“How long did you work there?”
“Long enough to give me an appreciation for cooking.”
“I see that.”
“That’s what I loved about magazines. You become an expert in something for a few years. Budget travel, world affairs, celebrity lifestyles.”
“Jack of all trades.”
“Master of none.” Which was true. She was highly skilled as an editor and basically a dilettante at everything else. Except now she wasn’t even an editor anymore.
She folded the eggs onto the plate and started to douse them in more hot sauce. He raised his hand. “I think maybe that’s enough.”
“You have to trust me,” she said. “I don’t understand the scientific reasoning why spicy cures hangover, only that it does.”
“Perhaps we should author a paper on it.”
“Then we have to test it first.”
She put the plate in front of him. He made a face.
“One bite. You just said it smelled good.”
He picked up the fork, took a small bite, chewed, swallowed.
“See,” she said. “You’re not dead.”
“Give it a few minutes,” he said.
“Your sense of humor is returning. Try a second bite. Keep it small.”
“You’re an excellent doctor.” He smiled weakly. “Or maybe I should say, nurse.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Demoted after one bite?”
“Promoted,” he countered. “Nurses are the true healers.” Then as if to convince her, he added. “Felicity was a nurse.”
“Oh,” she said. “Was that how you met?”
“No, she worked in pediatric oncology.”
“Oncology.” Maribeth shook her head. “How ironic.”
Stephen took a bigger forkful of eggs. “I think this might be working,” he said. “And ironic, how?”
Maribeth wondered if the question was some sort of rejoinder, scolding her for intruding on their private affairs. But he was the one who brought her up. Maribeth stammered something about the irony of an oncology nurse dying of cancer.
Stephen’s fork clanked against his plate. “Felicity didn’t die of cancer.”
“She didn’t?”
“What gave you that idea?”
Maribeth’s face, neck, arms went hot. “I don’t know. She was just so young and pretty.” She heard how ridiculous that sounded. “And you had those pink ribbons in your office.”
He almost smiled. “Mallory works for the Breast Cancer Survivors’ Network. She’s an event planner. That’s me showing school spirit. I’m sorry. I assumed you knew. Because everyone around here knows. And because of what you said that day in the ice cream parlor.”
What had she said? Something about a deal, him not digging into her secrets, and her not digging into his.
“I didn’t know,” Maribeth stammered. “I mean, I don’t.”
“It’s no mystery. It was in the newspaper, after all. I’d have expected you to do a more thorough job of vetting me.”
She shook her head. She hadn’t googled him once. She’d decided that if he had done something terrible, she didn’t want to know about it.
“She died in a car accident. Which wasn’t noteworthy. Many people do. Except this one happened to be my fault.”
Her heart did something strange, an undulation stopped cold by a thud, which she understood had nothing to do with her coronary disease. “Your fault?”
“Perhaps not in the legal sense. But that doesn’t change anything, does it?” He made a bitter guffaw, so un-Stephen-like, Maribeth thought. It was a sound much more at home coming out of her own mouth.
“What happened?”
“Bad luck. Bad karma. Who knows?” He waved his arms, as if accusing the universe. “We’d gone to see one of her former patients play with an orchestra in Cleveland. She was always doing things like that, attending school productions or weddings or concerts of former patients, and I was dragged along. This was a point of contention. I thought our job was to treat the patients, get them well to lead their own lives, not weave them into ours. But Felicity continued to collect her survivors. Sometimes she lectured me that I would be a better doctor if I wasn’t so clinical. So removed, she said.” He barked out another bitter laugh.
“In any case, I’d gone, reluctantly, to the orchestra, and then after we’d been—or rather, she’d been—invited to a gathering where this oboist patient of hers would be, and I had no choice but to go along. I wound up sitting at the bar while Felicity made herself the life of the party, as always. We didn’t get on the road until midnight, which meant we wouldn’t be getting home until two.
