Slow Dancing on Price's Pier (42 page)

“What are you thinking about?” Lori asked, smiling in her playful way.

He picked up his fork. “My brother. He's gone down to D.C. for a while.”

“Are you close with him?” Lori asked.

“Yes.” He wasn't sure how much he should share with her. They didn't know each other very well yet, and he didn't want to rush things. He liked the idea of keeping the conversation light. And yet it weighed on him—what he'd done. It sat heavy on his chest and heart. “My brother's in love with Thea,” he said.

Her pale eyebrows lifted. “For how long?”

Jonathan thought it over. “Since forever, just about. Since we were kids—before Thea and I got married, anyway.”

She stopped eating to give him her full attention. “Is that why he went to D.C.? Because he couldn't stand to be around her?”

“That and he couldn't stand to be around me. I told him . . .” Jonathan swallowed. Saying aloud what he'd done made him sound like a terrible person. And yet what he'd done seemed so very justified in his mind. “I told him if he wanted to be with her, I wouldn't count him as my brother anymore.”

“Oh,” she said, a little breathless. “Well, I understand you must've been angry. She
is
your ex-wife.”

“Yes.”

She pushed a chickpea around her plate. “Do you still love her?”

“Of course,” Jonathan said. “When we were separating, I'd always imagined us staying friends. It's what we both wanted.”

“But you don't still . . . you know . . .”

“Oh, no,” Jonathan said. “It isn't like that.”

Lori reached for his hand. “It's not really my place to have an opinion, but maybe it's time you let her go. You can't hold on to love and
not
hold on to it at the same time. It doesn't work that way.”

“It's less about me and Thea than it is about me and Garret,” he said. “He betrayed me. He went behind my back.”

“But you said he's loved her forever.” She frowned, an expression he so seldom saw. “Did you know he loved Thea when you married her?”

“Deep down? Maybe. I don't know. I guess I did.”

“Then you know what he feels like,” she said, and she pulled her hand away. “Be careful with your family. Don't take them for granted. You have to show them that you love them. Every day. Because you just don't know what tomorrow will bring.”

“I know,” he said, and he shifted in his seat. He really hadn't wanted to talk about this. And yet he felt a little bit better. Since the day Garret had essentially asked permission to see Thea, his pride had been smarting with the injury. He worried he would look foolish—to his friends, his family, to everyone in town—if Garret started dating Thea again. He was still angry, but he would have to think about it. What he was feeling toward Lori was thrilling and fantastic, and it was nothing like what he'd ever felt with Thea. It hurt to think this was how Garret and Thea might have felt, at some point, before Jonathan got in their way.

“Enough about my family,” he said, smiling. “Tell me about yours. Brothers and sisters? Or at least a dog?”

She laughed, and he knew she was as willing to drop the subject as easily as she had been willing to pick it up. “I have seven brothers and sisters, and I'm the youngest.”

He swallowed a bit of eggplant. “Why do I have the feeling this is going to take a while?” he said.

 

 

Like Garret's condo in Providence, the hotel room had a nice love seat. A flat-screen TV. Like his condo, it had a stove, a microwave, a kitchen table. It had a bathroom fan that hummed when he turned on the light. Like his condo, the hotel room had a dresser where he folded his sweaters, a closet where he lined up his shoes, and a pillow where he rested his head and dreamed. But that's where the similarities ended. His hotel room was not his home.

Fall crept slowly toward winter, and he filled his hours with long, long workdays. Mornings when he could not sleep, he got up early and dragged himself to the gym for the relief of breathlessness and sweat. In the evenings he went with coworkers to happy hour, and when happy hour was over, he often walked home, even though he was sober enough to drive. The hotel room waited for him—its perfect lamps, its little bottles of shampoo and lotion that were replaced by a housekeeper he never saw, its soundproof silence.

Once before, he'd known what it was to lose Thea—and yet he hadn't known at all. When he was a young man and he'd lost her, what he'd lost was the potential of their future together, their hypothetical, projected lives as lovers, partners, parents, and friends. His notions of an adult relationship had been hazy and vague at best.

But now, this second time, he knew what he'd lost. He'd seen what a good mother Thea was—the way she might have cared for and loved the children they would never have. He'd known what it was like to talk through problems with her, to fight with her—and he wanted her even then. Worst of all, he now knew what it was like to be loved by her, fully, completely, as an adult. He'd thought he would be able to withstand this second loss more easily than the first one. But he'd been wrong.

At night, he turned on the television and flipped mindlessly through the channels, waiting to get tired and wondering what he was missing back in Newport. He wanted to be there for the most important moments of Thea's life—moments as big as weddings and funerals, moments as small as holding her hand during a commercial that made her cry. He rented a movie and realized ten minutes later that he'd already seen it before.

In the morning, the phone rang and startled him out of bed—his heart racing with hope. But an unfamiliar voice greeted him. A wake-up call. He sat on the side of his bed, stymied by the prospect of the day, exactly the same as the one before.

 

 

The moment Thea heard Irina's cry, she knew something had gone wrong. There was something in her child's voice that was different than a cry for attention, for a refill of juice, for the answer to a question. What Thea heard was panic. Terror. Maybe pain.

Later, she would rationalize how strange it was when the unexpected occurred—how quickly—and not—a person could react in the middle of a boring weekday, when nothing much ever happened, and nothing was expected to go wrong.

She shut off the espresso machine mid-drink, and she hurried back to her office, where she'd left Irina to do her homework, and where Irina had cried for Thea to come quick. Her mind constructed possible scenarios: perhaps Irina had pinched her finger in a drawer. Perhaps she'd hit her head. But when Thea made the sharp turn midway down the hall that put her in her office, what she saw made her freeze.

