by Ari Rhoge
Richard grinned, and hopped off the counter and onto his feet in one fluid jump. “You know what they say. Denial is a river in Egy—”
“Blow it up your ass!” Lizzy snapped, crankily. Richard raised his eyebrows and snickered, and Lizzy held out for a few seconds before she began to laugh with him. “Shut up,” she murmured, smiling despite herself. “You're pissing me off.”
“I know — I'm really good at that,” Richard assured her, brightly, straightening the lapels on his blazer. He finger-combed his hair in the mirror, and winked at her. “I best be going, then. —— But it was an absolute pleasure to meet you, Lizzy,” he said, smiling. “And I hope I see you again soon.”
Elizabeth stood up on her tiptoes to hug him. “Me too.”
• • •
It happened on the flight back, too. She had managed not to think about Will Darcy for a handful of hours, mostly because she had been too preoccupied with checking out, calling a taxi, checking in her suitcase, finding the right terminal, getting some coffee, getting some more coffee, digging her boarding pass out from the bottom of her purse, and finally stepping onto the plane. But the moment she rested her head against the window and closed her eyes, it hit her again.
His face, slack-jawed and hurt. His bright blue eyes.
“Motherfucker.”
The man sitting beside her bristled, but Lizzy wasn't looking at him.
She was staring at the envelope tucked into the seat pocket right in front of her. Lizzy swallowed hard. Hesitating at first, she snatched it quickly, then tore its flap open. “Let's get this over with,” she mumbled, to herself. She unfolded the letter — two sheets of paper folded in three places — and took in the rows and rows of small, precise handwriting scribed on the hotel stationary. Lizzy braced herself, and began reading:
Dear Elizabeth,
I guess if you're reading this I have Richard to thank for persuading you to do so. But you don't have to worry. I'm not going to renew my sentiments and repeat myself. This isn't some desperate love letter. I just think it's fair to you (and, quite frankly, to myself) to address the things that you accused me of, to protect my motives, but also to clear things up. There are some things that you just don't understand.
Lizzy rolled her eyes, but continued.
Charlie and Jane — this warrants explanation. These are two people we see as our best friends, and we're both fiercely protective of them, which is only natural. You were right; I didn't suggest that Charlie break up with your sister. But I did encourage the idea because I believed that she was passive and that he was the more committed of the two. I agreed with Caroline. I thought I saw Charlie getting his heart broken in the future, because he's followed this pattern at least half a dozen times before. I didn't make the decision for him, but he does value my opinion a lot; I know I influenced him. And I know it seems to you that I acted like some vindictive asshole out to get your sister or prevent her from being happy. But I was just trying to protect my friend, and I didn't anticipate the pain that would come at both ends.
Or your pain, for that matter.
She read over that line again, and chewed on her lower lip thoughtfully.
The other issue is Greg Wickham. Maybe I should have seen this coming. I don't know how close you are, or what he's told you; but he's been lying, and this doesn't surprise me. You just have to have faith in what I'm saying; I've known him since we were kids. If you don't, then I'm sorry. But I don't care. You need to know the truth as it is.
We grew up together as boys in Bridgeport. His mother nannied me and my sister throughout our childhood, so she usually brought Greg around the house to play with us. We were really close. Georgie was too small to join in the games for a couple of years, but we really did go everywhere together. My mom wasn't in the picture, and Dad traveled a lot — the three of us were very close, almost inseparable.
Everything changed when Greg and I graduated high school and moved on to college. I went to school in New York; and he moved to Philadelphia. I'm not going to pretend that I tripped over myself to keep in touch, but neither did he. The friendship just naturally weakened over time. Things work like that sometimes. I'm not the best at keeping touch, but in this case I often think about what would happen if I did, or whether things could have turned out differently.
He dropped out of Drexel by the middle of sophomore year. Georgie told me over the phone, but didn't say more about it. Four years went, and I graduated, took an internship in Manhattan at a firm of a family friend. I wanted some experience before law school. I was really stressed out and busy, and every time I called home I got the same report from my sister: “Everything is fine.” But my dad had a heart condition, and hadn't worked for the last year and a half. And I know Georgie better than she knows herself; the quieter she gets, the more she has to hide. I took a week off in September and flew back home.
