Ginny
I WAS TRYING TO CAPTURE WALT’S RIGHT EAR, THE ONE THAT folds over instead of standing up like a sailboat sail as it’s supposed to, when Harris told me that he was moving out. Or that he had been moving out, little by little, for weeks, slowly shifting his belongings—the bare essentials anyway, since it could be argued (although it seemed Harris had no intention of arguing) that almost every item in our house at least half belonged to him—from our house to the room above the garage to his rented furnished apartment not five miles away, an ebbing away so subtle and slow that I hadn’t even realized it was happening.
Still, I should not have been as surprised as I was, rendered temporarily speechless, my sketching hand frozen midstroke, when he came into the sunroom, a cardboard box in his arms, and said, “This is the last of it, Ginny.”
I sat cross-legged on the rug at eye level with Walt, who had, at that very moment, revealed a previously undiscovered talent for modeling, sitting regal as a New York Public Library lion, paws evenly spaced, head nobly lifted. When Harris and his box made their entrance, Walt didn’t jump up or change position, just opened his bright root beer–brown eyes wider and smiled his incomparable gap-toothed, guileless smile.
“You mean you’re leaving?” I finally managed to say.
“You didn’t know?” he said.
“I— I—” I shook my head. “No.”
Should I have known? We’d been sleeping apart for weeks—no, months—addressing each other cordially whenever one of us slipped into the other’s orbit, which wasn’t even daily. Christmas had been an almost jolly holiday, with Harris coming into the house for gift opening followed by breakfast: Avery’s homemade cinnamon buns—warm, redolent, yeasty, golden, palm-size galaxies—and French press coffee lashed with cream. Harris and I never touched once, not even by accident, but Christmas performed its sleight of hand, nonetheless, magicking us into a happy family and Avery into a dancing-eyed, carol-humming, carefree child.
Mostly, Avery kept her guard up around Harris, and their relationship seemed reduced to homework talk and wooden hugs. I’d watch her face, though, whenever he left, her eyes following him, her gaze staying on the kitchen door, even after he’d shut it behind him.
“You want to set that box down and stay for a minute?” I said.
Harris tensed and then said, “Sure.”
He sat in the blue armchair; I stood up and sat down on the sofa, grateful when Walt settled into my lap, curling himself up like the warm cinnamon bun he was.
“You have an apartment, I guess,” I said.
“I rented it six weeks ago,” said Harris. “I bring boxes over every so often, spend the night there now and then.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I knew you went somewhere, but I didn’t know where.”
“I didn’t want to tell you and Avery until I was sure. As you know”—he smiled ruefully—“I’m not really a guy who makes bold moves or quick decisions. More of a go-slow, test-the-waters type. Cautious.”
“Mostly cautious,” I said, but I smiled back at him.
“And look where that got me,” said Harris.
“Here we two are,” I said. “Joking about what happened. It’s about time.”
Harris said, “I’m so sorry, Ginny. I’d give anything to change what I did.”
“I believe you,” I said.
“Thank you for finding my therapist. He’s helping me see.”
“See what?”
“Myself,” said Harris. “I never did that before, stepped back and really saw myself.”
“What do you see?”
Harris sighed and said, “I am a man who things happen to. School, my job, even you.”
I was tempted to disagree. Maybe it would’ve been kinder. But I said, “Yes.”
“I met you and you were young and gorgeous and interested in me, for reasons that I could not fathom. And I should have tried to fathom them. But instead, I went with it, with you, without stopping to ask questions about where we were going or whether or not you were actually in love with me.”
“Or whether or not you were actually in love with me.”
Harris nodded. “That, too. I knew you were beautiful, and back then, you seemed so fragile. I wanted to take care of you.”
“And I let you. I was fragile. I hadn’t always been. Before you knew me, I was brave, an adventurer. Everyone said so, and it was true. But by the time you met me, I was bruised and searching for a safe haven. You happened to me, too.”
“But none of that is quite the same as being in love, is it?” said Harris. “Maybe we would have figured that out, but then suddenly, so quickly, there was Avery. Avery happened to me, and I could not believe my luck.”
“Our miraculous girl,” I said.
