“That’s going to change.” Her words came out in a shaky, breathy rush. “I’m going to cut back… with the kids.”
“Right.”
“I am, Paul. I’ve made that decision already.”
She had, long before the plane touched down in Newark. She’d talk to the teachers next week. She’d resign as PTA president after the end of the term. And she wanted to have sex with Paul again—often—fiercely—the way it once had been—sex on the dryer—sex in the shower—sex like they used to have, spontaneous, frequent, and raw.
“Yeah, well, maybe you will,” he said in a low, grim voice. “Maybe you’ve decided this is all you have to do to fix this. Cut back on the kids’ schedules. Get life back to normal.”
“Yes!”
“I know how much you love the kids, Kate. No denying it. They’re your whole world.”
Tears prickled at the back of her eyes. “Yes,” she said, around the lump swelling in her throat. “Yes, they are.”
“So, for the past two weeks,” he continued, “I’ve been running our marriage through my head like a damn slide show, trying to remember something—a single argument, a single betrayal, anything big enough to make you want to put half a world between us, because it’s become as clear as glass that you didn’t go to India to get away from the kids.” His voice roughened. “You did it to get away from me.”
Time stopped in a sort of buzzing haze as Kate found herself remembering a toy Paul had bought Michael when he was young, a three-foot blow-up clown that was weighted at the bottom so, no matter how many times you punched the thing, it would wobble back up again, ready to be smacked anew.
And yet even in this gob-smacked state of mind she felt Paul’s pain. She’d hurt him. She was gripped with the urge to take his face in her hands and look into his eyes and tell him that she loved him, loved him, and nothing else really mattered.
She took a step toward him to do just that—but he grabbed a lawn chair off the ground and folded it flat, keeping it between them.
“You forget,” she said, gently, “that I begged you to follow me to India.”
“It’s an easy enough demand to make when you know damn well that I couldn’t leave work and the kids.”
Paul turned his back to her. He kicked the rocks off the edges of the next set of draped towels. Numbly, Kate pulled at the nearest lawn chair, tied up on both sides with more towel-and-jump-rope tents. She searched her own heart as she slipped into automatic, twisting the knots out of the ropes. Had she been fooling herself? No, no, she had definitely wanted him to join her. Desperately, in fact, she’d ached for him every day. But now, standing on her own lawn, she began to wonder if she’d expected the impossible.
Doubts worked on her mind. Absentmindedly, she folded a lawn chair. Maybe Paul was right. Maybe, after the heat of the skydiving experience, she’d been entirely unreasonable, and this rift between them was all her fault, born of some crazy idea that they could have a different sort of marriage, a wildly romantic, idealized love life only found in novels. Her actions suddenly seemed so idiotic—just make a plane reservation, and off to India we’ll go! But they lived in the real world. Maybe every couple comes to a point in life when marriage by necessity morphs into little more than a working partnership, centered on raising kids.
Jo cleared her throat and pinned Kate with a significant look.
You’re not just going to cave, are you?
Kate looked away so fast she nearly threw out her neck. Damn. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to still the whirling of her thoughts, but no sooner had she done that than a gust of wind slapped her hard. It whipped her hair off her cheek. A gust so sudden it reminded her of free-falling from eight thousand feet. It reminded her of feeling weightless and exhilarated.
It reminded her of Rachel.
And in that instant, Kate opened her eyes and saw herself and the world as if she were seeing it from above. She saw the house and the broken-down maze and Paul’s stiff back and frustrated gestures as he gathered everything up. She saw herself following in silence, helping him with the chore, nothing between them right now but a fierce need for everything to go back to normal, to avoid talking about what hurt most.
And just like that, her mind cleared. Kate knew. She couldn’t cave. She could see the consequences if she did, as clearly as she saw the wind chasing shadows of the clouds across the lawn. Oh, yes, she could see the unfurling of the long years passing in clockwork predictability, and nothing would change. Nothing would change, and she and Paul would become that old couple eating out on Saturday nights with absolutely nothing to say.
