After You (4 page)

7

I
don’t think I’m coming home,” I say to Phillip over the telephone, and the six words hang there, across the Atlantic, suspended in the invisible line between us. Once I say them out loud, though, I feel something akin to déjà vu, finally hearing the sentence out loud that’s been playing on repeat in my head.

“Come on, what are you talking about? Of course you’re coming home.” Phillip doesn’t sound mad. He sounds like we are negotiating.

“I can’t, Phillip. Not while Sophie’s like this. She hasn’t said a single word in days.”

“So, what, you’re planning on just picking up and moving there? Permanently?”

“I don’t know. For a while, I guess. I need to be here for her.”

“You can’t make this decision unilaterally.” When words fail him, Phillip turns to investment-bankerspeak. He says things like he’ll
ring me
, and we can
circle back
and
reconvene later to discuss
. We should certainly
think outside the box
here. Maybe
decision-tree our options
. I’ve always found the habit endearing, if only because I spend my workdays teaching business-school students how to talk just like this.

“I don’t have a choice. I made a promise to Lucy,” I say, hoping the tone in my voice will tell him all he needs to know, that being here is the right thing to do.

“Give me a break.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You really believe when Lucy asked you to be Sophie’s godmother she thought it through? Like,
Hmm, if Ellie accepts here, then if I get murdered one random Thursday morning during the school run, now I know Ellie will move to London and take care of things. Phew, that’s a load off my mind
. You really think that’s what she thought? Need I remind you that Sophie has a father?” His voice has gotten louder and faster, tinged with the slightest edge of fear. He is not shouting—Phillip doesn’t shout—but that doesn’t mean his words don’t erupt. This shouting without shouting is a powerful weapon. One that’s not in my own arsenal of self-expression.

“Do you realize how callous you sound?”

“I’m not callous. It’s a tragedy, what happened. No doubt about it. But though Lucy may have been selfish—there is no question about that either—even I think she wasn’t selfish enough to expect you to give up your life if something happened to her. Come on, Ellie, be reasonable.” Phillip’s favorite expression, his fallback position: what is reasonable and rational, or, as he likes to say, “what makes sense.” He sees everything with a clarity—a clarity wrung of all emotion—and then trusts in what he sees. It wouldn’t occur to him that it’s inappropriate to mention Lucy’s selfishness right now, so soon after her passing. In his mind, her selfishness is a fact, and to state otherwise, regardless of the circumstances, would be akin to lying. And what could be wrong with speaking the truth out loud?

“Phillip, you be reasonable. You always talk about doing the right thing; well, there’s clearly a right thing here.”

“I think you’re taking this godmother thing a little too literally.”

How do I tell him that Sophie needs a glass of water before bed and that I leave it on her nightstand; that, still, despite all evidence that it will go untouched, the glass of water feels like the most important work I’ve ever done. That Greg is not even home from the office yet and won’t see his daughter today. That the things that bound Lucy and Greg together—their cold, diffident mothers, their dead fathers—have left Sophie alone. That Greg’s mother is at her home in the south of France, because that’s where she “summers,” though I think it should be illegal to turn seasons into verbs. That Lucy’s mother lives in San Francisco now with her new multimillionaire husband, and though she flew in this weekend for the funeral, she left the next morning, giving Sophie a typed list of contact numbers and e-mail addresses and false-sounding promises that she’ll visit again soon. That even Sophie’s nannies have left, after having been fired by Greg for their petty theft and nasty indiscretion. That there is no one else but me to read her
The Secret Garden
.

“She needs me. Sophie needs me.”

“I need you, El. How many times do I have to say it?”

“Phillip, please. I have to do this.”

“Ellie? One question,” he says.

I pause to take a breath, gather myself. I know where this is going, and I don’t want to go there.

“Is this about Oliver?”

“No,” I say, keeping my voice flat, devoid of emotion. “No, this is about Lucy, and this is about Sophie. This is about their family. Not ours.”