My dad had undergone heart surgery while I was away in New York during the summer, and nobody had let me know. It hadn't gone well. He passed away a couple months later. By then, I learned that Greg was back in town, and had been living in our house for the last month that I wasn't there. He didn't have a job, and Georgie begged me to let him stay there. I wasn't happy. I wasn't happy with anything. We hadn't spoken for several years, and I felt that he had taken advantage of my father's hospitality while he was ill. And then Georgie told me that they had gotten really close and that they were in love.
There was a huge fight, and Wickham and I said some horrible things to each other. I accused him of butting in just to take advantage of my family's generosity after all these years. I called him out for just using us. And he accused me of being jealous because he had been there for Dad when I wasn't. To make things short, I told him I would pay him as much as he wanted if he left town and didn't return. He accepted right away. Georgie was devastated.
Elizabeth folded the letter quickly, and set it down. She looked out the window, at miles and miles of dusky blue sky, and felt her stomach lurch unpleasantly. She opened the letter again and read more.
Then last year I was in New York, and Georgie had left home to attend JMU. I saw her during winter break a lot, but I couldn't make it home for the spring. Greg Wickham did — he returned to Bridgeport for the week she was home. I didn't know, but they had been emailing each other behind my back for a year and a half before that. Georgie told me that they were just friends now, and that we had to forgive each other. But, of course, Wickham wasn't interested in that. I was furious. I told him to leave. He told me that he didn't have the money I had paid him, that he had lost it all. He didn't say how. He demanded I pay him more, because he had 'done so much for my family', you see. I refused, and drove him out, and I hadn't seen him again until I ran into you both at the bookstore that night. I didn't even know he was living outside Philadelphia, but he had gone to school close by. I just hadn't expected it. I was shocked and angry and disappointed.
The next two words were scratched out in black ink. Lizzy stared at the line before, shell-shocked. She couldn't shake the feeling that “disappointed you were with him” was the unwritten fragment.
So, now you know. That's all I really wanted. I'm not going to make a bigger idiot out of myself and talk about last night. You made yourself pretty clear, and you obviously want to forget about it. I made a mistake, and I was presumptuous, and for that, I'm sorry for the way things turned out. But what happened happened, and I guess that's just the way it is. Just know that I wish you the best.
Take care,
Will
Lizzy read two magazines after that. She got three quarters through an issue of Entertainment Weekly, then looked at three pages of Vogue without really reading a single word or taking in a single picture. His words reran themselves through her mind, and she gave up and had to read his letter three more times, from start to finish. By the third time, her mouth was dry and she felt mildly sick. She was flushed. She rested her palms flatly against her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut, feel
ing too much at once. “Shit… shit.”
• • •
Jane was ecstatic to see her, and demanded pictures from the wedding. She had none, and no proper explanation to give for their absence. Instead, she dawdled in the kitchen, her suitcase still in hand, and contemplated the truth:
“I didn't take any photos. I was too depressed in the vineyard when Charlotte didn't make a run for it. I couldn't take any at the reception either, because I got drunk with Richard Fitzwilliam and met his pretentious aunt. Plus, the ballroom was ugly. The band was only decent. Then I got even more drunk. Will Darcy took me home… he was there, did I mention? Yeah. We almost had sex. He's a really good kisser. And then we had a fight about you and Charlie and Greg Dickham… sorry, Wickham. —— But how are you doing? Your hair looks gorgeous.”
Jane regarded her in silence, and her mouth settled into a frown. “Sweetie, you look terrible. Bad flight?”
“Yeah,” Lizzy piped up, running a hand through her hair with a heavy sigh. “Bad, bad flight. I'll tell you about the wedding later. I just want to shower and go to bed, okay? You can still stick around though. Order pizza.”
