On the way to the Margolises’ house, or should she say “Charlie’s” now, Cece watched the familiar sights flash by her window: Fred’s Bait and Tackle, the concrete teepee that used to be a motel, the blue lake strobing through the trees. She wasn’t sleepy at all but couldn’t stop yawning. Her stomach hurt from dread, nerves, possibly hunger. She’d been unable to eat breakfast, staring at her bowl of oatmeal this morning as if it were prison gruel. Garrett seemed as nervous as she was, gazing silently ahead, his hands clenching the wheel. Every so often he glanced at the mirror and fussed with his hair, so thin on top it looked like a baby’s.
It had taken Charlie years to forgive them—nine, in fact—and now they were driving to the house that she’d once loved, the place where Charlie and Cece had intended to take their children every summer. Where they’d had their wedding and vowed to love and to cherish, till death did them part. How strange to be headed there, now, for a visit. Cece had driven by it before, of course, though only once when she had to get to Missoula for a flight; she generally did everything in her power—took the long way around the lake—to avoid it.
Lana seemed to have absorbed the nervousness of her parents, sitting in the backseat with her hands clasped, thumbs steepled together. She hadn’t said a word since they left. This was uncharacteristic enough to seem like an omen: a sign that they shouldn’t have accepted Charlie’s invitation. Cece had only explained to her, of course, that he was an old friend. Lana knew nothing of the history, the wedding, Cece getting so sick she couldn’t fly back to LA with Charlie—and then never flying back to California at all.
“Honey, we need to tell you something,” Cece said, turning around in the front seat. Her daughter, seven years old and preposterously beautiful, like a child in a French movie, seemed strangely obedient.
“All right.”
“The man we’re visiting, Charlie, he and I used to be—well, we were engaged to be married. But I fell in love with your father.”
Lana nodded. “I know.”
“You know?”
“You ran away with Daddy after your wedding.”
Cece blinked at her. “How do you know that?”
“Daddy told me.”
Cece looked at Garrett, doing her best to convey her annoyance without telegraphing it to their daughter.
“She asked me about it last night,” he said, shrugging. “Wondered why she’d never met Charlie before, since he has a kid her age. And a house ten minutes away. Did you really expect me to lie?”
“Yes,” Cece said. “What else do you know?” she asked Lana.
“You and the man we’re going to see weren’t full-way married yet. When you ran away with Dad. You never turned in the certificate to get it certificated.”
“Certified,” Garrett said.
“Plus the man has a whole new family. So it’s cool.”
Cece looked at Garrett again. “Right. Extremely cool. Coolest thing I’ve ever done in my life.” This was meant to be a joke. Her throat clogged and she looked out the window.
“Also, Dad was refereeing the wedding and he was supposed to say a speech, but he was too in love with you to write it beforehand and had to make up something on the spot.”
“You told her that?” Cece said.
“Well, not the referee part. She might be confusing marriage with competitive sport.”
“What did the speech say?” Lana asked.
“Oh, it was really…,” Cece began, but found herself at a loss for words. Beautiful? Appalling? Like a knife, now, in the heart?
“I’ll tell you about it sometime,” Garrett said. “When you’re older.”
Cece stared at him, wondering whether to be mad or not. There was so much agony there—so much guilt and second-guessing and trapdoor ambivalence opening to regret—that she didn’t know where to begin. The thing was, she loved Garrett, still desired him on some molecular level she didn’t fully understand. But of course being married to him was a lot different from not being married to him. Not being married was the easiest thing in the world. It was as impossible for her to imagine the hunger she’d felt, the dark aching madness that had caused her to blow up her life, as it was to imagine a stranger’s. More impossible, perhaps. The things that had seemed so irresistible to her—Garrett’s tragic sadness, his distrust of pieties, his gimlet-eyed way of looking at the whole American project—were less alluring when you had to live with them on a daily basis. Nonconformity, when you’re married to it, ends up looking more and more like inertia. And yet there were surprising compensations: she would never, for example, have imagined him being such a good father.
