person. A good one, in fact. Who’s trying to make a difference.”
“Oh, Natalie.” Dupris’s heels clicked on the sidewalk as she started walking again. “Don’t take things so personally. I was just asking! No offense was intended.”
I felt my pulse quicken and clamped down my jaw. No offense was ever meant by the senator unless she’d sent one of her minions to do the offending and thus fall on their swords for her. Like I might have done with my best friend.
“Anyway, where were we?” she continued. “Oh yes, the stem cell bill. Sorry, my hands are tied.”
I stopped in the middle of the street, which forced her to turn and look back at me.
“Well, I guess that brings us to the second thing,” I said in a tone I used to reserve for my mother. “And that’s an enormous exposé that’s coming out about the machinations of politics. A cover story, in fact. The New York Times Magazine. Oh, and it’s taking its cues from the stem cell bill. Why certain people are voting one way, why others are voting another.” I smiled sarcastically. “You know, just a nice little piece on how pure all of our intentions are.” I saw her eyes widen. “And it just so happens that I’ve spent the past month trying to keep your nose out of it, trying desperately to protect your image from being smeared, when it seems to me that you’re doing a fine job of smearing it all on your own.”
I saw her mouth drop, and I thought that I had her. Instead, she took a step toward me and for an instant, I was certain that she was going to slap me. But she lowered her voice, grabbed me by the elbow, and said, “Why didn’t you tell me about this ages ago.”
“Because, Senator, you prefer the don’t ask, don’t tell policy. You know that you do.” She looked at me and clenched her jaw. “I was trying to keep you above it,” I said.
We walked the block in silence.
“I have to think about this, Natalie,” she said finally, just as we approached the steps of The Four Seasons. “Sit down and talk it over with Andrews and figure out how I’ll do the least damage.”
“Of course,” I replied dryly, stopping at the stairs.
“You’re not joining me for lunch?”
“No, Senator,” I said, just before I spun on my heels. “I’m pretty certain that I just lost my appetite. Besides, I’m headed for sunnier skies.”
TWENTY-FOUR
There were no skies more sunny than those off the coast of San Juan. Jake loaded our suitcases into the back of the cab while I pulled on my oversized, Jackie-O glasses and read the driver the address. Sally had told me that the hotel was smack on the beach, just a literal stone’s throw from the airport, so when we pulled into the resort’s driveway, with its skyscraping palm trees and mammoth lion sculptures, I’d barely even had time to check my voice mail; the ride was less than five minutes. I was just about to key in my password when I saw Sally standing at the imposing marble entrance. I’d left her a message the night before, hat in hand, tearfully explaining that nothing mattered more to me than her forgiveness. And saying that if she’d still have me, there was nothing I’d be more proud to do than stand up beside her at her wedding.
“Hey,” she said shyly. “You’re here to watch me become an honest woman?”
“Sally, you’re long past an honest woman. Sorry, there’s nothing I can do about that.”
“Sshh,” she mock whispered. “Don’t tell Drew.” I pulled her into a tight hug, as Jake paid the driver and went to check in.
“Sal, I’m so sorry.” I choked on my words. “I can’t…I mean, I just didn’t…I’m sorry. I should never have asked you to do what I did.” She shook her head on my shoulder telling me to stop, but I wanted to finish. “You have been nothing but an incredible friend to me. And I’m sorry that I can’t say the same. I’ll make it up to you.”
“Hey.” She pulled back and wiped away her mascara. “We don’t keep score. There will be no making up. Only moving on.”
“Fine.” I smiled. “To moving on.” I raised my hand in a mock toast.
“Oh, you said it, sister. There is waaaaay too much of that going on already.” She nodded toward my fake cocktail. “So here’s the dealio,” she continued, as she readjusted her ponytail and linked her arm in mine, as if our friendship had never taken a plunge from which it might not have recovered. “I have, like, a zillion things to do before people get here. Honestly, when I planned this, why didn’t it ever occur to me that throwing a wedding where 150 people show up for three days and expect a nonstop party would be totally exhausting? Anyway, I digress. I have a zillion things to do, but you, my dear, should make your way down to the beach with that rock star boyfriend of yours, order some rum punch, and show off your size zero body and perky breasts.”
“Size two and counting. I’ve been eating like a cow. No, correction, I’ve eaten about ten cows. I can’t stop.”