I have had two big love affairs in my thirty-five years, and both were with Phillip. Sometimes, when I think back to those times, of being so infatuated I couldn’t see anything else but him, I can almost distinguish between the first and the second time, between young PhillipandEllie and older PhillipandEllie, though the memories and our photographs from both eras contain the same patina of shamelessness: saying words you should never say aloud, like
forever
or
no, I love you more
or
to the moon and back, babe, to the moon and back
. We didn’t hear when strangers shouted at us to get a room. Didn’t notice as our coupled friends started calling less and less and our single friends stopped calling altogether. We were too busy finally realizing what all
the fuss—
the music, the art, the
everything-everything
—was all about.

The first time, in college, we were too young to know any better. To know that you can’t spend a lifetime staring into each other’s eyes. Ours was an unsustainable kind of love, and when Phillip graduated two years before I did, we combusted. I cried, he cried, both of us reveling in the delicious brutality of our first heartbreak. And eventually we both stopped crying and started sleeping with other people.

And that was that.

The second time, almost a decade later, we were old enough to know that you can’t just discount those hormones. I like to tell people that when I saw him, all those years later, on the packed train home to Boston, I knew immediately I was going to marry him. But that’s a lie. In reality, I knew I was going to kiss him again and that it was going to change me, though I couldn’t have told you how. He likes to tell people that the very first time he spotted me, braiding my hair into neat rows as I studied in a carrel in the library, he knew that I was The One. But that’s a lie too. I think he realized then that he might just spend the rest of his life, like we all do, chasing after that feeling of certainty.

Less than two years after remeeting, Phillip and I got married in my father’s backyard, not too far from where we live now. We had a white tent, with white lights, and I carried calla lilies, like you see in the magazines. Afterward, we always described the wedding as beautiful. And it was beautiful, as all weddings are where two people who love each other get up there and make promises that they hope to keep.

After Oliver was born and lost, all at once, the two events one and the same, Lucy had said, “Don’t worry, you’ll have another,” which was the exact wrong thing to say. My baby had died in the womb—had died inside me
—
with less than one month to our due date, and that’s all she could come up with: “Don’t worry, you’ll have another.”

Even amid the overdose of grief and numbness, I remember thinking I hadn’t expected this from Lucy, for her to somehow utter the sentence I was least ready to hear. Not from Lucy, who had given birth to her perfect little Sophie, who even as an infant, fresh from Lucy’s body, looked exactly like her mother, beautiful and so alive. Not from Lucy, who had given birth to a child whom I loved immediately, because loving her was the same as loving her mother. And so she said the exact wrong thing, and until this week I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to forgive her.

Phillip, though, was the one who spoke the truth, and that hurt more than anything else. What he said was: “I think this may be harder for you than it is for me.”

And then a year later: “It’s time to put this behind us.”

But it was harder for me and there’s never been time. And I wish I had the nerve to tell him the truth:
You don’t understand, and I don’t
think you ever will, and maybe that’s unforgivable too
.

“This is about me wanting to,
needing
to, be here for Sophie,” I say now, bringing us back to the real subject before we careen even further off course.

“What about your job?” Phillip asks, back to the practicalities.

“I don’t have to go back till after Labor Day, when the fall semester starts, and then maybe I’ll take a sabbatical. I think the university will survive without me.” Since I stepped off the tenure track last year, my work feels like more of a hobby than a career. Something that I do to fill time, not to fill me.

“And money? What are we going to do about that? Did you know that London is the number one most expensive city in the world?”

“I’ll stay here at the house for a while, so no extra rent, and if that doesn’t work, you know I have savings.” My savings were supposed to be for Oliver’s college tuition, or maybe private school, if we had decided to go that route. My comforting bank balance, the product of a short and lucky stint during the dot-com craze. These days, I teach a business-school class about entrepreneurship, though I’m not sure how long they’ll let me capitalize on long-stale work experiences.

“So I guess you have it all figured out, then.” A statement, not a question.

“Not really. I’m just going to take it day by day and see what happens. I may be home soon. I’m not sure.”

“And I’m supposed to just wait here, not knowing when my wife is coming back?”