She touched his leg now, choosing to forgive him. Garrett, stiff as a statue, smiled back. Yes, he was sick with fear too. When Charlie had emailed him a month ago, out of the blue, it had seemed like a miracle; neither of them could believe it, that Charlie had invited them back into his life. A long letter, mostly about himself: his wife and kids, how happy he was. He’d lost a transplant patient during post-op; the guy’s best friend, whom he’d fought with in Vietnam, had been in the room when he died. I don’t want to go the rest of my life not speaking to my best friend. Garrett, reading the email aloud to Cece, had stopped after this line, overwhelmed. It was one of the few times she’d seen him choke up.
They rounded the bend to the Margolises’ and there it was: the dock, the electric lake, the house making its guttersnipe face at them, porch sticking out like a tongue. Other than some rosebushes on the front lawn, blooming as yellow as the house, the place looked the same. Even the fence post that Garrett had put in was still there, shorter than the rest. It angered her, for some reason, that Charlie hadn’t replaced it.
Garrett parked by the side of the road—the driveway was blocked—and Cece got out first and walked down to the lake without thinking to bring Lana with her or to tell either of them where she was going. She felt it in her legs: an almost physical tug. The boat creaked gently in the water, dock lines straining against their cleats. She’d forgotten this sound existed in the world. A sound she loved. A daytime moon hung over the Lazy Bear, which had yet to open. Cece stepped out of her thongs and warmed the soles of her feet. The huge lake, glazed by the sun, shone bright as a movie. Beyond the western shore loomed the peak of Baldy Mountain, wearing its green gown of trees, unzipped down the middle from an avalanche last winter.
She’d given all this up. Oh god, what had she done?
Charlie met them at the door, looking fit and happy, astonishingly the same except for a reddish beard that shouldn’t have suited him but did, maybe because it made him appear less boyish. He introduced them to his wife, Angeliki, who said she’d encouraged Charlie with the beard; of course, he would never do something without it being carefully focus-grouped. Shaking hands with this beautiful Greek wife, who had a beautiful half-Greek toddler clinging to her leg—Charlie’s youngest—Cece felt the twinge of something she wasn’t used to feeling in Montana. Frumpiness. She wished she’d had her hair cut in the last six months.
“And this little fellow is Jasper,” Charlie said, in a proud-parent voice she wouldn’t have expected. Somehow this suited him too. A tan-faced boy with Charlie’s slender, rocket-fin nose smiled politely up at them. Something crumbled in Cece’s chest. No: came down all at once. The toddler hugging Angeliki’s leg mimed some squeezing motions with her hand, as if she were milking a cow, and Angeliki sat down on the edge of the couch and promptly began to breastfeed her. Unlike Cece’s Montana neighbors—who used what they called “hooter hiders”—the woman didn’t feel the need to conceal herself.
“And how old are you?” she asked Lana, who did not smile politely like Jasper but stared brazenly at Angeliki’s breast.
“Eight.”
“Actually, she’s seven,” Garrett said. “She’s been lying about her age since she was six.”
“I’m seven too,” Jasper said.
Lana gave him a withering look.
“Do you like mushrooms?” Charlie asked her.
“No.”
“How about hot dogs?”
“No. They taste like airport.”
“Lana!” Cece said, blushing. “Be polite.”
“I dislike them very much, thank you,” Lana said.
“Why don’t you put some pasta on the stove,” Angeliki said from the couch, “for anyone who doesn’t like airport.”
At dinner, she set up a booster seat for little Téa, who proceeded to calmly suck peas from her fingers. She had to be the mellowest two-year-old Cece had ever met. Lana, at her age, was flying around like a pinball, breaking things left and right. Cece wondered why it had taken Charlie and Angeliki so long to have a second child, whether there’d been some kind of hidden trouble in their marriage. Infidelity? Depression? She found herself dwelling on the possibilities.