“Okay, so go get your size two ass down to the beach and vegetate. I have to have dinner with our families tonight—please shoot me or else I might shoot
Drew’s mother first—but I’ll try to swing by your room later. And if not, we’re doing manicures in the morning. And hair and makeup for Saturday is at noon.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Jake’s promised to show me how to windsurf.”
“If I didn’t have my own wedding to attend,” Sally said, raising her right hand to her forehead and pretending to faint, “I’d drop dead. Because the day that Natalie Miller cuts loose in a bikini, turns off her BlackBerry, and hits the waves to surf a big one is a day that hell just about froze over.”
“This just might be that day,” I said before I kissed her on the cheek and went to find Jake at the front desk.
WINDSURFING, IT TURNED out, was not so much my thing. Jake had been helpful enough, but my postchemo arms didn’t have the strength to keep the sail aloft, so, more or less, I went nowhere. With the exception of the occasional times I went flat on my ass and belly-flopped into the ocean. After an hour, we gave up, and he returned to the room to nap, and I fell asleep on a beach chair with one hand grazing the sands below. The shouts of three teenage boys tossing the football in the waves woke me up, so I rubbed my eyes, pulled on my cushy hotel robe, and made my way to our room. The air was so cold inside, I felt as if liquid nitrogen had been shot through my veins.
Jake was lying on top of the sheets in the dark, still in his bathing suit, his hands tucked behind his head. I flipped on the lights.
“Have a good nap? I checked out the seafood buffet menu. I think we should definitely hit it tonight.”
“Actually, I didn’t sleep.”
“Is something wrong?” I felt my stomach drop.
“Sammy called.” Sammy, the Misbees manager. Jake didn’t even need to keep talking. I knew what was coming next. But I let him keep going anyway. He swung his legs up in the air and rolled himself upright. “The thing is, Nat. They need me in London.”
I blinked and started picking my cuticles.
“They need me in London,” he repeated. “And I don’t know what to do.”
“Of course you know what to do,” I said quietly. “You just don’t want to do it.” I stood in the doorway, unable to move.
“No, truly. I don’t know what to do.” He said it with enough conviction that I believed him. “I promised you something. I promised you that I’d be here not just for Sally’s wedding, but I’d be there for you. But London…” His voice trailed off. “We got a call from the Rolling Stones. The Rolling fucking Stones, Nat. They want me to come and record a song with them. And then maybe have the band open up on their summer tour. I mean, the Rolling Stones for Christ’s sake.”
“I get it, Jake. It’s the Rolling Stones. You don’t have to say their name ten more times for me to get it.” I took a few steps forward.
“I haven’t said yes yet. I wanted to talk to you first.” He folded his hands in his lap and reminded me of a five-year-old who’s been caught pants-ing the girls in the playground.
“But you’re going to. Say yes,” I sniped, as a I dropped my robe and reached for dry clothes in my suitcase. “We both know that you’re going to, regardless of what I say. Because really, what could I say that would be enough? That I was counting on you to be here for this? You already know that’s true. That I was counting on you to live up to your promises? I think you already know that’s true, too.” I considered it for a moment. “You know, Jake, I didn’t ask you to come back. You came back on your own. I didn’t think things could be different, but you asked me to believe that. So I did.”
“It’s just Sally’s wedding,” he said. “It’s not the end of the world. This is my fucking career, Natalie.”
My eyes flashed, and I threw his damp towel to the floor. “No, Jake,” I said. “That’s where you’re wrong. It’s not the end of your world. But that doesn’t mean that your world should be a part of mine.”
“Natalie, I love you.” He flopped his arms helplessly.
“That’s not enough.”
“What would be? Tell me what would be enough so that I can make this up to you.”
I thought about it. I really did. I zipped up my sweatshirt and moved to the window, staring out at the rhythm of the lapping waves, the kids darting in and out of them. I thought about Colin and about Brandon and about Dylan and about Ned. I thought about how what might have been enough six months ago wasn’t nearly enough anymore. I thought about second chances and how easy it is for them to get tossed aside like misplaced Post-it notes. I thought about how I once would have given anything to have Jake come back, but now I knew that what happened the first time wasn’t a mistake because it had already repeated itself. The first time out, in a relationship, on a baseball diamond, on the Senate floor, you can blame naïveté. You can say that you didn’t know how to do it any differently. But the second time around, there’s really no such excuse. You should know better now. And I hoped that I did.
“It’s not about making it up to me, Jake,” I said finally. “It’s about doing it right the first time so there’s no space in between you coming back and me asking you to leave.”
