‘What would you like me to do, Mom?’ I asked, perhaps more icily than was entirely fair. ‘You’re the one who told me to be realistic. To look for a new husband, even. Shouldn’t you be happy I finally took your advice and left Carolyn and Tim to their great love?’
There was a strained sort of silence. I couldn’t bear it. I leaned my head forward, letting my forehead touch the glass. It was shockingly cold. I shivered immediately, jerked back, and pulled Brooke’s flowing dark-grey sweater tighter around myself. Why did my mother make me feel so much more lost than I already was? Did she mean to do it? Or was this a product of our dynamic – did we simply … bring out the worst in each other? All I knew was that we always had. I assumed we always would.
‘Christmas is next week,’ she said eventually, her voice stiff. Awkward, maybe, though it was something new to think of my mother that way. I wasn’t sure I welcomed that insight.
‘I know that.’
‘We would love it if you’d come home,’ she continued. Her voice started to sound excessively deliberate then, as if she’d practised this particular speech. ‘We’re not going to go all out, of course, with so much going on, but we’ll celebrate all the same. A bit more subdued than usual, that’s all.’
‘Mom.’ I sighed, and turned my back on the window. I frowned at the wall of books instead. Brooke was at work, editing masterpieces in a lauded publishing house, and I was freeloading in her house, having quietly heart-rending conversations with my mother on the phone. If this was my life, I wanted no part of it. Come on Manhattan, I thought fervently, hurry up and take me back! ‘I’m not coming home for Christmas. You know that.’
‘You’re always welcome—’
‘So you’ve said,’ I interrupted her. ‘But that doesn’t mean much when you refuse to entertain what I’d need for that to happen, does it?’
She made a noise that I interpreted as somehow connected to that way she liked to rub at her temples, as if conversations with me caused her pain. Maybe that wasn’t an act.
‘I only want to invite you home for Christmas, Sarah,’ she said in a wounded tone. Always so wounded. And my response was always so annoyed. I wondered why, thirty-three years into this dynamic, neither one of us had ever come up with an alternative. A middle road. ‘I don’t appreciate being belittled for the sentiment. I don’t think that’s fair.’
‘I don’t think any of this is fair,’ I bit out. The silence hummed between us, and it hurt me. It always hurt me. But this felt different, somehow. I pressed my own free hand against my temple, just to see what it was like. ‘But thank you for asking,’ I heard myself say. ‘I know you mean well.’
I disconnected the call and wondered if I should take myself over to the hall mirror to check for demon possession, or whatever else might have caused me to take leave of my senses and talk to my mother like that. She meant well? Had I really said that? When on earth had my mother ever actually meant well? At least, to me? It had to be Brooke’s infectious Christmas spirit, I thought then, glaring balefully at the plump, bright tree that stood near the fireplace; one more perfect New York postcard to reel me in against my will. It encouraged me to work on that peace on earth nonsense where it was least deserved. The tree sparkled invitingly, I could smell the clean, crisp scent of cut pine and resin in the air, and there was something about an evergreen tree in the dark of winter, even if your feelings on Christmas were dubious at best. It made my heart feel glad, somehow, despite everything. And when I knew it should have been far too cold and bitter to feel anything of the kind.
And so I told myself that it was time, finally, that I let go. That it was past time. One finger at a time from the stranglehold I’d held on my marriage, and each one harder to release than the last. The truth was I didn’t want to do it. I only knew I had to. I might not have liked the things Brooke had said to me. Her perspective. Her opinions. I might not have agreed with her take on Tim, or on me. But I couldn’t deny the fact that by any rationale, I should have been angrier. With Tim himself and really, just overall. I’d had pathetic covered from the start, hadn’t I? I’d waited. I’d loomed around town like some kind of Ghost of Wives Past. I’d told myself I was waiting for Tim to change his mind, but why had I imagined he might? He hadn’t wavered at all. He hadn’t shown the slightest hesitation in asking for a divorce.
