She couldn’t find either one of them. She couldn’t figure out which one she wanted to find.
She wanted to find Goody.
She wanted to find Pick.
She wanted to find Pick.
She wanted to find Goody.
The more she debated with herself, the more Laura came to know that finding either one of them wasn’t what this was about. She was what this was about. Her choices. Her decisions. And how, at certain times in life, everything can turn on which choice you make. Everything.
Will you not get this one simple idea? Will you just repeat, and repeat, and repeat?
Her own life, she felt, had turned more on the bad decisions than the good—how far, really, did she have to look, how much further than the last few hours? She kissed a man who wasn’t her husband. She offered herself up to leave with him—she actually thought seriously about how to deal with the kids. So where, in the Pantheon of all her decisions, was the one she’d just made two hours ago? Mommy’s going away for a little. Dad will take care of you. And Grandma and Grandpa will come down. Any questions? Don’t forget we love you, so much.
If Goody had taught her anything, if only by example, it was the futility of running. Because it doesn’t matter where you go—if you’re running from something, it stays right with you. Every separate flight brings you right back to where you are. And there’s no such thing as a finish line, there’s only more running—until finally, one day, in one way or another, the running runs out.
And if Pick had taught her anything, if only by example, it was the futility of standing up to the wind and expecting somehow that it won’t blow you over. That fighting harder doesn’t always lead to winning, and that the sharpest sword in all of creation is useless, if there’s nothing to swing at but air. Laura remembered reading once, that a warrior’s greatest weapon is his love; at the time she had a hard time getting that, but now she was beginning to understand—when there’s love, real love, there’s nothing out there to swing at, there’s no need to carry the sword. No one wins a fight, she’d told Andy; triumphs are all temporary, and so are defeats. Everything changes, everything becomes its opposite. It’s the decisions we make, that make the difference. It’s the choices. She knew that now.
She felt her body shaking—an unfamiliar shiver, deep from her core, as if it started in her capillaries and was building out from there. The curtain was pulled now, and she could see it: how she had been fooling herself, even cheating herself, by holding space for Goody all this time. He was her escape; he had been that all along. He was her Get Out of Jail Free card—on long winter nights when she and Pick weren’t speaking, on summer drives in the car where the tension was thicker than humidity, Laura would dial into the What If ? world of imagining life with Goody. How he would understand her intuitively. How his patience would be infinite. How his love would be rock steady and never waver.
She remembered her first apartment, back in Chincoteague; more like a fitted-out screen porch than anything else, all two tiny rooms of it, but her first home all to herself. She remembered how the previous tenants had painted it some awful shade of brownish red, or reddish brown, with possibly some green thrown in—the kind of job that can only be inspired by bad taste and cocaine, in equally grand amounts—and how she’d decided to paint over it, and learned the hard way that you can’t do that, you have to strip off the old paint first, otherwise it’ll rise up and poke its way through the new color and there goes all your work. Laura had done herself wrong, she realized, and she’d done Pick wrong and the kids as well, by letting Goody in the mix the way she did; by holding Goody out as her own personal safety zone, she had made them all unsafe. And she had to face it—if things had been the other way around, if Pick had been doing what she’d been doing, Laura would know exactly what to call it.
Exactly what it’s called.
She was headed back up to the waiting room when she saw Goody. He came out of a men’s room, carrying his satchel, dressed the same but looking different somehow. There was something more serious about him; something that meant business. And Laura saw, now, the person he had become—as if the younger Goody was the early prototype, and before her now was the result of years of development and painstaking care. She remembered a piece she’d read about quantum physics, about how a particle can be two places at the same time, but you can’t see it travel from one place to the other. The best she could do at the time was accept this to be true, because physicists had come up with it, and because physicists are not known for being wrong about something, once they’ve worked it all out and announced it. Still though, she couldn’t get her mind around it, and understand it the way they did—you can’t be here if you’re there, and you can’t be there if you’re here. Also, wherever you are, you have to get there from the place you were just before. And yet here was this entirely other universe, deeply infused with our own, where you could be two places at once, and you didn’t have to get there. Every universe has its own set of rules, she thought. Nothing says you have to understand it. Things just are.
