London Is the Best City in America (26 page)

“And I take it you’re the girl named Emmy?” he said, pronouncing it “E-my” in a thick Greek accent. “I take it you’re not going to order anything either. You know this isn’t a messenger service.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, taking the envelope from him. “I really appreciate it.”

I tried to smile at him, which he wasn’t having any of, and went outside to the front steps. I took a seat by the banister and opened the envelope, slowly, afraid to see what he’d written to me.

But inside there was no letter for me. There was no real note—no card even.

There was just a little arrow drawn on the envelope’s flap pointing downward, THIS STILL BELONGS TO YOU written in all caps right above the arrow’s stem.

I opened the envelope wider.

And, there, tucked into the deep left corner, something glistened back at me. My engagement ring.

I reached in, carefully taking it out, holding it in my hand. This part of Matt and me—this tangible part of what our life had been together. I flipped the ring onto my pinky finger, holding it to my mouth. And then there I was: back in a motel room in Narragansett. I was looking up at the ceiling. I was taking the ring off my finger. I was about to do what I had to do one last time. I was saying good-bye.

It was a tricky kind of luck, saying it to myself because I, alone, was left to believe it. But this time, it felt like Matt was saying it too. From just beyond the parking lot, where he had driven away sometime before I arrived. When had he decided that was the thing to do? This morning when he woke up, thinking about us, or—maybe—on the way over here, thinking, again. Maybe when didn’t matter. It just mattered that he came to the same decision. And for the first time, in a very long time, both of us were giving the other exactly what we needed.

Matt had left the ring in Scarsdale this whole time because he hadn’t wanted to look at it either. He hadn’t wanted to look at it any more than I had, which maybe wasn’t the worst way for both of us to remember that it counted. But that it wasn’t going to count for everything. Knowing that, the distance between us started to disappear. And I had the smallest trickle of what was to come—a glimpse of the truth of this whole thing—which was that the distance between us would come, and it would go. It would be different, and it wouldn’t be so different. I’d remember Matt, and I’d remember him wrong. And that was probably when I’d miss him most.

From behind me, I heard knocking and turned around to see the host with his nose pressed up to the diner’s glass front door, flattened there against it, his hands on either side.

“You okay?” he mouthed to me through the pane.

I smiled at him.

“Almost,” I mouthed back.

“Well,” he said, opening the door. “Then can you almost get off of my steps?”

I had one more stop to make.

My plan, initially, was to go right back to the house and meet Josh—call him if he wasn’t back yet—but along the way, I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t even sure I remembered how to find my way to this place, exactly, especially in the dark. There were so few times I’d been there, and all of them had been so long ago.

But the thing was, I was going to figure it out, right then, even if it was the last thing I did.

Berringer was playing basketball in the driveway when I pulled up. He was standing right under the hoop and throwing one
swish
in after the other, catching the ball as it came through the net. The driveway was dark, so he was playing under the beam of his car’s headlights. He looked soft, flushed, in the glow.

I walked up to him slowly. “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to wake the neighbors?” I said.

He looked over at me, fairly surprised, holding the ball under his arm and smiling.

“Air ball,” he said. “Safe at any hour of the night.”

I smiled back. He was standing so close, I could feel heat coming from his legs. I worried he could feel my heart beating. Even if he couldn’t, I could tell he was looking to me for clues as to what to do. I didn’t want to stand there and make him feel like he had to say anything to me, but I couldn’t make myself leave either.

“You missed him by about six minutes,” he said, switching the ball over to the other arm. “He just left.”

“Josh?”

He nodded. “He said he was going to head over to the pool.”

“The Scarsdale pool? Why?” I put my hand up. “You know what? I take the question back. I don’t want to know.”

“I won’t tell you then. I won’t even give you a hint.” He paused, and I could tell he was having trouble figuring out what he was trying to say. “But you should know, about earlier, I mean about us . . . I was stuck in the bathroom. I didn’t just disappear on you. I wouldn’t do that.”

