Results May Vary (20 page)

He made a wry face. “Yeah, but Rose is…let's just say a sex discussion with Rose is not going to be any less embarrassing than one with me.”

“Well, you still have some time to figure it out. If all else fails, you can buy them one of those books, throw it in the room with them, and lock the door.”

“Believe me, that's about what I'm planning on,” he said.

“Just as long as you give them the talk way before you even think they'll need it. I think dads tend toward a certain…inaccuracy about that sort of thing.”

He flipped onto his side again, facing me. “How old were
you
?”

“The first time I had sex?”

He nodded.

“Seventeen.”

He pursed his lips, clearly torn between the sense that this was perfectly normal for the grown woman he was sleeping with, yet alarmingly young-sounding for either of his daughters.

“It was fine,” I assured him, grinning. “
I
was fine. Hell, we even got married. Although, actually, scratch that. Maybe marrying the first guy you sleep with isn't such a sterling idea.”

He leaned in to kiss me, like he always did whenever I made some deprecating remark about my marriage. “I don't think I knew that about you,” he said. “I knew you were together a long time, but high school, wow.”

“Yeah. Adam cited that as one of the reasons he imploded.
He never got to explore who he was without me, let alone with another person.
” I heard the bitter, mocking tone of my voice and I despised it. “Anyway, he's exploring now.” I paused for a moment, but remembered the promise I had made to myself, and, though unspoken, to Neil: total truth. “It was Patrick, by the way. That Adam had the affair with.”

Neil blinked, twice. “Who's Patrick?”

“Patrick Timothy. Rubinowitz,” I added, as a matter of spite. “I found out about it at the gallery opening when I realized the guy Patrick was kissing in one of his photos had a very familiar birthmark.”

“Shit,” Neil said softly. “No wonder you didn't want to try to exhibit him.” He shifted closer and pressed a lingering kiss to my shoulder. “I have to tell you, I thought about you a couple of times. Before we were dating.”

“You thought about me? What does that mean?”

“In the sexy way,” he said, a soft laugh in his voice. He trailed more kisses down my arm. “Like, I saw you at work looking hot, and then I went home and jerked off while I thought about having sex with you.”

Surprise and self-consciousness flushed my skin with heat, but he kept going. “The first time, I hated myself for thinking of someone else instead of Eva. It felt like a betrayal. And then I came in the next day and there you were again. Laughing, and talking to me. I'd always thought you were so beautiful, and then your sister posted that cute photo of you two with your Jason masks, and I realized I just
liked
you. And for the first time it felt like maybe it was better…if I didn't think about sex with Eva. Because here was someone who was actually alive.”

I cupped my palm against his cheek and kissed him, slow.

He eased me back onto the pillow to give himself better access to what he wanted. “I obviously never expected to have the opportunity to act on it,” he said, resuming his chain of kisses along my shoulder. “I would never have wished for Adam to do what he did. But since he did do it…”

The thought of Adam felt very distant now. “I agree with you,” I said. “Since he did do it, I am enjoying a lot of benefits.”

“I'm very happy to be your silver lining,” he said, and lowered his head to kiss me in earnest.

“Daddy?”

The tiny voice brushed against me in my sleep, like a soap bubble. “Daddy,” it peeped again, and I groaned in protest, but Neil was already stirring. The room was still dark. The doorknob rattled, but didn't turn, and I barely had time to feel grateful for Neil's foresight in locking it before the voice outside escalated into a panicked wail.

“I'm right here, baby, just hang on a second,” he called, whipping his jeans up his legs and tugging on his T-shirt, but the door rattled harder and the wailing intensified.

“Sorry,” he whispered to me with a pained grimace, then opened the door to the small banshee melting down in the hallway. He pulled it closed again behind him, but I could still hear his voice as he soothed her.

“Clara, sweetheart, I'm right here. I'm right here, I've got you.”

“I couldn't find you, Daddy!” she sobbed. “Where did you go?”

I flinched. Oh, how that must have raked him.

“Sweetheart, I didn't go anywhere, I was just asleep. I woke up as soon as you called me. And here I am, see?”

“But I couldn't get to you, I couldn't find you.”

“Baby, that's only 'cause I locked the door,” he explained. “I was right on the other side, like I am every night. Like I will be always. Now, what's wrong? Why did you come to get me?”

“I made the bed wet again,” she snuffled.

