The Guy Not Taken (22 page)

•   •   •

But that night, Drew was working late again, and, after she’d wiped down the countertops and sponged dried oatmeal from Zeke’s breakfast off the floor, Marlie found herself back on
WeddingWishes.com
, rolling her eyes over Bob and Karen’s towels and polyester-blend tablecloths. Before long, not even that was enough, and some dark impulse led her to stick one of Bob’s old mix tapes into the stereo and click back to the log-in page. If you are the bride or groom, click here, she read, as the Cure’s “Why Can’t I Be You?” jangled in the background. She clicked on
GROOM. PLEASE ENTER YOUR PASSWORD
. She held her breath and typed. The whole time she’d known him, Bob’s password had always been Felicity, which was the name of his cat.
VERIFYING
. Then,
WELCOME, BOB. CLICK HERE TO UPDATE REGISTRY,
read the screen. Her heart was pounding as she scrolled through Household Items to find just the thing she wanted, adding it to the list, hitting Update. One Hitachi Magic Wand, with its wonderfully suggestive shape, added to the Morrison/Kravitz wish-list. Heh. But why stop with sex toys?

UPDATE BRIDE’S CONTACT INFORMATION,
invited a link. Marlie
clicked, and there were the address and phone number for Karen Kravitz. Little Miss Help Me Celebrate My New Life with a Food Scale. Marlie cut and pasted Karen’s information into a new window for future research purposes. Maybe she’d forward it to Gwen, who was a whiz on the Internet. Maybe Gwen would get lucky and find a picture . . .

Her fingers froze above the keyboard as another idea occurred to her. Quickly, before she could lose her nerve, she erased Karen Kravitz’s name and typed in her own.
UPDATE
? the screen asked.
This is crazy,
Marlie thought. But the knowledge of her own insanity didn’t stop her. Maybe once she saw her name and Bob’s together at the top of a wedding registry that now included a food scale, beige china, and a vibrator, the obsession that had taken hold of her since she’d learned that Bob was getting married would loosen its grip, and she’d be herself again, and happy.

She hit Enter. There was a popping noise, as small and unimportant as a soap bubble bursting . . . and her screen went black.

“Oh, no,” she murmured, giving the laptop a little shake. She hit Control-Alt-Delete. Nothing happened. She hit Restart. Still nothing. “No, no, no,” she groaned, yanking out the power cord and plugging it in again. What if she’d broken the computer? And what was going to happen when Bob saw what she’d done to his registry?

She heard Zeke make his little crowing
eh eh eh
noise in the bedroom. She ran into the bedroom, pulled him out of his crib with shaking hands, changed his diaper, nursed him on the couch next to the black-screened laptop, while frantically trying to restart the computer with her free hand and figure out how to tell Drew what had happened. She’d gotten as far as “Honey, I’m really sorry” when she fell asleep.

•   •   •

“Marlie?”

The instant she opened her eyes, she knew something was wrong. The light. The light was wrong. There was too much of it. In his entire life, Zeke had never slept past six in the morning, and the room was too full of light for it to be that early. The light was wrong, the bed felt wrong, and that voice . . .

Marlie rolled over and felt her whole body break out in goose bumps when she saw who was lying next to her. Bob. Bob Morrison, with new wrinkles at the corners of his brown eyes, looking at her with his familiar slanting smile. She sat straight up in the bed—the futon—barely managing to bite back a scream.

“You okay, babe?” The sunlight glinted off the silver threads in his hair, and his hand was warm on her bare shoulder. “You’re not getting cold feet or anything, right?”

“Right,” she managed. Her heart was in her throat, and she could feel her pulse booming in her ears as she slipped one hand underneath her pajama bottoms, feeling for the line of raised flesh. No scar. Hence, no C-section. Ditto, no eighteen pounds of baby weight. And, presumably, no baby.
This is a dream,
she thought, running her hands over her hips and wondering why she had ever thought she was fat before she’d had the baby, or if she’d ever had a dream that felt this real. Everything was so vivid—the feel of the sheets on her bare skin, the faint smell of beeswax candles, the sound of traffic through the windows, even the sour just-woke-up taste in her mouth.

