Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (4 page)

Monique continued, “It’s all so problematic. I’m going to have to figure out how to read complicated train schedules in multiple
languages, and decipher taxi fares and learn the tipping customs—”

“Oh, cry me a freakin’ river.” The dogs lunged, catching sight of another squirrel. Judy righted herself while they tried
valiantly to pull her arm out of its socket. She reminded herself that the young girl who had tripped lightly through Europe
had subsequently vaulted herself back home to marry Bob and birth five children and plant her feet firmly in suburban American
soil.

That girl was dead.

Judy shook herself out of her odd reverie. “That’s the whole fun of travel, Monique. Learning new customs. Screwing up along
the way. You’ll figure it out.”

“And then there’s Becky and her disability.”

“Becky’s not blind yet.”

“Yeah, but Lenny’s got some hairy things on the list for a blind woman. Walking through the catacombs of Paris, for one. She
is already night blind.”

“So she can shop on the Champs-Élysées while you look at old bones.”

“In a city she’s never been to? Come on, you’ve seen how she’s been behaving. She hardly leaves the house.” Monie straightened
from touching her toes to fix Judy with her sharp hazel gaze. “I could use a second hand.”

“You mean helping you convince Becky to go along with you? If she has any sense, she’ll jump at the opportunity.”

“I’m asking if you’ll come with us.”

Judy heard Monique’s words but she wasn’t sure she’d heard them right, and her mind did somersaults as she struggled to understand
what was just offered. The dogs took advantage of her inattention and broke from her inertia, dragging her in skittering steps
farther down the path. She stumbled after them, yanked just as fiercely into memory.

She’d had long hair that fell to her waist. She’d had flexible knees and no marriage or mortgage or children. She’d had an
internship at the European Parliament, as a translator and coffee-fetcher, briskly walking through the echoing halls, shifting
papers from one office to another, filled with a sense of international purpose. And after the internship was done, she had
money in her pocket and a crew of Belgian and French buddies who were thinking of tripping off to Marseilles. The world had
unfurled before her, one winding cobblestoned street at a time. She’d wandered across the continent, sleeping in hostels and
on park benches, working the grape harvests, eating from street vendors, basking in the sunshine.

It flooded over her, the hot, hungry, swift-footed joy of it.

“Wow,” Monique said, stretching her arms over her head, “I didn’t think it was possible to shock you into silence. But it’s
not a joke, Judy. You can even choose a destination or two, as long as it’s not too far off the path—”

“This is crazy.” Judy yanked sharply on the leash, dragging herself and her dogs and her senses back to Monique’s side. “I’m
not going to be a cliché, Monie.”

Monique paused in her stretching, cocking her head in confusion.

“It’s in all the books. Middle-aged guys in crisis buy little red sports cars and take up marathon running. But middle-aged
women trot off to Europe to ‘find themselves’ and end up shacking up on the Adriatic coast with Italian lovers.”

Monique sputtered.

“Besides, to fund this new level of midlife crisis, I’d have to dig into Audrey’s tuition money.”

“No, no.” She waved a finger. “You’re not going to spend a single penny. This is all-expenses-paid. Lenny left me enough,
and it’s been in high-interest CDs ever since.”

“You can’t have that much.”

“Wasn’t I prepared to take both Kiera and Becky? Now Kiera’s out.” Her face was a sudden rictus of pain. “There’s enough money
for three. Maybe not for an Italian lover though. That’s all on you.”

Judy opened her mouth but no words formed. She mustn’t think of the young woman she once was. She’d cast that girl aside when
she’d returned to New York, giving up wanderlust to tumble into Bob’s welcoming arms.

No. She must think logically.