“Okay,” Jane murmured, softly. Her strawberry-blond hair was down, framing her face in delicate waves. She wore a pale pink sweater, and looked almost too effortlessly pretty then — and it broke Lizzy's heart all over again.
“Tell me about Delaware in a couple of hours,” she said, half-smiling. “Wake me up when the pizza gets here.”
“You got it,” her sister said, smiling, pulling her in for a hug. “Welcome back, honey.”
Lizzy closed her eyes, and pressed her nose against Jane's shoulder.
16
—
No Alarms and No Surprises
Lydia Bennet drove like a maniac.
If they were on a more congested street, Elizabeth would have been gripping her seat belt until the whites of her knuckles shone. But, as it were, they were zipping past on a highway just lightly speckled with cars, in her '97 tan Corolla that would only give them trouble if it started to rain. Sugar Ray was playing on the radio, and Elizabeth rested her head back against the seat, relishing the feeling of the wind whipping through her hair. It was April — she had waited for this weather long enough.
“I just wanna fly, chicka yeah —— put your arms around me, baby.”
The last 24 hours were a blur.
Well, actually, the past 30 days had been a blur. Mostly of the same thing, in one long, consistently boring stream of late nights spent staring at her computer screen, of correcting papers and making lesson plans, of pretending to enthusiastically help Jane redecorate her apartment. Maggie King's birthday party was jammed in there somewhere — maybe the 26th of March, something like that. She didn't remember it very well.
March consisted of crowding her plate with so many useless, filler activities that Lizzy no longer had time to think and to regret and to feel awful about herself, rather to simply surge forward. Keeping busy was a comfort.
Jane had started to worry, because she knew her too well.
“Why don't I ever see you anymore? We live 10 minutes away from each other,” she reminded her, disapprovingly. They were grocery shopping at the time, and Lizzy lifted her gaze from the label of Ragu pasta sauce she was holding. “My God — our quality time is shopping for produce? … Really?”
“I think it's kind of sweet — like we're roomies again, or something,” Elizabeth said, smiling, tossing a box of noodles into the cart. “Bennet scores 10 points.”
“You're so busy lately.”
“And that's bad?”
“You're trying to distract yourself from something,” Jane said, plainly. “And you're not telling me what it is. You do this when something bad happens — you close off. This happened after Steven.”
“Hey, that's ridiculous. I'm just busy,” Lizzy said, breezing past her. “I'm allowed to be busy, aren't I?” She rolled the cart on, and cocked her head toward the freezer section. “You want ice cream?”
Jane pursed her lips, and followed behind her sister silently. It was as close to prying as she was going to get, and Lizzy had to maneuver around that familiar knot of guilt in her stomach.
• • •
It wasn't just Jane that she avoided.
Greg tried to get in touch with her a week later. He buzzed at her apartment complex at 11 o'clock at night, when she was in bed, with a bowl of chicken noodle, watching a recorded episode of Conan. Irritated, Lizzy had pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and searched through the mess of her closet for a hoodie to shrug over her pajamas. She met him outside, in the lobby, and immediately hated that stupid, endearing grin on his face.
“You've forgotten all about me, haven't you?” Greg's mouth curled into a slow smile. “Cute pajamas, by the way.”
“Greg, it's really late — stop stalking me.”
The smile disappeared from his face instantly. “I'm not stalking you,” he said, laughing shortly, trying to bring forgotten levity back to their conversation. “A couple of unreturned phone calls and a visit? I thought it was called persistence. —— I like you.”
She ignored his last comment, and lifted her chin defiantly. “Not an hour before midnight, Greg — then it's just annoying,” Lizzy muttered, shoving her hands into her hoodie pocket. “What's up?”
Greg's brown eyes darted quickly to hers, then down at his shoes. Her attitude was stripping him of his confidence, and his voice wavered. “Are you okay?”
“I'm fine.”
“Wanna go grab a bite to eat or something?”
“No, thanks. I'm actually halfway through a bowl of chicken noodle upstairs — canned, so none for you.” Lizzy smiled quickly, but it didn't touch her eyes. “Rain check?”
