The Transformation of Things (20 page)

“No. I’m sorry,” I said. I sat up and hugged him, held on tightly. I inhaled the familiar pine smell of him, the warm feel of his cheek against mine. “I don’t want a divorce,” I whispered in his ear.

“Neither do I.” He reached up and gently ran his thumb across my cheek, and then he held his face close to mine.

I leaned up and kissed him softly on the lips. “You didn’t ruin me,” I whispered. “Just the opposite.” He kissed me, harder, more insistently than I’d kissed him, and I pulled him on top of me on the bed.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered in my ear. “I have to go. I have an appointment at four. And then I have to go to a dinner retreat in the city.” He kissed my neck, and let his fingers linger to trace the outline of my collarbone.

“Okay,” I whispered, bringing his mouth to mine again.

His mouth turned slowly and carefully the way it might the first time you ever kissed someone, the way it might when you wanted to taste another person, when you wanted to drink them in.

When he pulled back again, he looked me in the eyes and smiled. I remembered the way his smile had once made me feel like I was melting, and the way it sort of felt like that right now.

Twenty-two

T
he next morning when I woke up, Will was already gone. He’d come in late last night, and I’d woken for only a minute when I heard him getting into bed. And then I’d felt him kiss my shoulder and put his arm around my waist, and I’d rolled into him and fallen back into a deep sleep.

I couldn’t remember dreaming last night, but the dream about Kat and Grant from yesterday afternoon still felt so fresh in my head. So over breakfast, I hastily wrote up some wedding announcements. They weren’t due until the end of the week, but I had four announcements that took me less than an hour to compose. While I did it, I sipped my coffee slowly, and then I took a shower and got dressed. I left Will a note in case he stopped home for lunch again.
Gone to the city. Be back for dinner.
I thought for a minute, and then added,
Love, J.

I sat next to a woman holding her baby on her lap on the train. The little girl was quiet and sat calmly sucking her
thumb. Until she started trying to grab my leg. “Stop it,” her mother said, but the girl kept grabbing. I shifted in my seat. “I’m sorry,” the mother said to me, moving the little girl farther away, so she was grabbing her mother’s leg instead.

“That’s fine,” I said. The woman smiled at me, this odd smile of relief and sadness that reminded me, in a way, of Lisa. “How old is she?” I asked.

“Seventeen months,” she said.

“That’s a good age,” I said, though really I had no idea if it was or not. “And she’s very well behaved.” It was true, despite her attempts at my leg. Most babies I saw on the train were screaming or jumping on the seat.

“She’s my little angel.” The mother sighed. “What about you?” the woman asked. “You have any children?”

“No.” I shook my head. And because she kept staring, I added, “Not yet,” as if I owed this stranger some sort of explanation.

When I walked into
City Style,
Kat’s office was empty, so I knocked on Hank’s door. “Where’s Kat?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Not my turn to watch her,” he said.

“I have these.” I held up the folder that contained the wedding announcements, as if it was something important, top secret documents that were necessary to hand deliver, even though I normally just e-mailed them in on the due date. “I’m going to wait in her office.”

“Be my guest.” He didn’t even look up from his computer screen.

On my way back to her office, I swung by my old office, Grant’s office. It looked the same, tiny window in the corner, messy desk off to the side. Had it not been for the ultra handsome Grant sitting in my old chair, his feet up on the desk, the phone cocked between his ear and his shoulder,
I might’ve felt like I could’ve walked back in and taken it over again, this oddly carefree life that used to belong to me, the Jennifer Daniels me: the one who only sometimes remembered to check her breast for lumps, who did the
Times
crossword puzzle at her desk, e-mailing answers back and forth with Kat so it looked like we were working, who enjoyed spontaneous sex with Will so much that she couldn’t stop thinking about it the next morning, couldn’t stop glowing into her coffee.

Grant cleared his throat. He’d hung up the phone and had noticed me standing there. “Hey there—”

“Jen,” I said.

“Kat’s friend.”

I nodded. “She has an interview this morning,” he said. “She should be back soon.” It bothered me that he knew more than Hank, that he knew too much. Why the hell would he know her schedule, unless they were talking, unless he was waiting for her to return? “You can wait in here if you like.” He paused. “This used to be your office, right?”

I nodded. “If you’re not busy,” I said, stepping past him, not waiting for his answer.

“Sorry about the mess.” He started moving things around on the desk. “I bet you kept it neater than this.”

I hadn’t. My life as a reporter had been nothing like my life as a housewife: messy, hurried, bogged down, filled with too much caffeine and too much alcohol and not enough sleep. With time on my hands I’d become a neat freak, and I felt a little jealous looking at the mess, at the sloppy way life could unfold, could strike you in insane and beautiful ways that you would sometimes not expect, the way it had struck me that night I’d first met Will.

I sat down across the desk from Grant and stared at him
closely. He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He was gorgeous. I would give Kat that. He had a nice square jaw, an easy manner, deep blue eyes that were a shade lighter than Will’s, and he smelled like a combination of coffee and citrus. “So, Jen, tell me. What made you leave this job?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “My husband wanted to move to Deerfield, and I didn’t feel like the commute.”

“You guys have a bunch of kids?” he asked.

“No.” I frowned, annoyed at being asked this question twice in one morning. Why did kids have to be a measure of everything, success, happiness, failure?