“Is that all? That's no big deal, baby. Come on, let's go find you some clean sheets.”

The crisis seeming to have been averted, I sighed out my breath and sagged back onto my pillow. The malevolent red numbers on Neil's alarm clock stated it was 5:54 in the morning. I had no idea what to do. Should I get up and help him? He seemed to have it well under control, but I felt a little useless just lying there.

A few minutes later, he shuffled back into the room, scuffing a hand over his head and yawning. “Clara's back down, but now Annie's up. And when Annie's up, she stays up. So that means I'm up,” he said, leaning across the bed to kiss me. “But you should stay here. I'll try to keep her quiet so you can sleep.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and Caroline?” he said as he straightened. “As much as I love having you naked in my bed, PJs would probably not be a bad decision.”

I stared at him and slowly shook my head. “Neil, I didn't bring PJs to your house.”

“Right,” he said, nodding once as if remembering something. “Of course you didn't.” He crossed to his dresser and pulled out a T-shirt and a pair of plaid flannel PJ bottoms.

“Plaid,” I muttered as they landed in my lap. “Damn New Englander.”

“Damn New Yorker,” he said. “You think the plaid is bad? I could have given you my Brady jersey.” He winked at me as the door closed behind him.

I'd like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion….

—Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera

I woke again to an explosion of giggles as a herd of very small elephants thundered barefoot down the hallway.

“Annie, your turn!” A squeal, then more giggling. Then more elephants.

I squinted one eye at the clock: 7:37. It was still pretty painful, considering we hadn't gone to sleep until after two, but at least the sun was up.

As I extracted myself from under the covers, I heard Neil's voice.

“Guys! I told you, no running. You can play in your room, but you cannot play out here.”

“But whyyyyyy?” It had to be Clara.

“Because I said so. Enough.”

The sounds drifted away again, but I was up. I needed some sort of sweatshirt, though: Neil's apartment was chilly now that winter had really settled in. I creaked open a likely looking drawer in the big dresser from which he'd retrieved my PJs, and grinned at what greeted me inside. Gray sweaters, navy sweaters, oatmeal sweaters: The drawer was overflowing with rugged, manly wool. I grabbed the first one off the heap and tugged it over my head. The cuffs were so long they covered my fingertips.

Neil was nowhere in sight when I emerged from his bedroom, so I followed the sounds of muffled laughter down the hall toward the girls' room. The door was ajar, so I knocked and nudged it open a little further. Annie and Clara were sitting in the middle of a large, colorfully striped rug, their Disney dolls strewn around them like victims of a shipwreck.

“Hey, ladies, whatcha doing?” I said.

“We're playing princesses,” announced Annie. “Wanna play?”

“Sure,” I said, settling cross-legged on the floor. Presumably Neil would reappear before long from wherever he'd gone and rescue me.

“Here, you be Belle,” said Annie, thrusting a yellow-gowned brunette toward me. I thought of King Kong with Fay Wray in his fist.

I retrieved Belle from her, but I wasn't sure what precisely one was supposed to
do
when playing princesses, and Annie did not give immediate direction. I studied Belle, who had some severely snarled hair and a permanent expression of dimwitted surprise. Well, I knew what to do with the hair, at least.

“Do you have a brush, so I can brush out her hair?” I asked Annie, but it was Clara who passed it to me, unsmiling.

I tackled Belle's bedhead in silence for a few minutes while Annie chattered. She and Clara seemed to be setting up some sort of tea party for the dolls, and I couldn't help noticing that amid a passel of blondes and redheads, and a couple of brunettes with a hint of a tan, there was only one princess who looked like these two little girls. And not only that, but pinned on the wall above the twin beds on either side of the room were posters of the ethereally blond heroine of the latest merchandise juggernaut disguised as a children's movie. I was absolutely certain that Neil, understandably, despised it, and equally certain that, if Annie and Clara were anything like my other friends' kids collectively, the noble intentions he must have started with had been slowly but helplessly ground down by the glacier-like weight of his daughters' craving for princesses. There was something adorable about that.

I could sense Clara watching me, so I offered her a friendly smile, but the only response was a frown. It was such a peculiar sensation to look at her—her beautiful eyes and the shape of her face were so familiar, it was all Neil—but the hostility made her a stranger.

“Did you sleep here in our house last night?” asked Clara after a while.

Ruh-roh. “Oh…um, yes, I did,” I said.

