Chapter 10

Justine

When I left Ariel at her house, I kept walking, thinking about how much I had grown to like my new neighbor. I liked how she didn’t put on pretenses, how she let her faults show. I liked how she didn’t seem caught up in the neighborhood politics, didn’t jockey for position like I’d seen other neighbors do. Her house was messy and sometimes she was messy and her boys were definitely messy. I rarely allowed mess in my life. It felt too out of control. Lately I’d been wanting to be out of control though, straining to break free from the confines of my own ordered life. I had a feeling that Ariel could help me do that.

My feet took me to a destination that my brain seemed unaware of until I turned down the street. I don’t know what I expected to happen. To see his house? To see his kids playing in the yard? To see him? I felt like a silly girl. The closer I got to his house the more my heart raced.

I replayed the moment that I saw him at the pool. I had been introducing Liza to Ariel, thinking how Ariel was my new project. I could tell Ariel was so taken with the whole scene at the pool and with being a part of Essex Falls. I enjoyed seeing the neighborhood through her eyes. The way she asked me questions like I knew everything, the way she held on to my every word and looked at me like I would lead her to the Promised Land or something. About all I could lead her to was uncluttered counters and the best playdates for her kids, but if that was enough for her, I was glad to do it. I remember Liza said that I needed to meet the new neighbors, and all I could think was I don’t need any more new neighbors to keep track of.

And then she called them over, Tom and Betsy. He shook my hand. When our hands touched, I felt like someone opened a trapdoor in my life and I fell through. The only thing that was keeping me from hitting bottom was his hand, holding on. Our eyes connected for a fraction of a second—nothing that would give us away to Liza and Ariel and Betsy and the others standing around us, but enough for a flash of recognition, and revelation, to pass between us. His eyes said, “There you are.”

And mine said, “Finally.”

Walking toward his house, I wondered if I was being stupid. Mark always said I read too much into things, that I wanted things to be what they weren’t. It was possible that was true with Tom. Maybe his eyes were just saying, “Nice to see you again.” Maybe I just needed to let this go, turn around, and go home. Or maybe I just needed to look into his eyes again.

His house was “the one with the terrible backyard,” a house everyone knew about in the neighborhood, mostly because it wouldn’t sell. I came to a stop in front of the house, debating what my next move should be and what would possess someone to buy a house that no one else wanted.

“It was a steal of a deal,” he said, coming up behind me. “I like people who get desperate. They make foolish decisions.”

I looked around me as if he’d materialized out of thin air, willing my heart to stop pounding from the scare he gave me. “Where’d you come from?” I asked.

He smiled and held up an extension cord he’d wrapped around his arm. I turned my eyes from his strong hands as he gripped the cord. I couldn’t start thinking about how those hands had once touched me or I’d be useless. He pointed at the house across the street. “Was at the neighbors’ borrowing this. How about you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, where’d you come from? I mean, you don’t live on this street, right?” He smiled at me, and I knew he was teasing.

“I was on a walk. Was just wondering who bought this house after all this time and it turns out it was you. And here you are.” We both knew my vagueness was a cover.

He shifted his weight and adjusted the extension cord, the orange coil looking like a snake he had tamed. “Here I am,” he said and smiled. He held out his hand to shake mine, and I took it, happy for the excuse to touch him somehow. “Name’s Tom Dean,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Dean?” I asked just like I had all those years before, just like I had at the pool in front of everyone, a message to him that no one but us would know. “Like James? I just love James Dean. He’s so …”

“Sexy?” He was grinning too, both of us repeating lines from a moment that seemed inconsequential at the time.

“Cool,” I corrected.

“Stick around,” he said. “James Dean’s got nothing on me.”

We both laughed as a look passed between us, saying things neither of us would ever say out loud, so much history called up in just the acknowledgment of that one long-ago exchange. I changed the subject. “I thought I might invite you and your …”

“Wife?” he asked, still smiling.

“I was trying to remember her name,” I said.

He looked down at the ground, kicked at a stray pebble, and then looked at his house. “Her name’s Betsy,” he said softly, the smile gone.

Of course I remembered it, I just didn’t want to say it out loud. “Yes, I’d like to invite you and Betsy to dinner,” I said. “I try to invite all the new neighbors to dinner. My husband and I like to get to know them.”

This was not true. Ariel and her husband had lived behind us for weeks and I had never even thought of inviting them to dinner. The truth was I would use any excuse to get to know him, even if I had to include his wife and kids.