“In the car, I was angry with her about how late it was, and she was chiding me for being in such a rush when I had nothing to do the next day, and then she got upset with how fast I was driving, and things got nasty and I was distracted, so when the traffic backed up in front of us, I didn’t see it. I slammed on my brakes but couldn’t stop in time.”
“Oh, god, I’m so sorry.”
“No,” Stephen said, holding out his hand. “That wasn’t it. We were fine. It was just a fender bender.”
The dread in Maribeth’s stomach solidified. “What happened?” she whispered.
“What happened was that instead of pulling onto the shoulder or putting on my hazards, I spent the last moments of Felicity’s life berating her for making me get into a crash. I was yelling at her when the car plowed into us from behind. I didn’t even have my brake lights illuminated because I’d thrown the car into park.”
“Oh, no, Stephen. No.”
“I wound up with a concussion and dislocated shoulder. But Felicity.” He paused to clear his throat. “Her side of the car . . . it wasn’t even a car anymore.”
He continued telling Maribeth this most terrible of tales: sitting opposite Felicity, caged in by the wreckage, begging her to hold on, seeing that she couldn’t. Maribeth started to cry.
He handed her a napkin and carried on, dry eyed. She had the sense that he wasn’t talking to her anymore, but toward her, using her as a cover, so that he might withstand telling the story to himself. Much the same way she wrote to the twins.
“After, I took a month off work, and when I came back I’d already lost some patients. And then I lost some more because I became, I suppose the term was gruff, though I’d always been gruff, but I guess I just became something untenable.
“Maybe that was why the rumors started. Felicity was beloved. I was not. She was dead. I was not. There were whispers of my being drunk. I wasn’t, though I certainly have been many nights since.” He gestured toward the sink where the empties had been. “But people seemed to smell my wrongdoing. Or perhaps they didn’t want any part of the whole sorry business. Who can blame them? The practice began to suffer. It was suggested I take a leave, though we all knew it was permanent.”
He pushed away his plate of eggs. “Perhaps it was for the best. Medicine requires a certain level of delusion, a belief in one’s invincibility. But watching Felicity die, being right there and not being able to do a goddamn thing to stop it, well, it robbed me of that, too.”
And so this was it. Not a malpractice suit. Not binge drinking. Not even a scandal, at least not the kind she’d thought. It was a damaged heart, eating away at itself. This was something she understood.
Stephen was quiet now but his hands were shaking. Maribeth cupped them in hers, held them firm until the shaking stopped. Then she kissed him.
47
Before her swimming lesson on Monday, she stopped at the library in Squirrel Hill to search her e-mail archives for her parents’ social security numbers. Since she had deleted the message from Jason without replying, she was not expecting to hear anything more. But there it was, another e-mail from him, the subject line an ominous P.S.
As in, P.S. I hate you? P.S. Don’t come back? P.S. You are the worst mother in the world?
p.s. You seem to think I’m punishing you. For the record, it was Than
ksgiving and we were in the country and then Oscar got sick so I was home with him and those e-mails were sent to my work account so I only saw them on Monday night. You’ll forgive me if I took one goddamn day to absorb it all seeing as you haven’t uttered a word for a month.
For Christ’s sake, Maribeth, I’m leaving you be. I’m doing EVERYTHING you asked me to do. I don’t know what else you want me to say.
She checked the date. It had been sent the day after she’d received the first e-mail from him. Two days before she had kissed Stephen.
She had been thinking about that kiss with a strange mix of tenderness and confusion, but now those were joined by a retroactive guilt. Because would she have kissed Stephen had she received this second e-mail from Jason? Had she kissed him to spite Jason? It hadn’t felt that way. If she’d been thinking of either of the spouses in that kitchen, it was Felicity.
She read the message again. They were in the country? And what was wrong with Oscar?
Is Oscar okay? she typed immediately, and without thinking, hit send.
Jason must have been at his desk because his reply was immediate. He is fine.
