by Zoe Kane
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Annie, something in Dr. Sharma’s voice making her suddenly uncomfortable.
“You’re tangled in a knot composed of many different kinds of grief,” said Dr. Sharma. “There’s how much you miss your sister, first and foremost. There’s mourning the loss of Grace and Danny as the axis of your family. There’s the children’s pain, and Marcus’ pain, which you have absorbed just by being near them. But Annie,” she said, “did you not think you were allowed to grieve your love for him too?”
“I don’t – “ Annie began, and then stopped. “It doesn’t do any good, though, to think about that now,” she explained haltingly. “He was never going to belong to me. Now he’s gone. What’s the point of letting that be one more thing that hangs over me?”
“Because it’s true,” said Dr. Sharma. “You haven’t allowed yourself to feel the specific thread of grief whose existence makes you secretly afraid you’re a terrible person. You’ve locked it away, deep inside, this poisonous dark thing just lurking there. But it was always going to come out. Of course your body shut down and you couldn’t move for three days after you read that letter, Annie. That’s the most sensible thing you’ve ever said to me. My God. Of course it did. Because you spent three months telling yourself you weren’t allowed to let those feelings into the light. You spent three months telling yourself you were only allowed to feel certain kinds of sadness, but not others.”
Annie looked away, feeling the sting of tears behind her eyes.
“You loved a man and he died,” said Dr. Sharma simply. “You have permission to feel that part of it too. That’s the plainest, most straightforward version of the truth. Start there. Let yourself grieve that. Not just his death, but the relationship you never had. Let yourself grieve that other life, that other Daniel and Annabel that never had the chance to exist. You’re allowed to feel that. Because honestly, Annie?” she added, “you did everything right. You were loyal and you were selfless and you put the needs of your family before anything you might have wanted for yourself. Congratulations,” she said with a wry smile. “You’re a parent.”
“I don’t know how to be a parent.”
“Sure you do. You were doing it already. You’ve spent the last decade of your life facing multiple sets of unbearable choices, and while perhaps you have made mistakes, you have been guided, every single time, by the thought of what was best for the children. Listen to me, Annie,” she said, as the tears in Annie's eyes began to spill over. “You did everything right.”
* * *
JUNE
There was no parking near the school pickup area, so Annie left the car two blocks away and walked to the lobby door to wait for Isaac and Sophia. The afternoon bell rang, and a sea of children began to flood out the door, pulsing with that wild animalistic energy specific to the last day of school before summer vacation.
An aristocratic silver-haired man with a boy about the twins’ age in tow – a boy with a faint scar above one eye – brushed past Annie. She whirled around and tapped the man on the shoulder.
“Excuse me,” she said politely. “Are you Blaine Clifton?”
“And you are?”
She ignored him. “And you must be Chase,” she said, looking down at the boy at his side, who gave her an arrogant, disdainful glance before dismissing her. The children came out the door just then and saw Annie talking to the Cliftons. They approached close enough that she could see them, but she could feel Isaac's desire to keep his sisters far away from Chase.
“I’m Annabel Walter,” she said. “Isaac and Sophia’s aunt.”
This did get Chase’s attention, and he began to shift his weight a little guiltily. It got his father’s too.
“Your nephew attacked my son,” said Blaine coldly.
“Yes, he certainly did,” said Annie, without taking her eyes off Chase, “and your son knows exactly why. Don’t you?”
“I wasn’t doing anything!” Chase whined.
Annie snorted. “Oh please. Listen to me, Chase, I’m going to tell you something. When you tell a girl whose parents have just been killed in a car accident that she is an orphan and nobody loves her – “
“He said what?” said Blaine, a note of shock creeping into his voice almost in spite of himself.
“. . . and then you act surprised when her brother comes to her defense, do you know what I think?” Chase was silent. “That makes me feel very sorry for you, Chase. That makes me wonder just what kind of relationships you are going to form as an adult when you are so clearly unable to demonstrate the barest minimum of compassion for another human being.”
Chase was staring at her, dumbfounded to be spoken to this way, and even his father was frozen still. The Walter children edged slightly closer, eyes wide with excitement. Nobody had ever had the guts to talk to Chase Clifton like this in his whole life.
Do you understand what the word ‘orphan’ means, Chase?” Annie went on in that terrifyingly polite voice. “You used it on Sophia as an insult, you intentionally used it as a weapon to hurt her, but you used it incorrectly. Here’s what it actually means. It means she has experienced a loss, and a degree of suffering, whose magnitude you yourself, with your affluent and happily-married parents, cannot begin to understand. And yet, less than a month later, there she was, back at school, doing her best, trying to live her life. She is heroic, and so is her brother, and so is Lucy, who is four years old and has already survived traumas that would break the spirit of an adult ten times her age. They would certainly break yours. And yet you thought it would be tremendously amusing to use the word ‘orphan’ to taunt Sophia, to hurt her on purpose, by telling her that it meant a child that nobody loved and nobody wanted. And that is not correct, Chase, that is so far from correct that you cannot even begin to comprehend its level of incorrectness. Because I love those children. I want those children. They have lost their parents, but they have me. Next time you come after my kids to poke and prod at the memory of the most painful moment of their lives for your own entertainment, know what the damn word means before you use it.”
