Versions of Her

by Andrea Lochen

  “Why are you first telling me this now?” Ben asked, rolling over onto his side to face her. “Because your back was against a wall?”

  “I didn’t tell you right away because it’s so far-fetched,” she said. “I didn’t think there was any way you would believe me. I barely believed it, and I experienced it firsthand. So I tried to share what I could with you by pretending I had found my mom’s diary.”

  He closed his eyes thoughtfully, or maybe he was just drifting off to sleep. Melanie was so bone weary that if the bucket of adrenaline from the past several hours hadn’t still been coursing through her veins, she would have been out like a light in a minute.

  “Maybe you should review our marriage vows,” he said softly, his eyelids fluttering. “For better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, in far-fetched time-traveling scenarios or really any of life’s struggles, until death do us part.”

  She couldn’t help laughing. “I don’t remember that last part about far-fetched time-traveling scenarios.”

  He opened his brown eyes. They had a roguish twinkle in them she hadn’t seen in a long time. “It was in there. I remember. It’s probably even in the Bible. Go look it up if you don’t believe me.”

  “I’ll believe you if you’ll believe me,” she whispered.

  He scooted off to the side so he could pull the quilt up over them. “Do you think your mom will read that note and really take your advice?” he asked. “Will we wake up tomorrow morning and find out she’s stopping over for a visit and nothing was ever amiss? And if so, will we remember what life was like when she died? Or will our memories just totally be revised to reflect the new reality?”

  “I have no idea,” Melanie replied. “But if it happens, which I think is really unlikely, I don’t think it will happen tomorrow already. It might take a few days because of the way time moves so differently inside of the portal.”

  Ben yawned again. “I can’t believe you’re not selling the house, Kelsey’s turning it into a B and B, and your mom might be miraculously alive again in a few days because of a letter you sent her through a time portal.”

  “Me either.” She inched closer to him as she curled the quilt around her legs, daring herself to take a risk and say what she wanted to say next. “And to add on to that list of incredible things, I can’t believe you still love me.” She said it like a definitive statement, desperately trying to conceal the terrified question embedded within it.

  “Who said anything about still loving you?” He adjusted the pillow under his head and inched closer to her too. “I’m still very much hurt and pissed off at you, you know.”

  “Yes, I can tell. But you’re still here, aren’t you?”

  “I am, Mel, but I honestly don’t know how much more of this I can take.” He had dropped the sleepy, lighthearted tone and sounded wide-awake and deadly serious. “When you said that you thought I was going to leave you for another woman just so I could have a biological child, that was probably one of the most hurtful things you could have ever said to me. Do you honestly think that? Have I ever given you any indication that I would leave you because of this, or anything else, for that matter? Do you honestly have that low of an opinion of me? Because if you do, I don’t see how there’s a way out of this seemingly bottomless hole we’ve found ourselves in.”

  “No, I don’t really think that.” She moved her face until it was only inches from his and he could see how earnest she was. “I just have so much self-loathing right now that I can’t help projecting some of it onto you. It’s hard for me to imagine that you wouldn’t want to leave me.”

  “Well, I don’t.” He pressed the tip of his nose against hers. “But this self-loathing has got to stop. You didn’t do anything to cause the difficulty of getting pregnant. You didn’t cause the miscarriage. It is not something you did wrong or something you chose. It is something that just happened, Mel, and not just to you but to both of us. Every single day, my heart breaks but not just for our baby. It breaks because I feel like I’ve lost you, too, and I don’t know how to get you back.”

  One fat tear escaped her eye and dampened her pillow. “I’m trying to come back to you,” she whispered. “I promise.”

  WHEN MELANIE AWOKE, she was alone in the queen-size bed, and her alarm clock read four thirty. I slept for nearly twelve hours? Why didn’t anyone wake me? She needed to talk to Charlene as soon as possible. In fact, she had a missed text message from her, sent around noon. Have you guys made a decision about the offer? Let me know if you have any questions. I’ll need you to sign some papers, and I’m happy to come out there to do it. We need to give them an answer by 7:00 p.m. at the very latest, but sooner is always better.

