Now
Saturday, August 14
Woodstock, New York
I unpacked my laptop, hooked it up to the rental’s Wi-Fi, and briefly checked my email. I was confirmed for the visit with the preschool on Monday and the Forbes interview on Tuesday morning, and the real estate agent had sent a bunch of rental properties for our meeting on Tuesday afternoon. I hopped out of my email and headed for the lawyer’s portal. The site loaded this time, and I typed in my username, tabbed down. Usually the password autopopulated, but it didn’t this time. I ran through my list of go-tos until a red pop-up appeared, telling me I’d been locked out. Christ. I grabbed my phone, dialed the firm’s number, but it went to voicemail. I left a rambling message, trying to explain the situation, then ended the call.
I forced myself to take a deep breath. There was no point in obsessing over it now. George and I had been so clear, so detailed, in our recent communications with each other. This was only a formality.
Still, Henry’s words rang in my head.
George won’t let you go this easy, you know.
Did Henry really have a place here, or was it all a convenient excuse? I navigated over to the search bar, typed “Henry Haywood Woodstock New York.” A few links appeared, and I clicked the first one, to see a photo of Cassandra, with Henry at the Woodstock Film Festival, so tall and glamorous, on his arm, the Cartier Panthère bracelet—her pride and joy—shimmering on her wrist.
I clicked back, found another article.
City Investors Set Sights on the Hudson Valley
It was from the real estate blog of one of the local papers, and it went on for several paragraphs about how the landscape of this part of the Hudson Valley was changing. I read more of the article, unsurprised by the focus on my brother-in-law. This area, in all its progressive crunchiness, would hate someone like him swooping in and buying a bunch of properties, and the blog listed three that were now his—one in Rhinebeck, another in Kerhonkson, the final in Woodstock: 12 Waterfall Way.
I pulled it up on Google Maps. True to Henry’s word, it wasn’t far, just about a block away. You could get there by returning to Tinker Street and heading around the corner or cutting down a side street down the block. Maybe my running into him was nothing more than a coincidence.
I checked the time, then FaceTimed George’s mom, intent on talking to Alex while he was still in a good mood. The two hours leading up to bedtime could be chaotic at best, hell-raising at worst.
It rang three times, and then the call went through. Immediately, I saw my son’s beautiful face, Ruth just behind him. Alex’s cheeks were chubby as a chipmunk’s, and his crooked smile was wide and open. He was delighted to see me.
My heart swelled, and I felt a longing so strong, so powerful, and I knew that what I was doing, coming here, making a good, simple life for him and me, was the absolute right thing.
“Hi, baby,” I said, grinning wide back at him. “Mommy misses you so much.”
Just after seven, I shut the front door behind me, key tucked into the interior of my purse. I’d spent the last two hours, after saying bye-bye to Alex and reminding Ruth that the boy demanded we adapt the lyrics of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” from “like a diamond in the sky” to “like a dinosaur in the sky,” researching my Forbes subject and outlining my interview questions. The sun wasn’t anywhere close to setting on Woodstock, the light, yellow and hazy, still dancing among the leaves and azalea bushes, climbing ivy and wild lilies, the kind that grow on the sides of the roads like cheerful weeds up in Old Forge. The asphalt road was cast in an intricate pattern of shadows, and there was a coolness in the air, sweeping down from the proud mountains in front.
I hovered at the crosswalk, waiting, a bit impatiently, for the parade of Subarus and Volvos to step on the brakes, then crossed and headed toward a gravel-and-grass lot with a hut in the back that sold bagels in the morning and wood-fired pizza in the evening, landscaped to welcome families and young couples up from the city for the weekend. There were picnic tables on one side, stone seats on another, and firepits in the middle, the whole place sprinkled with Instagrammable spare tires and rusted farm machinery.
The menu was absurd, especially for a place that was all to-go—twenty-six dollars for a smallish pizza covered in “locally foraged” mushrooms—but I put it on my credit card anyway, as well as a glass of wine. When they called my name, I grabbed a cardboard box that was steaming out the top and already soaking with grease on the bottom and a generous pour in a plastic cup. I situated myself at a lone table close to one of the firepits, as far removed from the families and couples as I could get. The resolve I’d felt only hours ago, hopping off the phone with Alex, detailing interview questions, faltered as I realized that this would be my life now. On the weekends, when Alex was with George—or, at least, with the nanny—I wouldn’t even have my son as a social buffer. I would have to make new friends. I would maybe even have to date, if I ever wanted to have a partner—or hell, a sex life—again.