Jason was never one for specifics. Not one for sweating the small stuff, though Maribeth could never get a bead on what qualified as the big stuff for him. For instance, did her running away count?
But Oscar being sick was a concern. Was it his ears? His tubes? Oscar had been a late talker—everyone had assumed it was because Liv had a tendency to answer questions for both of them—until Lauren noticed him saying “What?” a lot and asked if they’d had his hearing tested. It had turned out Oscar’s ears were so full of fluid he could barely hear, and that was why he wasn’t talking. Maribeth had been mortified, by her failing Oscar, by Lauren catching it before she did. (“Come on,” Jason had said, “she has four kids.”) Oscar got ear tubes and speech therapy and had caught up, but over the summer, the tubes had fallen out, and the ENT said they needed to make sure the fluid didn’t build up again.
She wrote back a longer e-mail: Was it Oscar’s ears? Had Jason made an appointment with the ENT? Had he spoken to the speech therapist? Now that she had an opening, she asked more general questions: about the children’s mental state, their physical state, their pediatrician appointments, their haircuts. When she finished, she had filled an entire screen with queries.
Jason’s reply came too quickly for him to have answered properly. They are doing fine, he wrote.
Can you be more specific? she wrote back.
Oscar is fine. Liv is fine. I’m taking care of things. We are all fine.
Fine? Everything wrong with Jason Brinkley could be boiled down to that one innocuous word. It was one part wish fulfillment, two parts laziness. Yeah, everything was fine. Because she was there to make sure it was.
But she wasn’t there now, so how exactly were things fine? He claimed he wasn’t punishing her but when she and Jason got into a fight, this was exactly what he did: became a turtle, all hard shell. It was the perfect protection, the perfect weapon. She lost every time.
She understood that she deserved his anger. She wasn’t trying to weasel out of it. She was not seeking forgiveness or absolution. She just wanted to know where she stood. For once, to know where she really stood. Because how could she even think of going back without knowing this? With the ground always shifting under her, how could she ever hope to regain her footing?
Fine? How could she trust such an insubstantial word? How could she trust such an insubstantial man? Who never said what he really meant. Did he mean fine as opposed to drowning, or fine as in thriving?
But then a jolt of understanding hit her like a fist to the gut. What if Jason was saying something else entirely? That they were doing fine. Without her.
48
Pittsburgh was not as cold as Maribeth had expected—she’d been anticipating piles of snow—but as winter approached, the blue skies seemed to disappear under a constant shroud of gray that chilled her to the bone. Maribeth had brought her winter coat but it was no match for the long, windy waits at bus stops, and she found herself lingering in her apartment, watching more TV, and feeling generally itchy and sad. Until one day she broke down and went to the fancy Goodwill in Shadyside and spent fifteen dollars on one of those puffy parkas that she and Elizabeth had always sworn never to wear.
Before leaving the store, she put on the new coat, stuffing her stylish but insufficient one in the plastic bag. As soon as she got outside, she understood she’d been doing it wrong. Wearing the parka was like walking in a sleeping bag. The cold nipped at her nose, her earlobes, but had no purchase with the rest of her. How in the world had she survived forty-four years without one of these things?
After her next swimming lesson—more time with the kickboard to work on rotary breathing—Maribeth felt so snug in her new coat, she decided to walk back from Squirrel Hill to Bloomfield through Shadyside. This was the chicest neighborhood she had found in Pittsburgh so far, the one with packed Asian fusion cafés, organic coffee shops, artisanal ice cream stores, and many boutiques. Aside from the stationery, she had not bought anything in Shadyside, had not really bought anything beyond necessities here. But sometimes, when she was missing home and needed a New York City hit, she liked to walk through the area.
Today as she window-shopped down Walnut, she stopped in front of a cosmetics chain. There was a sandwich board sign in front advertising makeovers.
One of the employees came to the door. She was beautiful in a Björk sort of way, jutting cheekbones, green, slanted eyes. “Minimakeovers are free,” she said. “Or you can have a full makeover with fifty dollars worth of products.”