  “Ben?” she called as she padded barefoot down the stairs. In her still-groggy state, she half expected her mom to glide out into the living room. All the windows were open, and the curtains were dancing in the cross breeze. “Ben?”

  “Out here!” She found him in the gravel driveway, unloading a bag of mulch from the back of his truck.

  “Why did you let me sleep so long?” she asked. “I need to call Charlene before our twenty-four hours are up.”

  “Clearly your body needed the rest.” He wiped sweat off his forehead, causing his already messy hair to stand straight up in the front. “Besides, Kelsey told me she was going to take care of it.”

  “Kelsey?” Melanie leaned against the tailgate. “Take care of the call to our realtor?” She widened her eyes at him. What if she broke things off with Charlene too indelicately, making it seem like we’d been planning the bed-and-breakfast for ages and only using her?

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “She said she didn’t want you to have to worry about it, and since she’s the one responsible, she thought she could best explain it.”

  They stopped talking as a silver SUV drove slowly up the Fletchers’ driveway. Maybe Jess and Nicholas were back with the kids, or maybe it was Marie and Lavinia. Melanie tried to hide behind the truck because she was still wearing her pajamas at four thirty in the afternoon, but Ben waved cheerfully at the driver. Melanie couldn’t make out who was inside or if they even waved back because of the glare on the windows.

  “Why don’t you give Kelsey a quick call and see how things went?” he suggested. “Then come back out here because I want to show you something.”

  She’d discovered another pocket of cell phone reception in her parents’ bathroom, and she headed there. As the phone rang, she took off her pajama top and pulled a clean shirt over her head.

  “Hey,” Kelsey answered. “Don’t worry about calling Charlene, okay? I just got back from her office.”

  She went to see Charlene in person? Melanie hadn’t known that her sister even knew where the realtor’s office was located. “Ben told me,” she said. “So how did it go?” Though she knew Kelsey’s intentions were good, it was driving her nuts that something of this magnitude had been taken out of her control.

  “Really well, I think.” Kelsey paused. “I’m sorry I kind of did this without you. But it made me feel so bad when you brought up all of Charlene’s hard work last night, and I wanted to try to make things right. And I didn’t want this to fall only on your shoulders since it was really the mess I had made.”

  Melanie caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror. Despite the twelve hours of sleep, she still looked careworn and tired. But she also looked relieved. Kelsey had shown initiative and handled a sticky situation so Melanie wouldn’t have to, and the house would stay in the family after all, under Kelsey’s direction, as a new, reimagined incarnation—and a new incarnation for her sister too. Melanie was the only one still struggling to adapt.

  “I explained to her how the idea of holding on to the house by turning it into a bed-and-breakfast had only just recently come to me,” Kelsey continued. “And that I’d hesitated to share it with you and take the house off the market right away because I wasn’t sure at first about the zoning ordinances and other issues. Then I told
her how incredibly grateful we are for all the time and energy she put into our house, that we would be highly recommending her to all of our neighbors and friends, and we wanted to make it up to her in some way. I asked if she’d be interested in staying at the Montclare Inn, all expenses paid, for a romantic weekend with her husband as soon as we open. She seemed a lot more forgiving after that.”

  “Wow, Kels.” Melanie grinned at her reflection. “That was really clever of you. Very resourceful.”

  Kelsey burst into laughter. “Thanks, sis.” She suddenly clapped her hands. “Sprocket! Drop it. No, no! No more washcloth-eating for you.” Her volume lowered as she returned to the phone. “Can you believe that little stinker? Sorry about that. So you haven’t gone back inside the closet yet to see if Mom replied, have you?”