“So when I was older than you, sixteen years old,” Angeliki said to Lana, though everyone at the table was listening, “my parents sent me to this summer camp in Oregon. We’d just moved to the States and I didn’t really like American food.” She explained how they’d gone on a camping trip and one of the counselors had found some chicken-of-the-woods mushrooms growing out of a tree and cooked them up for all the campers. Those big, orange, ugly-looking mushrooms that supposedly taste like chicken. Well, they convinced her to try one, because all the campers were eating them, and then suddenly one of the girls said she didn’t feel very well and threw up in the woods. And the counselors were like, ‘Poor kid! Has the flu!’ But then another kid clutched her stomach and had to go throw up. And then all of them were suddenly groaning and hugging themselves and rolling around on the ground. They had to take everyone to the hospital. “We were all passing a cardboard box around in the bus and throwing up into it. We made up a song about it: ‘Puke Box Hero.’ Turns out the counselor had picked some mushrooms growing out of the wrong kind of tree! The kind that grows on conifers or hemlocks, I don’t remember which, can make you really ill.”
“Hemlocks are a kind of conifer,” Cece said. “They’re conifers already.”
“Oh yes, well,” Angeliki said graciously. “You’re right. Something else then.”
Lana looked at Cece—wondering why she was being such a bitch, probably. Cece blamed it on the rock slide in her chest. Angeliki’s story had made her think of the wedding, of course, how Mr. Margolis had given half the wedding party norovirus all those years ago. Judging from the awkward silence, Charlie and Garrett were thinking about this too; only Angeliki, cleaning Téa’s face with her napkin, seemed unfazed by the connection. Perhaps she didn’t know about the wedding at all. Was it possible Charlie hadn’t told her?
It didn’t help that she was lovely: olive skin and big stagestruck eyes and the kind of symmetrically perfect face that flipped a switch inside you, one you wished didn’t exist. It was one of those faces that seemed kind because it was beautiful. This had always seemed ludicrous to Cece—a literal interpretation of moral beauty, exploited by Victorian novelists—but in this case it seemed to be true. The woman was genuinely kind. Cece had not counted on this. She had prepared herself for anger, brittleness, even open hostility. But this hearty indifferent friendliness—somehow it was worse.
Charlie put his hand on the back of Angeliki’s neck, massaging it gently. He used to do the same thing to Cece whenever they had company over, as if showing everyone in the room how lucky he was—had done this during their rehearsal picnic, in fact, little knowing what lay in store. If Cece hadn’t been felled by norovirus after the wedding, too sick to fly home with Charlie, they might still be together. He’d wept on the phone when she told him she wasn’t coming back to LA, that she was in love with Garrett and staying in Montana: wept and wept. How horrific it had been! Charlie had done his share of screaming, of course, but mostly Cece remembered how crushed he’d sounded, how small and broken and abandoned, like a little boy. He’d pleaded for her to come back, made himself sickening and pathetic, then when that hadn’t worked vowed never to forgive her. And Cece really thought she’d done something unforgivable, that she was some kind of monster. She despised herself, but at the time this seemed like an acceptable price to pay. Or, if not exactly acceptable, bearable. She could be a good human being and marry the wrong person, or be a monster who ran off with his best friend, the man she’d fallen in love with.
But now, of course, Charlie had forgiven her. And why not? It had worked out in the best possible way for him. He’d found someone better.
“And, Garrett?” Charlie said in his friendliest voice. “Catch me up on your life.”
“Okay,” Garrett said, then fell silent.
“You’re a wildlife biologist now?”
“Sounds a bit more glamorous than it is. And lucrative.”
“Well, last time we were in touch”—a bit of awkwardness here, a pause, but he seemed so at peace it may have only been a hiccup—“you were working at the airport.”
Garrett blushed. “Everything’s relative, I guess. But yeah, fieldwork mostly. Population ecology. I’m out in the trenches.”