She turned towards the awestruck children and held out her hands to them. “Grace was the nice sister,” she said to Blaine, who was staring at her, slack-jawed. “I’m not the nice one. I’m the stone-cold bitch. I'm the one everybody's afraid of. I’m the one that spent my entire adult life taking human brains apart for a living. And there is nothing that I will not do to protect my kids. I don’t care that you’re the school board president. I don’t care that your brother is the pastor. I’m not afraid of you. And I’m going to be watching.” Then, without even a glance behind her, she sailed out the door.
"You said the B word," said Sophia in an awed voice the moment they were out of earshot.
"Yes, I did," said Annie, "don't tell Aunt Vera," which made Lucy collapse into helpless giggles at Sophia's side.
"Sometimes you're kind of scary,” Isaac observed.
"Well, I apologize. I wasn’t trying to scare you.”
"No, it's okay,” he said cheerfully. “That time it was the good kind. You were scary on our team."
"I'm always on your team, Isaac,” she told him, and squeezed his hand. “I promise.”
“Hey, Aunt Annie,” Sophia piped up suddenly. “Are we gonna do anything for summer vacation?”
“Yeah, can we go to the zoo?” asked Isaac. “Or to the beach? Oh please oh please, can we go to the beach?”
“There are dinosaurs at the science museum this month, Isaac, we could go see the dinosaurs! Aunt Annie, can we go see the dinosaurs?”
“I have a better idea,” said Annie slowly, a plan beginning to formulate in her head.
“What?”
“Have you guys ever been on an airplane?”
Chapter Twenty-Three: New York
This is how the story finally begins to come to its ending.
We begin in Marcus Rey’s apartment.
It’s one big open space, with a pair of big folding
wood-panel screens he found at the Chinatown night market to divide the bedroom from the rest of the loft. They’re painted green and blue with winding golden vines, and he likes them because it feels a little bit like living inside Jack and the Beanstalk, though this is not something he has ever told to anyone.
In the 1900’s this was a factory that built parts for Ford automobiles. Now, in 2016, the impossibly high vaulted ceilings and exposed brick walls and floor-to-ceiling windows that made it functional for manufacturing have become the kind of commodities that realtors use as selling features. Marcus likes the gleaming hardwood floors the last owner added, and the sparkling steel-and-glass bathroom, but he likes the history too. He likes thinking about the men that used to come to work in this building, and the America that they built with their hands. He wonders about their stories.
It’s a Monday night in June, and the sun is just thinking about setting. Marcus has had a pretty good day. He’s doing some consulting work for a friend, but it’s the kind of thing he can do from anywhere, so he spent the afternoon with his laptop at a coffee shop in Williamsburg and then went to the farmer’s market.
The light streams in through his wall of windows, bathing the space in gold. He’s in the kitchen, absently humming along to Miles Davis. (He can’t cook while listening to music with words. He starts to sing, and gets distracted, and burns the garlic.) Cooking elaborate dinners distracts him. It gives him something to do. Filling the days isn’t hard; he has a little bit of work, now, and he goes for walks and runs errands and visits bookstores and stops by Linnet’s auto shop to bring her lunch.
But nights are harder.
He used to have one guaranteed way to fill his nights, to keep the dark things at bay, to push back the loneliness that sometimes woke him up at two a.m. in this vast brick cavern that used to be a factory. There was one thing that always worked.
But he doesn’t do that anymore.
And so, in the absence of gourmet dinners at restaurants whose chefs are on television where they charge you nine dollars for a side order of bread – in the absence of fifty-dollar pours of whiskey at the kind of swank, lamplit, brass-and-mahogany bars where men like Marcus Rey take girls like the kind of girls Marcus Rey used to date – in the absence of sweaty, breathless nights under his gray Calvin Klein sheets beneath the moonlight pouring in through the big industrial windows – he discovers a very different New York.
A New York that fits the very different Marcus Rey he was when he and his boxes arrived home six months ago.
And this new Marcus Rey has a lot of time to fill, but very few people, anymore, he wants to fill it with. He doesn’t have much to say to his old friends. A few of his former coworkers threw a big “welcome home” party for him when he got back to town, and he made a reluctant appearance, Linnet at his side. But after the tenth or twentieth or hundredth person to congratulate him on whatever he’d done to weasel out of getting stuck in Oregon for the rest of his life babysitting three kids he’d never met, Linnet seized his hand, murmured “Let’s get out of here,” and took him home to make popcorn and watch The Hunt for Red October instead.
So the new Marcus Rey doesn’t do any of the things the old one did.
Instead, he cooks.
A lot.
And so tonight, on this cool June Monday in Brooklyn, he is making cassoulet. He is following Julia Child’s directions exactly, down to the letter, even making a side trip to a specialty grocer for rendered goose fat. He likes dishes like this, ones with a lot of steps, ones that take hours. It buys him some extra time before he has to remember that he’s alone again. (Funny how much he used to revel in the blissful silent solitude of this vast open space. Funny how eerie and oppressive he finds it now.)
