Inside (33 page)

Being in New York made her L.A. life feel made up, unreal, and now that she was here, she felt no loyalty to California. She spent the day walking around her old neighborhood, looking in store windows, people-watching. The Midtown hotel seemed like a bad mirage, nothing that had anything to do with her. She was eating egg rolls at
Panda Kitchen when she finally checked her cell phone. There were seventeen new messages, all from various people she hadn’t attended to, about the events and appointments she had blown off. Five were from Adam, asking her to call him as soon as she could. She deleted these without even listening all the way through, and cutting him off mid-sentence gave her no small amount of satisfaction. The last was from Julia, confirming their dinner tonight. Anne texted her that she wouldn’t be able to make it.

She licked the salty residue of the egg rolls off her fingers. She had a photo shoot in the morning and knew she’d get in trouble; too much salt made her lids puffy and gave her skin a creped quality. But maybe she wouldn’t do the photo shoot. Maybe, she thought with a smile, she wouldn’t go back at all.

She didn’t return to the hotel until midnight, and she threw a blanket over the blinking red voice-mail button on the phone and went to sleep. In the morning, she took a cab down to Tribeca for her photo shoot, where her late arrival earned her a cursory, halfhearted scolding from the publicist. They were used to this kind of thing. They dressed her up in a variety of outfits—a spy, an executive, a nurse, and the president of the United States, if the president were very young and a little bit slutty.

The lights beat hot on her face and people were yelling instructions and a woman kept oiling her cleavage, then dusting it with sparkly powder.

Amid the hubbub she became aware, after a while, that Adam was standing in the back, watching with a lazy, proprietary interest. An hour later, he came up as she was removing the many layers of makeup. Her fake eyelashes felt exoskeletal, and she peered at him through their spiky, bristled edges. Outside of L.A. his posturing looked even more ridiculous, his tan incongruous, his teeth strangely uniform, plastic.

“That was hot,” he said. “You’re going to do fine.”

“Why are you here?”

“The show’s going off the air,” he said. “It underperformed.”

He had arranged his features into an expression not of concern or reassurance, or even of a readiness to listen and explain, but of complete neutrality.
Don’t blame me
, it said.
You’re on your own
.

“So that’s it?” she said.

He put a hand on her bare shoulder. “I should’ve canceled the shoot, but there’s this little fucker at the magazine that I’ve been waiting to get back at for years. So now they’ll have to eat the cost. I’m glad you showed up. I thought maybe you were on a bender or something.”

“I don’t do that,” Anne said mechanically. She was out of her pinstriped miniskirt now and slipping on her jeans.

“No, you’re a wholesome girl,” Adam said. “Good luck.”

She cabbed it back to the hotel, where her room had been tidied, her clothes folded, the toiletries replaced. She took a long bath, her skin pruning. When she got out, her cell phone was beeping. There were two messages: the first from Julia, who almost sounded like she was crying. She was sorry about the news, she said, but while she understood that Anne might be upset, the time to get back on the horse was now. It was the most sympathy Anne had ever heard from her, and she was surprised. The second message was from Hilary—there was no doubting the tears in
her
voice—begging for Anne to call back.

She deleted Julia’s message and listened to Hilary’s again. The baby was making noises in the background, and she thought about the baby she’d seen on the street outside her apartment, staring back at her, curious and unafraid. But Hilary’s baby was in a small town that Anne couldn’t picture and would never see.

Suddenly she was crying too, the short, dry sobs shaking her all over, her body shivering involuntarily. There was no one to go to or run away from. What had Neal said—that if you have nothing to mourn, then nothing in your life’s worth anything?

She was dangling at the end of her particular tether.

She spent an hour like that in the dark, sterile room, and she felt dismantled. Ended.

Okay, she finally thought. Okay.