I shook my head. “You don’t have to explain.”

“No, I know. But I was. Stuck there. I heard your mom rummaging around in the linen closet and I didn’t have my pants on and I didn’t know how to go out there without causing alarm. For a minute I thought she was opening the bathroom door, and I jumped into the shower.”

I felt myself starting to smile. “You could have actually been in the shower, you know. You could have actually been sleeping there, even,” I said. “You are Josh’s best friend.”

“See? Where were you with that kind of guidance when I needed it? This is what they call a day late and a dollar short.”

I started laughing, so did he.

But then we stopped.

“The thing I’m thinking, Emmy, is maybe we should talk about this,” he said. “About what happened. If you want to talk about it.”

I started to say I did, but really I wasn’t sure I could. If he was just going to say something to try to make me feel okay about it—make me feel okay about us going our separate ways—I’d rather just leave the whole thing where it was. In a place where, for a few moments, I felt really happy again.

“What’s there to talk about?” I said. “Isn’t this just the part when you save my life?”

He smiled at me—a big, round smile. And for a second, I thought that was what he was going to say he wanted to do. As if he could. As if anyone could do that for me now but me.

“What if I said that you always have a place to stay in San Francisco? If you ever need one?”

“I’d say that sounds great,” I said. Then I squeezed his hand, squeezed it like I meant it, and started to walk away. But he reached for my arm, holding on. He really held me there.

“You know,” he said. “You could plan to need a place to stay. We could make a plan for that sort of thing. People do that.”

“Which people?” I said.

“Just some people I know,” he said. “People who can actually, you know, admit they like someone a little.”

“Ha, ha,” I said, looking down. I was blushing, my face getting redder by the second. And I knew that even in the dark, he knew that I was blushing. And he knew I couldn’t stop.

He flipped the ball into the air, caught it. “You don’t have to say it now or anything,” he said. “Just one day.”

“One day,” I said, looking at him again. “But before I start planning any trips, I definitely have to go back to Rhode Island for a little while and quit my job and get my stuff and move it somewhere.”

“Back here?”

“No, I can’t make my mother that happy,” I said. “It would be bad for the team. I’m thinking Los Angeles. Film school, maybe, or just getting a job somehow more related to film than fish.”

“But no more Narragansett?”

“No more,” I said. And it sounded right. It sounded so right, I couldn’t deny it. The documentary was over. I wasn’t going to start it again, even though, in theory, I could. I could try to get it right this time. But really, I had no idea how, and I knew I couldn’t spend any more time trying to figure it out: how to
really
start again, or to steer it toward where I thought it needed to go. I understood, now, that I could say the same thing—the exact same thing—about Matt.

“I just don’t think that I really have anything to go back to there,” I said.

He nodded. “That sounds like a good reason to try something else.”

It did. To me too.

“You know, they have a great program at Stanford. I mean I don’t know that much about these things, but I hear it’s
arguably
the best documentary film program in the country. I’m not saying that for me,” he added quickly. “I’m just saying.”

I smiled at him. “Well, I appreciate you . . . saying.”

We were both quiet. I wanted him to say something else. Anything else. That was all I wanted.

But maybe it was my turn. “Why don’t I call you when I get out there?” I said. “Maybe you could come and visit.”

“Or we could meet in the middle,” he said. “And I’m not trying to be all symbolic. Big Sur is in the middle, and Monterey. It’s incredible there. And there’s this great restaurant right on the water near Carmel. It’s in this old cabin. Tiny place, like six tables total. A buddy of mine is the chef there. He’s an incredible chef, actually. Not as incredible as me, but, you know . . .” He smiled. “I may even have to have an actual meal.”

“Then I’m in,” I said, and I was. It was incredible there—that whole area along the California coast. I had been there as a little girl, and I liked the idea of going back. I liked the idea of all of it, really: the idea of driving up the coast, and having something I was excited about checking out, someone I was excited to see. And maybe something I was excited about getting back to also.