It is seven twenty-three. The cassoulet, with its herb-flecked layers of sausage and roast duck blanketed in velvety white beans, has just gone into the oven. It will be done cooking in ninety minutes. He closes the oven door, pours a glass of wine and sits down at the kitchen table to read.
Before he has even turned the page, his phone chimes in his pocket. “Yo, I’m downstairs,” reads the text from Linnet. “Buzz me in. I have a surprise for you.”
He’s not really in the mood for Linnet’s snarky banter tonight – he’s in a softer mood, full of jazz and red wine and the smell of thyme and garlic. He knows exactly who he wants right now but he can’t have her, she’s four thousand miles away, it’s pointless to dwell on it, Marcus, and Linnet’s his only real friend so this is much better than nothing. He made enough cassoulet for eight and seeing it sitting in his refrigerator all week, neatly parceled out into single servings, will depress him.
So he presses the buzzer.
His back is to the door when he hears the knock – he’s pouring a second glass of wine for Linnet and putting his book away so she doesn’t make fun of him for reading the collected letters of Julia Child. “It’s unlocked,” he calls to her over his shoulder, and hears the door open as he’s tidying up a little, moving the messy cutting boards and pile of prep bowls into the sink in case Linnet wants to play cards later. He washes his hands, and dries them, and that’s when he realizes that Linnet hasn’t said anything.
He turns around.
“Surprise,” says Annie, with an uncertain smile that slices directly into the deepest part of his heart, a smile that says Please, a smile that says she's not sure whether he would have opened the door if he'd known who was really on the other side of it.
“Annie,” he says, over and over, it’s the only word he can say, and he feels the world begin to spin on its axis until it clicks into place and suddenly everything is right again.
* * *
TEN MINUTES EARLIER
“This is a terrible idea,” said Annie, sliding into the cab next to Linnet.
“It’s nice to see you again too.”
“Hi. Nice to see you. This is a terrible idea.”
“It’s a brilliant idea.”
“He doesn’t even know we’re in town. Shouldn’t I give him some warning?”
“It’s more romantic this way.”
“But it’s also very bad manners.” Linnet shrugged this off. “Besides, he might not be home.”
“Oh, he’ll be home,” said Linnet emphatically. “He’s always home.”
“He might have gone out. With friends or to dinner or something, or – “
“Or on a date? No, idiot. He’s home. He’s probably in his kitchen right now, listening to jazz and drinking wine and cooking something elaborate from that Julia Child book he thinks I don’t know he’s become weirdly obsessed with. He will definitely be home.”
“So what, we just go knock on his door?”
“This is New York,” said Linnet with an exasperated eyeroll. “There are buzzers. That’s why you need me.”
“What?”
“The apartment buzzer is hooked up to his phone. I text the buzzer number, he gets the text, he pushes a button in his entryway to let me in. So for this to work he needs to see it coming from my phone number.”
“So . . . you could have done your part from your living room.”
“I had to come along,” Linnet pointed out, with devastating accuracy, “because otherwise you’d have chickened out.”
“You don’t think this is a pointlessly elaborate plan?” asked Annie, raising an eyebrow. “You don’t think I could have just called him and said ‘Hey, we’re going to the Museum of Natural History tomorrow to see the dinosaurs, do you want to come with us?’”
“How the hell are you going to have makeup sex at the Museum of Natural History?”
“This was a terrible idea.”
“Don’t worry, pal, I’ve got your back on this. I’m like such a good wingman.”
“Oh God.”
“Left at the light,” she said to the cab driver, “it’s this brick building on the corner. And leave it running, I’m not going in.”
Annie followed her to the door and watched her push the button, t
hen pull out her phone to text Marcus. Her heart began to beat faster and faster. Finally, an eternity later, the door buzzed and Linnet held it open for her. Annie looked in front of her towards a high-ceilinged brick foyer with a wrought-iron staircase. “Second floor,” said Linnet.
Annie didn’t move. She just stood there, staring ahead of her, thinking about the apartment at the top of the stairs.
“It’s gonna be okay,” said Linnet at her shoulder. “Go.”
“I threw him out of my house, Linnet. And I haven’t seen him in six months.”
“If you think there’s any chance in the world that he’s not going to be happy to see you,” Linnet pronounced firmly in a tone that brooked no argument, “you don’t know Marcus Rey at all.” And with that she shoved Annie through the door and closed it behind her.
* * *
She stood in the open doorway. Behind her was a cold brick foyer. In front of her was a warm open space that bathed her in quiet music and the scent of rosemary, and there he was.
He was in the kitchen, with his back to her, and she just stood there for a long moment, taking him in. The soft waves of his thick dark hair. The strength in his back. His arms, with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the elbow. The way even in this room she’d never seen before, he looked like home to her.
She could live anywhere in the world, she thought to herself, and it would be home if he was there.
Then, suddenly, heart-stoppingly, he turned around.
She could not breathe. She could not move. They just looked at each other, for a long, long time, and then he spoke her name.