So everything was over, the short wild ride. She called her landlord
in L.A., broke her lease, and told him to sell whatever was left, which wasn’t much. She decided that today she would do one good thing. She rooted around in her purse and wrote out a check to Hilary for the entire amount she’d earned from the TV show, more money than she’d made in her entire life and far more, she was sure, than Hilary had ever imagined. She put the check in an envelope, added the address in Utica, and left it with the concierge to mail.

When she checked out, she was carrying a single bag that was no bigger than the one she had had when she first got to New York. Rinsed of all her trappings, she felt lighthearted and at ease. For years she had been escaping into one life after another, and this wasn’t the time to stop. People like Hilary and Alan were only temporary runaways. They would always go home; they belonged to the place they came from. Other people were destined to keep leaving, over and over again.

ELEVEN
 
 
Montreal, 1996

GRACE DEBATED FOR DAYS whether to even make the trip. What did she expect? She turned it over in her mind, picturing the bestand worst-case scenarios. Eventually she decided to go, because at least she would stop thinking about it and be reckoning with something real.

Tug had never talked much about his hometown or his life there. When Grace spoke of her childhood, which came up naturally every now and again, he’d nod and listen but only rarely reciprocated with stories of his own. Looking back, she understood that this elusiveness had been part of his appeal; he withheld himself, and kept her wanting more.

Knowing this didn’t mean she had stopped feeling that way.

At the funeral, she had stayed in the back and watched his parents—well-dressed, quiet-looking people, his mother in glasses, his father balding, slightly stooped—navigate the service. They didn’t know who she was, or even that she existed, and she wasn’t about to introduce herself then. Perhaps this wasn’t an appropriate time either, but she couldn’t help wanting to go.

The drive to Brantford wound through farm country, with silver
silos and red barns and cows here and there. The day was gray and drizzly. Grace felt a tightening in her chest, her heart seized by the dreary prettiness of the landscape. She crossed from Quebec into Ontario, the farms neat and well tended, the fruit trees black in the rain. Things Tug would never see again.

Feeling sick, she stopped at a gas station and let her stomach empty itself out, as if some interior part of her wanted to escape. Afterward, she sat in the car with the wipers on, their rhythmic sweep soothing her. It was Saturday. There was nowhere she had to be.

Tug’s parents were listed in the phone book, and she pulled up in front of a two-story house, red brick with black shutters, as well kept as the farms she’d passed. His father was a retired chemist; his mother had never worked outside the home. In the years Tug had been abroad, they had always stayed in Brantford, rarely traveling. “They never wanted to see the world,” Tug once said, and the disapproval in his voice rang clear. Now that she’d arrived, Grace was tempted to turn around and drive back to Montreal. Maybe all she’d wanted was to see the childhood home of a man she’d loved, to know that it still existed, some remnant of him in the world.

A woman in a yellow rain slicker walked her dog past the car, frowning in the few seconds she looked at Grace. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where you could just sit in a car without attracting notice. Everybody here must know everybody else, and which cars they drove. Still, she didn’t move. In the warmth of her car, an exhaustion came over her that was strangely close to contentment. Was this enough? Had she already gotten what she’d come for? She turned on the radio, leaned back in her seat, and closed her eyes. The CBC was playing opera, and a woman’s voice tripped light and high through an aria Grace didn’t recognize.

She could sleep here a few minutes, she thought, before going home.

The sound of a door closing made her open her eyes. And there was Tug’s mother, a little old lady stepping down the cobbled pathway that led from the house to the street. Wearing a dark red raincoat, her head bent against the rain, she was clutching her purse to her stomach
as if she, too, felt sick. She was heading for the maroon Honda that Grace had parked behind, but with her head down and the rain starting to fall harder, she wasn’t likely to notice her sitting there. Then the front door opened again and another woman came out—this one blond, pretty, and much younger—and Grace’s stomach bucked again. She had seen Marcie at the funeral service too.

As if she could hear Grace’s thoughts, Marcie glanced down the street at her car. Barely seeming to register the rain, she looked right at Grace, her expression indecipherable. All Grace could think was how pretty she was.

