Clare dragged a wedge of blueberry pancake through a puddle of maple syrup. She and Matthew sat across from each other, so close she could see the faint creases at the corners of his eyes, the stubble on his chin.
They had been discussing a movie they were considering seeing that night. Was it getting good reviews? Should they maybe just stay in and order food? He was quiet for a minute, then looked down at his plate, stabbed a triangle of pancake with his fork, and gazed at it. “You should meet Jack,” he said.
A little breeze blew in and rustled the newspapers on the counter. Her upstairs neighbors’ cat scuttled overhead. Matthew was still gazing at his fork.
“Has Jack never met a pancake before?” she asked.
He looked up, half smiled at her, his teeth bluish. “Come home with me for a visit.”
Clare paused, or froze: her entire body was alert to this sudden and particular moment, to the sticky amber syrup on their plates, the cooling coffee in her cup, music from a car on the street below Dopplering past, the pressure of the chair on the backs of her legs. She felt it all move through her, how they might look back on this exact moment years from now and think, “That was when it began,” or, “That was when it died.” Either was possible. They were right there, perched on that fault line.
She had spoken with Jack on the phone once, lying in Matthew’s bed on a Saturday morning. He had a little-boy voice so high and sweet she felt a burst of ridiculous love, an oxytocin misfire, like a letter sent to the wrong address.
“Oh, hi!” he’d said to her. There was a slight echo on the line. “I’m actually drawing something!”
“How nice!” she said. “What is it?”
“I don’t actually know yet. It’s quite lovely, though. Could I talk to my dad, please?”
“So, what do you think?” Matthew asked her now. “Flights are cheap.”
She speared another forkful of her pancake. The thought of leaving—even just the thought of it—was a seam coming loose. She felt the little stinging pop of it in her chest.
But he wasn’t asking her to move to England with him. He was just asking her to meet his son. They could go on a Thursday, return on a Monday. She would return to work and her coworkers would hardly have missed her. “How was your weekend?” they would say. “Did ya have a good one?”
A visit to London. It was not a binding contract.
Still, she looked at Matthew and took quick note of the things that might annoy her—would! would definitely annoy her!—some day, in some possible future: the way he tapped his fingers incessantly on the edge of the table, how he extended his legs at an awkward angle so that anyone trying to navigate this little kitchen would just have to climb over them. He talked in his sleep. He could be pedantic. He was a backseat driver even though he did not have his American driver’s license and often got confused about which side of the road one was supposed to drive on.
It was a catalog of minor irritations, and she knew even as she was assembling it that it was no guarantee against future pain.
She chewed slowly, swallowed. “Okay,” she said.
Matthew had stopped eating. He was just staring at her now, a dopey grin on his face.
“What?” Clare stood, embarrassed, hot. “What is it?”
“My two favorite people,” he said.
She smiled as if she were someone who heard this kind of thing frequently, then gathered their dishes and took them to the sink. The forks clinked against each other; syrup stuck the plates together. She swiveled away from Matthew, turned the taps on and squirted green liquid soap onto a sponge.
“Why don’t you leave the dishes for me?” Matthew said.
“It’s all right. I don’t mind.”
terribly upset
How could she possibly go with him?
can’t put into words
She was born to stay put.
“Right!” Matthew said, over the sound of the running water. “Then I’ll start looking into flights!”
“Okay,” she said again.
Why does she have to be so far away from us?
She was coiled in those words, trapped in their urgent, whispered pleas. They were like filaments wrapped around her chest, so beautiful she could hardly breathe.
They agreed to stay awake.
“It’s better this way,” Matthew insisted. He held Clare’s hand as he led her around his flat, which was narrow and recessed with little alcoves, like a rabbit warren. “I promise. If we can stay awake now, we’ll sleep really well tonight, and then tomorrow our body clocks will have adjusted.”
She couldn’t quite understand what he was saying. She heard, “sleep” and “body clocks,” and they stood in the doorway of his bedroom, its space taken up almost entirely by a big, fluffy cloud of a bed, and she felt a weariness so all-encompassing, she moaned softly. She tugged at his hand, tried to pull him toward the bed. He tugged back, laughing.
“Clare, I’m serious. Just wait a few more hours.”
“How many?” she squeaked. Her throat was dry. Were these the first words she’d spoken since they’d walked into Matthew’s apartment? His flat? Maybe. Yes.
He looked at his watch, grimaced. “Eight.”
He made her a cup of tea and sat her down on the couch. “I’m going out for food,” he said. “We need milk for a proper cup of tea. And bread and just a few other things. I’ll be quick.” He made her promise she wouldn’t fall asleep.
She fell asleep as soon as the door clicked shut. She slept the dreamless death-sleep of the jet-lagged, and she woke to the sound of her own alarm clock in Milwaukee, although, as her head cleared to the noise, she thought it was strange that her alarm was buzzing when usually it jangled, and the light in her apartment seemed different, the feel of the pillow strangely scratchy against her cheek, and she wasn’t in her apartment at all, and there was an odd little elf-woman standing over her, and a boy.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” the elf said. She had very short white-blond hair and a tiny, pointy nose.
Clare sat up, blinked as the room swam, and then settled into focus. “Harf,” she said, a combination of Hello and who are you and elf.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the elf said again. “You’re Clare, and you’re exhausted. I’m Deirdre.” She stuck out her hand and Clare stared at it. “We’re a bit early. I am so sorry,” the elf said again, and Clare remembered the day before, at the airport, as she and Matthew raced to their gate (late), how Matthew apologized to everyone he veered past, including, once, a metal pole: “Excuse me, I’m so sorry, sorry, pardon me.”