For a moment, we just basked in the exquisite light of our daughter, bound by shared luck and shared cherishing. Harris and I needed to end, should have ended long ago, but in ending we were each losing the person—the only person—who had shared in the private moments of being parents to Avery. The moments when our eyes met over Avery’s head. The foods and books and toys she’d loved. Her sleeplessness at four in the morning. The time she came home from school with her pockets full of marbles and beads and pebbles, “manipulatives” from her kindergarten classroom that she’d stolen because they were “so pretty, like stars that wanted to come down from the sky to live in my house.” The small, precious, shiny daily stories of her childhood. Losing that—more than betrayal or anger or incompatibility—was the tragedy at the heart of our story. Briefly, I wondered what I could’ve done to save us from this loss. But I did not wonder what I could do to save us. That horse, I remained well aware, had left the barn.
“What else did you figure out with your therapist?” I asked.
“That I’ve been depressed. Not myself. For a long time.”
“Really?” I said, genuinely surprised.
“And it’s no excuse, but before I—” Harris broke off and rubbed the spot between his eyes with his finger. “Before last summer—”
“Before Cressida came to work for your company.”
“Yes. Before all that began, it had been months, a year maybe, since I’d felt—”
“Felt what?”
“That’s it,” Harris said. “Just felt.”
“A year,” I said, evenly.
“Don’t blame yourself for not noticing,” he said. “I did everything I could to hide it.”
I knew firsthand what depression was, the lightlessness and bone-deep weariness. The gray, spiraling misery. The hope jumping ship.
“No, don’t let me off the hook,” I said. “I should have paid closer attention to you, Harris. Not only during that year.”
I paid attention now. In the sunroom with winter surrounding us on three sides, the lace of trees, the stone-gray sky, sun like a pearl, I took in the man before me, Harris McCue. I saw that in the months since he’d been fired, he’d lost weight, his sweatshirt loose around his middle, his square-jawed face catching shadows. But if these changes were the aftermath of depression, he didn’t look depressed now. There was—I don’t know—an animation to him that I realized I hadn’t seen in a long time, a receptiveness to his features, a new sharpness in his movements and his gaze and his edges. As I observed him in the here and now, I also tried to summon the Harrises of the year before and the one before that. Harris after Harris after Harris. It wasn’t easy. But even my blurred and patchy recollections of my husband, from past to present, coalesced into a vision of a man walking, slowly and at long last, out of the fog and into the open.
“What a disservice I’ve done you,” I said. “Not paying attention. I’m sorry.”
The defeated, hangdog Harris of a few weeks ago would’ve waved off or protested my apology. This one said, “Thank you. And I’m sorry, too, from the bottom of my heart.”
“Thank you,” I said.
We remained for a few more seconds in the new, well-lit clearing we’d made for each other, and then Harris leaned over, picked up his box, the last one, said, “Okay, then,” and stood up.
As he turned to go, I said, “It hurts to see you leave. I know it’s what’s best, and I know we’ll both be okay, but it stings. I just wanted to say that.”
Harris didn’t turn around, but he stopped in his tracks. His shoulders rose and fell, hard inhale, slow exhale, before he said, “Thanks, Ginny,” and kept walking.
“YOU’RE CREEPY, OKAY?” I TOLD KIRSTEN. “WHAT DO YOU have? Spies? Camped out in my front yard? Harris just left, left-left, left for good not—no exaggeration—forty-five seconds before you called me. I may actually still be able to hear his car engine.”
“I know, but don’t worry. I don’t think he saw me. I parked a little way down your street; plus, I may have, you know, ducked when I saw him backing out of your driveway. And even if he saw my car, it’s Harris. He could’ve seen it a million times before without it making even the tiniest imprint on his memory. Harris is oblivious. Hold on. There’s probably a word to be created there. Oblivharris?”
“What? You’re here? You’re the spy you have camped out on my front lawn?”
“Is that a problem for you?”
“Get in here. No, wait, meet me at the garage. You can help me clean the garage guest suite.”
“Being your friend is so fun, Gin. It’s like one long party, really.”
“Come on. It’ll be cathartic.”
“Drinking wine is also cathartic.”
“Fine. I’ll bring wine.”