“Oh,” he said. “It’s just—it’s a great job.” I nodded. It was a great job. Amazing. Free dinners, movies, and shows, with very little expected in return except for an opinion on all of the above. “I hear you’ve been looking for some freelance work.”

I knew what he was really asking, whether I was here to try to reclaim the job from him. The truth was, I realized, sitting here again, that I actually didn’t want it. I’d left the job not because we’d moved to the suburbs, because Will became a judge, because Will thought we should have a family soon, but because I’d found the lump. The benign lump. But the lump, all the same.

After the lump, as I’d sat at this desk and typed up my reviews, it hit me that there must be something more, something else for me. This, this job, couldn’t be all there was. Though, I thought now, I still hadn’t exactly found it, whatever else there was for me. For a while I’d thought it had been my deceptively simple life in Deerfield, but maybe deep down, I always knew that wasn’t what it was either. “Don’t worry,” I finally said. “The job’s all yours.”

“I’m not worried,” he said.

“Though you can do me a favor.”

“What’s that?” He leaned in across the desk, so his face was close to mine, almost uncomfortably close, because I could still remember the feel of his lips on Kat’s ear, the feel of his breath on her skin. And thinking about it made me feel nervous and a little bit tingly, the way I’d felt in the dream.

“Stay away from Kat,” I whispered.

“Kat’s a big girl,” he said, sitting back, away from me. “She can take care of herself.”

“What’s that you’re saying about me?” The sound of Kat’s voice from the doorway made me jump, and I turned around and smiled sheepishly.

“She was just asking where you were.” Grant lied easily, in a way that made me distrustful of anything that would come out of his mouth.

“Well, I’m here now.”

“Nice to see you again, Jen.” Grant nodded at me.

I nodded back, but I shot him a look that I hoped would make him think twice about Kat.

Back in Kat’s office, I handed her the folder of announcements. “You didn’t have to come all the way down here for this,” she said.

“I know.” I nodded. “I wanted to see you. I thought we could get lunch.”

“I can’t.” She shook her head. “Fucking lunch meeting with Hank today.”

I made a face. I remembered the lunch meetings with Hank, incessantly long and boring, where he handed out assignments and made fun of people who actually dared to—gasp—eat their lunch while he was talking. It was something
that I didn’t miss, that made me happy not to be a part of this place anymore. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you have a few minutes now? To talk.”

“Not really,” she said, gesturing for me to sit down anyway. “What’s on your mind, hon?”

“You,” I said. “What are you doing, Kat?”

“What?” She looked confused.

“With Grant.”

“What are you talking about?” Her eyes narrowed to slits. “What did he say to you?”

“Nothing,” I said. I almost blurted it out. The truth. The whole truth. About the dreams, about knowing everything now, knowing too much. But there was no way she was going to believe me, and besides, it didn’t matter how I knew, only that I did. “Kat, you have Danny and the kids.” I thought about the way Ara had held on to my watch with her tiny delicate fingers, the way she’d admired my curls, the way her warm body felt snuggled into my lap, and I felt desperately sad for what might happen to her if Kat and Danny split up, if they both buried themselves in work and other people even more, and what it was like to lose one parent, and then lose another. “I’m just worried about you.”

“Jen, look. I appreciate your concern. I really do.” She paused. “But come on, you’ve spent the last four years in some fancy-schmancy suburb with all your rich-bitch friends. Suddenly they’ve had enough of you, and you come running back here?”

“It’s not like that,” I said, though what she said stung, maybe because it was partly true. I’d never meant to leave Kat behind when I left the city, but she became a working mom and I become a woman of Deerfield, and there was not
too much to say to each other the few times a year we did talk, when our calls were filled with awkward slow silences and discussions of things we remembered from the past.

She leaned in closer. “I know you’ve been through some shit this year. Will fucked up. Big time. And you didn’t leave him. Good for you, Saint Jen. But I’m not a fucking saint, okay?” She paused, pulled a cigarette out of her purse, and tapped it on the desk. “Just get out. Get the fuck out of my office.”

I sat on a bench in the train station, Kat’s words echoing in my head.
Saint Jen.
Was that really what she thought of me, that I was a martyr for staying with Will, that there was nothing else there? My head was throbbing and I rubbed my temples, willing the pain to stop.

A little girl, Ara’s age, ran past my feet, dropping her book on the ground. I picked it up as her mother came tumbling after her. “Here.” I handed it to the mother.

“Thank you.” She smiled, scooped up her daughter and the book, and sat on the bench across from me.
“Goodnight Moon,”
the woman read the title of the book.

I closed my eyes, and it hit me in this flash, my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, reading that book to me. I couldn’t have been more than five years old. I could hear the soft, sweet sound of my mother’s voice—a memory that flashed back for only a few seconds and then I knew it would disappear just as quickly.

When I opened my eyes, the woman was gone, and I was sitting in the train station, all alone.

Twenty-three

I
came to the realization that if a moment could change your life, then another one could change it back, just as quickly, just as irreversibly. I would stop taking Ethel’s calming herbs, and the dreams would stop, the windows into other people’s lives would shut.

But without the herbs, I found myself lying awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to the quiet hum of Will’s snore in my ear, and when I finally did fall asleep, my sleep was fitful in short and anxious bursts, so no amount of coffee or jogging could clear the fog from my head the next morning. Midweek, Lisa called and canceled our jog, saying she wasn’t feeling up to it this week, so I stopped going by myself, too. I was too tired for the exercise, and I realized I was feeling even worse off the herbs than I’d felt on them.