“I’m sure we could work that out. We’re new in town, so I know Betsy would love to get to know some of the other moms.”

“Well, it sounded to me like she’s getting involved quite well,” I couldn’t help but say. “And who would you like to get to know?” I added, unsure where my bravado was coming from except it’s not every day that the one who got away is standing in front of you with an orange extension cord.

A look of shock passed across his face, as brief and fleeting as the flicker of a firefly. “Me?” he sputtered.

I nodded, pulling myself up into a proud stance and making myself look him in the eye.

“Well, let’s just say I’d like to get to know one of the moms,” he said. He looked away again, then back at me. “Can we meet to talk about … this?”

“What about this?” I countered, being purposely coy.

“About us being thrown back together. Here. Now. I’d like to talk about how we should handle this. I mean, do we tell people, or do we try to keep it quiet? There’s just questions we should … go over.”

“Sure. We can meet privately. But I’m still going to ask you all over. For dinner.”

He shrugged. “You do what you need to do. If it eases your conscience.” He gave me that teasing smile. “But in the meantime let’s figure out how we could meet. Alone.”

I thought suddenly about a coffee shop across town where I had met a woman a long time ago to pick up items for an auction at school. It was as if my brain had cataloged it for a time like this. The depths of my own depravity shocked me but didn’t keep me from blurting out, “There’s a place. Give me your number and I’ll text you the address. We can figure out a time.”

“Do you have something to write with?” he asked.

“Just tell me,” I said. “I’ll remember.” And then, for the same reason that had made me walk by, made me say the things I’d said already, I added, “I remember lots of things.”

Sitting in the coffee shop across town with sunglasses and a ball cap on, I felt a little silly and a little excited. I couldn’t deny that this sneaking around added an element to my life I’d been missing before Tom showed up at the pool that day. I couldn’t believe I’d agreed to meet him like this, away from people we knew, people I knew. And I couldn’t overlook the fact that the same person I’d once fantasized about seeing again was about to walk through the door, that I was about to sit alone with him and get to ask all the questions I’d waited to ask.

The bell over the coffee-shop door jingled and I looked up, but it wasn’t him. A frazzled mother carried a flailing toddler. The child kept screaming, “I want juice!” I scanned the room to make sure I didn’t see anyone I knew, my heart racing. I wondered how people carried on affairs for years on end. Was that what I was doing? Carrying on an affair? I took a deep breath. No. I was seeing an old friend. That was all. I smiled at the man next to me and tried to look like I met men who weren’t my husband in coffee shops every day.

The third time the bell jingled, it was him filling the doorway, smiling at me like we’d just seen each other, like I was as familiar as his own reflection, like we did this every day. What can I say? My heart soared. It literally soared, its wings beating on the inside of my chest. I stood up and let him hug me, let his strange familiarity engulf me. By the time I took my seat across from him, I knew I was in trouble and foolish to keep telling myself I wasn’t, an addict in denial.

He ordered coffee for me, and a few minutes later the waitress placed it on the table, the steam rising and heating my face. I wrapped my fingers around the mug but didn’t bring it to my lips. “So,” he said. “Tell me everything. Everything I missed about you.”

“Why don’t you tell me everything you missed about me?” I teased him. I was pretending to be confident when I was anything but. Fake it till you make it: That had been my motto for as long as I could remember. It had served me well.

He smiled and cocked his head as if he couldn’t figure out whether I meant it or not. There were little laugh lines around his eyes, and his hairline had moved slightly farther back, but other than that, I couldn’t find a single thing that had changed about him. I wondered if he saw the changes in me—the pooch of my belly where I’d had the girls, the angry 11s between my eyebrows that had come from too much worrying, the fact that my eyes weren’t the same vibrant blue they once were—more a washed-out denim color now.

“When we saw each other at the pool, I wondered if you’d remember me,” he said. “I mean, I thought you would, but there was this part of me that was afraid you’d moved on so completely that you didn’t.” He looked at me. “That I didn’t rank high enough to be worth remembering. A girl like you, I figured, has a lifetime of memorable loves. Who was I to think I’d be anything special?” He scratched at a mark on the table but gave up when he realized it was a stain. “So that’s what I remember about you. I remember how truly remarkable you were.” He looked up. “And how stupid I was to let you go.”

I looked back at him, unblinking. His words pinged around my body, finally settling in my heart, expanding there, filling me up with something that had been missing for a very long time. “You sure know how to say the right things,” I said. “You always did.”