When the wipers swished, clearing the windshield, Marcie’s eyes met Grace’s, and she stepped off the path, walked over to the car, and knocked on the driver’s-side window. And Grace—feeling as though this were a dream—rolled it down.

“I recognize you,” Marcie said. “You were at the service.”

Grace nodded, her tongue gummy and thick. Marcie was waiting for her to say something, her eyebrows knitted.

Swallowing, Grace said, “I was a friend of Tug’s.”

Marcie grimaced. “I’ll bet,” she said.

It wasn’t what Grace was expecting. “Excuse me?” she said.

The other woman glanced at Tug’s mother’s car; the engine was on, the taillights glowing red in the rain. When she looked back at Grace, she shrugged in a strangely airy way. “You know,” she said, “my husband had a lot of friends.”

Grace didn’t know what this meant, and didn’t want to, either. “I see,” she said softly.

“Oh, do you?” Marcie was still standing there bent over, her head down at Grace’s level, a position that couldn’t possibly have been comfortable. Her cheeks were flushed. Rain was dripping into the car. “That’s good,” she went on. “I’m so glad you see.”

Grace flushed now herself. In her grief over Tug, in her need to see where he came from and trace his roots in the world, she had forgotten that those roots were, of course, planted in other people. “I’m sorry to have troubled you,” she said.

“Right,” Marcie said.

Grace wondered what she was doing here, and where she was going
with Tug’s mother. Tug had told her that when the marriage had fallen apart she’d gone to live with her parents in Hudson.

“I’ll be going,” Grace said.

“So soon?” said Marcie. “We just met.”

“What?” Grace said.

“Did you come from Montreal?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Grace had no idea how to answer. All she felt was embarrassment and regret. The woman’s voice was taut with anger, and her eyes burned feverishly. She kept staring at some spot just to the right of Grace. It was as if she knew that Tug had once sat in the passenger seat, slumped against the door.

“I think I’d better go,” Grace said, waiting for Marcie to step back so she could roll up the window and back away. But instead, Marcie moved her head even closer, and Grace could see that her eyes were ringed with dark circles or maybe smeared mascara. In front of them, the taillights on the other car faded, and Tug’s mother got out and walked over.

Marcie straightened up. “Joy,” she said with a bright, false smile, “this woman is a friend of Tug’s.”

Grace was mortified. She hadn’t really planned what she might say to Tug’s parents—if anything—but whatever fantasy existed in her head, this wasn’t it. A sick feeling washed over her like the sudden onset of flu, and she clenched her abdominal muscles and prayed to be delivered from this moment. As the older woman bent down, her face next to Marcie’s, Grace turned her head and retched onto the passenger seat.

“Oh, dear,” said Tug’s mother. “You’d better come in.”

Fifteen minutes later she was sitting on the sofa in Tug’s childhood home, cradling a cup of tea in her hands while three strangers sat around her in postures of fake repose. It was pouring outside, the rain loudly lashing the windows, and Grace was nauseous and hot. No one spoke. Tug’s father, a tall, rangy man with short-cropped
white hair, kept glancing longingly toward the den, where an afternoon hockey game was playing on TV, the sound of the crowd rising and ebbing in the background.

Grace looked around the room. She couldn’t imagine Tug sitting on this furniture or running through this room as a child. The couches were dark pink and flowered, and white vases sprouting plastic flowers sat on doilies on the side tables. Everything smelled of Lysol.

One night, in bed, Grace had told Tug about her divorce, and about how Mitch had moved his things out of their apartment so quickly and thoroughly that she’d felt like she was being robbed. When she saw his frantic packing she resorted to stealing a few small things from his boxes—a photograph of him as a child, a teapot that had belonged to his mother—just so she wouldn’t feel like the entire world they’d built together was disintegrating completely. And then he put his stuff in storage and went off to the Arctic, leaving no phone or contact information, and she felt doubly bereft: both divorced and abandoned. Tug had shrugged. “When you realize you’re in the wrong place,” he’d said, “it makes sense to get out.”