Three Weeks Later
It’s nine o’clock when the cab finally pulls up outside: I run down the three flights of smelly stairs and burst my way out of the steel front door. There she is, my sister, looking up the noisy Chinatown street, trying to take it all in. Christmas lights are strung up and down it, twinkling over the crowds of people spilling out of the restaurants and grocery stores that line both sides. I’ve loved the bustle of it these last few weeks, the way it’s allowed me to be alone without feeling too alone, but now I’ve got my favorite person in the world right here in front of me, I’m overjoyed that the solitude is at an end.
“Look at you with your New York pad!”
“Trust me, it’s not fancy,” I say, grabbing her bag and leading the way.
It really isn’t. It was cheap as chips on Craigslist, the cramped hovel of an NYU professor who’s left town for Christmas, but it’s perfect for a newly unemployed homeless hobo such as myself. The moment of truth with Mary came on the Monday, the day after I’d walked and walked around Central Park, thinking about every single dusty corner of my life and deciding that I couldn’t face coming home quite yet.
“I’m astounded by your lack of professionalism,” she started, “but maybe that’s my own naivety. It seems to me that all I’ve done over the years is make allowances for you. I would never have sent you on that assignment if my back hadn’t been against the wall, and it turns out my instincts were right. I’m not sure you’ve got a future here after this.”
“No, me neither.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I
was
really unprofessional,” I said, with none of that cringing fear that always takes hold when she transforms herself into the hissing dragon of my nightmares. “I just don’t think my heart’s in it anymore. That’s why I’m resigning.”
“Resigning?” she said, a tremor of amusement in her voice. “There’s my Livvy, the eager to please girl I know so well. I reckon we need a probation period, a change of title. If we give it a year you’ll be back to where you were.”
“I’m not resigning for you, I’m resigning for me. I don’t want to do the job anymore. In fact, I hate it.”
“You hate it?” She gave a patronizing laugh. “Trust me, Livvy, there are people queuing round the block for a job like yours.”
“You’re right, scrub that. It’s not the job I hate, it’s doing the job for you.” I heard her sharp intake of breath, and
started to feel a little remorseful (as well as conscious that at some point I’d be needing a reference). “I’ve learned so much from you, Mary, and I’ll always be grateful for that, but it’s time to grow up. I never know where I stand, and I can’t live like that anymore.”
“You’re being ridiculous. What will you do?”
“I’ll temp if I have to, and I want to see if I can write. The truth is, my life doesn’t fit me anymore.”
And suddenly, standing there in the middle of Central Park, I realized that I was free.
“It’s cozy,” says Jules, looking around the tiny kitchen-dining-sitting room that is the heart of the apartment. It’s funny, it’s even smaller than that dingy box in New Jersey, but it doesn’t matter because it feels like someone’s real home. We sit on either end of the corduroy sofa with our knees pulled up to our chins, glasses of cheap red wine clutched in our hands.
“Is it okay not having Nathaniel?”
She looks pained for a second, and then she gives me a smile.
“It’s three days. It’ll be great for the two of them. And it’ll be great for us.” She shakes out her shoulders. “I’m just me for a bit.”
“I love him to bits, but I’m so excited we’re doing this.”
“Me too.” She grabs my hand. “It’s not like I don’t miss it too, you know.”
“Really?”
“Course.”
I’ve already told her everything, but we talk about it all over again, my tears coming as I describe that last meeting.
“I just miss him so much,” I say. The downside of having this time to myself is that I’ve had all the time in the world to feel his absence. I didn’t know it at the time, but through all of that searching for answers, I was still somehow alongside him: his life was there in sharp relief, as well as the knowledge that I would have to take it all to him once I’d assembled the pieces. Now there’s simply the loss, the long road to walk until I start to believe I could love someone else like I love him.
“His e-mail
was
lovely,” says Jules.
“I know.”
The problem is, that its loveliness makes the fact it’s over even harder to bear. He sent it to me the Wednesday after we met, and I printed it off in an Internet café, tears streaming down my face. I’ve kept it with me ever since.