“Yay! And not to be insensitive, but did you inherit those super-huge Waterford goblets from your mom? Because you know how I like heavy stemware.”
“I did. And I do. But I think they’re for red wine, and all I’ve got is white.”
“Awesome. What better way to get revenge on Adela than use her glasses for the wrong wine?”
“Not to be insensitive.”
“God, of course not.”
MY FRIEND KIRSTEN HAS THE REPUTATION OF BEING FUNDAMENTALLY unable to keep a secret, but that’s only partly true. She’s kept every secret I’ve ever told her since we were twelve years old, which is every secret I’ve ever had (minus one that I barely shared with myself before I erased it from my personal history forever and so doesn’t really count).
What she’s terrible—wretched, abysmal—at is keeping her own secrets. In high school, she cheated on every boyfriend she ever had, would tell me about it practically while her lips were still locked on the mouth of the forbidden guy, and swear me to secrecy. But within twenty-four (or four or two) hours, she would have spilled the story to everyone we knew, from her mother to her math tutor to Mr. Jones, the head maintenance worker at Lucretia Mott (who almost didn’t count because he was the most trustworthy human on the planet and the best listener and ended up on the receiving end of everyone’s secrets), to the poor, dumb, cuckolded boyfriend himself.
So it was not a surprise that we weren’t even halfway up the steep stairs to the garage apartment when Kirsten, two steps ahead of me, spun around, flung the back of her left hand in front of my face, just inches from my eyes, and screamed. I screamed, too, and grabbed her hand, and we performed a heartfelt, if highly, possibly life-threateningly precarious, dance for joy right there on the staircase.
“Isn’t it shiny?” she said, when we were settled on the couch in the garage apartment. She flipped her hand around in the air in the manner of a very enthusiastic conductor so that the emerald-cut diamond that used to belong to Tex’s grandmother scattered prisms all over the room.
“It almost blinded me. Literally almost put out my eye,” I said, and then I leaned over and kissed Kirsten’s cheek. “I’m deliriously happy for you, sugarplum.”
“There was a time, like twenty years, when I thought I’d have to ask you to be my matron of honor, which sounds so, you know, thick-waisted and dowdy, but now you can be my maid of honor, and I can be your matron of honor!”
“What about thick-waisted and dowdy?”
“I’ll be your newly married matron of honor, which is obviously totally different. Although if you don’t move fast, I might be sporting a baby bump under my matron of honor dress because the wedding’s in June, and we’re launching Operation Baby ASAP.”
“This June? Doesn’t it take forever to plan a wedding?”
Kirsten shrugged. “It’s possible that I got a jump on the planning a few months ago. Or six.”
“You started planning your wedding six months before you got engaged.”
“Only the location. And the caterer. And the florist. Anemones. Don’t you love anemones?”
“So you decided to hold off on choosing the napkins.”
“Pale pink damask, and I’m talking very pale, like the tights I wore for ballet when I was six. And don’t worry, I’ll share all my information with you for your next wedding. I’ve got a file as thick as a five-tiered Victoria sponge wedding cake decorated with sugared berries and floribunda roses.”
“That’s so nice of you,” I said. “But here’s a thought: Harris carried off his last box of stuff ten minutes ago.”
“Exactly. Times a-wastin’. Start dating, honey!”
“If by dating you mean going on dates, I’d rather poke needles—or three-carat diamonds—into my eyes.”
“You’ve always been a boy magnet. You’ll meet someone.”
“A boy magnet. My first boyfriend was gay and my second was Harris.”
“Third time’s a charm! Come on, there must be men you’ve been attracted to since the Harris blowup. UPS deliverymen. Or those cute newly divorced guys in the grocery store who are paralyzed in front of the peanut butter selection or stand there reading the labels of the egg cartons.”
To my horror, my face got hot, and I dropped my head before Kirsten could notice me blushing.
“Holy shit,” she said. “Who is he?”
“There’s no he, idiot.”
Kirsten folded her arms and looked at me, waiting. Kirsten, with her silver-dollar-size blue eyes, could win a staring contest with a dead person. I groaned.
“Shut up,” I said. “It’s not a big deal. My dog park friend, Daniel the vet.”
“The one you said you could say anything to?”
“Yes.”