“Studying what?”
“I did fishers for a bit. That was for Defenders of Wildlife. Then mountain caribou, up in northern Idaho. For the past couple winters, we’ve been tracking wolverines in Glacier.”
“Wolverines are endangered?”
“In the lower forty-eight they are. Or should be. That’s one of the study objectives—we’re trying to get them designated.”
“There are only about three hundred left,” Lana said informatively.
“Is that so?”
Lana glanced at Téa and leaned forward, lowering her voice. “Sometimes they kill each other too. Their own offspring.”
She adored her father and had adopted his sociopathic way of describing animal behavior. Well, not sociopathic exactly—just free of the cuddly Disney-isms Californians used when talking about animals, particularly ones they wanted to keep roaming the earth. (Cece and Garrett’s neighbors, who hunted elk with rifles and crossbows and weird primitive muskets you had to load with a rod, anything that would allow them to keep killing things all year round, talked about animals in the same way Garrett did.)
“It’s the shorter winters that are really killing them,” Garrett said. “The decline in snowpack. They build snow dens for their young, ten feet deep sometimes—for insulation, but also to hide them from predators. I mean, have you ever seen a wolverine’s feet?”
Charlie shook his head.
“They’re as big as Ping-Pong paddles.”
“Really?”
“You’d be hard-pressed to find an animal,” Garrett said, “that evolved more thoroughly for snow.”
Charlie smiled at him.
“What?”
“Just amazed. A wolverine expert. Last thing I heard, Cece, you’d married a baggage handler.”
There was an awkward silence. What did he mean by this? Nothing. Everything. Cece looked at her daughter, who was staring at her in astonishment.
“You were married to a baggage handler?” Lana asked excitedly.
“Yep,” Garrett said. “A real loser.”
“So you’re away from home a lot?” Angeliki asked Garrett.
“Just a few weeks at a time.”
Angeliki shook her head. “Must be hard,” she said sympathetically. She’d turned to Lana, but Cece felt like she was addressing her.
“We manage okay,” Cece said. “Don’t we, Lana?”
“I’m kind of a latchkey kid,” Lana said provocatively. Where did she get these terms?
“You’re not a latchkey kid.”
“I am. I come home after school to an empty house. I watch TV by myself.”
“Only for a half hour!”
“I want to be a Latchki kid,” Jasper said. It was the first thing he’d said all dinner.
“Mom forgot to put the spare key in the mailbox one time, and I had to wait for her to come home. It was below freezing outside. My ears fell off.”
“Your ears did not fall off. You had a wool hat in your backpack the whole time and didn’t even take it out. Besides, I told you to go to the Washburns’ if anything like that ever happened.”
“The Washburn kids chew tobacco. Plus they set their little cousin on fire.”
“That was an accident.”
“Can we go to the Washburns’?” Jasper asked his mom.
“No,” she said calmly, with that noirish unflappability certain moms had and that always made Cece feel like a mass of nerve endings. Angeliki looked at Jasper for a second, as if wondering whether Lana was a bad influence. “And where do you work, Cece?”
“At the Trout and Tackle. Next to the playhouse.”
Angeliki looked at her blankly.
“That’s her restaurant,” Garrett explained.
“Oh, wow. You have your own restaurant?”
“No no,” Cece said. “It’s not mine, thank god. I’m just a server.”
“Actually, she’s going back to school,” Garrett said. “To get her PhD. It’s just a matter of when we can get our lives in order.”
Cece looked at him, suddenly furious. Why was he so intent on making her life seem less small? Probably he just didn’t want her to feel humiliated, but in fact his rushing to her defense had the opposite effect. It made sense that she would have supported his career first, given how unhappy he was working at the airport. They’d rented an apartment in Missoula those first few years so he could finish up his bachelor’s, then his master’s, while she tried to map out a future for herself, something that would allow him to continue doing fieldwork in the Rockies. All the English grad programs were on the coasts—at least if she wanted a PhD worth its salt, that might actually translate into a career. Regardless, he’d agreed to follow her wherever she wanted. They’d make it work.
