All of Us and Everything (31 page)

Atty unzipped her fanny pack to get her iPhone so she could Instagram the glass box of boxing squirrels in the front yard of her grandmother's old Victorian on Asbury Avenue, but then she stopped.

She zipped her fanny pack back up. She knelt down and tapped on the glass. “It's going to be okay, fellas,” she said to the stiff squirrels.

She stood up and decided to keep this little moment for herself. She decided to live it and remember it.

Ru drove the station wagon to Fifty-Eighth Street and parked in a tow-away zone. She could see Teddy Whistler standing on the boardwalk. He had, in fact, dressed in a well-tailored blue suit, but his striped necktie was untied, flipping in the breeze—his back to the wedding itself.

She didn't want to tell him what had just happened to her father—and all of them. She wouldn't know where to start. And, about to break up a wedding, he wouldn't be interested in small talk.

Why was she here? To break up the breaking up of a wedding?

He looked earnest in his suit, determined, almost heroic. Ru wondered for a moment if, as a little girl looking down at the young, raging, brokenhearted Teddy Whistler, she'd actually really just wanted to save him. Maybe she'd been the young heroine after all.

When Ru got out of the car, Teddy saw her but didn't wave or say hello. She walked up next to him and looked out at the rows of chairs lined up in the sand, the red aisle, a large white canopy instead of an altar. Some guests had started to arrive.

“When does it start officially?”

“In about half an hour.”

“Don't do it.”

He looked at her, the wind rumpling his hair. “Why not?”

“I just think she deserves—”

“No,” he said. “Why not? The truth this time.”

“I don't know—”

“Do you believe in win-backs or don't you? Do you even remotely believe in what you do? Was it all just a jaded attempt to make money—your Teddy Wilmer win-back?”

Ru didn't like the way her heart felt—riotous. She didn't want to say a goddamn thing. She'd stopped believing in her work, and, once she made the money, she pretended that that had been her intent. It was easier than believing that she'd truly made an impact on people, that she'd given their hearts a shove, made some believe in love again. But she
had
believed; it was why she wrote it all in the first place. Personal honesty. A win-back. She felt like she was being thrust into living her own life. She said, “I don't want you to marry her because I think I'm in love with you.”

He took a step toward her. “And?”

“And I don't have a window to punch, but I guess I was dragged in by the dog, if the dog in this scenario is my family.” Could Teddy Whistler fall in love with her? Was he just trying to make a point?

“I love that metaphorical dog,” Teddy said. “Go on.”

“And Ru Rockwell isn't really Ru Rockwell, but maybe I'd like her to be. Maybe with you she could be.”

His eyes were wet, but it could have been the wind. He let his eyes linger on her lips—waiting to hear what she might say next? Wondering if he should kiss her?

“But what about you, Teddy Whistler? Are you still trying to be a hero? Or will you be the one who's here, the one who stays?” That's how the win-back in the movie ended. It was Teddy Wilmer's line and now it was a question. Ru stopped breathing. Her hands felt tingly.

“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

They took the station wagon and drove out onto the highway. She listened to Teddy's directions, but they were otherwise quiet. She felt like bursting.

Finally, he told her to pull over into a parking lot. “This is where you wanted to take me?” Ru asked.

“Look over there.” He pointed out the windshield.

Ru saw an overpass. Traffic was a little busy but not jammed. “What am I supposed to—”

And then she saw it.
I HEART RU
spray-painted in big red letters on the side of the overpass. They got out of the car.

“Your name's shorter,” Teddy said. “I had enough time.”

“I'd assumed that the last time you'd actually drawn a heart, not written the word
heart.
”

“In retrospect, that would have been considerably faster.” He pulled her into his arms. She put her head on his chest. His heart was pounding away.

“I heart you too, Teddy Whistler.”

“Good,” he said.

“It's just the two of us,” she said and it was. Everything else slid away—an entire universe.

And he leaned down and kissed her. She ran one hand up the back of his neck and through his hair. She felt breathless—like she was looking down at a drunk boy on a lawn from a very tall window, the wind rushing all around her.

It started to rain.

Augusta helped ease Nick onto the double bed in her bedroom.

“You sure you want me in here?” he asked.

“Easier to keep an eye on you,” she said.

“We'll get to tell them everything now, Augusta,” he whispered. “About the night we met in the driving snow and sitting next to you on the bus and the hotels opening their doors up to people on the streets.”

“Who did you assassinate that night?”

“I just stood next to him at the urinal. That was it.”

“But who was it?”

“Maybe a Polish diplomat.”

“We'll tell them it was a Polish diplomat.”

“And the motorcade,” he said, “how it cut across the park in all that mad gusting whiteness. We'll tell them how we fell in love with each other that night.”

“I'm not sure why people don't believe in that anymore, but it happens. Two people fall in love sometimes, and it's sudden.”

“And it never stops,” he said.

“Even when you'd like it to.”

“I never wanted to split up,” he said. “I understood what you meant when you told me you could have gone on but only if you loved me less, but it wasn't what I wanted. What with all the times I should have died, that was what nearly killed me. Do remember saying it?”

“Of course I do. It was the truth then.”

“And now?”

“Everything's different.”

“We can't do it all over again,” he said.

“No, we can't.”

“That's what I regret.”

Rain beaded on the bedroom windows even though the sun was still bright, and Augusta sat on the bed and pushed off her shoes.

“I wasn't planning on taking the bus,” he said. “And then I saw you through the window—your perfect profile—and I started walking fast so I could keep looking at you and then the bus lurched forward and I started running.”