“Is he good-looking?”
I pictured Daniel, backed by the green grass of the dog park, his gray eyes and dark hair and smile as heavenly as my dog Walt’s.
“He is. Very, actually. But it’s more that he’s so nice.”
Kirsten’s eyes widened. “Oh Lord. You’re sunk. It’s what they never tell you when you’re younger, how when you grow up, nothing on God’s green earth will be sexier than nice.”
“True. But let’s stop this nonsense and talk about your upcoming nuptials.”
Kirsten got a funny look on her face. “Yes. Right. Okay. Here’s the thing.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I want you to throw me an engagement party. Soon. Really soon. Like in a couple of weeks, so it doesn’t seem like we just got engaged and—boom—we’re getting married.”
“Oh! Is that all? Well, of course I will! We can do it at my house, unless you think we’ll need a bigger space?”
“Your house is perfect.”
“Perfect.”
Kirsten grimaced. She had an adorable nose-wrinkled grimace and knew it. I had seen that grimace in action more times than I could count.
“What?”
“I want everyone there. Everyone I love best.”
This seemingly reasonable request knocked the wind out of me. I knew what she meant: everyone she loved best, who, not coincidentally, happened to represent the bulk of the people (minus Harris) I’d failed most miserably in this world.
“Kirsten. I haven’t seen them in seventeen years, and that was at a party while we were in college, and as soon as I got there, they left. They hate me. Not that I blame them,” I said.
“I don’t think they do,” said Kirsten. “I mean, I don’t know because we have this unspoken agreement never to talk about you, which I break fairly often, but still, and actually, CJ might still hate you just because he is so loyal to Gray, but, come on, it was all so long ago.”
“Gray’s dad died, and I abandoned him. That’s the only word for it. I failed him. At the time, I could barely figure out how to get up in the morning and get dressed, but that’s no excuse for letting Gray down like that.”
“We never talk about this, you and I,” said Kirsten, quietly. “Not really. All those things that happened senior year; it’s the only thing we never talk about.”
“I know. I try not to even think about it, but I’ve thought about it a hundred times by accident over the years. What’s the point, though? I’d give anything to go back and be a better friend to Gray—or even a not hideously awful friend—and I can’t do that. I can’t fix anything.”
Kirsten absorbed this, and then, slowly, said, “I think— Okay. I think we were so used to you being the strongest and bravest of all of us that we didn’t see the toll everything took on you. When Gray came out, you were his champion. You were amazing, like Joan of Arc going into battle. But that must’ve been so hard for you.”
“I was heartbroken. I thought I would marry him,” I said.
“Yes. And then his dad died. And then whatever happened between Trevor and your mom happened, and he transferred to Emory midyear and basically disappeared from your life. When I think about it now, when I envision the person you were that whole second half of senior year, I think you must have been depressed. Like, very.”
I nodded. “I was.”
“So, yeah, maybe you should’ve been a better friend to Gray. But we three should’ve been better friends to you. We should’ve seen that you needed taking care of, too.”
My friend Kirsten and I sat inside a haze of regret and remembering, before Kirsten said, “At least, after the fire, things got better for Gray at school.”
“Well, yeah,” I said, wryly. “It only took running into a burning building to save his best friend and losing his father in the same night for those assholes to stop holding his sexuality against him.”
“He’s in a good place now,” said Kirsten.
“I’m glad he found Evan. I’m glad they got married.” I smiled. “I’m dead jealous of course, but I’m glad.”
“They’re having a baby.”
Tears filled my eyes, hot and sudden. “Oh, that’s wonderful.”
“They used a surrogate. Gray’s sperm, and Evan’s sister donated the egg, so it’ll have both their genes.”
“Those are some good genes,” I said, remembering Gray.
“Hell, yes, they are,” said Kirsten.
“Will you prepare them, Gray and CJ? Tell them I’ll be getting in touch about the engagement party?”
“Yes! And, um, one more thing? Or one more person, actually?”
I sighed. “Trevor. You two always did love each other.”
“Please?”
“If I die of awkwardness, you’ll look after Avery?”
“I love you, I love you, I love you,” sang Kirsten, and then she slid over and wrapped me up in the Kirstenest of Kirsten hugs.