Dear Olivia,
Bizarre and inappropriate though this may sound, it was a great pleasure to see you last week. I had spent the weeks before fretting constantly about the pain I caused you, and berating myself for the cowardice I displayed at Madeline’s christening. The kindness you have shown to both of us in recent months is something that I will never forget. She will never forget it either, even if her means of remembering it are not conscious ones. You have helped us both with a transition that has been almost unbearable, and indeed continues to be so.
And that is why I could not continue to bleed you dry, while offering so little in recompense. You of all people—so vital, so loving, so effortlessly funny (having had the chance to laugh these last few weeks has been the best medicine I
could ever have asked for)—deserve much more than that. And I feel sure that you will find it. How could you not? How could any man not meet you and avoid feeling utterly unmanned? Please don’t allow any residual hurt around me to hold you back, and please do not interpret my behavior as a rejection: it is quite the reverse. And that is why it was right and proper that you released yourself—that insidious cowardice of mine might have prevented me from doing so indefinitely, and yet I couldn’t have lived a life with you knowing that my contribution to the relationship was inadequate, that I was keeping you from the kind of full-blooded connection that you deserve.
Despite what you might think to the contrary, I am also very grateful to you for finding out what really happened. Your clear-sighted knowledge of Sally’s character allowed you to cut through the lies and secrecy that clouded her death. After months of foggy confusion, I took a long walk through the city and made a couple of clear decisions. Firstly I texted our friend Richie, asked him to meet me, and punched him soundly on the jaw. It was intensely satisfying and I like to think you would have been proud of me! He had to tell Mara that he’d been mugged, but I think that their relationship can survive one more lie. I’m certainly not going to involve myself any further: one thing I’ve learned from these last few months, or maybe years, is that every relationship has a unique infrastructure that no one beyond those two participants can truly judge or understand.
Talking of which, the next thing I did was to call off the hearing. I read everything, read it time and time again, and I feel even more sure that she didn’t want to die, but equally, that I didn’t want to drag her fragile mental process through a public forum. In fact, I question why I allowed it to go as
far as I did: perhaps it provided a distorted reflection of the questions that tortured me. Thank you for liberating me from them: however painful the truth is, it is at least the truth. Now the insurance company has called off the dogs, I’m more than hopeful that the police will feel happy to stand firm with their original verdict of accidental death.
I dearly hope that in time we will be able to be a part of each other’s lives. My decision to make you Madeline’s godmother was not one I took lightly, or from some misplaced sentiment about your complicated relationship with Sally. I cannot imagine a finer person for her to aspire to.
With much love and infinite gratitude,
William
I’m scrunching it up again, tears rolling down my cheeks, sinking into Jules’s so welcome embrace.
“It will get easier, Livvy.”
“I don’t regret it.”
“Don’t you?”
“How can you regret love? It’s like finding a unicorn. It hardly ever comes along.”
“And definitely not James?”
I point at my snotty, tear-stained face.
“Look at me. Everything William said about me and him is how I feel about giving James this. He deserves someone who can’t imagine being with anyone else. And even if I wanted to fool him, he knows me too well.”
“So what if William had never come along?”
“But there’s no such thing, is there? He did. And if he hadn’t, I’m not sure James would ever have started thinking
of me like that. I know him, I’m sure there was an element of competition. And I got less sappy too, stopped following him around like I had a head injury.”
Jules laughs, and hugs me again.
“So you definitely can’t move back in?”
“No way. We need to redefine things. To be honest, we needed to do that anyway.”
“Mom’s really excited, you know.”
I cannot believe I’m pushing thirty-six, and I’m moving back in with my mother.
“I was worried Dad’d be hurt I’d chosen her house, but it seems like he’s Mr. Sunshine now he’s got a girlfriend. I couldn’t believe how jolly he was when I Skyped him.”
“You know he rang Phil and asked him to come around and teach him how to Skip? He didn’t want to tell you that he didn’t know what you were talking about.” She grabs my arm. “Oh, and Mom’s said they can come for Christmas!”
