Landline (28 page)

“You do?”

“Yes. Neal, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I
want
you to take that for granted. I
will
love you no matter what.”

Georgie felt herself sliding out of control again. “Don’t say that. Take it back.”

“No.”

“Take it back.”

“You’re crazy,” he said. “No.”

“If you say that, it’s like you’re telling me that all the insensitive things I do are okay. It’s like you’re just handing me ‘no matter what.’ You’re pre-pardoning me.”

“That’s what love is, Georgie. Accidental damage protection.”

“No, Neal. I don’t deserve that. And it isn’t even true. Because if I had that, already, you wouldn’t have left.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. The
s
in “sorry” slurred, like his mouth was pressed against the phone. “I won’t leave again.”

“You will,” she said. “And it’ll be my fault.”

“Jesus, Georgie. You’re all over the place. I can’t talk to you if you’re going to be like this.”

“Well, I’m
going
to be like this. I’m going to be worse than this.”

“I’m getting off the phone,” he said.

She shook her head.
“No.”

“Then we’re starting over.”

“No!”

“Yes. We’re starting this whole conversation over.” He still wasn’t shouting, but his voice was building like something that was about to blow.

“I don’t want to,” she panted. “It doesn’t work. Everything bad and everything good has already happened.”

“I’m going to hang up now, Georgie. And we’re both going to take some deep breaths. And when I call back, we’re
starting over.
”

“No.”

He did it then.

Neal hung up.

Georgie tried to take a deep breath—it caught in her throat like a millstone.

She dropped the receiver on the hook and wandered out into the hall, to Heather’s bathroom. Georgie hardly recognized her own face in the mirror. She looked pale and witless, a ghost who’d just seen a ghost. She rinsed her face with cold water and sobbed tearlessly into her hands.

So this was how Georgie talked her husband into proposing to her. By practically begging him not to. By finally freaking the fuck out.

Neal would be freaking out, too, if he was the one with a magic phone. . . .

Neal
did
have a magic phone, and he didn’t even realize it.

God, why had she said all those horrible things? Georgie looked in the mirror again. At the woman Neal had ended up with.

She’d said them because they were true.

Georgie went back to the bedroom and looked down at the yellow phone.

She picked up the receiver and listened for the dial tone, then dropped it on the floor and climbed into bed.

That noise the phone makes when you leave it off the hook? It stops after a while.

W
hen Georgie woke up, she couldn’t believe she’d fallen asleep. (How could she have fallen asleep? She’d probably fall asleep during an air raid.) She sat up and looked at the clock, 9
A.M.
, then at the phone splayed out on the carpet.

What had she done?

She crawled out of bed, hands first, hanging the phone up before she even landed on the floor. It took a few tries and a few minutes before she got a dial tone again. Then she dialed Neal’s house impatiently, catching her finger in the next number before the dial had completely unwound. . . .

Busy signal.

What had she done?

Neal’s mom must be on the phone. Or his dad.
(Jesus. His dad.)

Georgie thought about how you used to be able to break into someone’s call, if you had an emergency. You could call the operator and she’d interrupt. That had happened to Georgie once in high school, before they got call waiting; one of her mom’s friends needed to get in touch with her mom, and Georgie had been on the phone for two hours with Ludy. When the operator cut in, Georgie felt like it was the voice of God. It took a while before she could talk on the phone again without imagining that the operator was there listening.

She hung up the phone and tried again. Still busy.

She hung up—and it rang.

Georgie jerked the receiver back to her ear. “Hello?”

“It’s just me,” Heather said.
“I’m calling from inside the house.”

“I’m fine,” Georgie said.

“I can tell. Fine people are always telling everybody how fine they are.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m leaving in a little bit, and Mom wants you to come out for breakfast and say good-bye. She’s making French toast.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“She says depressed people need to be reminded to eat and bathe. So you should also probably take a shower.”

“Okay,” Georgie said.