“So then I’ll call you, I guess, ” I said. “You’re in my phone.” I held it up for him to see.

“I’m in your phone,” he said.

I looked down, feeling shy all over again. If this were the right thing to be doing, shouldn’t I not have felt so shy? Shouldn’t it just have felt familiar already? Easy? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure this wasn’t in fact the beginning of the very best part. And still, back at the house people would be swarming around—my mom, my father, Josh eventually. There would be a lot of explaining to do, a lot of time to feel out what would happen next. It would, in the end, be a little while before I could make that call to Berringer. But before I left him now, I took a long look at his face to remind myself that I wanted to make it. I really did want to.

Berringer reached out and touched my ear, pulling my hair behind it gently. “You’ve got such a nice face,” he said.

I smiled. I smiled, and then looked down, mostly because I was just about to tell him the same thing.

Which seemed like a good place to start.

When I began thinking about Josh’s wedding toast—when I began doing all the research about different wedding customs for it—I stumbled on all this information about the history of toasts itself. It turns out that there was an ancient French custom of putting a scorched piece of bread in the bottom of wineglasses—back when wine still needed to be decanted because of all the heavy sediments. The toast would absorb all that residue. It would absorb what was misplaced so you could enjoy what it was you were meant to enjoy. The French called this process “toasted.” That was where the word came from.

And while I was driving all over my hometown late in the night after the wedding that never happened, after the fireworks and the bachelor party and the road trip and the blackout, and my mother’s wet-naps and the pineapple cake and the broken blinker—that small broken directional arrow—and the lost love and the unlived lives, I thought about what I would say in a toast to my brother, if he ever needed me to make one again. And for the first time, in a long while, I had the answer to something. I knew the answer unequivocally.

I’d find my way here—I’d start with what happened here—the Scarsdale Pool. For the second time in the longest and shortest weekend of my life.

When I got there, I saw Josh’s lone car in the parking lot under the three lit parking lot lamps, light-beads falling out of them.

I parked in the spot next to him and peeked into his car—the doors unlocked, the engine still warm. Then I opened the trunk, taking the first-aid kit out of the corner where he always kept it. I held it under my arm, and tried to follow his footsteps to the oval groundside hole we all knew about in the back fence (still there) and over to the hill. The place was now entirely deserted—silent. Even from a distance, I could make out his shadow’s form. I knew where to look.

I walked quickly, deliberately, back to where we were sitting the other night. And there Josh was: right up close, lying on his back, by himself. His suit jacket and keys in a pile beside him. A large blue flashlight.

I stood there above him because I thought, at first, he wasn’t going to say anything.

But he surprised me. “Do you think it’s safe for you to be wandering around closed public spaces like this?” he asked.

I was still standing. “It’s not unsafe,” I said. “Which may be one of the few benefits of coming home again.”

“Not a bad one, I guess,” he said. He sat up, taking a closer look at me, noticing the first-aid kit in my hand. “What happened here?” he said.

“I need you to fix me,” I said. Then I moved his pile of things out of the way and sat down where they’d been, taking my flip-flop off. He reached over and picked my damaged foot up, cradled the heel in his hand.

“What did you step in exactly?” he said.

“Exactly one broken Amstel Light bottle,” I said. “I think it split open inside my foot. I’m sure there are still some slivers in there. Maybe now slivers of the slivers.”

He shone the flashlight on it, pushing on the wound lightly with the tip of his finger.

“It doesn’t look too bad,” he said.

“It’s not too great,” I said.

But as I said it, I started thinking of Josh’s first year of medical school. I had gone to stay with him, and was flipping through one of his books. What was that line I read that always stayed with me?
The body can accommodate all types of foreign objects as long as you need it to do so.
I started to ask now if that was true—if I were remembering correctly or revising it somehow. But I decided to just let it be true, for the next two minutes, especially because that wasn’t even my real question. My real question was, How did the body do that? How did it learn what to hold on to, and when to let go?