“I knew it was you before I knew you,” she said, lying down beside him. “I felt something, saw your coat flapping out of the corner of my eye.”

“We couldn't have had a little house and a little life.”

“No, we couldn't have. This was all we could do.”

Atty walked into the used-book store and wiped the rain from her face. She walked up to the counter. She was a regular here and the owner, a tan woman named Janice with stiff, shiny blond hair, knew what she wanted.

“We got a few new ones in for you. Bad condition. Real bad, but I didn't toss them because I thought you might want them anyway.”

“Thanks for keeping me in mind,” Atty said.

Janice reached down behind the counter and popped back up with a stack of about ten Nancy Drews—old and waterlogged, their puffed covers and warped pages made them hard to stack. “Might've gone through Sandy, by the looks of them.”

Atty's eyes glided down the spines. The ones she needed were there—twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, and forty-nine. “You got 'em!” she said. “They're all here!”

She lifted the top books off the stack and opened twenty-four.

“They're far from mint,” Janice said. “You might want to keep looking.”

Atty shook her head. “This isn't about the books. It's about the give and take of the universe itself, Janice.”

“Well, these books were well read,” Janice said. “Look at what some kids scribbled in them.” She reached forward and opened the inside of the hardcover.

Atty read what was written there in pencil.

E.R. 3 hours and 10 minutes

L.R. 2 hours and 45 minutes

R.R. 5 hours and 10 minutes, pretty much memorized

These weren't just any copies of Nancy Drew mysteries. These were the Rockwell sisters' originals.

Atty flipped to the front of the other copies and found their initials, their times, and whether or not Ru had memorized the whole thing. Some of Liv's and her mother's marks looked like they'd been erased and then rewritten, perhaps a few times as if the times had been disputed. In those cases, Ru had read the fastest.

“This is it,” Atty told Janice. “These are ours! They were lost, but now they're found!” The store was filled with light even though the rain was still ticking on the roof. Atty felt like this was a golden, hallowed moment.

She thought of Instagramming the books, but this wasn't about other people. This was personal. She hadn't even tweeted about The Amateur Assassins Club and she was pretty sure she wouldn't. She even decided, then and there, that she would go to Europe by herself to confront her father. If her mother didn't start shopping for plane tickets, she'd do it the way her aunt Ru had tracked down the old spy. Atty felt herself suddenly unhitching from the desire to snag the respect of Lionel Chang. The world was a bigger place. Screw you, she thought loudly in her head, as if those telepathic words could shuttle to the Vineyard and find Lionel getting high while lounging in someone's wicker furniture.

“You'll still have to pay for them.”

“Of course I'll pay for them, but, Janice,” Atty said, “it's the universe talking. Don't you hear it?”

“What's it saying exactly?”

“It's saying that it's all going to be okay.”

“Because you found the books?”

“No,” Atty said, looking at the dust motes spinning wildly in the air around them. “It means things are going to work out in the grand scheme. It means things that get taken apart can get put back together.”

“Like what? Book collections?”

She thought, Like a dinged-up high school record, like a childhood, like a family, like our entire lives, like the world, the universe.

And you.

And me.

All of us and everything.

TWO AND A HALF YEARS LATER…

Ru Rockwell is living in Chicago with her fiancé, Teddy Whistler. She has recently turned in a memoir called
The Language of Elephants and Love
to her agent, Maska Gravatz—who loves it—and her editor, Hanby Popper, who's too nervous to discuss it just yet. Ru is expecting a baby in three months; no wedding date is in the offing. In fact, marriage itself doesn't seem all that important. Teddy Whistler and Ru Rockwell sometimes give each other a preemptive win-back, which feels more authentic to them than vows.

Liv Rockwell has opened up a mind–body–spirit dating service called Love Loves You in New Jersey, using a mix of quasi-Buddhism, yoga, and acupuncture—by master acupuncturist Sue Kwok—to prepare her clients for love. And because she tends to overspend, she brought on a more conservative business partner, Esme Rockwell.

Esme lives in Ocean City once again. An empty-nester, she finds having her own place is liberating. After dating Rob Parks (aka Darwin Webber) for a few months, she reconnected with her old friend Todd Wentworth, aka Little-Head Todd, history teacher and antique gun collector. They've been dating, long-distance, for about six months. Esme and her father frequent a dog park together with Ingmar and Toby in tow. Sometimes they talk about important things.

Atty Rockwell wrote a brilliant college essay and now attends a major public university on the East Coast where she studies social media and, as a freshman, has founded three on-campus movements, one of which—Take Time to Tune Out—is extremely successful with three budding chapters on other campuses.

Doug Toomey, Atty Rockwell's estranged father, was insinuated into a threesome by the French dentist who'd fallen in love with Arnaud, a Parisian photographer of some renown. Doug couldn't sustain the intimacy of the threesome and begged out of the relationship. He now works in a private Episcopal school in Indiana. He is trying to regain the trust of his daughter.

Virgil Pedestro has moved out of his childhood bedroom, having converted the third floor of his mother's home into his bachelor's pad.

Mrs. Pedestro remains virtually unchanged.

Clifford Wells and his producing partner have recently had a film project—about a televangelist who turns to drug smuggling—greenlit, but not with Sony.

Bill Huckley took over the care of his father, Herc Huckley—feeding him, bathing him, singing to him—and he was present when, in the middle of the night one month ago, Herc peacefully passed away in his sleep.

Jessamine is in semi-retirement and only comes to work at the Rockwells' house three days a week. Augusta Rockwell, whom she refers to now by her first name, is her closest friend.

Nick Flemming and Augusta Rockwell live together in the house on Asbury Avenue. They are still not married.