“Okay, bye,” Heather said. “Love you.”

“Love you, bye.”

“But you’re actually coming out to say good-bye, too, right?”

“Yes,” Georgie said, “bye.”

“Love you, bye.”

Georgie hung up and tried Neal’s number again. Busy.

She looked over at the clock—five after nine. What time would Neal have to leave Omaha if he was going to drive to California by tomorrow morning? What time had he gotten here that Christmas Day?

She couldn’t remember. The week they were broken up was a weepy blur. A weepy blur fifteen years in her rearview mirror.

Georgie picked up the phone again.
One, four, oh, two . . .

Four, five, three . . .

Four, three, three, one . . .

Busy.

“Take a shower!” her mom shouted down the hall. “I’m making French toast!”

“Coming!” Georgie yelled at the door.

She crawled over to her closet and started pulling things out.

Rollerblades. Wrapping paper. Stacks of old
Spoons.

At the back of the closet was a red and green box meant for Christmas ornaments. Georgie had written
SAVE
in big letters on every side with a black Sharpie. She pulled it out and opened the lid, kneeling on the floor next to it.

The box was completely full of papers. Georgie had started a second Save Box after she and Neal got married (it was at their house somewhere, in the attic), but by then, she had a computer and the Internet, and all her saves became bookmarks and screenshots—jpegs that she dragged onto her desktop, then forgot about, or lost the next time her hard drive failed. Georgie never printed out photos anymore. If she wanted to look at old Christmas pictures, she had to go searching through memory cards. They had a box of videotapes from when Alice was a baby that they couldn’t even watch because the cassettes didn’t fit into any of their machines.

Everything at the top of this Save Box was from just before Georgie moved out of her mom’s house. Just before her and Neal’s wedding. (
Which has already happened
, she reminded herself.)

She found the receipt for her wedding dress—three hundred dollars, used, from a consignment store.

“I hope whoever wore it first is happy,”
Georgie’d said to Neal.
“I don’t want leftover bad-marriage mojo.”

“It doesn’t matter,”
Neal said.
“We’re going to be so happy, we’ll neutralize it.”

He
was
happy then. During their engagement. She’d never seen him so happy.

As soon as Georgie said yes, as soon as the ring was on her finger—it stopped at the second knuckle of her ring finger, so he slipped it onto her pinkie—Neal jumped up and hugged her. He was smiling so big, his dimples reached theretofore unknown depths.

He held her by the base of her spine and the back of her neck, and kissed her face all over. “Marry me,” he kept saying. “Marry me, Georgie.”

She kept saying yes.

The memory was fuzzy in her head now, which seemed impossible—how could she have let any of those details go? At some point, her brain must have taken the whole scene for granted. She and Neal were so fundamentally married now, it didn’t seem important how they got there.

She remembered that he was happy. She remembered the way he cupped the back of her head and said,
“From this moment onward. From every moment onward.”

God
—had Neal really said that? Had she really only half-understood her own proposal?

Georgie dug back into the Save Box in earnest. . . .

Her college diploma.

Some stupid chart she’d torn out of
Spy
magazine.

The last
Stop the Sun
strip. The one where Neal’s dapper little hedgehog went to heaven.

Ah—there.
Polaroids.

Georgie’s mom was the last person on earth to give up her Polaroid camera; she’d always lacked the follow-through to get 35-millimeter film developed.

There were three snapshots in the box from the day Neal proposed—all three taken inside the house, in front of the Christmas tree. Georgie was wearing a baggy T-shirt from her high school improv group that said
NOW, GO
!—and she looked like she’d spent the whole week crying. (Because she had.) Neal was wearing rumpled flannel and had been driving through the night. But still, they both looked so young and fresh. Skinny Georgie. Chubby Neal.

Only one of the pictures was in focus: Georgie rolling her eyes and holding her hand up to show the too-small ring, and Neal grinning. This might be the only photo ever taken of Neal grinning. This might be the only time he’d ever grinned. When he smiled big like that, his ears stuck out at the top and the bottom, like wrong-facing parentheses.