She shoved the last towel on the pile with the others. She gripped the determination twisting up inside her, and she held on to it as she strode across the yard, kicking rocks aside, trotting around the folded lawn chairs until she reached Paul’s side.
He jerked up in a spasm of long, lean muscle. He glared at her through eyes of heartrending blue.
“Paul, this is not all about me.” She seized the strap of her carry-on bag, fisting it for courage. “After Tess was born, you changed, too.”
He shook his head, swiveled on his heel, and took one long step toward the house—away from her, away from explanations, away from the ugly truth. Just then, Jo cleared her throat. Loudly.
Paul stopped. He paused with is back toward her, his shoulder blades knife-sharp against his T-shirt.
Surprised, Kate glanced at Jo. Jo leaned against her car with her arms crossed, giving Paul an intense glare. Suddenly Kate remembered that Jo had been talking to Paul all week. Kate realized that Jo had been working on him, using all her people skills to coax him from an angry ledge.
Later, Kate thought, with a quiver of gratitude, she would have to thank Jo for trying.
Then she turned back to Paul, and took advantage of his sudden quiet.
“You did change after Tess was born,” Kate said, “and most of the changes were wonderful. I’ll never forget the way you cradled Tess’s head in your hands, just after she was born. You just… you seemed to know exactly what to do. Not every man adapts so well.”
He gave her his profile, squinting down the street at Michael doing skateboard tricks with a friend, but she knew he was thinking of his own father.
“But you also quit your job around that time. I used to tease you about becoming Mr. Corporation, but it wasn’t easy leaving southern Cal, leaving that start-up company, and coming here. It’s a whole different attitude, the whole nine-to-five, meeting-after-meeting thing, and you worked hard to adjust.” She remembered, oh so well. “I know, Paul. I watched.”
“I had to get a real job.” He shuffled in a tight half-circle, bracing his hands on his hips, stopping and then starting again, like he did at a soccer game when a referee made a bad call. “I wasn’t going to raise the kids on some commune, planting okra and collard greens, having Tess dig latrines and Michael learn to tie-dye—”
“You wanted a better life.”
“Yes, and I gave it to us—to all of us.”
“You did, Paul, you did.” She leaned toward him, willing him to understand. “But somewhere along the way, we both started thinking that a ‘better life’ was like a Ralph Lauren ad.”
He blinked at her, blankly.
“Think about it. Haven’t we become so tied up in our kids—so determined to give them some Nick at Nite version of a stable life—that we forgot to take care of us?”
She watched him as he processed what she’d said, in his infuriatingly logical way, as he stared so intensely at the ground he might as well have been taking inventory of the weeds. She trembled so violently that it took her a minute to realize that the stinging feeling in her hand was where the buckle of her luggage strap had cut through the skin of her palm.
She loosened her grip and then dared to close the space that separated them. She paused, gauging his reaction to her nearness. When he didn’t move, she put her hand on his shoulder.
She felt his muscles tighten under
her palm.
“Someday Tess, Michael, and Anna will be grown.” She pressed her nose in the hollow just by his shoulder blade. “Someday they’ll be out of this house, living lives of their own. It’ll just be you and me then, with all the time in the world.” He smelled of cut grass, of old cotton, of dish soap. “I know what kind of marriage I want. I want us to be the couple caught slow-dancing to the music of street musicians in Barcelona. I want to be the couple that is the life of every party. I want to be the old twosome that still holds hands.” She felt moisture and realized that a tear had slipped out. “That’s what I want, Paul, that’s all I ever wanted. A life, with you, full of adventure and love. The way we once were. Tell me”—her voice caught—“tell me that’s what you want, too.”
She pressed her cheek against his back, willing his spine to soften as she waited in free-fall, ticking down the seconds, waiting while her heart threatened to burst in her chest, along with all her hopes and all her dreams.
Abruptly, he stepped away, turned around, and fixed her with a steady, wary gaze. She tried to hold it through the shimmer of her own tears.