“I'm sor-reeeeeey!” Irina said, tears streaming down her face. “Mom—”

Thea sprang into action. The garbage was on fire, a thick column of smoke rising out of it like a geyser. Without thinking, she grabbed the entire metal garbage bin so she could get it out of the coffee shop as quickly as possible. But she hadn't calculated the heat—she smelled her skin burning before she felt it, and then came the pain. Instinctively, she dropped the garbage, and when the contents of it spilled across the floor, the fire did too—catching the paper in her recycling bin through the silver wire mesh.

She grabbed Irina's hand with her good one. “Come on!” She pulled her daughter down the hall, shouting as she went. “Claudine, Tenke—get out! Everyone, get out! Call the fire department! Now!”

Two customers left their drinks on the table. One left her dollars crumpled on the counter. Thea picked up Irina and handed her to Claudine. “Take her. Get away from the building and call the fire department!”

“But—”

Thea reached for the fire extinguisher that was on the wall, and she prayed it would work. She'd never had to use it before. “Go!”

Claudine hurried out; Thea barely heard Irina's hysterical cries over Claudine's shoulder. She took a deep breath as she made her way back down the hall. Already it was filling with smoke—it smelled sweet, woodsy. It burned her throat and made her cough, but she squinted through it and read the directions on the fire extinguisher. She pulled the pin, tested it. A plume of feathery white rushed out.

Steeling herself, she fast rounded the corner to look into her office, thinking of all the people in the wharf area, of how close and old the buildings were, how the wooden beams and rafters were dry as kindling, and thinking
aim at the base of the fire.

But there was no base—at least no single base that she might weaken as if pulling up a weed by its roots. She coughed, her eyes teared. The fire had spread. Going on instinct, she blanketed the room in white, the wheeze of the fire extinguisher barely a whisper against the crackling roar of the fire itself. Her desk was burning. Irina's chalkboard was burning. Her filing cabinets were burning. Dolls, crayons, printers, fax machines, and her computer were melting. And the blizzard of snowy spray that rushed from the fire extinguisher did little more than if she were attempting to fight off an intruder by tickling him.

She didn't realize how badly she was coughing. How she couldn't quite breathe. She forced her way into the room, thinking that if she could get closer to the fire, she could put it out. But the fire extinguisher had died—some part of the back of her mind realized that it had only lasted a few moments, though it had felt like an eternity. She dropped it but never heard it hit the ground. She groped for the door behind her. It was gone, swallowed by smoke. Instinct led her toward it, her hands reaching out zombielike, and she thought she was in the hallway. She turned left, heading toward the public part of the coffee shop—her espresso machine and cash register, the closet where Irina had first learned to play hide-and-seek, the tables and chairs that her parents had bought decades ago . . .

She prayed the fire wouldn't spread, that the other shops on the pier would be spared, that no one would be hurt, that the fire department would arrive fast—

For a moment, she thought the smoke was clearing. She could see the end of the hallway. Clear air. But then, without warning, darkness closed in, darkness that was not smoke but something else, and though she fought against it, fought hard, willing her weakening legs to move one after the other, her own strength seemed to have been split and sapped by the same fire that had turned her father's accounting desk into char, and at the very end of the hallway, her last glimpse of her life was the door leading out of the coffee shop and the thought that she should have told Irina that she loved her before Claudine had carried her away.

 

 

Garret had nearly hit
ignore
on his cell phone. He was about to walk into a meeting. But something within urged him to answer his brother's call. He stopped in the hallway, watching his colleagues file past him into the boardroom.

“Garret?”

“What's up, Jon?”

“I'm sorry. Please. There's been an accident. Garret—you need to come home.”

“Is it Dad?”

“No, Gare. It's Thea. The shop is burning down. We think she's inside.”

Disbelief was instant and fleeting. Thea was in trouble—and here he was, hundreds of miles away. He didn't think for another moment about the meeting, didn't think to tell anyone why he was walking down the hallway in the other direction. Everything that had seemed so important a moment ago suddenly meant nothing.

“Tell me what's happening,” he said.

 

 

In the days after Thea had told Garret about her parents' plans to move back to Turkey—the plans that would keep her from spending her senior year in Newport—the three of them walked out to the edge of the pier, past the old lobster market and as far away from land as they could get. On a park bench, Thea sat between the boys—the boy she loved in secret and the boy she called her best friend. It was a mild autumn day, and the press of their shoulders on either side kept her warm.

They meant to reassure her:
Don't worry. We'll think of something. You don't have to move away
. Jonathan had suggested they talk to her parents, to reason with them, to ask them to stay and depend on them to know it was the right thing to do. Garret had suggested that they get an apartment together: Jonathan could sign the lease since he was eighteen, and they could pool their money to pay the rent. Thea had wondered if any friendship could be as meaningful and companionable and loving as theirs. And she'd put her arms around the two of them, because there were no words to say thanks.

“Promise me,” she told them. “Even if I have to move away, promise that nothing will ever come between us.”

Jonathan's eyes were warm. “Nothing and no one.”

“Not even an ocean,” Garret said.

 

 

Thea woke in the ambulance, jostled by potholes and speed. She looked around at strangers—a young Asian man with a mustache and a woman with her light-colored hair pulled back so tight she might not have had hair at all. “Irin—” She coughed, tears streaming from her gritty eyes. She smelled smoke in her clothes. “Irina? Where is she?”

“She's fine,” the man—nearly a boy—said. “Just relax. We're taking you to the hospital to get checked out.”

“I'm okay,” she said. She realized that the girl was holding the hand that she'd burned, wrapping it in gauze, and she wondered how odd it was that she couldn't really feel it hurting. Maybe she hadn't been hurt that badly. Or maybe it was the adrenaline. Either way, she had bigger things on her mind. “Where's Irina? What happened to the shop?”