“Him and Margery? And he’s said yes? We’re all spending Christmas together?”
“I think she’s secretly quite pleased she doesn’t have to feel like she’s ruined his life anymore.”
There’s something rather perfect about the imperfection of that. While some of me agrees with William—knows that I couldn’t go back into the place of clinging desperately to a tiny little piece of him—I also know now that there’s a million different ways for happiness to look. I hope he doesn’t end up as lonely I was, waiting, fruitlessly, for all the cracks and joins inside himself to knit together and release him to start again. But does that ever happen to men? No doubt Trixie will slyly introduce him to some halfway decent blonde at the precise moment he’s become
too exhausted to keep manning the barricades. I feel myself starting to wobble, and I push the thought away as hard as I can. I hate the idea that on some level we were too close to perfect to make it.
“But think about it,” I say, “she won’t want to look too spinstery in front of Margery. God knows who she’ll shake out of the tree to pull her cracker.”
Jules laughs, tops me up.
“You’re going to be all right. More than all right. You’re going to be amazing.”
I hurt, every piece of me hurts, and yet the next three days are still heaven. It’s one of the things I’ve learned about grief, how it sharpens everything: the colors are particularly bright right now.
Those thousand words for love I’m coming up with? One of them would express the kind of love you feel for a sibling—the way it’s both boundless and complicated, lightly dusted with those stupid spats you’ve been having since birth, and underpinned with the knowledge that you’d lie under a bus or wrestle a tiger if that was what you had to do to protect them. I’ve got absolutely no spare cash for shopping, and Jules is far from flush, but we still trawl around the Park Avenue stores and marvel at the five-figure gowns, even trying a couple on just to annoy the snooty saleswomen. We buy makeup in Bergdorf’s, try on high heels in Saks, and drink coffee on the roof of Barneys. Of course it all makes me think of Sally, makes me imagine her sweeping through these swing doors and flexing her plastic until it reached melting point, or sipping champagne on this same roof. I hope she was happy some of the time,
properly happy rather than simply high, waiting for the sky to go dark again.
It’s amazing how little money you need when you’re with someone you want to spend every waking moment with. And I do, I really do, despite the odd flare up about how long to keep the bedroom light on (“Stop reading, Livvy!”).
I say that to her on the last day, as we walk around the spiraled interior of the Guggenheim Museum.
“Me too,” she says, threading her arm through mine. “We should try and do something like this every year. Even if it’s just the Travelodge in Reading.” She giggles. “You know what I mean. Sometimes that’s just us.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve been crap the last few months.”
“You haven’t!”
“I have a bit. I’ve been so wrapped up in . . . in everything”—I’m nervous of saying William’s name out loud, I know how it echoes inside of me—“and meanwhile you’ve been going through loads of your own stuff.”
Jules went back to work a little while ago, and on the face of it is doing absolutely brilliantly. She did call me from the loos a couple of times in tears—the emergency toilet call seems to be a bit of a sisterly specialty—and I made sure I was always on the end of the phone, but I know I would have had more to give if I hadn’t been so consumed by my own traumas.
“You have been there, you just don’t notice. Just seeing you is enough. Makes everything feel normal.”
“Do you feel like you again?” I ask her.
“I think me’s a bit different now, but still me, if you know what I mean. I don’t feel like I’m having to get to know a whole new person.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
I do, I really do. I wonder how long my confidence in the new version of me will last when I’m back on home soil.
I thought Jules would want a big New York night out for her final evening, but she insists that all she wants to do is stay in. I’m a little bit disappointed, truth be told, but her wish is my command, so we load up with goodies from a deli on the Upper West Side and take our places either end of the tiny sofa. I don’t want it to be over, not yet.
“You are going to come home, aren’t you?” she says, squeezing my toes. They’re clad in thick wool bed socks due to the lack of warmth from anything other than the feeble blow heater that’s wheezing out occasional puffs of hot air like an ailing baby dragon.
“Yeah, course. I can’t afford not to, apart from anything.”