“It’s not just words,” he argued.

“It’s all just words,” I countered.

He reached out and peeled my fingers from the mug I was clinging to, lacing them in his own. “When I lost you—” he began.

“You didn’t lose me. You let me go,” I said.

He looked down. “I know. I did. And I’ve regretted that decision for a long time.” He laughed. “I can’t believe I’m getting a chance to tell you that after all these years. It’s like I’m dreaming. The best dream ever.”

“Whenever we’d go to a restaurant or a place like this,” I said, gesturing to the shop, “I’d always have to sit facing the door, so I could see who was coming in. Mark teased me, said I was afraid of terrorists and stuff. And to be honest I never knew why I did it. But sitting here with you, I know that I was always watching the door, waiting for you to walk through. I guess somewhere deep inside I always hoped that we’d get to this moment. That one day the door would jingle and I’d look up and there you’d be, walking in with that smile on your face. And then my life could start again.”

He squeezed my hand. “And now it has.”

I nodded. “Now it has.” The door jingled, but I didn’t look up. I just kept staring into his eyes.

Days later, when I went to get the mail, I found a CD with my name on it waiting for me. My heart pounded as I opened the envelope and slid the shiny silver disk into my hand, a rainbow arc playing on the surface as I took in the handwriting I recognized from letters traded years ago. “Because I See You” it read. I held it for a moment, scanning the street to see if anyone was watching. And yet, as I walked inside, I was already wondering where I’d hide the CD. If Mark ever saw it, he’d know something was up.

I had to listen to it. The girls were outside playing with Ariel’s boys and—later—I had promised to go over and teach Ariel how to bake her own bread. But first, I would listen to what he had made for me. I imagined him downloading songs late at night, burning them onto the CD, his wife upstairs asleep in her bed unaware. He was thinking of me, searching for songs that reminded him of me.

The music filled the den as I sat down on the couch, Barry Manilow’s voice singing what to many would just be another cheesy love song. No one but him knew what that song meant. I marveled that he had remembered all these years later, that the memory hadn’t been punched through with the holes of time. I thought back to that morning when we had spoken on the phone, how our conversations were growing longer, more frequent. How lately when something happened instead of thinking, I can’t wait to tell Mark or I can’t wait to tell Laura, it was his face that flashed across my mind, his number I automatically dialed.

“I want to see you,” he’d said that morning. “How can we see each other for, like, more than an hour?”

“We could meet somewhere tomorrow night. I’ll tell Mark I’m having a girls’ night out with Ariel. He’ll believe that.”

“What about Ariel?” he’d asked. “How can you be sure she won’t drop by your house or he won’t see her in her backyard?”

“I’ll make sure she’s occupied. Don’t worry. I’ll figure something out.”

He exhaled loudly.

“What?” I asked. “Are you worried?”

“No, just impatient. I don’t want to wait. I think about you all the time. I can’t believe I got through all these years without you. Now that you’re in my life, I—”

There was silence on the phone as I waited for him to finish the sentence. I could hear both of us breathing. “You what?” I prompted.

“I don’t think I can ever go back to the way things were.”

“I know.” Upstairs the girls were jumping up and down, singing and giggling. It sounded like they were coming through the floor. “I know.”

“I keep thinking,” he went on, “that this was supposed to happen. I mean, out of all the neighborhoods in all the cities we could’ve ended up, we ended up being neighbors. What are the odds for something like that? It’s got to be a sign, right?”

“A sign of what?” I asked. I needed to hear his answer.

“That we’re supposed to be together,” he said. There was silence as we both processed what he’d just said. I didn’t know what to say in response. That I thought the same but that it scared me to death? That the one thing I’d always fantasized about happening was happening to me? That I had never stopped loving him, only pushed the pause button?

“Are you there?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m here. I’m just … confused. There’s so much that would have to happen. You have Betsy and the kids, I have Mark and my kids. We have homes and bills and legal obligations. Not to mention morals.”

“And yet here we are getting this amazing second chance. Do you see that we also have an obligation to us?”

“I see that. I do.” I thought of the verses in the Bible that talk about divorce and adultery. I thought about Erica and how the women in the neighborhood talked about her, how they shunned her. I had even encouraged them to shun her for reasons I didn’t want to think about. Did I want to be an Erica? Was I willing to sacrifice my position—my reputation—for another chance with Tom? My heart sang back its answer: Yes, yes, yes.