Except she’d gotten pregnant. A mistake: she’d gone off the pill, suspecting it was giving her migraines, and they’d become a bit complacent. She’d always imagined having kids, just not quite so soon. There were complications: six months of bed rest with bathroom privileges (thank god). She had an “incompetent cervix”—this always made Garrett laugh, though in med school you got used to the slanderous dissing of body parts—and a doctor sewed it up. Cerclage. Every day Cece took to the couch, worried the feckless organ would pop its stitches. The worry and boredom and confinement were unspeakable. It was the sort of ordeal that sweeps you out to sea and then crashes you back to shore half a year later, your bones turned to coral, your hopes and dreams worn down to basic human demands. You just want a healthy baby. You want to get off the couch again. You want to smell something other than your armpits. She would not trade Lana for anything—she was determined to be a great mother, who would never die—but Cece couldn’t help feeling her dreams had failed to recover from those months of bed rest. They’d never fully made it off the couch.
Broke, having burned through the meager savings Garrett had inherited from his father, the dregs of his TIAA-CREF account, they moved back to Salish—or rather to his father’s house, which he’d failed after his dad’s death to even rent out. They needed more space, Garrett had begun working at Glacier, so it made sense. Plus they both missed it up here, though it didn’t take long for Cece to realize she’d confused the place in general with her very limited experience of it: i.e., the lake. The lake, in summer, with no money problems to speak of. How divine it was, to splash around in the water! She felt hopelessly naïve. Not that the landscape didn’t move her—she couldn’t drive home from work, the Swan Mountains white with snow, hovering like shot-down clouds in the distance, without feeling a lump in her throat—just that she didn’t know who she was. That was the trouble. Money, she realized now, had protected her from this startling fact.
She did her best not to obsess about it, but sometimes Cece couldn’t help imagining the life she would have led if she’d never left LA. In this alternate universe, she’d gone back to med school and become a doctor: a radiologist, with humanely regular hours, living in a nice suburb somewhere where the neighbor children didn’t chew tobacco. She was happy and professionally fulfilled. Cece knew this was bunk—she’d been miserable in med school, ill-suited to the whole endeavor—but in her weakest moments blamed Garrett for everything she’d lost.
After dinner, she helped Charlie and Garrett clean up, since Charlie insisted that Angeliki—who’d spent the afternoon cooking—relax. Apparently, “relax” in Angeliki’s case meant happily agreeing to play Monopoly when Lana and Jasper asked her to, a game Cece refused to play at home. (She loved her daughter but would rather have killed them both in a murder-suicide.) Lana, who did not realize mothers played Monopoly—or board games at all, really, except under duress—was delighted. It was like she’d discovered a new kind of life-form. She even got to insist on being banker, making things proceed even more glacially than usual.
Cece watched the Monopoly game from the kitchen, where she was helping to do the dishes, Garrett scrubbing each one in the sink and then handing it to her to dry before she passed it to Charlie to put away. Charlie chatted about the renovations they’d done to the house, seemingly oblivious to the awkwardness of the three of them doing dishes together. It was as if he and Cece had never so much as kissed each other on the cheek. She kept glancing at Garrett, wondering what he made of Charlie’s happiness. Did he feel as depressed as she did? Full of disdain for his old friend’s restless waste of money? Or—because anything was possible with Garrett—was he just happy to be there at all, too humbled by Charlie’s forgiveness to say much?
“Remember the old kitchen?” Charlie said, to Cece in particular. He looked away when she met his eyes, the first time he’d seemed at all uncomfortable.
“Yes.”
“We just gutted it completely. Knocked the wall with the pass-through in it down—remember that?—knocked the whole damn thing down and just went ahead and absorbed the old dining room. It was all Angeliki, really. I mean, my brothers had a say, of course, but she came up with the design herself.”