She thought about the mums she was going to plant in the side garden. She thought about the shutter on the front of the house
that was peeling and needed to be taken down, scraped, and repainted. She thought about her mother’s antique vanity made out
of bird’s-eye maple that she wanted to sand down and refinish. She thought about the attic paint job that had been “waiting”
for approximately thirteen years, since she and Bob had renovated the attic themselves, as a room for their oldest boy to
live in. Back then they’d finished the Sheetrock and laid a rug over the old attic boards, but Robert couldn’t wait so he
moved in. The next thing they knew he was moving to college.

A family now scattered, like so many dandelion seeds to the wind.

“Look, there’s Becky.” Monique glanced over to where the tall, slim mother emerged from around the railroad tracks. The blonde
kept sure to the path, her head lowered, her special sunglasses with the amber lenses covering half her face. “I’d like to
ask her about the trip today. That is, if you’d join us, Judy.”

And in that moment, standing in the dappled sunshine under the broad branches of a sycamore tree, Judy felt the swirling energies
that had bedeviled her for months coalesce in one singularly fierce idea.

Europe.

“Oh, God,” she said, sucking in a breath so fast that the cool autumn air braised the base of her lungs. “Oh, God, Monie,
yes
.”

B
ecky felt vaguely foolish as she stood in her room with the suitcase open on the bed before her. Through the closed door,
she could hear the last sleepy, read-me-another-story mutterings of her children as her mother-in-law, who’d be helping Marco
out in the two weeks Becky would be gone, put them to bed. The muted roar of a football game slipped up the stairs from the
den, where Marco watched TV. Becky fingered her passport, six months away from expiration, last used on a driving trip to
Quebec City before Brianna was born.

Monique’s offer for a trip to Europe had been a shock. It was as if it had emerged out of one of those foggy places in Becky’s
vision. She’d run full-speed into it, only to come out stunned and seeing stars, wondering what the hell she’d just hit. She’d
said yes, of course. Everyone in the neighborhood had been trying to help her, all in their own lovable, awkward ways. She’d
become “That Neighbor” now, the one the whole coven whispered about, shared concern for, fussed over, like when Mrs. McCarthy
down the street had breast cancer.

Becky appreciated Monique’s offer. She really did, even now, as she slipped her passport in the purse at her feet and for
the fifth time pulled out the clothes and toiletries and shoes she knew she could more artfully puzzle into the carry-on suitcase.
But the feeling she couldn’t shake was that Monique’s crazy, heartfelt, unbelievable offer to show her the castles of Europe
was a mildly reprehensible distraction from what she
should
be doing. Like learning the exact number of stairs in her house from one landing to another. Or studying Braille. Or memorizing
the milky shade of cappuccino that formed the inner ring of Brianna’s eyes.

She heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. Her spine tightened, and she bent over her suitcase, refolding the yoga pants and
sports bras with increased intent. The door squealed open, and Marco came in, swinging it closed behind him.

She didn’t look at him, but she was aware of him anyway. His dark mess of crisp Italian hair. His broad longshoreman’s shoulders.

He said, “I thought you’d be asleep by now.”

She sensed the surprise in his pause. “Everything is harder to fit than I expected.” She reached for the compact tin of her
wax oil crayons and tried to wedge them upright against the side of the suitcase. “I can’t overpack. We have to be mobile.”

He flicked his watch off his wrist and set it on the bureau. “The car for the airport is coming at five a.m.”

“I can sleep on the plane.”

“You’d better. I’ve seen Monique’s ten-page itinerary. You’re not getting much sleep once your feet hit the ground.”

 “I’m almost done.”

She felt a tingling at the back of her neck, a certainty that came of twelve long, difficult years of marriage. Marco had
something on his mind. It would have been better if she had finished packing earlier, if she’d been asleep when he came upstairs—or
at least in bed feigning sleep. She could have avoided that awkward moment when Marco would look at her under the brooding
ridge of his brow, a question in his dark eyes. Right now, sex was the last thing on her mind.