But now. With Goody, like this, Laura saw him in two places at once. And then two became five and five became a dozen and then even more. It was like seeing every slide in a slideshow, each at the same time and with equal clarity. You didn’t have to take your eyes off one to see the other, you could see them all and with every detail, and every memory that went along with them. And every part of that was completely normal somehow.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” Goody said back.
She felt shy all of a sudden. A teenager, on a first date, at the mall. “You, um …”
“I was in the chapel,” he told her. “Pick found me.”
“Oh,” Laura said.
“He won’t be long. I think he just—”
“Stewart, we can’t.”
Goody stopped, looked at her.
“We can’t,” Laura said again.
“I know,” Goody said finally.
“You do?”
Goody nodded. “He loves you,” he told her. “He doesn’t know how to say it. He’s terrified.”
“Me too,” Laura admitted. Wondering, one last time, if mutual terror is a place from which to begin things, or end them.
“I’ve done this before,” Goody said. “I know what it’s like.”
“What?” Laura wondered, “You’ve done what before?”
“Gone without you,” Goody replied. “I’ve gone without you. I do it every day. So I know what it’s like.” He looked at Laura. “Pick won’t be able to do that. And he shouldn’t have to.”
Laura took a long deep breath. “Is that enough of a reason?” she asked.
“It is for me,” Goody said. And the way he said it brought a whole encyclopedia of other reasons, none of which needed to be said; Laura understood, and agreed, with every last one.
“Me too,” she concluded. “it’s enough for me too.”
Watching him, Laura remembered a line from his book, one of the many passages that would never, ever leave her, describing his heartbreak back then, and the loss. Like whooshing down a mineshaft, the line went, faster and faster, where all it gets is darker, until it’s black as ink and the breeze going by becomes ice. She wondered if that was happening now. If so, she could tell him that she finally knew what it felt like.
“You all right?” Goody asked.
Laura nodded. She could see the affection. And the hurt, and the concern, the weight. And she knew it exactly mirrored her own. They saw straight into each other’s heart.
“Okay then. I’ll see you upstairs,” Goody said. Then he turned for the elevator.
“Stewart—”
Goody turned. Looked at her one more time. “Walking,” he pointed out. “Not running.” Then he turned again, and went the rest of the way. Carrying his satchel as if he were catching the 5:05 to Massapequa. As if he did that every day.
An older couple came off the elevator, stepping slowly; the husband gripping his I.V. on wheels, like a coat rack. His wife, her hand on his back, listening while he explained the different colored lines on the floor to her, and what each color was assigned to and where it went. He was telling her that earlier in the day he had asked, but nobody knew how the colors were decided on—just that at some point they were. He was curious to know if the same colors meant the same things everywhere, or did each different hospital just choose for itself? But no one had been able to tell him.
“Flora Pankow’s a nurse,” his wife was saying. “Maybe she’ll know.”
“Who’s Flora Pankow?” her husband wanted to know.
“She’s our alternate for bridge. She replaced Helen Parazaider after Helen fell and broke both hips.”
“Both hips?”
“Both hips. We can call her in the morning.”
The wife noticed Laura watching them; she turned to her as they passed. “He’s an engineer,” she told her, and somehow, to Laura, that explained everything. Engineers need to know. They see patterns, they look for structure, and predictability. To be married to one requires things. And to be one, married to someone who isn’t—that requires things too.
These were angels, Laura was convinced, sent to speak to her directly. About what it takes to understand someone, as they are—not as they were or might someday be. What it takes to hold two lives together. What it takes to walk like that, down this antiseptic hallway, parsing out over the meanings of colored lines on the floor. Better and worse, thick and thin, rich and poor, sickness and health and back again, good times and bad, until there’s nothing left before you but death do us part—a slow careful walk down the final runway, pushing your fluids on a pole alongside you. The White Mile. He’s an engineer. She’ll ask Flora in the morning for him. He thanks her. Her hand steadies his back, to keep him from falling.
They got to the end of the hall and turned around. Laura lingered, watching them. Four wide colors, on a floor so shiny you could see their faces looking back. And a quiet and patient promise, to find out what they meant.