And now the elf was saying, “This is Jack,” and Clare finally snapped to—she was here, in Matthew’s apartment in London, with, for some reason, his ex-wife and his son.
Jack looked up at her, skeptical. He wore small wire-framed glasses. His unkempt light brown hair stood up in tufts. It looked exactly like Matthew’s in the morning. Clare cleared her throat and smiled at Deirdre and said to Jack, “Let’s not tell your dad I was sleeping. I promised I would stay awake!” A flash of dismay sparked across Deirdre’s pointy little face, and then Clare realized that she had just asked a four-year-old to lie to his father. “I’m just kidding! We’ll tell your dad. We’ll tell him as soon as he comes home that I fell asleep. We would never lie to your dad!” Jack sidled up closer to his mother and buried his face in her sleeve.
Matthew walked through the door, just in time, a cloth bag hanging from his arm. Jack disengaged from his mother and leapt at his father, and they both howled with delight. Clare glanced over at Deirdre, who had sat down on the other end of the couch and was gazing at Jack and Matthew with an inscrutable little smile.
How completely strange that she was witness to this intimate reunion, that these two particular humans had come together and made this little bespectacled creature, this person who wouldn’t exist if Matthew’s parents had decided to live somewhere else, if Deirdre had fallen for the bartender who’d asked for her number the week before she met Matthew, if Matthew had gone to a different university. What sheer cosmic oddity. This boy. These two people. This family! Clare swallowed a dry lump in her throat and felt like she was disappearing, which was probably just the jet lag.
Matthew lurched over to the couch, Jack suctioned around his torso, the sack of groceries still dangling from his wrist. “I picked up bread and milk and jam and this little jellyfish that just sort of attached itself to me. I was thinking we could have it for tea.” Jack giggled, and Matthew kissed the top of his head.
Deirdre stood then and leaned toward her son and ex-husband, gave them a quick, encompassing hug. “Right,” she said. “I’ll be off. Have a good weekend,” she said. “I’ll pick you up on Monday, sweet. Remember to brush your teeth!”
“I will,” Matthew said, and Jack melted into giggles again.
Clare had not pressed Matthew on the reasons for his divorce, and Matthew hadn’t elaborated beyond a few sentences about marrying too young and growing apart. He said he thought Deirdre might be dating a woman now, but he didn’t really have any evidence for it and anyway it didn’t matter. He said it twice: Anyway, it doesn’t matter, and so she put a check mark next to it in her brain, flagged it for later.
She knew now, watching them together, seeing the light pleasure they took in each other, the handing-off of their child, the no-nonsense hug, that in fact there was no simmering bitterness between them, no thwarted passion turned to resentment, and she was relieved. But the thickness in her throat remained. She missed her mother, suddenly, stupidly, like a foal on new legs. She had been in England for four hours. She was hot with homesickness.
They had two hours without Jack, late on Saturday afternoon. They dropped him at a birthday party around the corner in the midst of a rainstorm. (“Ah, Jack, love!” the birthday girl’s mother said from the doorway, ushering the dripping child into her house. Then, to Matthew and Clare, with a wink: “Don’t linger, you two! Off you go! Do not get sucked in!” She was sizing Clare up and cheerfully shooing them away at the same time. How did she do that?)
Nobody but Clare seemed to mind the pouring rain. “Lashing!” Matthew said. It came at them from above and also somehow sideways, swooshing up and around them. They were like pasta being rinsed in a colander.
Matthew pulled her closer under their utterly ineffective umbrella, which was about to turn inside out. They splashed up the street. The cobblestones under their feet were beautiful and slippery, like beach pebbles. Matthew steered them toward a doorway. “Come on. This is why we have pubs.”
He held the door for her, shook out the umbrella on the front steps. The pub was warm and smelled of hops and wet wool. Matthew put his hand on her back and guided her to a table in the corner. All weekend, she had been led from place to place to place, thought to thought. She was still so tired, woozy with jet lag, almost feverish with it, and more malleable than usual. Matthew took her coat, and she sank into the booth. She liked the feeling, just for now—this sense of being wrapped in a blanket, of not having to make any decisions. Steam seemed to rise from her skin. She thought about her mother, at home in Milwaukee: running errands or telling her father a story about work or eating tomato soup, and she knew her mother was thinking about her.
“This is my fourth favorite pub!” Matthew said. He was so happy here, a lighter version of himself. And so, in a way she hadn’t predicted, was she.
“My favorite,” Matthew went on, “is called the Queen’s Knickers.”
Clare nodded sleepily, caught up in the warmth. She sipped the cider that had magically appeared in front of her. It took her a full minute to laugh.
At the bars her friends liked in Milwaukee, someone was always about to pinch your bottom or throw up next to you. This place, actually called the Windmill, was quiet, though there was one man at the bar slumped over and another, a few stools down, muttering to himself. Above the bar was a framed photograph of Princess Diana, who had died almost a year ago. In the picture, her hands were folded underneath her chin, and she was gazing off to the side benevolently.
Matthew took off his glasses and wiped them on his sleeve. “Clare,” he said. “Thank you for doing this for me. With me. I’m so happy you’re here.” He leaned forward, unembarrassed. “I really am.”
She slid a little lower in her seat and let out an assenting squeak.