“I don’t want to leave, Nat. I don’t. Please don’t ask me to leave.”
“But you do, Jake. You do. You just don’t want to admit it yet. And besides, it’s not like I’m not asking. We’re both already gone. You wanted to come back and rescue me. Fine. I wanted it, too. But it turns out that no one can save anyone else, and you certainly can’t save me.”
He got up and moved to the window, curling himself around me, and for a few last lingering moments, we just looked out at the beach without words.
“I can hear your heart beating,” I said to break the silence, just like I used to when we were lying in bed, before cancer ever hit, before we came undone and then later tried to undo the damage.
“What’s it saying?” he said back, just like he always used to. This was our thing.
“It’s saying ‘I love you.’”
“You know what they say—‘a heart can never lie.’” And then he pulled me tighter so that the thumping of his heart literally echoed in my ear. I don’t know how long we stood there, watching the sun go down on more than just the water, but all of the sudden, I felt claustrophobic, so I untangled myself from Jake and grabbed the room key to get some fresh air.
I was almost out the door when Jake called me back.
“Nat, what if I say no to the Stones? I’ll do it if it will make the difference.”
My eyes filled with tears because this was the moment, the one that you either seize or shy away from when you’re going to make your own fortune. I took mine and clutched on. And then I shook my head no to his plea.
“So what do you want from me then?” he said, desperation filling his voice. “What is it that you want?”
“It’s not about what I want from you, Jake. It’s what I want for me.”
“So who saves you then?”
“I do, Jake. I save myself.” And I closed the door behind me.
It wasn’t until after I got in the elevator that I realized that I’d never heard his song. The one he wrote for me. And then I realized that it didn’t even matter.
I DON’T KNOW why they call them rehearsal dinners, when nothing much really gets rehearsed. Mostly, guests get tremendously shit-faced, the members of the wedding party give obscenely random toasts, and, inevitably, one, if not more, of the parents of the bride and groom breaks down and shares embarrassingly long speeches and intimate details of the bride’s or groom’s childhood.
Sally and Drew’s rehearsal dinner was no different. Since you have most likely sat through dozens of other similar events, I will spare you the painful details. But what I should probably fill you in on is the fact that as we poured into the rented restaurant in Old San Juan, a quint-essentially perfect Caribbean restaurant, complete with open-air sides, stucco walls, and bright flowering trees that gave you the sense that you were still outside, I did not see Zach in sight. I suspected that Sally knew something about his absence, but she
was a virtual tornado all day: part bridezilla, part Tasmanian Devil, so it didn’t seem fair to bring up my crush in the midst of her spiral. The only down-time we had was our manicures at the spa, and since Lila was a fellow bridesmaid, and since this was supposed to be girl-bonding time, I guessed that it wasn’t entirely appropriate for me to inquire about the status and location of her is-he-or-isn’t-he boyfriend. Especially since I didn’t really feel like explaining why mine was homeward bound.
I knew that I had no right to be disappointed. I knew that Zach was coming as Lila’s date, and I further knew that this not only gave me no right to be disappointed, but made me a fairly lousy friend to boot. But I was disappointed all the same. My newly svelte figure afforded me the luxury of donning duds that I could not normally pull off, and to be honest, I thought I looked pretty damn fine that evening: my bright pseudo-Missoni crocheted dress clung to all the right places, and even though I didn’t grow them myself, even I had to admit that my breasts were one of my better accessories.
As these things tend to happen at rehearsal dinners, Lila had a wee bit too much to drink. It wasn’t so much her fault: The waiters were passing around rum-laden cocktails at such a clip that I feared that even Sally’s thirteen-year-old niece was a little tipsy from her virgin margarita. Osmosis and all. So when we pushed back our chairs from the buffet dinner and toasted our final toast to the happy couple, Lila nearly fell over. It was both fortuitous and regretful that I was the one to steady her before she toppled to the adobe-tiled floor.
“Fucking asshole,” she slurred, as I held her elbow and righted her.
“Excuse me?” I said. “I was just trying to help. What’s the problem?”
“Not you.” She waved her hand in front of her face, as we followed the crowd out through the door and onto the street. Jessica, a college friend, had suggested an after-party at a bar, the Blue Parrot, down the block, and I was considering retiring to my king-size bed and pile of Cosmos, but Lila was dragging me with her at the moment. Literally almost dragging: She was half-bent over, pulling at my arm, and more or less stumbling over the cobblestones as we walked.
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