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Gina and I were at the same table in Bryant Park where I’d had lunch with Veronica before leaving for San Francisco. She was sitting on the small metal chair with her knees tucked up to her chin.
“Did you see us?” I asked. “When you passed, I mean. Were you able to see us, your family and friends, and how we reacted?”
“Of course.” She lifted her chin off her knees. Her white T-shirt had little skulls forming the shape of a peace sign. “I saw it all then, and I still continue to see everyone.”
I crinkled my nose and gave her a side-eye. “What do you see exactly?”
She didn’t seem fazed. “When you’re on this side, you’re not interested in human-level things. I don’t want to see my friends and family having sex, going to the bathroom, or human body-based things.”
“I hope not!”
“You get a new perspective when you get here, a new ‘knowing’ when you’ve finished your life. You’re here, and you still love all the people you loved—love doesn’t die—so you want to be a part of guiding them on each of their soul’s journey.” I knew she said those last words in such a way to preempt mocking from me.
I still imitated her back. “Our soul’s journey.”
“So, yes, that’s how it works. I saw.” She put her chin back on her knees.
“I think about that day a lot,” I said. “It still rips me apart if I think about it for too long. Hearing your mother’s shriek. Seeing my mother screaming in a ball on our kitchen floor. I kind of just have to let the memory come and go, or I could really lose it.” I coughed to clear the lump in my throat. “You had your whole life ahead of you. It’s just so unfair.”
“I know,” Gina said. “It’s impossible to explain to you why it happened. But know this at least—when we see our loved ones being happy, it makes us happy. We celebrate with you. If you had all thrown a big, fucking party with streamers and balloons and a stripper for my funeral, now that would have been the best, seeing everyone laughing and having fun. But no one ever does shit like that. It’s too bad.”
I shook my head. “You’re nuts.”
“Honestly, when I see my mom, sometimes when she’s alone in our house and stares at my picture and cries, I scream ‘Go out! Listen to music! Laugh! Please!’ But I get it. I mean, I tell her that during visits I have with her, and I think...” She sighed. “I think we’re getting there.”
“She seems to be doing better,” I said. In the years since Gina passed, Aunt Fran had been slowly going out more. I noticed a change from the first couple of years when she hadn’t left the house, gone to anyone’s wedding, except mine, or done anything except pretty much stay home in bed. She hadn’t cleaned her house or cooked. My mom would visit and sit with her, straighten up, do the dishes, and help with laundry. She still helped like that, but now they did more together. They went out to lunch, dinner, the movies, and the beauty parlor, as they called it. “You really tell your mom to get out and do things? She’s definitely been doing more.”
“Hell yeah. Pretty much every one of our visits ends with me being like, ‘Laugh! For the love of God, laugh!’”
“It’s not that easy, Gina. She lost her child.” If anything ever happened to Ethan, I didn’t know how I would go on.
She glanced down. “I know.”
“I still don’t think any of us are over the shock. People talk about the stages of grief, but I don’t think they’re linear. I think you can go through all of them and still never get over the shock.”
“I know,” she repeated.
“A car accident. I still can’t fucking believe it.”
She untucked her knees. “Would you have rather I’d gotten cancer and died a slow death?”
“Yes.”
“Gee, thanks.” She offered me a cigarette. I declined.
“I would have gotten to say goodbye,” I said.
“Death is not a goodbye,” Gina said. “I’m still with you.”
“No. You’re really not, not in the way you should be. And we would have been prepared.”
“Would you have been? Really?” She removed the unlit cigarette from her mouth and put it back in the pack. “I feel like having a chocolate milkshake. Let’s go to Serendipity.”
She stood and stretched her arms up. The peace sign of skulls on her shirt stretched to an oval. We walked out of the park and up Fifth Avenue, which was unusually quiet except for a few passing cars.
“So, in your invisibility cloak, what have you seen about Todd? The voice mail said ‘Can you meet for a drink Friday night? Somewhere where we can talk.’ Talk about us, right? He’s being so damn cryptic.”
“Ye-ah,” she said with a sort of drawl.
“Ye-ah?” I realized I’d stopped walking. “What’s going on?”
“Come on, keep walking.”
“Tell me right now.”
“Walk.”
“No.” She knows something. I have to know what it is. Right now.
“You really don’t listen.” She put her hands in her front pockets and rocked to her tiptoes for a second before saying, “Okay, don’t freak the fuck out.”
“Saying ‘don’t freak the fuck out’ makes me freak the fuck out. So does your ‘Ye-ah.’ What the hell is going on?”
“You’re not the first person Todd cheated on his wife with.”
Ouch.
“We didn’t have sex!” Even though that was the first thing that came out of my mouth, I knew it didn’t matter. A million questions swirled in my mind.
“And there was someone he was with a few times about two months ago,” she continued. “Someone he also met up with on a business trip.”
That last part struck me particularly hard in the heart. That’s just his MO. Don’t go thinking you’re special.