“Um, sure. Yeah. Okay.”
“Bye, Greg.”
Lizzy's bright green eyes had finally met his for the first time in the conversation, and nothing was necessarily masked from him anymore. There it was, rolled out for him to see — cold, unbridled disapproval. The tension in her jaw, the icy distrust in her eyes, and the downward curl of her bottom lip. Her fists were clenched tightly at her sides. Something had obviously changed.
Greg turned to walk back to his car, but hesitated on the balls of his feet. “Well.” His voice was low and suspicious. “Call me if you feel like it.”
I won't be, she had thought crisply, bolting up the stairs as soon as his car pulled out of the lot.
Lydia's voice suddenly brought her back to present time. She was singing along to the radio, and cranking up the volume — she paused, to flash her older sister an award-winning smile. “Girl, don't you bitch me out about my music selection again. It is what it is —— and this is my car.”
“Your car needs gas,” Elizabeth said, dryly, smirking at the fuel gage — the needle teetered on 'E'.
In her disbelief, Lydia propped her large, square sunglasses up over her hair, and squinted at her dashboard. “Fuck.”
Elizabeth started to giggle.
If you would have told her 24 hours ago that she would be whipping down the interstate with her bratty, narcissistic and least favorite sister for an impromptu road trip, she would have thrown her head back, laughed in your face, and insulted your intelligence. But, as it were, Lydia Bennet's presence on her stoop during yesterday's lazy afternoon was a blessing in disguise.
Lizzy had had no patience for it at the time, of course.
She had just returned from work, with a dried coffee stain on her blouse from that morning, and her hair was starting to frizz in the humidity. And she hadn't even recognized Lydia at first, whom she had not seen since last July when she dragged her tattooed, monosyllabic boyfriend to the annual family picnic — their mother had a screaming fit about him, but assumed that nobody else could hear her just because they were in the veranda — but they could. Obviously.
“Not one of Ma's brightest moments.”
But it was April 2011 now, and the girl had gone and shorn off
her hair into this piecey, platinum-blond look. Her dark roots were showing, and she wore a ton of black eyeliner and this indecisive, cute little nose stud that Elizabeth suggested she take out before visiting their parents. Lydia pulled it off though — she had attitude. And chunky hipster sweaters and denim cut-offs and black combat boots. Lizzy hadn't expected any less. Lydia went to art school in Philadelphia.
Well, she had done.
The whole reason she was in Longbourn County, grinning innocently up at her sister to begin with, was because she had dropped out, and was too chickenshit to spill the beans (those agonizingly overpriced college tuition beans) to the folks.
“So, I propose a plan,” Lydia had told her, clinking a glass of lemonade against hers in her apartment kitchen. “My friend Lucy's boyfriend Nathan has a gig in the city tomorrow night. Let's drive down, have a fabulous night, get a little shitty, meet some wonderful people, drive back, and then break the news to Mom and Dad.”
“The news that you've just wasted $45,000 worth of tuition money and no longer have a concrete path in life?” Lizzy had nodded her head lightly, pouring coffee beans into the grinder. “Hmm. Yeah, honey — that'll earn you a proper shitstorm.”
“Exactly!” declared Lydia desperately. “So, let's do it. As my older sister, you're pretty much obligated to show me a good time before I'm slaughtered — it's your sororal responsibility.”
“Ask Jane.”
“Too straight-laced.”
Lizzy gave her a withering look over the coffee machine. She couldn't really argue, though.
She should have said no — it was forming since the beginning of the conversation, just at the tip of the tongue, ready to be used at a particularly heavy pause. It didn't really matter that Lydia's eyes were saucer-wide, or that her lower lip was jutting out, puppy-dog style. Elizabeth's reasoning was selfish, and she didn't care. This was Lydia, and Lydia wouldn't pry into her business, nor her emotions. Lydia would distract her, and be fun — and the last month had been anything but that. And Lydia would have gone down to New York City by herself anyway — so why not act as her guardian, and prevent her from being kidnapped in the process?