Bob’s hand followed Marlie’s under her waistband. He leaned close and kissed her cheek, then her ear. Marlie shuddered as his beard scraped the tender skin of her neck, feeling a flush of pleasure, which was quickly followed by a full-on wave of guilt. “Bathroom,” she gasped. She tossed back the covers and
hopped out of bed, skidding through a patch of sunlight, and stopped to twirl in front of the bathroom mirror, checking out her prebaby physique from all possible angles.

“Okay,” she whispered in the mirror. “Focus.” It was a dream, brought on by the mishap with the registry and possibly bad sushi. (Hadn’t she thought the toro had tasted iffy?) And even though she could smell the toothpaste and the soap, could feel the slightly damp bath mat under her feet, could hear Bob padding across the floor to come find her, maybe hoping for a quickie in the shower before she headed off to work and he headed off to wherever, it wasn’t real. So it wasn’t cheating.

He eased the door open and looked at her with a familiar gleam in his eyes. “Good morning, sunshine.”

She grinned at him. When she was pregnant, she’d had the most outrageous X-rated dreams, and one of them had started off sort of like this, and had eventually wound up including every guy on
Laguna Beach.

He backed her up against the vanity and kissed her, once, and not for long. Then he reached for his toothbrush. “I need to get out of here.”

“Oh?” This was a dream, she reminded herself. He probably just had to go downstairs, where Stephen, Talen, and Jason were waiting, wearing nothing more than their swimsuits and their smiles. “Where?”

Bob stared at her. “To work,” he said, speaking slowly, as if Marlie had become deaf overnight. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Marlie nodded, looking at her hands. The left one sported an engagement ring. It was a perfectly nice diamond ring. Just not hers.

Bob leaned close and kissed her again. “Tonight,” he said, his voice low and husky. “I’ll make it up to you. Have a good day.” He smiled and went to the closet, where he started getting dressed. “Have a good massage.”

“What?” asked Marlie. Then: “Don’t I need to go to work?”

He was looking at her strangely again. “You took the day off. My mother got you that gift certificate at Bliss. Remember?”

“Oh, right,” she said. She nodded. He nodded, reassured, picked up his coat, and walked out the door. Marlie hugged herself and grinned, skipped back to the bedroom, and flopped onto the down comforter that was still warm from Bob’s body, feeling joy flood through her.
Freedom,
she thought, in the manner of Mel Gibson rallying the Scots in
Braveheart.
Freeeeeedom! And a massage, too. What an excellent dream this was turning out to be.

•   •   •

Marlie spent the afternoon in baby-free bliss: skipping down to the newsstand at the corner, where the guy behind the counter remembered her name and handed her
Us, Star,
and
People
in a big, slippery stack; having a grilled three-cheese sandwich for lunch in the window of her favorite coffee shop; savoring every exquisite, silent moment of her massage. Afterwards Marlie took a taxi back to their old apartment, where she wandered barefoot through the small rooms, admiring her ruby-red toenails and noticing that the dream-Bob—Bob 2.0?—was still in the habit of leaving half-finished cups of coffee on the radiator. But there weren’t any canvases, unfinished or not, propped against the walls. No paintbrushes or paint anywhere, either, no smell of linseed oil or turpentine. Weird, Marlie thought as she opened the closet, trying to see if there were any unstretched canvases in there. No luck . . . but when she slipped her fingers into the pockets of Bob’s winter coat, she found a business card. Robert Morrison, it read. Director of Innovation and New Technology, Morrison Law, LLP. So Bob had broken down and gone to work for his father, as director of innovation and new technology, whatever that was. It gave her a
strange, sad pang. Just for the heck of it, she dialed her own number at New Directions. Instead of her own voice, cheerful and confident, saying
This is Marlie Davidow at New Directions Theater,
there was three-toned chime, then a mechanical voice.
You have reached a nonworking number. If you feel you have reached this recording in error
. . .

Now she felt even sadder, and stranger. Was New Directions still mounting
Uncommon Women and Others
? Who was making follow-up calls to the city’s jaded, cynical theater critics, convincing them that the play wasn’t just a throwback gloss on
Sex and the City
because it involved more than one woman? And how long had she been asleep, anyhow?

She wondered whether Zeke was sleeping, too, or whether he’d woken up and Drew was with him. She tentatively pinched her right arm . . . then, wincing, pinched it harder. Nothing happened.

The logical thing to do would be to fall asleep again and hope that she’d wake up in the right bed (or at least on the couch in the right apartment). But after the first good night’s sleep she’d had in months, dozing off seemed unlikely.