After these photos were taken, Georgie’s mom had forced pancakes on Neal, and he’d admitted that he’d gone the last two nights without sleep.
“I pulled over for a few hours in Nevada, I think.”
Georgie dragged him to her room and pushed him onto the bed, taking off his shoes and his belt, and unbuttoning his jeans, so she could rub his hips and his stomach and the small of his back. She burrowed with him under her comforter.

“Marry me,”
he kept saying.

“I will,”
she kept answering.

“I think I can live without you,”
he said, like it was something he’d spent twenty-seven hours thinking about,
“but it won’t be any kind of life.”

Georgie laid the Polaroids out on the floor. Three moments in motion. There he was—there he was happy and hopeful. Her Neal. The right one.

“Georgie!” her mom shouted. “Come on!”

She laid the photos out on the floor and waited for them to go black.

H
er mom opened the bedroom door without knocking and walked in. “I was coming,” Georgie said.

“Too late,” her mom replied. “We’re driving Heather out to Dr. Wisner’s now.”

Georgie always forgot that Heather had a different last name. They all had different last names. Her mom was Lyons, Heather was Wisner, Georgie was McCool. Georgie’d wanted to be Grafton, but Neal wouldn’t let her.
“You don’t come into this world with a name like Georgie McCool and throw it away on the first pretty face.”

“You’re not that pretty.”

“Georgie McCool. Are you kidding me—you’re a Bond girl. You can’t change your name.”

“But I’m going to be your wife.”

“I know. And I don’t need you to change anything.”

“Have you talked to the girls today?” her mom asked.

“Not yet,” Georgie said. “I talked to them yesterday.”

Had
she talked to the girls yesterday? Yes. Alice. Something about
Star Wars
. No . . . that was a voice mail.

Had she talked to them the day before?

“You should just come along with us,” her mom said, “for the ride. The fresh air will do you good.”

“I better stay,” Georgie said. “Neal might call.”

What would it mean if he called now? That he was still in Nebraska? That all bets were off?

“Bring your phone,” her mom said.

Georgie just shook her head.

Her mom settled down onto the floor next to her. She and Georgie were wearing matching lounge pants. Her mom’s were teal, Georgie’s were pink. Her mom reached over Georgie’s lap and picked up one of the Polaroids—a blurry one of Neal looking at Georgie and Georgie looking off camera.

“God, do you remember that?” her mom sighed. “That boy drove halfway across the country in one day; I don’t think he even stopped for coffee. He’s always been king of the grand gesture, hasn’t he?”

Down on one knee. Waiting outside Seth’s frat house. Inking cherry blossoms across her shoulders.

He always had.

Her mom set down the photo and squeezed Georgie’s velveteen knee, shaking it a little. “It’s going to get better,” her mom said. “It’s just like those commercials say. ‘It gets better.’”

“Are you talking about that campaign for gay kids?”

“It doesn’t matter what it’s for. It’s true about everything. I know you feel awful now; you’re right in the thick of it. And it’s probably going to get worse—I don’t know how you’re going to work this out with the girls. But time heals all wounds, Georgie, every single one of them. You just have to get through this. Someday you and Neal will both be happier. You just have to survive, and give it time.”

She started kissing Georgie’s face. Georgie tried not to flinch away. (And failed.) Her mom sighed again and stood up. “There’s French toast for you in the kitchen. And plenty of leftover pizza . . .”

Georgie nodded.

Her mom stopped at the door. “Do you think if I give my ‘it gets better’ speech to your sister, she’ll admit she has a girlfriend?”

Georgie almost laughed. “She doesn’t think you know.”

“I didn’t,” her mom said. “Kendrick kept telling me, ever since she wore that suit to Homecoming, but I told him it was perfectly normal for a busty girl to want to de-emphasize her curves. Look at you—you’re not gay.”