Since her haircut and lice comb-out, Maribeth kept meaning to buy herself a tube of lipstick, maybe a new mascara, or to get the haircut professionally cleaned up. Like so many things she kept meaning to do—go to the movies, take herself out for lunch—she had not. Straying from her ascetic existence for even the most minor indulgence felt wrong.
But why was she punishing herself? If they were doing so fine without her? She followed the young woman inside to a swivel chair before a large, lit mirror.
“Are there any products you like?” the young woman asked. Her nametag read Ash.
“Not really.” Most of her products were pilfered from the beauty samples closet at work; Revlon one day, La Mer the next.
Ash pulled Maribeth’s hair back with a headband, and for a brief moment, Maribeth saw another face in the mirror.
“You have a great skin tone, so I would go minimal,” Ash said. “Maybe a tinted moisturizer, a pale lipstick, a touch of mascara.”
It felt so good to be touched, Maribeth felt herself surrendering. If Ash had recommended a full on Goth makeover, she probably would have said yes.
Ash returned with a few products and swiveled Maribeth toward her as she dabbed drops of each onto her wrist to match tone. “You really have gorgeous skin, and a lot of collagen left,” Ash said. She pulled up the skin along Maribeth’s jawline. “Do you know if you have Scandinavian in your background?”
Maribeth shook her head. There was a pleasant buzzing in her chest. “I don’t know.”
“I’m told Scandinavian skin ages really well, because the sun there isn’t so strong. Did your mother’s skin stay so young?”
“I don’t know,” Maribeth said. “I mean I do, but I don’t. I’m adopted.”
“Me too!” Ash said, a huge smile lighting up her face. “I was born in Kazakhstan.”
“Kazakhstan?” Maribeth said. “I’m not even sure where that is.”
She laughed. “It’s in Central Asia. Between China and Russia and Mongolia.”
“Sounds far.”
“I know. When I graduate next year, me and my parents are going to visit.”
“Will you try to find your birth mother?” It was the kind of personal question Maribeth never would’ve dreamed of asking a month ago.
“I doubt it. I was found in a box outside an orphanage in the middle of
the night. I just want to know where I come from, you know?”
Maribeth nodded. “Yes, I know. You’re lucky your parents are so supportive.”
“They’re even more excited about the trip than I am. They had to stay in Almaty for two months to get me and they loved it there so they’re thrilled to go back.”
Maribeth had been unable to locate her parents’ social security numbers in her e-mail files and for a second had thought of asking her mother. And then she’d remembered all those veiled remarks growing up. The drama about seeing Annie.
And there was the time she and her mother had gotten into a huge fight when Maribeth had missed curfew because her friend Stacy’s car had broken down. Her mother had grounded her for a week. Maribeth had tried to explain it wasn’t her fault but when her mother had refused to reconsider she had packed a bag and stormed out. She hadn’t gone far, all of ten blocks to Stacy’s house, where she was invited to have dinner. Halfway through the meal, her father had arrived, apologizing for the interruption, but telling Maribeth she needed to come home. Now.
They rode back in a stony silence and when they pulled up into the driveway, her father said, “Your mother thought you ran away.”
“Good!” Maribeth had said, gratified that she’d scared her mother and ready to go back into the ring for another round. Because her mother was being so unfair!
“She thought you ran away to find her,” her father had clarified.
It had taken a moment to realize who the her was. Her birth mother. And then all of the fight had gone out of Maribeth. She’d gone back inside and, at her father’s insistence, apologized to her mother and accepted the terms of the punishment.
“That moisturizer is perfect on you,” Ash said. “I’m going to do a brown mascara and then a pearly plum sheer lip gloss, unless you want something more dramatic.”
“Whatever you think.”
“Look up and to the right.” Ash expertly applied the mascara and casually asked Maribeth if she knew her birth mother.
“I don’t. But I think I’m close to finding out who she is.”