Marlie forced herself to think calmly. If this was a dream, she could wake up. If it was some kind of alternate reality, a glitch in the time-space continuum that had nothing to do with bad sushi and was possibly related to actual magic, she could figure that out, too.

She stood in the center of the room, closed her eyes, and clicked her freshly pumiced heels together. “There’s no place like home,” she said. She opened her eyes. Nope, still Bob’s apartment. She shut her eyes again. “It’s a wonderful life?” She opened her eyes. No dice.

Heart racing, mouth dry, Marlie scanned the room, looking for clues. Bob’s dirty clothes on the floor . . . last Sunday’s newspaper, ditto . . .

Her hands clenched into fists as she stared at the artwork-free wall. Taking a deep breath, she started walking toward it . . . then trotting. She’d worked herself up to a half-decent jog when her forehead made contact.

“Ow! Shit!”

Marlie reeled back, blinking. Her eyes were watering and she saw stars, but beyond the stars she could see that she was still, emphatically, not back home again. Then it hit her. She wiped her eyes and ran to Bob’s laptop, drumming her fingers on the desk and muttering “Come on, come on,” as the cranky dial-up connection stuttered its way online.

HELLO BOB AND MARLIE
! read the log-in screen at Wedding
Wishes.com
.

She clicked on the
BRIDE’S INFORMATION
tab. The screen froze.
SYSTEM ERROR
, it read.
WINDOWS WILL SHUT DOWN
.

“No, no, no!” she hissed. But the connection was broken, and she heard Bob’s feet making their way up the scarred staircase, and his key in the lock.

“Hey!” Bob called, said, coming through the door with a garment bag in one hand and a shoe box in the other. He frowned when he saw that she was barefoot, in her jeans. “We’d better get going. Can’t be late to our own party, right?”

•   •   •

“Here comes the bride!” Bob’s brother Randall called from the doorway of the bar two blocks from their apartment, where Bob and Marlie were regulars. Not because they’d ever liked the place—the bartender was surly, and the jukebox ate their change—but because it had two-dollar pitchers on Monday nights, which made it an affordable option for Bob’s slacker friends.

Marlie winced as Randall enfolded her in a rough hug. Randall had grabbed her boob in the Morrison family dining room after Thanksgiving dinner one year, and then tried to explain
away the gesture as the consequence of overwork and the tryptophan in the turkey, while Marlie had stood there, face flaming, afraid to move lest she bump into one of the many Morrison antiques. She looked over her shoulder for her putative husband-to-be, but Bob had vanished. He always does this, she remembered, feeling the old frustration wash over her. Classic Bob. He’d take her to a family function, promise to stay by her side because he knew that she was shy and that his brother was a boob-grabber, and when she’d turn around he’d be two rooms away watching the football game.

Drew would never,
she thought. Drew could be loud, he was frequently late, he was deeply opinionated, and he was not shy about sharing his beliefs with friends, and even less so with strangers. But at parties, he would take her coat and hold her hand. He’d stick to her side, making sure that her glass was full and that she was part of a conversation. Marlie shook her head, feeling the afternoon’s unease ramping up toward panic. What if she was really still asleep, on the couch, and the baby was awake and she didn’t hear him? Not likely, she knew, but every once in a while Zeke woke up and didn’t cry. She’d walk into the bedroom and find him lying in his crib, staring up at her calmly with his blue-gray eyes like he was waiting for her to tell him a story.

The crowd swept her toward the buffet set up on tables along the back wall. Per usual at Morrison family affairs, there was a surplus of booze and very little food. Bob’s parents were standing by the bar, looking prim and out of place, Mr. Morrison in a sports jacket and Mrs. Morrison in two-hundred-dollar yoga pants and a beaded peasant blouse the likes of which no real peasant could hope to afford. Bob brushed past her, deep in conversation with someone Marlie didn’t recognize. Marlie grabbed his sleeve and he gave her a nonchalant smile.

“Come meet my friends,” he said. He steered her toward the jukebox, where she was introduced to Barb and Barry, from Ultimate Frisbee, and Karen from Morrison Law.

“Karen Kravitz?”

The woman looked startled. “That’s right.” She was of medium height and medium build, in a pale-blue jacket and a pair of unfortunate high-waisted blue jeans. Her hair was light brown, but her eyebrows and eyelashes were so pale and wispy they were practically invisible. “Have we met?”