Cece tried to picture exactly where the wall used to be, envisioning the kitchen as it once was, brown and cramped and windowless. It was twice the size now, and objectively speaking a hundred times better, with a stainless-steel fridge and a separate island for the sink and those quartz countertops that looked like marble but didn’t stain. There was even a built-in wine cooler. Everything was in perfect taste. And yet Cece much preferred the old kitchen: its brown appliances and jack-in-the-box toaster and breakfast table with its plastic tablecloth. God, that tablecloth! She could see it perfectly in her mind. At least the living room looked the same, probably because they hadn’t gotten around to renovating it yet: beige carpet. Musty furniture. Haunted windows that popped open for no reason, impossible to latch. Cece, twisting around to look, was relieved to find the hand-drawn duck still taped above the stairs. Relieved and heartsick. She dropped the glass tumbler she was drying, but miraculously it hit the quartz without causing so much as a crack.
She excused herself and went to the bathroom, where she sat on the edge of the tub for a minute to recover. Even the bathroom, its familiar ugliness, stabbed her heart. Probably they shouldn’t have come. She’d thought about rejecting Charlie’s invitation—why reopen the wound?—but it was important to Garrett, whose guilt, perhaps more than hers, kept him up at night. A pardon they’d never expected, dropped into their laps.
But it wasn’t just Garrett. She’d felt pulled here herself, drawn treacherously to the house, the way a murderer might be drawn back to the scene of the crime. She’d wanted to see what she was missing.
Cece hadn’t smoked weed in a long time—years—but suddenly craved a joint. She could almost smell it, the sweet mildewy funk. She wondered if Charlie had any lying around—or maybe his brothers?—but remembered the sparkling kitchen and came to her senses.
After cleaning up, they walked down to the lake for an after-dinner swim. Cece was worried Lana would throw a fit about quitting Monopoly—at home, she tantrumed if you didn’t finish a board game in a single sitting—but somehow Angeliki was able to convince her to abandon her miniature collie on Marvin Gardens. Clearly, the woman had cast a spell. Angeliki brought Téa down to the lake, dressing her in a sunbonnet with little birds on it, which the toddler suffered without complaint. Lana, starstruck, insisted on holding Angeliki’s hand. Cece walked along beside them. The evening was warm and breezeless, the dock still hot on Cece’s feet though the sun on the lake was beginning to congeal, frosting it like a cake. The fish jumping looked like invisible rain. Before long the sun would sink below the mountains, swallows strafing the water.
Angeliki went swimming first, handing Téa to Charlie. Of course she looked good in a bathing suit. A bit heavier than Cece—but she knew that Charlie was susceptible to this, so long as the plumpness was where he liked it (especially up top, where Cece was more, well, streamlined). Impatient, Garrett jumped in too, hooting as always when he hit the water. He’d gotten this from Cece.
“Come on!” Garrett said to her.
“In a minute.”
She sat next to Charlie on the dock. Garrett swam to where his feet could reach bottom and hoisted Lana onto his shoulders, dunking her underwater and then springing up suddenly so that she toppled like a tree. He did the same thing to Jasper, who laughed and laughed. Garrett laughed too. He looked balder when his hair was wet, Cece noticed.
“He’s turned into quite the dad,” Charlie said, holding Téa on his lap. She did not like the water, or perhaps was intimidated by Lana. “I never would have expected it.”
“Me neither,” Cece said.
She looked at him and blushed. He’d kept all his hair: not even a widow’s peak. Téa asked for her mother, the first grumble from the girl she’d heard all day, and Charlie pointed at Angeliki in the water, who was bobbing in the wake of a speedboat. Cece would have loved to do that too—it looked, honestly, like bliss—but something gravitational was keeping her here. Partly she wanted to face the lake and not the lawn, where they’d had the wedding. Walking across it had been upsetting enough.
