St. Helena, Napa County, California
September 1999
THE NEXT MORNING, I VENTURED into kieran’s room, where he was still sleeping soundly, then headed downstairs, tightening the knot of my robe. My body buzzed with the memory of Emilia. I wondered if she was thinking about me too. I wanted to see her again, even though it still hurt me to think about betraying David. Even though he had already betrayed me.
I found Josh in the kitchen, hunched over the newspaper, sipping from a mug of coffee. In profile, he looked so much like his father that I almost did a double take.
“Good morning,” I said as he turned around. “Thanks for making coffee.”
“Aunt Camille did,” he said. “She was up with Kieran earlier. She said she was going into town to get groceries.” His eyes dropped back to the newspaper, and I noticed the dark circles ringing them.
“Is everything okay? Camille said you went out with Michelle last night. How did that go?”
“It was fine,” he said, offering up no other details.
“Is she coming by today? She can stay for dinner again—”
“She has practice,” he said shortly. “Says she can’t miss it.”
“Well, tennis is important to her—” I started, but he cut me off.
“It’s our two-month anniversary, though, and it’s just a practice. I thought she’d want to celebrate on the actual day. But I guess since I took her out last night, she thought that was the celebration.” It was a rare burst of emotion. Josh barely spoke to me unless I initiated the conversation.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sure you two will work it out—” I stopped myself from saying anything else. I decided that no advice was better than bad advice.
“Of course we will.” He fixed me with his blue eyes, and I saw a side of Josh he rarely allowed me access to anymore, a reminder that he was sensitive and easily wounded. “We love each other, Mom.”
“Wow,” I said, the admission catching me by surprise. “Love. I mean, it’s so soon, and at your age—”
It was the wrong thing to say. His nostrils flared. “You weren’t much older than me when you met Dad.”
His words felt like a slap across my face. David had been so different from other twenty-year-old boys, so much more mature. But he had done the same thing my father did to my mother. He had cheated.
“I just want you to be careful, and take things slow,” I said instead, making him roll his eyes. It was a benign statement that meant nothing. I suddenly wished David were here. He always said the right thing. Authority came easily to David, in both work and parenthood, while I was constantly searching for the adult in the room before realizing it was me.
“Sure, Mom,” he said, somehow slinging Mom like an insult. When Josh had been entering the toddler years, I’d heard Mama nonstop from his perpetually needy mouth, dual syllables that seemed to carry on like a song stuck on repeat. It morphed into Mommy, soft and sweet and questioning, a little boy with jam-stained dinosaur pajamas and damp ringlets clinging to his neck, always instinctively reaching for my hand to curl snaillike around his own, except my hands were always full. The final iteration, Mom, was as incisive as a stab wound.
When Camille returned from the store, she told me she wanted to take Kieran to the library in town for a baby playgroup she’d seen a flyer for. I gratefully accepted the offer, and after I dropped them off, I drove straight to the Blossom and nosed the Escalade into a vacant parking spot. A shivery sensation flooded my body as I thought about Emilia’s face under the moon, the giddiness of rushing to the barn where we couldn’t be seen. It was like my nerve endings had lain deadened for decades, and had sparked back to life.
Mingled within the excitement was the guilt. There was work to do at the winery, and I should have been with Camille and Kieran, taking my sister around Napa, spending time with my son. And there was David, lodged in the back of my mind. The mystery of what he was doing, where he had gone, why he had ruined everything.
Emilia wasn’t in the tasting room, or milling around like I’d pictured she would be. I walked around the winery looking for her, but she was gone. I was brought back to UC Davis all over again: Emilia’s vacated dorm room. The lyric she slipped under my door the morning she flew to Provence, scrawled in her loopy cursive. But I’ll be back again. It was from a Beatles song; Emilia had loved John Lennon. When he was murdered a couple of years later, I’d thought of her immediately.
The song was unusual and tragic, lacking the popularity of other Beatles hits, but it was Emilia’s favorite, making recurring appearances on the cassette player in her dorm room as she swayed with her eyes closed. Later, I’d gone over the full lyrics, wondering if Emilia had been trying to tell me she loved me every time she played it. If she had been trying to tell me for a long time, and I’d failed to hear her.
My lower back broke out in a sweat as I returned to the driver’s seat of the Escalade, ready to admit defeat, before I heard my name.
“Bev?”
I practically jumped. Emilia strode toward me in a pair of cropped black pants, her hair in a loose bun.
“I should have called first,” I said apologetically. “I just thought… I don’t know what I thought.”
She draped her arms over the window frame. “I have a meeting in an hour, but…” She peered into the Escalade. I glanced back with her and saw what she was seeing. Kieran’s empty car seat. “I forgot you had another baby. David mentioned it, but… Bev Jamieson, with kids.” She shook her head, smiling wryly. “I remember when you said you didn’t want any.”
I remembered saying it. I remembered believing it. I had been stubborn and idealistic, and had been adamant about putting myself first, the way my mother never did. I’d wanted to travel the world, not remain in one place forever.