And could I blame him if what Brooke said were true? What had become of me? I might have had good solid reasons to choose the things I did when I met Tim. There were a lot of great things about the life we’d planned, and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise now. But what had happened to me? How had I gone from the girl who wanted to save the world, who wanted to dedicate her life to helping others, to someone who defended drunks from their rightful punishment? It was as if I’d abdicated any claim to anything that might require some personality. It was as if I’d forgotten all about the huge, overarching dreams that had once defined me and had become instead the sort of person who revelled in her own minutiae. There was nothing wrong with that, necessarily, I thought now, still staring at Brooke’s Christmas tree as if I could see what I was looking for nestled in its branches, in between silver balls and dangling reindeer. But it wasn’t me. It wasn’t anything like me.
And say what I might about Carolyn – I could think of many things to say, as it happened – but she had always known exactly who she was. As a girl. As a teenager. As a twenty-five-year-old, when she’d packed up everything she owned, thrown it in the back of a car, and announced that she was moving to the other side of the country. Just because she’d felt like it. I hadn’t ever had any particular desire to move to Portland myself, but I’d understood even back then that Carolyn’s sense of herself was something awesome – something monolithic. She’d even moved back home earlier this year without a shred of self-consciousness, taking up residence in my parents’ house as if it were a grand hotel.
It’s not that I’m opposed to looking for a job, she’d told me over the summer, by which time, for all I knew, she had already started sleeping with Tim, but after being made redundant, I’m in no hurry to get back out there and experience the economy again. I think I’ll wait a while, and see what happens.
Even if she’d been talking about Tim then, even if he was what she’d been waiting to see about, what I admired was her certainty. Her sense of purpose even in her lack of purpose. I would have been in an extended panic attack if I’d lost my job, determined to figure something out, for fear that others – my parents, friends, gossipy Mrs Duckworth in the supermarket, for God’s sake – would judge me.
Who could really blame her for trying on my life for size? Wasn’t that what I’d been doing myself? It was as if I’d been marking time in my marriage, pretending I was the kind of person whose goal in life was to argue with Annette the office manager over who should do which duties. Maybe I’d even become that person without noticing. I’d cut my hair off into that bob I’d believed made me look professional. I’d dressed in lawyerly drag. But none of that was who I’d wanted to be. It wasn’t at all who I’d meant to be.
And I had the strangest, not at all pleasant, notion that this was why I wasn’t as angry at Tim as I should have been. Because deep down, I worried that he knew this already. That he’d known I was doing nothing more than treading water and he’d decided simply to get out of that pool. I might not particularly support his methods, but I couldn’t deny that he was right.
I wished I knew what that meant.
‘Would you do it again?’ Brooke asked a couple of nights later. I had been in New York for just over a week. We were picking our way down a treacherous stretch of pavement outside the restaurant where we’d just finished a long, giggly dinner with a pair of our old college friends. I hadn’t thought about Tim or Carolyn or my own revelations in at least two hours. Maybe even three. I was feeling full of myself, and even more full of Thai food.
‘Eat that fried banana fritter thing?’ I considered. ‘No. I should have gone for something chocol
atey. I don’t know what I was thinking.’
‘Not your dessert,’ she said, laughter in her voice. ‘Your marriage. Would you marry Tim again, knowing what you know now? Would you leave New York the way you did?’
Would you leave me, she did not ask directly, but I heard her.
We separated to walk around a slow-moving pedestrian in front of us, then came together again on the other side to slow at the intersection as the light changed and traffic surged.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, the question taking me more by surprise than perhaps it should have done.
I knew what she wanted me to say. What I wanted to say. That those years had been a mistake. That I’d been sleep-walking, maybe, or taken advantage of, somehow. That I regretted it all. That I wished I could simply rewind and act as if none of it ever happened.