“You weren't in the office room,” she said. “And I didn't see you on the couch where Uncle Colin sleeps when he stays over. Where did you sleep?”

I pressed down on my panic, reminding myself that this wasn't an inquisition; she was just a little girl and she was curious because I had apparently spent the entire night in her apartment and she had no idea where I had been. I didn't see a way to lie, or a reason to. “Oh, well…I, uh…I slept in your daddy's bedroom.”

The frown deepened. “But that's Daddy's room.”

“It is, you're right. But he said it was okay for me to sleep there.” God damn it, where the hell was Neil?

“That used to be Mommy's room, too. Why did Daddy let you sleep in Mommy's room?”

I was losing ground, quickly. “You know, I think…I think maybe that's something you should talk about with your daddy. And he can tell you about it.”

“What's something she should talk about with me?” said Neil, appearing in the doorway and crossing his arms with a lazy smile. I had never been happier to see him.

“Why
she
slept in you and Mommy's room,” announced Clara, landing hard on each angry syllable.

“Oh, that's easy,” said Neil. He swept some of the flotsam and jetsam out of his way until there was room for him to sit down next to her. “Caroline is my sleepover friend.”

“Your sleepover friend?”

“Yeah.” He selected one of the other abandoned dolls—I think it might have been Ariel the mermaid—and started fastidiously straightening her outfit. “You know how some of the older girls have their friends come and stay over at their house for the night?”

“Yeah…”

“And they sleep in their rooms so they can talk about stu
ff?
”

“Yeah…”

“So that's why Caroline slept over. And every once in a while, I sleep over at her house, too. We're sleepover friends.” As he delivered this coup de grâce, he shot me such an intimate smile that I was sure steam had to be rising from my skin.

“Daddy, can I have a sleepover friend?” asked Annie.

“Sure you can, sweetheart, when you're a little older.”

And exactly how MUCH older depends on which sort of sleepover friend we're talking about,
I thought, unable to repress a smirk.

“All right, princesses,” said Neil. “It's Sunday morning, and you know what Sunday morning means—”

“Pancakes!” shouted Annie, leaping to her feet and charging out the door, her doll dangling wildly from her hand. Clara followed behind, laughing, her concerns about my lurking behavior apparently forgotten for the time being.

“Nice save, sleepover friend,” I said, shimmying against Neil for a kiss as his arm slipped around my waist.

He grinned. “Oh, I had that one ready. I knew that was going to come up sooner rather than later.”

“Pretty
and
smart,” I said, between little nibbling kisses. “And they said it couldn't be done.”

He gave my flannel-clad butt one last lingering rub, then herded me toward the door. “Come on. Pancake time.”

Sunday pancakes, it turned out, were something of an event in the Crenshaw household. Until Neil told them to knock it off, the girls ran laps around the kitchen island like it was the hippodrome; then, once quelled, they sat in their spots at the counter and chattered at him nonstop. He'd clicked on his iPod—a bright, infectiously rhythmic Cuban band this time—and he was punctuating his movements around the kitchen in time to the music. I don't think he even realized he was doing it, but it was cute as all hell. And the actual pancakes themselves were no ordinary pancakes—these were made with lemon juice and ricotta cheese, moist and delicious, drizzled with maple syrup from a farm in Vermont a few miles from where he'd grown up.

“Daddy makes us different pancakes every single week,” bragged Clara. “These ones are my favorite, but I also like the pumpkin ones—”

“Chocolate chip!” bellowed Annie.

“And blueberry, and banana, and cinnamon apple…”

“Wow, Neil,” I said, but the extensive repertoire was only part of the reason I was so impressed. He'd created this ritual for them, so they'd have something to look forward to every week, something delicious and fun and sweet. And repetition would engrave it into memory. One happy one, from what otherwise had to have been a pretty damn sad space of time in their lives.

The following weekend, I arrived at Neil's on Saturday afternoon bearing an overnight bag, nightgowns for each of the girls (I was clearly not above bribery), and a puffy pink sleeping bag emblazoned with the whole gaggle of princesses all over the front.

“Who's
that
for?” demanded Clara, after they had each unwrapped their own gift. She was eyeing the sleeping bag covetously.

“Oh, that's for me,” I said, shooting an arch smile at Neil. “For my sleepover with your daddy.”

It was worth the twenty-nine dollars at Target just to hear his delighted, dirty laugh.