Marco seized his T-shirt by the back of his neck, dragged it off his shoulders, and then balled it into his hands. He opened
the closet door and tossed it into the laundry. She busied herself rolling a slinky, deep blue rayon dress, her one choice
for evening wear, a dress she’d last worn on her and Marco’s ten-year wedding anniversary.

“I heard your mother reading to Brian and Brianna,” she said, casting about for anything to fill the tense silence. “She must
have been at it for a good hour. She’s likely to coddle and feed them so well that they won’t want me to come home.”

“That’s Mom’s way of showing you that you don’t have to worry about the kids. All you have to worry about is enjoying the
vacation.” He pulled his cell phone out of the pocket of his jeans and glanced at the face. “This was incredibly generous
of Monique.”

Becky heard the undercurrent of meaning, the vague discomfort that Monique was gifting Becky something luxurious and much-needed,
something he, as a man temporarily out of work, could not provide.

“She is as big-hearted as always,” Becky said, “bringing both Judy and me along.”

His gaze flickered to the notebook lying next to the open suitcase. “You’ll get to sketch. That’s good.”

 “Castles, castles, castles.”

Unwittingly, her gaze slipped to the drawing hanging on the wall near the closet, a framed sketch Marco had playfully drawn
of this old house, just after they’d committed to buy it. Upon Marco’s rendering with all its sharp corners and straight lines,
she’d made a few fanciful renovations with his wry approval—adding two turrets, topped with flags.

 “I’m glad she talked you into this, Beck.”

She paused at the use of her nickname, at the low timbre of Marco’s voice. That sound always rippled through her, like a low
mournful note of a cello in a darkened room. She hardly ever heard it anymore.

She spoke in careful, even tones. “I’m glad too.”

“Last week I thought you were going to back out.”

“It was a moment of panic.” Nudged by the knowledge that someday she’d be a blind mother in a kitchen full of pots of boiling
water and hot grease and sharp knives and small children. “I’m fine now.”

Then with a sliding drop of her stomach it overwhelmed her all over again, the explanations the doctors had repeated while
she struggled to understand. How the photoreceptors of her eyes were slowly deteriorating. How they had been failing for perhaps
all her life. How the rods—sensitive to low light—were the first to go, which is why night blindness was her first symptom.
She had argued with the specialist. She’d told him that she’d always had perfect vision in the right light, able to read up
close and see the whole landscape in the distance. But in his flat, unarguable voice, the doctor informed her that her vision
was tunneling, and within that good sphere, there were spots already deteriorating. She wouldn’t necessarily notice it, he’d
said, because her brain struggled to fill in the information. But those watery little rings of spaces would eventually grow
and merge, and eventually her brain would no longer be able to fill in the blanks.

Right now those blanks in between were big enough to eclipse the sight of a small fawn, running in front of her car.

No, this trip wouldn’t help anything. As far as she knew, only Jesus was on record curing the blind.

“Beck, maybe we should reconsider the phone situation.”

She glanced up. Marco stood by his bedside table, his attention fixed on his phone as he scrolled through email.

“There’s no reason.”

“I could call tomorrow, add international service.”

“It’s an unnecessary expense.” She wiggled a pair of flats between her cosmetic case and her sneakers. “I agreed to this trip
only because it won’t cost us anything.”

He went silent for a moment, the only sound in the room the nudge of his finger on the face of his phone. Since the furlough
from his job began, mentioning “expenses” or “costs” or “money” was a fresh new way to bring tension between them.

 “Bring your phone,” he said. “I may do it anyway.”

“Monique and Judy both have cell phones with international service. Their phone numbers are tacked up on the bulletin board
downstairs.”

“So we can play international phone tag if there’s an emergency?”

She raised her head to look straight at his classic, proud Roman profile. “If there’s an emergency, Marco, there’s not a hell
of a lot I can do about it from Munich or Paris or Monaco.”

“It’d be nice to be able to communicate easily.”