And I wanted to feel that way. I wanted it so much it felt like a new hunger. But I didn’t.
I didn’t want the life I’d left behind to marry Tim. I would never have found Tim in the first place, would never have dated him or married him, if I hadn’t felt that it was too … much. Too close. Too confining. Maybe Tim wasn’t the best choice, in retrospect, but he’d been the best choice then. Or the right choice, anyway. For me. Even if I’d gone ahead and lost myself shortly thereafter. That didn’t negate the choice itself.
This life didn’t fit me any more. I wasn’t that girl. I knew that with the kind of deep, abiding certainty I’d wanted to feel about coming back here but hadn’t. It clicked, and even as that made me unutterably sad, I knew it was right. My marriage might not have been what I thought it was, but then, neither was I. I didn’t regret it. I couldn’t.
Brooke looked at me, and her mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. She looked away again, out into the pulse of traffic that raced past us and down Seventh Avenue, deeper into the Village. I’d forgotten that we were open books to each other again. I’d forgotten how naked that made us both, how vulnerable. There were reasons friendships like this, so terribly close, were so hard to maintain sometimes. They took so much. They took everything. I’d left it – her – before because, after Alec left the country and more to the point left me, I’d had nothing left to give. On some level I’d known I couldn’t turn myself inside out like that again, and I’d known Brooke could see much too far inside me, into all the dark little corners I’d wanted to pretend weren’t there. I’d wanted to be new. Clean. I’d wanted to throw away the past as easily as I’d been thrown away, and staying close to Brooke had meant I could never, ever, do that.
One more thing I hadn’t known until this very moment. One more thing I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
‘That’s okay,’ Brooke said softly then. ‘I get it.’
‘This isn’t my life.’ I didn’t know what I meant to say until it burst forth, and then lay there between us, as cold as the concrete sidewalk. The light changed again, but we didn’t move. ‘I want it to be. So badly. I love everything about it. You. Being here. It’s like a dream come true in so many ways, Brooke. It is. I wish I could just come back. I wish I could erase everything.’ I shrugged, feeling helpless. ‘But this isn’t my life any more.’
I braced myself. Seven years ago, admitting something like that would have caused a terrible scene. We weren’t necessarily yellers, Brooke and me, bar one or two memorable occasions, but that wasn’t to say we couldn’t land the verbal blows when we felt called to it. She could be breathtakingly snide. And I could be shamefully mean in return. I didn’t want that.
But tonight she only looked sad for a moment, and then reached over to loop her arm through mine. She pulled in close, so our shoulders bumped, then leaned away again.
‘I wish it could be,’ she said. ‘I wish you could move right into that second bedroom and it could be ten years ago all over again.’
‘I think this has been such a great week,’ I said, and I could hear all the emotion of it bubbling inside me, catching in my throat, ‘but you have a whole life, Brooke. A great life. I’d love to be a part of it – but neither one of us has room to go back to the way things were before. Neither one of us wants to strangle on our own closeness again.’
Her mouth crooked up higher, and there was a flash of something like wariness on her face. She glanced at me, then back at the street.
‘After you moved,’ she said, her voice as careful-sounding as I realized mine must have been, ‘I spent all this time being so angry. How could you leave me like that? How could you actually leave New York? Getting married was bad enough.’ She laughed slightly. ‘It took me a long time to realize that what I really was, down beneath all of that, was a little bit relieved.’ Her eyes searched mine. ‘I missed you so much. Every day. But maybe we needed a break.’
‘I think we did,’ I agreed, my voice much too rough, and I refused to cry on a street corner. For one thing, I was no longer twenty-two. And for another, my cheeks were already frozen solid against the night without the addition of tears.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked after a moment, and maybe that was a hint of some kind of resignation in her voice, but maybe that was just the relentless cold. ‘Go back to Rivermark? To the hospital?’
‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’m still married to him, whatever else happens. Whatever that means.’ I shook my head, feeling something a little too close to dizzy for comfort. ‘I don’t really know what to do, to be honest.’
