There are arrangements to be made. Patrick has asked for a week. My apartment lease expires in three months, a lifetime from now. I walk through the rooms, assessing which parts of my life I’ll bring along. Everything feels expendable, as if I was waiting for a chance to get rid of it.
I research cities to disappear to. There’s the predictable spread of places, more fantasy than reality. Sun-drenched beaches in California, the endless movie set of New York City, watercolor towns in Europe. I skim past these, unable to fit ourselves into other people’s dreams. Instead, I look at unremarkable places, places people move to out of necessity. I imagine us living in a split-level on the outskirts of a run-down city, a freeway roaring past our bedroom window. I imagine us tucked inside the graying snow for months at a time in a northern state.
When I come to the Braddocks’ house tonight, I find him upstairs. He’s in the room that holds Sylvia’s belongings, looking at a stretch of gauzy white spread over the top of the boxes. I come to stand next to Patrick. Her wedding gown.
“I don’t know what to do with all of this,” Patrick says. “I should have thrown it away a long time ago. Or donated it. It felt like turning my back on her.” He glances around the confines of the room. “It’s impossible, but there’s more in here than there used to be.”
The unfairness of it hits me: that this pointless piece of Sylvia’s life should have survived longer than she did. All the possessions that my clients have brought to me over the years, each one outliving the person who loved it.
“Just keep the things that were most important to Sylvia,” I say.
“I have,” he says. “I already gave most of that to you.”
We exchange smiles.
“Patrick,” I say, “why did you bring me that lipstick? The first time you came to the Elysian Society. Sylvia barely ever wore it in her photos. And she—” I hesitate. She clearly chose it for Henry Damson, I want to say. Her lips were darkest in those photos from the lake.
“I can’t really explain it,” he says. “I walked through the house that day, trying to choose the right object to bring. It was still surreal, like a joke. I was trying to remember what she wore, what jewelry she liked or what perfume she’d put on. I found that lipstick lying at the bottom of her closet. I remembered seeing her in it, once. When she was getting ready to go out of town. She was looking at herself in the mirror, and she was different. Beautiful, but different. It was a moment of realizing how little I knew about her. How separate she was from me.”
I touch his arm. “Do you want to see her?” I ask, and his expression opens up as if he already knew that I was going to ask, as if he’s just been waiting for a chance to say yes.
In the bedroom, after I apply the lipstick, Patrick reaches out his thumb to wipe away the excess. The lotus lies on the bed next to me, nearly lost in the rumple of the sheets.
“Are you nervous?” I ask; briefly, a memory of that infinite, soundless world beneath the water fills my skull.
“No,” Patrick says. “Not really. Are you?”
I slide the lotus between my teeth, swallowing without water. The dry clot of bitterness brushes the tender back of my throat, and then I’m gone.
The moon is full tonight. So heavy that I imagine it falling right out of the sky, landing with a wet thump at our feet.
“She wasn’t supposed to do that,” he says. “It was a shock to me too.”
It’s not exactly an apology. I just shake my head, afraid that if I speak I’ll embarrass myself. An undignified lurch of a sob. A spiraling shriek of accusations.
When it’s clear I won’t respond, Henry sighs and reaches into his pocket for his phone, making a show of checking the time. Viv is still inside the restaurant; she excused herself as we were leaving, fluttering at the two of us to go on ahead, go on ahead. I wondered if this was the way it would be from now on. Viv flaunting her status, fussy, secretive needs that a barren woman can never understand.
The restaurant has ivy-choked trellises, sparkling lights strung along the gutters. Music playing soft and tinny, barely discernible on the outdoor speakers. We’re the last diners leaving tonight, alone in the parking lot. Blandly romantic violins twirl overheard. Everything feels like a mean punch line at my expense.
“Of course,” Henry says, as if we’re continuing a conversation, “you can’t blame her. She shouldn’t have told you. But you weren’t supposed to be here.”
“You wanted me to follow,” I say.
A soft, disbelieving huff of breath.
I see us as if I’m observing from a distance. Leaning against the car like people half our age, the strangeness of the evening and the alcohol hitting us at once. Patrick and I have always looked good together. We complement each other: my stark coloring against his sunniness. But Henry and I are similar, almost like siblings, with faces that tend toward melancholy when we aren’t making an effort to charm, with dark hair that snaps up all the light.
“You could have told me about the pregnancy yourself,” I say.