“I know I’m asking a lot, Phillip. I know that. But I need to be here. Can’t you understand that?”

“No, I really can’t.”

“Can you at least try to understand?”

“Okay, I can do that. I’ll try.” And here’s the thing about Phillip. Just when you think you may stop loving him, that you can give him up for good, that enough distance has grown between you that there is no climbing back into this thing, that he’s become more stranger than husband, he goes and says something that makes you forget why you could have ever doubted him in the first place: “Of course, I can try for you.”

8

I
’m analyzing whether to vote for Kelly or Stephanie, who are both up for eviction on
Big Brother UK
—an important decision, since it will cost me two dollars to vote and both deserve to be kicked off the show—when my real-life brother, Mikey, calls.

“You need to get a cell phone. And I know it’s safe in Notting Hill or wherever, but you make me nervous. Your senses have long been dulled by the suburbs. This is a big city. You need to protect yourself,” Mikey says, as usual all sincerity. “Remind me to show you how to hold your bag on the tube, and I’ll buy you a thing of Mace.”

“I’m fine. Don’t be ridiculous. Anyhow, I was going to borrow Lucy’s cell phone, but that seemed … I don’t know … weird. Tomorrow I’ll get one of those pay-as-you-go thingamajigs.”

“So is it really true? You’re planning on staying? Phil asked me to talk some sense into you, but—and don’t tell him I said this—I think it would be great if you stayed for a bit. I could use the company.”

My little brother, who’s thirty-two, is getting his PhD at the London School of Economics. He spent his twenties teaching tenth-grade history in Roxbury and then, after seeing one drug deal too many in the hallways, decided he really needed to understand why a fifteen-year-old girl would think she had no other option than to peddle crack. And so now he works with the world’s leading expert on the intersection between poverty, addiction, and crime. He lives the life of the scholar, my brother, and has the social life of a monk.

“I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m not going home just yet.”

“Can I take you to lunch tomorrow, then? I’ll even come to you.”

“You okay, Mikey? You
never
want to hang out with me.”

“That’s because you’re usually three thousand two hundred eighty-three and a half miles away. Seems a long way to go for lunch.” Typical that my brother knows it’s exactly 3,283½ miles between 11 Lexington Road, Sharon, Massachusetts, and 349 Nottingham Court, Flat B, London. He’s also read all six novels of the
Dune
series, can tell you the capital of Belarus, has traced our family tree back ten generations and made a poster-sized diagram for all of us for Hanukkah last year, collects antique stamps and baseball cards, and, at night, after he has finished his research for the day, plays his Sony PlayStation with a headset, so he can compete against his best friend from high school, who has six kids and lives on a farm in Georgia. He’s had only one girlfriend that I’ve actually met, and she was both awkward and sweet and would have benefited from owning a pair of tweezers.

The irony is, after surviving the indignities and clichés of the high school dork—glasses and science fiction and acne—he has now surpassed us all to win the crown of the best-looking Lerner. I have always been attractive enough, not stunning like Lucy, who always captured the room, and not pockmarked like Mikey was either. I tend to fall right in the middle, that place where you are neither ridiculed nor noticed, in some ways, the safest place to be. Now I’m cursed with the fine lines around my mouth endemic to mid-thirty-somethings who are afraid of Botox, a deep crevice of blue under my eyes, and, let’s face it, my breasts and ass aren’t what they were, even five years ago. And Mikey has turned handsome and shaggy and has these blue eyes that lack any genetic sense, as he is fond of reminding my mother. Come to think of it, I am not sure why he hasn’t had a girlfriend in a while.

“Lunch it is, then,” I say.

“How’s Soph? She seemed to be reasonably okay at the funeral.”

“She’s stopped talking altogether.”

“Poor kid. I’m glad she has you. By the way, I spoke to Mom yesterday, and she had news.”

“No, please say it ain’t so. Not again. They can’t be.”

“Sorry, but it’s true. Mom and Dad are dating again.”

“Shit.”

“Yup, that’s exactly what I said.”