“I brought PJs too,” I told him between kisses a few hours later, when we were finally alone in his room.

“You didn't have to; I got you some.” He jerked his chin at the bed. Neatly folded on top of the duvet was a set of fuzzy gray pajamas spangled with the New England Patriots logo in red, white, and blue.

“You,” I muttered, my voice rippling with the effort not to laugh, “you are a fucking asshole.”

“Enemy territory, baby, I told you that,” he murmured as he whisked my shirt over my head.

The next morning was as sweet as the one the week before. I was beginning to feel like I had stepped out of my own life and into somebody else's. Eating pancakes in another woman's kitchen, watching her kids giggle as they licked maple syrup off their lips. Having sex with her husband in the bed she had picked out for them from the Crate and Barrel catalog. I felt dirty, like I had stolen something that didn't belong to me, and I was going to get away with it—because the rightful owner of all of it was gone forever under the snowfall blanketing East Lawn Cemetery.

Neil had told me he suspected she would rather have been cremated, but he thought it would be easier for the girls if there was a proper grave. So they could bring tulips to her resting place. And trace their little fingers over the grooves in the stone that spelled the letters of her name, like sightless hands mapping an unseen face. I thought of him, dizzy with grief, having to answer this massively important question that had never occurred to him even two hours earlier. But he'd made the right decision; I was sure that, given the circumstances, Eva would have agreed. So there she was…and here I was. Slipping into her life like it was a jacket I'd mistakenly taken from a restaurant coatroom.

I stepped over to Neil, who was pouring a second round of batter onto the griddle, draped my arm around his back, and craned upward to plant a kiss on his jaw. But instead of turning toward me, he flinched away as if my arm were a strand of seaweed that'd clung to him in the ocean. He darted a glance at the girls, who were in their usual spots at the island. Annie was chewing complacently, cheeks stretched around an ambitious mouthful of pancake, but Clara had storm clouds gathering in her small face.

Ah.

I dove toward the refrigerator to hide my burning cheeks between its doors. Of course, I should have realized. Sleepover friend really and truly meant
friend.
Neil, otherwise a remarkably intelligent man, seemed to genuinely expect his kids to believe I was in the exact same category of adult as, say, his best friend, Colin—with the sole (peculiar) exception of my sleeping location.

After breakfast, I dodged into Neil's room to grab my things while he was occupied with the girls. If this had been Adam, I wouldn't have hesitated to speak up; whether I was upset over something real or something stupid, I always knew I could let it fly, and he would give me a fair hearing. Not to mention, love me the same at the end of it.

But I had no desire to discuss what'd happened with Neil. It was going to lead to a Talk involving a lot of things I didn't feel like hearing, things I'd known since the beginning—but I didn't want him to feel he had to say them. As if I needed letting down gently. As if I'd been taking this seriously. At all.

“I should get going,” I said when I returned to the kitchen, with a convincingly relaxed smile. “I'll see you at work tomorrow. Bye, girls, have a fun rest of the day!”

Neil's hands paused on the cast-iron griddle he was scrubbing. It had to have been a wedding present, just like my Dutch oven. “You're leaving?”

“Yeah, I've got a lot of housework to catch up on. Glamorous, I know.”

“I'll walk you out,” he said, setting down the sponge, but I shook my head.

“No, it's okay,” I said, as I backed down the hallway toward the door. Past the wall covered with photos of the Crenshaw family. “I'll see you later.”

“Stop—just hold on a second.”

He got exactly four steps before Clara yelled for him.

“In a moment, Clara.”

Then Annie. “Daddy, c'mere!”

He made a “Shit, sorry” grimace and froze.

“You better see to that,” I said, still smiling my creepily cheerful smile.

“Why are you in such a rush? Just give me five minutes.”

Impatience tightened my voice, and I didn't try to stop it. “Neil, I have a lot to do. I'll see you tomorrow. May the Pats lose badly.”

It was my signature parting line, and I said it to demonstrate my good humor. But as soon as the door closed behind me, I gave a groan of pure relief.

Well. So much for my guilt over easing into Eva Crenshaw's stolen life; her husband didn't even want me touching him in front of their children. He might be screwing me in private, but apparently even the mildest outward gesture of affection was crossing over a line I hadn't realized was there. He was two little people's father, and clearly he was still very much someone else's husband. He always would be.

God, how I missed my own. I missed
my own.