“Jesus, I only found out a few weeks ago,” Henry says, impatience clouding his words. “You’re not supposed to tell anyone except close friends. Family.”
A joke swirls wildly through my brain: Can you tell your mistress? It’s the kind of joke I could have made, a month ago. Henry liked my irreverent moments, and I’d play this up, half guilty, knowing that it separated me from Viv’s sweet, wide-eyed humorlessness.
“I deserved to know.” I’m too exposed in my white dress. “It matters to me too.”
“Fine,” Henry says. “I’ll report every detail of our lives to you. I’ll make sure you know what we do together. Every time she picks something new for the nursery, every time we have an appointment. Do you want me to send videos from the delivery room? Tell you each time our kid scores a goal, gets a laugh from the audience?”
It’s a keen hurt. He knows I don’t just want a baby, a newborn, but everything. The whole tedious and beautiful life that child would bring along. I’ve used those exact examples, achingly ordinary. The soccer matches. The school plays.
“I know why you introduced me to her,” Henry says. “So you could watch us fail.”
“That’s unfair,” I say.
“You didn’t expect I’d start a life with her,” he says. “You didn’t expect the baby. That’s what gets to you, huh? You wanted a baby for so long, and now here I am, in a relationship that was supposed to be a joke, and—”
When he stops talking, it’s not out of discretion or a desire to shield me from the pain. It’s because his point is already made. After so little time, he’s created a vision of a family that I’ve been chasing and losing. As if it’s truly this easy, and it’s just fatal stubbornness on my part that’s preventing me.
A light in the window near the front of the restaurant snaps off, and then another, closer. The insects are shrieking all around us. Beyond the parking lot, the roads are dark and quiet this late in the evening. I think of Patrick, back at the lake, miles away. Waiting for me. Waiting.
For the first time, I regret it. The pain is almost a relief, if only because it’s a fresher pain than the same aches I’ve been worrying over, pressing like bruises that won’t fade. I regret letting my heart be devoured by this imaginary child. I regret ignoring Patrick, the flesh-and-blood reality of the two of us. Who we were. Who we could have become.
“I have to tell Patrick about us,” I say.
I expect him to protest. I brace for his anger. But after a moment, he says, “No, you won’t.” Perfectly calm and assured.
“I don’t have a choice.”
“He’ll leave you,” Henry says. “What have you been telling me about your husband? He can’t look you in the face when you’ve been crying, he ignores you when you’re in bed all day—he’s not going to shrug this off.”
My tipsiness is a woozy layer just behind my eyes. “Maybe he won’t,” I say. “But whatever happens, I was honest. If Viv is happy with you, it’s because she doesn’t know you.”
“My wife knows who I am,” Henry says.
The restaurant door clatters open, and then Viv is walking toward us, grinning with exaggerated apology, waving like a parade-float queen. Henry reaches around me to open the car door; I understand I’m supposed to get inside. I panic like a hostage.
“Forget this,” Henry says to me, a quick whisper. “I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder and waiting for you to do something stupid.”
She’s coming across the parking lot, her body highlighted by the street lamp and then dimmed in the shadows. If she can detect the tension that surrounds us, she doesn’t show it.
His sudden anger closes the space between us, yanking us together like a string pulled taut. “I could lose everything,” he says. “You don’t understand what that feels like.”
“I have as much to lose as you do.”
He laughs.
I slide into my seat, away from him. Heart hammering, I watch through the window as he turns to his wife, all warmth, all solicitousness, opening his arms. Her face appears over his shoulder as they embrace. And I’m watching them from far away, trapped in a world beneath their feet.
Edie.”
who is that?
who is she?
Across from me, in the mirror, I see her: a strange woman in our bedroom. In our bed. Her coarse hair, startled and pale-lashed eyes. His arm around her; his hand tipping her chin to seek out her gaze.
“You’re all right, Edie?” he asks.
I want to tell him that’s not my name. But I remember, slowly, that it is. My name for this life with him. One name for each life.
“I’m fine.” My voice is hoarse; I clear my throat. “Could I please have a glass of water?”
After Patrick’s left, I sink back against the pillows. When I learned that Sylvia had brought us back to the surface of the water, I was grateful for a presence inside me that saw my body as something worth rescuing. But I know, right now, that it wasn’t a pure gift, freely given. It was a bargain, a truce, and she’ll ask for something in return.