“And that’s all I’m going to tell you right now.”
“There’s more? Can we sit down?” I pointed at a bus shelter a few steps away. As I sat, the sting of the cold metal through my pants caught me off guard. I stood up and sat back down again. “Does he love her? Is he going to choose her? Does she know who the lady in the red dress on the grassy knoll is? I bet she doesn’t. I bet they couldn’t talk all night.”
Gina sat next to me. “I know you thought—were hoping—maybe there’d be a future with him. But, Jada, that’s not why he came back into your life. I’m sorry. There was a different purpose.”
“I don’t want to hear about fucking purpose right now.”
She put her arm around me.
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
“I can.”
“Thanks.”
We sat in silence a little longer, listening to the cars whiz by.
“Listen, there is something about him you’re obviously missing with Mark. And that was the whole point.”
“I already knew there was something missing with Mark. Did I have to run into Todd and get my hopes up?” I put my head in my hands.
“Listen.” She stood up from the bench. “Todd’s a piece of crap, yes. But it takes two. Whether you had sex or not, it was a betrayal. You wouldn’t have gone back to his room if either of your spouses were watching. You have a lot of figuring out to do. But I can only get you so far in one day, in one visit. So get up! We’re going for milkshakes.”
I stayed seated. I didn’t feel like eating anything or sipping a milkshake.
She leaned down. “I’m sorry.”
We were surrounded in the bus shelter by an ad for whitening chewing gum. Gina’s spiky black hair made it look like there was a porcupine kneeling in front of me. Any other time, I would have pointed that out to her, and we would have cackled so hard, we would’ve snorted.
But not now. I let my head fall back into my hands. There goes hope. I should have known it was too good to be true.
When I lifted my head, Gina was closer to the street, her legs in a wide stance as she stretched her torso from side to side, with a cigarette hanging from her mouth. I thought she was sitting next to me, coming up with more words of comfort or wisdom, but she’s over there, doing calisthenics.
I rubbed my eyes. I could feel Gina move toward me. “All right, this is why I’m here instead of Grandma and Grandpa,” she said under her breath. I anticipated a hug or stroke of my back. But I got a yank. She grabbed a chunk of my hair and yanked, hard, like she’d done when we were girls, sparring over Barbie. My head cranked sideways.
“Ouch!” I swatted her hand away, but she had a death grip.
“I’m not really hurting you. This isn’t the physical world.”
“Well, it feels like it’s hurting. Let go!” I karate chopped her arm, and when that didn’t work, I chopped her neck.
She let go and fell to the ground, giggling. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to change the mood. Jada, you are a piece of work.” Her Converse sneakers touched the ground as she rocked back and forth.
“Don’t call me that. And what the hell is wrong with you?” I touched my head where she pulled.
She stared at me like she was studying a painting. “You will fight for things. You will not let anyone get away with anything. My scrappy cousin. You may be a fancy lawyer, but you can get scrappy.”
I was too confused to respond.
“Listen, I didn’t want you to feel sorry for yourself for too long,” she said.
“Well, I just found out. Can you give me a minute to mourn?”
“Wait ’til you hear the whole story.”
“What?”
She lifted herself up and sat next to me on the metal bench.
“Tell me everything right now,” I demanded while gathering my hair in a ponytail and inching away from her and her grabby hands.
“All I will say is, it wasn’t the right thing to be hoping for, to be with him. Sometimes, we’re given a glimmer of hope to make us realize what we were missing when we were too afraid to make a change.”
I contemplated that. I didn’t like it. Why does the path to happiness have to be so complicated?
“Listen, I want you to be happy,” she said. “I want to help you. That’s why I’m here.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” She stood and grabbed my arm to pull me off the bench.
“Don’t pull my hair again,” I said. “Fucking weirdo.”
“Lighten up. It was a throwback to our Barbie days.”
“When possession of a plastic doll would be our biggest problem, or so we thought.”
“Exactly. Let’s walk.”
As we headed up Fifth Avenue, I surveyed the new status of things. “So I’m going to divorce my husband. I’m not going to end up with Todd. And I’ll be a single mom.”
“Is that so bad? Maybe you don’t need a man. Maybe you’ll find happiness in other things. In seeing Ethan grow up. Enjoying a piece of dark chocolate and a new JFK book at the end of the day. The little things.”
“Watching the sun rise?” I mocked.
Gina turned abruptly to the right. I followed her gaze to see the big, fat yellow sun creeping up. We took it in.
I’ve never been a ‘look at the sun, look at the moon’ kind of person.
It was bright, and if we weren’t on the other side, it would be strange to be walking for milkshakes after the sun just rose. But here, there was no time, and every restaurant was always open. We walked the rest of the way to Serendipity in silence.
We sat at a table outside and started with frozen hot chocolates. Then Gina had a chocolate milkshake, and I had a vanilla one. We got fries too. I dipped a french fry in my shake and chewed it slowly, taking a moment to enjoy the sweet and salty of it all.