With a spasm of irritation, Becky thought, oh, yes, it would be nice to be able to talk easily to her husband again. But the
bed that stretched between them may as well have been a moat without a drawbridge. It had been so long since she and Marco
had engaged in an easy conversation that even these lame efforts only made her nerves tighten.

She could pinpoint the day the troubles began. It wasn’t the day he’d asked her to take in Gina, his twelve-year-old daughter
from a failed teenage relationship. During that time they’d had conversations that lasted for days about the logistics of
bringing into their growing family a brooding, emotionally wounded girl whose mother had just been jailed on drug-trafficking
charges. Marco had confessed his long-simmering guilt about leaving his daughter to be raised with someone who showed increasing
signs of instability and bad behavior. He’d frankly admitted his failings and asked her with great feeling and deference to
try opening her heart and their home to this troubled fledgling.

She’d agreed, wholeheartedly.

The real trouble began a few years later, when Gina was brought home in a police cruiser, stinking of vodka and vomit, after
she’d disappeared for three days into the Bowery with her nineteen-year-old slacker of a boyfriend. That night, Becky and
Marco had been at one another’s throats, arguing about the appropriate response, the need for discipline, for changes in expectations.
She’d accused him of behaving like the guilty, absent dad who indulged his child in the hopes of establishing friendship rather
than standards of appropriate conduct. He’d accused her of hardening her heart against his daughter; he accused her of not
even trying to understand Gina’s temperament. That accusation pinched, because she
did
understand Gina’s craving for independence. But for a few twists in their respective fates, Becky could have been Gina.  

Since then, the hurts and misunderstandings and differences in opinion had just accumulated, leaving nicks and scars where
no nerve endings grew anymore. Long, deep carapaces of hard tissue streaked their relationship, ridges of separation neither
one of them dared to approach, whole swaths of emotional real estate now bereft of feeling.

“You know what, forget your phone.” Marco tugged on the blankets, flipping them aside so he sat on the sheets. “Just don’t
bring it at all.”

Becky paused mid-zip, glancing across the bed at Marco’s back as he fiddled with his bedside clock to set the alarm.

“It’s a good idea to take a couple of weeks apart.” The muscles on his shoulders flexed as he clicked through the numbers
on the clock. “We both could use a breather.”

She felt a whole new chill in the room, as if the vent above her had blasted Arctic air. Marco didn’t move. She fixed her
attention on the nape of his neck, the short hair that grew there. The doctor had warned her that the cones in her eyes would
deteriorate too, stealing the ability to see color. Like the little dark mark like a fleck of fresh cinnamon on his swarthy
skin, just where the slope of his shoulder muscle met the curve of his neck.

“Let’s look at it as an opportunity,” he continued. “It’s a chance to think about our new situation.”

The chill shivered through her. She’d heard those words before. Thrown at her with the same controlled anger after they’d
found out that Gina had taken the car without permission. Becky had been at the end of her rope then, a rope that she felt
was tied around her hands, preventing her from addressing the root of Gina’s problems. So he’d taken his daughter to his mother’s
and stayed there for a week.

Imagine. She’d once thought things would get better, after Gina moved away to a dorm at Rutgers.

“There are going to be a lot of changes going forward, Beck.” He shifted toward her, and with great effort he met her eyes.
“This trip will give both of us a chance to think about how we’re going to manage.”

The word was like a blow to the solar plexus. She zipped the suitcase, pulled it off the bed, and turned away from him to
shove it against the wall. She’d always managed just fine by herself. Now she supposed Marco couldn’t wait to get her out
of the kitchen, away from the car, and far from the kids. He had to prepare Brian and Brianna for the sightless mom she would
soon be. He had to prepare himself for a lifetime with a disabled wife.

She couldn’t seem to breathe. The last time he abandoned her, he came back out of duty. Now he’d stay with her out of pity.

Pity.

Becky walked into the master bath, clicking the door closed behind her.

The morning couldn’t come quickly enough.