It was then that I saw a mom from the baby group I’d joined when I was pregnant with Alex, a little girl with a pixie cut sitting on her lap. They were about twenty feet away, at the edge of one of the firepits, and my shoulders tensed, because I didn’t want to see anyone I knew, didn’t want to explain why I was up here, on my own. My fears, I realized, had been quite real. There was no escaping Brooklyn life, not even here. I would always have to be on, would always be running into people from the city, in a way I never would if I could go all the way back up to Old Forge.
I took a rather large gulp of wine, cool and crisp, and turned my chair to be sure the woman couldn’t see me. For a second, I imagined giving up this entire plan, going back to George, putting all that had happened out of my mind, enjoying all the comfort money brings. I could get Alex into the best elementary school, I could join the PTA, I could do the sorts of things that rich women were supposed to do—become Pilates-instructor certified, join the board of the Brooklyn Museum. I could really work on George, get him to buy me my own Cartier bracelet, the simple Love one in warm rose gold, the only one of Cassandra’s I’d ever coveted.
I could make friends in Brooklyn, friends who weren’t Willa. That were nothing like Willa, or Annie, or whoever she was. Then I would never have to explain to perfect women like the one across the way that my whole life had fallen apart. I wouldn’t have to be up here, halfway between my life in Brooklyn and my family in Old Forge, completely untethered, without anyone to rely on.
I opened the pizza box and took a first bite. I was about to start the book I’d been meaning to read when my phone buzzed.
It was my sister, Rachel.
Hope you’re enjoying your week in Woodstock. Mom is doing well, though mostly still armchair-bound. Can’t wait for you to be back in nature and to have you and little nephew-kins oh so much closer xx
Between bites of pizza, I wrote Rachel back.
Thanks so much for taking care of her. Can’t wait to be closer to you and Mom. Love you.
I tapped out of my messages, but with the phone in my hand, wine on my tongue, I found myself losing my earlier resolve to put Willa out of my mind. I took another sip and opened Google instead. What if she lived here now? What if, among the Brooklyn moms up all the time from the city, I was destined to run into her, too?
I started a new search and keyed in my best guess at Willa’s full name, “Willa Walton.”
I’d done it before, so I skipped past the hits I knew had nothing to do with her. An obituary for an older woman in Kansas. A lady with a custom hat business on Etsy. A grandmother who’d set up a GoFundMe for her grandson’s medical bills—Jesus. Records from OfficialLocator.com that promised to provide me with an address and phone number in Half Moon Bay, California, if I only signed up for the affordable price of $19.95 a month. None of these people were my Willa.
I finished my first slice and dug into another. The real problem here was that I didn’t even know if Willa Walton was right. We’d never used last names with each other, had been on a first-name basis from the start, but I’d seen the last name Walton on the credit card that last night we’d had margaritas, and that was all I had to go on. I had no idea whether she’d actually taken her husband’s name; I didn’t even know if she and Jack were properly married, since I’d never seen a ring on her finger, but that alone didn’t mean much. So many women I knew in Brooklyn had these massive rocks that they left home for things like the playground. The whole I don’t take off my ring, not even for a minute felt passé, like something our moms would do.
Still, with nothing else to go on, I poked around a bit more, looking for Willas on Facebook, Instagram, and even Park Slope Parents, a behemoth of a message board that Brooklyn parents relied on. But there were no matches, of course, and so I sighed, finished the last of the wine, and tapped into my texts instead, began to type Willa a message.
I know you obviously don’t want to talk to me, but I wish you hadn’t lied to me. I know that was you this afternoon.
The text delivered instantly, and I set my phone down, knowing she probably wouldn’t respond, but leaving it open to that screen in case she did.
I gobbled down more pizza and convinced myself I didn’t need any more wine.
And then, only moments after I’d sent the text, three dots appeared. Willa was typing.
I waited like that, five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen . . .
The dots went away, almost like they had never appeared at all.
I was finishing up my last slice of pizza, and the mom from my baby group was finally gone, when I looked up from my book, and there was Willa.
She pushed a stroller along on the road, maybe a hundred feet up and to my left, walking next to a man who was tall and skinny, with shaggy hair, a thick brown beard, and a faded T-shirt, the words MEDICARE FOR ALL emblazoned across the front. A crunchy socialist, really? The guy couldn’t be further from Jack Senior if you tried. I looked down at my dinner, at the pages of my book, and when I looked back up I saw the two of them stop to grab something from the bottom of the stroller.
Should I attempt another encounter? Tell her I knew it was her, that I knew she’d seen my text, insist she be straight with me?
Willa and the man started walking again, and making a split-second decision, I dropped the crust of my pizza, shut the cardboard box, flicked my book closed, and abandoned my seat before I could stop myself. I scrambled around a firepit, up a dirt path, and onto the sidewalk.