His face was like stone, his jaw fixed, his mouth a tight white line, but beyond his eyes, Kate saw a flood of emotions—a roiling, fluxing deluge that stopped her breath. In those blue waters she read all the things that he wouldn’t say—all the pain he couldn’t admit. She saw the hurt of a boy who’d been abandoned by his father, and the struggle of a young man determined not to make the same mistakes. She saw what she’d never anticipated when she’d trotted off to India—how much her actions had wounded him, and how deeply he’d buried his scars.
“Oh, Paul.”
“Damn it, Kate.”
“You must have known,” she whispered, “that I was going to come back.”
“Yeah, I must have known that,” he said dryly. “Just like you must have known that I—”
He swallowed his own words. His gaze flickered away. A muscle in his cheek flexed.
“What, Paul?” She tried to draw his attention back to her. “What should I have known?”
“I tell you all the time.”
“Tell me what?”
Paul planted his hands low on his hips. His brow knit in confusion. “I do tell you all the time. At least, I mean to.”
Then he met her gaze. Searching, searching. Kate’s throat closed up. Her heart began to race.
“I love you, Kate.” His voice hitched. “It’s that simple. All I ever wanted in life was you.”
Kate met his blue, blue eyes and tried to absorb what he’d just said, but then there was no more reason to think. His arms wound around her. She smelled the shampoo he’d used that morning. She felt the throbbing of his pulse in his throat. His hair tangled in her eyelashes, suddenly damp with tears.
A little while later, when she could speak again, she whispered, “I missed you, Paul.”
He flattened his hands against her back. “I’m still angry at you.”
“I know.”
“We need to talk about this.”
“I know.”
“My mother is still here,” he said. “She could watch the kids one more night.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll go out. Just you and me.” His voice grew gruff. “I’ll even make the reservations.”
She laughed, a husky and uncertain sound, and then she burrowed closer to him. “That sounds… perfect.”
Gently, he rocked her back and forth, right there on the front lawn.
Jewish Hospice Institute
Room 300-C
New York City, New York
Dear Jo—
When you get this, I’ll be gone. I hope you’ll forgive me for not sharing this last adventure with you, because it hasn’t been joyous like the others. Imagine—cancer, after the life I’ve led. What a kick in the head, huh?
So I’ve got these letters spread across my hospice bed, and I’m so glad that I wrote them. They remind me of what good friends we’ve been, you and me and Kate and Sarah, how different we all are and yet how perfectly matched.
I keep remembering that trip we took to the Finger Lakes a year or so after graduation. Sarah was about to leave for the Peace Corps, and so we arranged to take that last trip together to an upstate music festival. Kate had mapped out the whole thing, brought water bottles and aspirin and a camp stove, a new tent and spades. You’d made a reservation at a nearby hotel, you told us, because now that you had a job you weren’t camping ever again. I’d been eyeing a nearby mining site where I could spelunk into some limestone caves. And Sarah planned to spend every moment worshipping at the feet of that Christian band from Vermont. As we talked about our plans on the way up, I remember thinking, This is the end. We’re spinning off in our own directions.
You remember that weekend, yes? How much it rained, and how someone screwed up your reservation, and how they closed the caves for flooding, and Sarah’s favorite band canceled. I remember sitting in the car, all of us quiet, just about ready to give it up and go home, watching all the other cars heading out. I don’t remember whose idea it was. I think we all thought it up at the same time, as we looked out the window at that muddy hill. I remember Sarah saying something about “monsoon slides” and you saying you sure could use a drink and me saying, “I wish we had cafeteria trays,” and Kate saying, “Garbage bags will do.” Then Kate, Sarah, and I were struggling through the rain to the top of that hill, clutching green Heftys, hurling ourselves down into the widening puddles, laughing, wiping the dirt out of our eyes, watching other cars stop, other people stream out. Only when we struggled back to the tent hours later did we realize you’d spent that time at a nearby grocery, stocking us up on beef jerky and bourbon. Then, impossibly, Sarah had found someone she knew, a musician, who settled by the camp stove and played his acoustic guitar like a dream, and we slung our arms around each other and sang songs, our crowd growing as mud caked on our skin and the rain subsided and the moon came out. That night I knew it wasn’t the end for us—that the thing that bound us together, the thing we all understood deep down, was that life—however we chose to live it—was something you embraced with open eyes and a full heart—and that if we made an effort, we could be friends like this forever.