  “No.” She hadn’t planned on it either. She figured she and Kelsey had done enough tampering with fate to last a lifetime. What was done was done, and all they could do was hope and pray for the best. But try as she might, she couldn’t fathom an ending where it worked out with their mom happily restored to them, an ending where they all simply returned to living the lives that had been upended four years ago. A miracle of that magnitude could exact a terrible, terrible price.

  “I wonder how long it will take,” Kelsey mused, sounding almost giddy. “And how will we know?”

  BEN HAD MOVED INTO the backyard. He was digging a basketball-sized hole near the porch footings with a hand trowel, probably because a shovel wasn’t among the random assortment of tools Melanie had accumulated at the lake house. He sat back on his heels and smiled at her. “Everything squared away with your sister and the realtor?”

  “I think so,” she said and relayed what Kelsey had told her. “What are you planting?”

  “That’s what I wanted to show you,” he said, reaching for two lime-green buckets he’d tucked out of view. “I hope you like them.”

  They were young rose bushes—one the same pale pink as a ballet slipper and the other the cheery color of a ripe peach. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “But why did you buy me rose bushes to plant here?”

  “I thought they could be a kind of memorial.” Ben touched the petals of a pink rose. “This pink one in memory of your mom.” So just like her, he wasn’t counting on her mom’s escape from a pulmonary embolism as a foregone conclusion either. He cupped his hand around one of the peach blooms but didn’t say anything for a few beats. When he spoke again, his voice sounded hoarse. “And this peach one for our baby.”

  Melanie knelt down on the ground beside him. Her eyes stung, and her chest constricted. She placed her hand over his and squeezed.

  “I feel like we never got to properly mourn him or her,” Ben said. “No funeral or ceremony. So I thought it might help us to have somewhere physical to visit. And I couldn’t think of a more beautiful place to remember our baby than right here with this view, especially now that this house will be staying in your family.”

  She nudged her head into the space between his neck and shoulder, and he turned to kiss her cheek. He smelled like soil and sweat and, underneath it, the quintessential smell of the man she had loved for the past eight years and would continue to love for as many more years as she had left on the earth. It would take that long to love him as well and as deeply as he deserved.

  “I love the roses,” she said, “and I love you even more.”

  “I love you, too, Mel.” He kissed her other cheek. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and we can start trying again once we get back home if you’d like. The Letrozole, the ovulation calendar, the whole nine yards. If you’re ready, that is.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and she surprised herself by the words that were on the tip of her tongue. “But I think you were right to want to take a break, to just be us for a little while without all the pressure.”

  It didn’t feel like the white flag of surrender she had imagined. Instead it felt like making a conscious choice to focus on her marriage. A child would come—she and Ben simply had too much love to give not to become parents one day. How that child would arrive was the only question—whether it was fertility treatments or IVF or adoption. She would have to learn to give up her control and be more patient and open-minded about the possibilities, which would, admittedly, be a huge struggle for her. But it would happen if they could continue to be a team and love one another. Leaning against her devoted, optimistic husband, she felt sure of that.

  “Just to be clear, I don’t want to give up sex, though,” she added, and he grinned.

  They took turns digging the second hole, then Ben wiggled the plants out of their containers, and Melanie loosened the soil around the roots the way her mom had shown her a long time ago. He filled the holes while she held the roses upright. While he went to fetch the margarita pitcher that had become their substitute watering can, Melanie spread the bags of mulch he had bought and admired the flowers.

  They were so gorgeous that it almost hurt to look at them. There was definitely a reason why poets used roses as a comparison for a beautiful woman’s lips or a baby’s downy cheek. The exquisite color, the silky petals, the delicate unfurling—everything about a rose seemed lush and ephemeral.

  Ben’s voice rang out in the distance, but it didn’t sound like he was calling for her. “That’s really kind of you. Thanks so much,” he said. “She’s back here.” Before Melanie had time to leap up from her undignified squat in the dirt, Ben and a silver-haired woman were rounding the wraparound porch.