With Willa only twenty feet or so ahead, I considered running to catch her, but then two little arms stretched lazily from the top of the stroller, and I lost my nerve. I was a mother, for Christ sake. Was I really going to go accost Willa when this little girl—whoever she was—was probably trying to sleep? But that didn’t mean I couldn’t see where she was going, did it? After all, the sun still hadn’t fully set, the air cool and crisp, the mountains standing proudly to my right; I was nothing more than a woman on a walk through town.
Who was this man? Where was Jack Senior? More important, where was Willa’s son? What was really going on here?
I followed them past the old shut-down gas station, one that looked like it could be a setting for Twin Peaks, a vintage Corvette and an eighties Dodge Caravan parked in front of the nonworking pumps like toy cars left behind by a toddler when playtime is over. Past the art and framing shop, nestled in a beautiful white Victorian building. Past the colorful sculpture that looked like a bunch of oversized crayons and a bookstore-slash-crystal-shop that probably had at least ten different tomes on tarot.
We were getting farther from my rental, and a blister was forming on the back of my right foot, but I had to follow, had to learn as much as I could, for my own sanity, if nothing else. Maybe they were going to duck into the parking lot, drive back to a rental—hell, even the city; maybe after today, I would never have to run into Willa, and all her mysteries, again.
She and the man didn’t turn into the parking lot, walking on toward the mountains. We passed a cemetery, headstones lined up neatly, so many souls potentially watching what I was doing, and with every step the feeling got stronger: Willa lived here now, and if she did, what did that mean for me? How could I start anew in a small town where the woman who’d broken my heart was walking around, pretending to be someone else completely?
A few more blocks up, Willa and the man turned, rumbling the stroller over a stone path that led to a lovely home. Navy blue and enormous for a house this close to town. With twin dormers that mimicked the mountain’s peaks and a sweeping front porch that stood bold and boastful, a NO MORE NUKES sign hanging proudly in the window.
The man walked around the front of the stroller to grab it.
I ducked behind a tree, only a handful of yards from the front porch.
Together, they lifted the stroller carefully up the steps, the little girl most definitely asleep within. When they got to the top, the man set it down, then leaned in toward Willa and kissed her.
When he pulled back, he dug into his pocket, pulled out a set of keys, unlocked the door.
The man walked inside, and I knew I would lose her then.
Before I could stop myself, I pulled out my phone, lifted it up between the foliage, took a photo of Willa ushering the stroller inside. Then I tapped into my texts, uploaded the photo, added five imploring words below.
Tell me this isn’t you.
I was exhausted by the time I approached my rental, and the sun had finally set back behind the mountains; the streets were dark now, the nocturnal animals beginning to come out. I heard rustling trash cans when I was a couple of houses away, looked to my right to see a shadow among the bins. I feared it was a bear, something that had been common in Old Forge but was entirely foreign to me now, but was relieved to see it was a raccoon instead, its white stripes catching the moonlight like reflectors.
I stepped into the house, tossed my bag onto the side table, and shut the door behind me, then paused. I scanned my surroundings, my breaths coming faster as I realized something wasn’t right.
There was a light coming from the kitchen—had I left it that way? The sun had still been out when I’d departed for dinner, and no matter how long I’d lived with George and all his gobs of money, I’d never gotten out of the habit of turning the lights off when I left a room, my mom always reminding me and my sister that electricity is expensive and “every penny adds up.”
I stilled myself, listening for movement, and I again scanned the room, seeing if anything else was out of place. Nothing.
I must have left it on, I thought. That was the only explanation.
I took a step forward, then another.
One more step, and I saw it. A flicker of light, but not from a lamp, something different, something like . . . candles.
Oh my god, I thought. Oh my god.
There were two flickering taper candles on the table, surrounding a silver ice bucket with a foil-tipped bottle of Krug bobbing within.
I looked up to see a shadow in the corner, and for a terrifying moment, I thought of Henry, the way he always got so drunk, how Cassandra had once told me he could be mean when he was angry.
The figure moved toward me, and I froze, too scared to scream, my veins pulsing, sweat prickling the back of my neck.
Then he stepped into the light, and it wasn’t Henry. It was George. Before I could say a word, his hands were on my shoulders, and he was leaning in, and I could smell the subtle hints of his aftershave and the salty scent of his skin.
“It’s okay,” George said, rubbing the sides of my shoulders. “It’s okay, baby. Don’t be scared. It’s just me.”
I looked up to my husband, so handsome and self-assured, who looked so much like Henry but whose features had always been softer, kinder somehow, his hair slightly more curly, his eyes gray instead of blue.
My stomach roiled with fear, with confusion, with shock. “What are . . . what are you doing here?”
He leaned in for a kiss, and I didn’t return it, but I didn’t push him away either, I was so very thrown.
Then he plastered on his George smile, the one that had won him so very many things, myself included.
“I hope you liked the flowers.”