Jo, of the four of us, you were always the strongest—stronger than you’d even let on, with all your smirking and no-commitment hookups. I knew that the first day I laid eyes on you at the meeting for the rock-climbing club. All those Southern wisecracks and flippant irreverence came from a heart that had known terrible trouble, and by sheer force of will risen above it. So I wrote all the rest of the letters thinking of other people’s lives and other people’s needs—but for this letter to you, I’ve been selfish. What I’m asking you to do is going to be the hardest job of all, and it isn’t so much for you as it is for me.
There’s never enough time, you know? I tried so hard. After Gracie was born, I cut back on the skydiving and the BASE jumping, I joined the adventure travel company and spent way too much time in an office, booking flights and making arrangements for strangers, but I thought I’d managed a balance, somehow, between the life I’d been living and the precious young life I was responsible for. But it was never enough, really, and it seemed every time I returned from a trip I was coming home to a little stranger, a daughter I had to get to know all over again.
What I’m asking you to do, Jo, is to succeed where I’ve failed. I know you are going to think this is a mistake, but it’s not. This isn’t the disease talking, either, because, though my hand is trembling and I can barely grip this pen, what I’m writing comes from that sure, solid part of me that cancer hasn’t yet touched.
Jo, I want you to be mother to my child. I’m making you her legal guardian. Take Grace. Take care of her, better than I could.
Love her, as I always will.
Love,
Rachel
chapter sixteen
A children’s tea at the Carlyle hotel on the Upper East Side was not the kind
of activity Bobbie Jo Marcum would normally have in mind for a Sunday afternoon. But today’s Bobbie Jo was not the same woman as the Bobbie Jo of a month ago, who’d spent most Sundays listening to Rascal Flatts while leafing her newsprint-stained fingers ever deeper into The New York Times. The Bobbie Jo of today sat across from a little girl dressed in a red plaid jumper over a neat white shirt with a Peter Pan collar. Atop her head, Grace wore a wide-brimmed yellow hat with a red ribbon, which she stubbornly refused to take off.
The room was filled with such hats. The children’s tea was a theme-inspired meal based on the Madeline series of books by Ludwig Bemelmans. The familiar tale about that smallest of French schoolgirls, who lived in a little brick house in Paris, and whose parents were always “away,” had thrilled Grace as much as it had Jo, who, as a foster child sleeping in a series of trundle beds, had once incurred nearly three dollars in fines for keeping Madeline’s Rescue under her pillow rather than returning it to the library.
Jo gestured to the man who’d just gathered a new bunch of girls on a plush carpet to read. “Do you want to join the group, honey? Looks like he’s going to do Madeline in London.”
“Nah,” she said, swinging her legs as she reached for a miniature burger. “He didn’t do Madeline and the Bad Hat nearly as good as Cousin Jessie. And that’s my favorite—because of Pepito.”
“Pepito?!” Jo pulled a mock grimace. “When you’re a teenager, Gracie, remind me to keep you away from psychopaths.”
“What’s a s-aye-co-path?”
“It’s someone really scary. Like a teenage boy.”
“Pepito isn’t scary!”
“Gracie, honey, do I have to remind you that he sets a cat loose among a pack of dogs?”
“That was before.”
“And he builds a guillotine for chickens?”
“He says that he’s sorry.” She stopped swinging her legs long enough to lean into the table, waving her half-eaten teeny burger at Jo. “And Madeline forgives him and tells him he’s not a bad hat anymore.”
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