“Kieran. He’s nine months old… He’s so sweet.” There was a squeezing sensation in my chest. Kieran really was such a sweet baby, and I needed to spend more quality time with him. “What else did David tell you about our family?”
She shrugged. “Nothing I didn’t already know.”
I didn’t want to think about what else she might already know—but no, David wouldn’t have told her anything that would sully our family’s reputation. Suddenly, I didn’t want to think about anything. I didn’t want to think about the questioning blue eyes, the hand falling out of mine, the spirit I’d been about to break.
“Your meeting is in an hour?” I said hopefully, and her eyes flickered up to me, her head tipping in the tiniest nod.
We walked up the stairs to her suite in silence, and I followed Emilia into the palatial bedroom. The door had barely closed before I pressed her against it and kissed her mouth; her cheek; her ear; her throat, the delicate milky skin there. I traveled down her breasts, unbuttoning her silk blouse, teasing her nipple with my tongue, savoring the little gasps that came out of her mouth. Sex with David had been regular but perfunctory, dwindling from twice a week to once before it ground to a total halt.
I unzipped Emilia’s pants and let them fall on the floor at her ankles. This was one of the fantasies I’d had about her: undressing her, unwrapping her like a gift. Everything about Emilia was soft, even softer than I’d imagined. I gently parted her legs and took my time exploring her: with my mouth, with my fingers. Her fingertips migrated into my hair, massaging my scalp as a low groan escaped her throat.
Afterward, she made us tea in the kitchenette of her suite, and we brought it out to the patio, where we watched the spiraling trellises of vines stretching into the southern sun.
“I wasn’t sure if I’d see you again,” she said, at the same time I opened my mouth, my own awkward question tumbling out.
“So, do you have anyone you’re seeing back in New York?”
She laughed, soft curls falling out of her messy bun. “No. It’s difficult with how often I travel. And I guess I just haven’t met the right person yet—someone who made me want to settle down.”
“I settled down with the right person,” I said. “And we still managed to fuck it up.”
Her eyes were downcast. “Do you know who David cheated with?” She paused, her lips forming a rosebud shape. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
I shook my head. “He said I didn’t know the woman, and it happened only one time.”
“Are you going to divorce him?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I know you came from a broken home,” she said, bringing her teacup to her mouth. “But coming from one is better than living in one.”
“But their divorce didn’t make it better,” I said. “Camille and I became their little messengers. They’d fight over us. Use us to pass along information to make each other jealous. The idea of doing that to my kids…” I rubbed my face in my hands, my skin stretching taut. “I’ve done everything possible to not turn into my parents.”
“You haven’t,” Emilia said, reaching for my hand. “You’re a great mom. I can tell by how you talk about them. And I know you love David.”
I did love them, but that love wasn’t enough to make me a great mom. Thinking about my roots—the rotting soil of my dysfunctional family—only exacerbated the distance between loving somebody and actually being good for them.
“I thought about you after graduation,” I said, meeting her eyes. “I heard that you moved to New York, and that you had that sommelier job lined up. I wanted to get in touch, but I didn’t know what I would say. David and I had just gotten engaged, and I was happy, but I missed you.”
Emilia smoothed my wrist with her thumb. “Why do you think I kept in touch with David? He was my friend, and we had wine in common, but we also had something else in common.”
“Me,” I said.
“You.”
Emilia looked at me with a mixture of empathy and curiosity. She took my hand in hers, cradling my fingers in her palm. I read her expressive face. Maybe she wasn’t lost after all.
“Do you think David wants to make things work with you?” Emilia said.
I shrugged. “I think so. Before this, I thought he’d do anything for me.”
I had friends whose marriages had ended. Camille’s had ended too, her heart broken. I’d listened to their stories, aching for the hurt they felt. But I had never once felt afraid that David would do the same to me. Never once had I questioned whether our marriage would meet the same fate. David and I knew everything about each other. We spoke our own shorthand. We were older, but no less in love; our love had mellowed into something deliciously warm and comforting, a climate I hadn’t imagined ever changing.
But he had either believed Josh about Abby or just wanted the problem gone, and I didn’t think the situation had been quite that simple. I had iced him out, pushed his brochures for boarding schools back at him in a huff. We’d had shouting matches I was sure the boys could hear, and I had sobbed afterward as the rage subsided. I was more like Dorothy than I wanted to admit.
In the aftermath, my relationship with David had been like a pond that had frozen over, going from deep to shallow before icing over completely. We skated around the surface, and any time I asked the wrong question or made a probing comment, another hairline crack forked out, threatening to plunge us both under, to a depth that would burst our lungs.
After Emilia left college, I chose a life with David. I loved my life with David, but maybe my feelings for Emilia had always been there, dormant but still existing underneath. Maybe I had always wondered.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Emilia said.
“I’m thinking,” I said, “that maybe you were right about the universe pushing people together when it’s meant to be.”