  “Melanie Kingstad, all grown up!” Lavinia said, walking toward her with both arms outstretched.

  Melanie tried not to stiffen as the older woman hugged her, but she felt like her emotions were raw and prickling just at the surface of her skin. She didn’t want Lavinia standing there where she and Ben had just planted the rose bushes for her mom and their baby, while the soil was still crumbly and her eyes were still red. She didn’t want to make small talk with her mom’s “other woman” while she and Ben should have been sharing a private moment.

  “Mrs. Fletcher,” she said, trying to sound warm. “It’s been so long!”

  “Oh, please call me Vinnie.” Lavinia swatted Melanie’s etiquette away.

  “Vinnie spotted our ridiculous pitcher and brought this over for us to borrow,” Ben said, holding up a large galvanized metal watering can. His face looked apologetic. Please forgive me for bringing her back here, it said. I couldn’t be rude, and I didn’t know what else to do. People were always going out of their way to be kind and helpful to Ben. Grocery store checkers, librarians, waiters—they all took a shine to him. Melanie thought it was his mussed-up hair and quick smile, like a grown-up Dennis the Menace. She suspected that she could have been outside watering the flowers with an eyedropper and Lavinia and the rest of her family wouldn’t have lifted a finger to offer Melanie a watering can.

  But maybe not. Maybe Lavinia was actually over there to talk to Melanie. Why else would Vinnie ask Ben about me? And how else was she at the ready with the watering can at just the right moment? Unless she was watching us.

  “We have a spare hose we could loan you, too, if that would be easier,” Vinnie said. She was wearing gray yoga pants and a pink tunic. Her long hair was tied back in a low ponytail, and though initially Melanie had been shocked by the fact that the once-proud redhead had let her hair go gray, she realized why Vinnie had made the decision. Somehow the silver hair made her still-delicate, youthful-looking features even lovelier because Melanie was expecting an older, more weathered face. She looked like the poster child for the health benefits of yoga.

  “That’s really nice of you, thanks, but the watering can should be just fine,” Melanie said. She knew further conversation was expected of her, but she was coming up empty. Should I mention I met Marie, or would that seem too prying? “So how are your kids?” she asked, settling on what was usually a safe topic. “What are they up to these days?”

  “They’re all terrible disappointments,” Vinnie s
aid, but her almond eyes were twinkling as if she were telling a really good joke. “Living miles and miles away and not giving me any grandkids yet. Beau is an anesthesiologist, and Stephen is our writer in the family. He just had a short story published in The Paris Review. And Jillian—she insists we call her by her full name now—just joined Teach for America.”

  Ben’s college roommate had also done Teach for America, so—God bless him—he jumped into the conversation. Melanie was left to let their words wash over her and silently stew. She hated the whole “not giving me any grandkids yet” shtick. It drove her nuts, and she was grateful that her mother had never participated in it. Besides, doesn’t Vinnie consider Noah and Gracie her grandkids? But maybe her relationship with Marie wasn’t as serious and established as Melanie had assumed. Or maybe Vinnie simply didn’t want to get into an awkward conversation about her divorce, sexual orientation, and relationship status.

  “I heard you and your sister are thinking of converting this old place into a bed-and-breakfast,” Vinnie said, toying with the tassel at the end of her necklace.

  Aha! So that was why she had come over for a “neighborly chat.” She was pissed off that a stream of tourists and out-of-towners was going to be lodging right next door. But how did she even hear about it? The ink on the listing cancelation was practically still wet. Ben raised his eyebrows at Melanie, clearly on the same wavelength.

  “I’m on the Lake Indigo Neighbors Association,” Vinnie quickly offered, reading both of their minds. “I have been for years. Someone from Fairfield Township contacted us about it last week.”

  “Yeah, we decided not to sell after all,” Melanie said as levelly as she could, but inside, she was spoiling for a fight. “Kelsey thought a B and B would be a great way to keep it in the family and honor the history of the house.”