I was still processing what I hadn’t known, not entirely anyway, not with any real clarity, until I’d said it just now. Until I’d admitted it out loud. That this wasn’t going to work for me, this attempt to slip back into my old life here – our old life here – as if the intervening years had never happened. That there was no pretending, after all, that all these things could be erased, just like that. No pretending that I hadn’t changed too much – and whether that was a good thing or a bad thing was irrelevant. I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t pretend to be in my twenties any more. I didn’t know what that left me, or where. All this, I realized then, and I still didn’t know what I wanted. What if I never did?
But Brooke nodded, and set her jaw in that obstinate way that spelled either trouble or genius, sometimes both. And I loved her for it. As I had always loved her. Once even enough to leave her.
‘We’ll figure it out,’ she said, a little bit fiercely. ‘I promise.’
‘We will,’ I agreed.
And I knew that this time, we both meant that we in exactly the same way. We started down the street again, arms still linked, and even though I had no idea what came next, even though that scared me, I felt okay. Better than okay. I wasn’t going to lose Brooke again. I couldn’t hide here, with her, the way I wanted to do. But leaving New York this time didn’t mean leaving Brooke, too. I wouldn’t let it.
We wouldn’t let it.
11
I got Brooke’s text on the train ride back north to Rivermark, as the train was in its final early-morning approach into the village through the frozen winter fields and barren trees that made up the Hudson Valley landscape at this time of year.
I wanted our time to be about us, she wrote, and maybe that was selfish. And maybe you don’t want this information anyway. I honestly don’t know. But …
It took so long for the second text to come in that I considered calling her and demanding she stop the torture – but then my phone buzzed in my hand again, and there it was.
A certain doctor emails me every once in a while, just to say hello, the second text read. So I happen to know that Alec is home for the holidays, up in Vermont. Just in case you find that relevant to anything you might be doing. Love you, B.
I read the text once. Twice. Then I shoved my phone in my pocket and looked back out of the window at the painfully bright morning rushing alongside the train. The sun bounced off of the snow, so brilliant it hurt. It made my eyes water and made me glad I had a pair of sunglasses in my purse that I could shove on my face. It was entirely too bright, I
told myself. Today was the third day of actual winter, after all, and it showed. It glittered hard all around.
I’d left the city under cover of darkness, the better to force myself to really, truly do it. I knew that I would take any excuse to stay, because what was there to go home to but more uncertainty? I knew a leisurely morning wallowing further in Brooke’s life with all of its echoes of our old one would lead to another whole day spent there, and while that wasn’t the end of the world, I knew it was time to move on. I tilted my head back against my seat, and told myself that this was the right thing to do. It was. I didn’t move again until the train pulled into Rivermark’s pretty little train station, and I was forced to disembark and face my life. Or what was left of it that early in a brand-new, post-Manhattan morning.
I didn’t have time to think about Brooke’s text. I didn’t have time to think through the possible implications. I had too many other things to do. I’d just spent a week excavating the past and that was enough, wasn’t it? Even Goldilocks’s attempts to find the right fit had been finite. How many more possible, discarded lives did I think I had to try on before I grew the hell up and lived the one I had?
I took a taxi back up to the house, and felt like a ghost the moment I walked inside. It moved over me like a shiver, like ice down my back. I’d just had a whole week in New York slowly coming to terms with the fact it wasn’t home to me any longer. I recognized the sensation when I felt it again, and I felt it now.
This was nothing more than a house. It wasn’t my dream any longer. Had it ever been mine or had it only ever been ours? Today, it didn’t feel like my home at all. I made my way through the chilly, empty rooms, then up the stairs to the master bedroom to change my clothes. None of it felt like mine, I realized, as I walked along the hall and into the bedroom. None of it felt the way I thought it should, if it was something worth fighting so hard to keep.