Angeliki waved at them from the water, and Téa and Charlie waved back. He looked tan, besotted, invincibly happy. “Lana’s an amazing girl,” he said suddenly. “One of a kind.”
“Yes, well, that’s one way of putting it.”
“She’s got a lot of…I don’t know. Spark.”
“I think the reigning euphemism is ‘spirited.’ ”
Charlie laughed. “Same old Cece,” he said, as if he were her folksy hayseed uncle or something. When did he start talking this way? Téa whispered something in Charlie’s ear; he reached into the swim bag by his feet and handed her a juice box. Was his hand, ever so slightly, trembling?
“Is there a reason you guys waited five years? Between kids?”
Charlie shrugged. “Happiness? I think we worried we’d screw it up.”
She ignored the smugness of this. Or tried to.
“And you?” he said quietly. “You always said you wanted two children.”
“With you.”
She’d just meant to be truthful, but it sounded different than she’d intended. In any case, he glanced in Angeliki’s direction. A loyal husband. They sat there in silence, watching Téa sip demurely at her juice box. (Lana still sucked them down in one go, as if she were huffing hair spray.)
“How are Jake and Bradley?” Cece asked.
“They’d never forgive me, if they knew I’d invited you here.”
“They hate me that much.”
Charlie nodded. That meant his parents did too. They were a family that, once betrayed, took no prisoners. Of course she’d known his brothers hated her, but hearing it from Charlie’s lips gutted her anew. Charlie must have felt something as well, because the breezy expression on his face wavered, straining at the guy-wires holding it in place. The happiness, the holiday-card platitudes, the children who gleefully ate mushrooms…Cece had the sense, if only for a second, that it was all some kind of hoax. That he’d ordered Angeliki from a catalog called Monopoly-Playing Moms. But of course she was imagining this.
“I forgot to put on sunscreen,” he said finally, without looking at Cece. “Shit. Do you mind watching Téa for a second? She’s not wearing a life vest.”
“It’s seven thirty at night.”
“As long as the sun’s putting out UVs, you can burn,” he said.
She’d forgotten how fair-skinned he was—and how fastidious. Cece took the child in her lap. Téa fussed and reached for her father, but then Cece dandled her on one knee and jiggled it like a pony, making her laugh. Anyone would have thought she was the child’s mother.
Charlie put some sunscreen on, doing that thing where you smear it on your palms first and then rub it two-handed all over your face, like a monk performing ablutions. Cece stared at his wedding ring. A simple band, like the one Cece had bought for him. No doubt engraved on the inside was a secret message. God, could it be the same thing she and Charlie had engraved in each of their rings? The corny lyric from Singin’ in the Rain, Charlie’s favorite movie? Cece shuddered inside just thinking of it. Couldn’t even bear to say the lyric to herself.
He must have caught her staring at the ring because he began to fiddle with it self-consciously, twisting it back and forth. Before their ceremony, she’d read about the origin of wedding rings: a vein, it was believed, ran straight from the ring finger to the heart.
She handed Téa back, feeling a strange aversion to the girl. Almost a disgust. Charlie’s face, greasy with sunscreen, shone like a painting. “This is the life, isn’t it?”
It sounded like an accusation. Or a boast. Or both.
Cece took off her T-shirt and grabbed the swim goggles out of her bag—she hated not being able to see underwater—and dove into the lake, feeling the cold grab her like a fist. It held her for a few seconds before releasing its grip. She came up panting. She’d swum countless times since her last summer here, in this very same lake, driving to the public-access beach with Lana. So why did this feel so different? So much more, well, correct?
This is the life. What an absurd expression. As if there were a single life and the others didn’t count.
Garrett called to her but she ignored him, leaving him with Lana and swimming farther out than she was used to, prey to the Jet Skis hot-rodding the lake. She floated on her back like a seal. There’d been a time when Garrett’s voice had quickened her pulse, when she would have obeyed it at once. How madly in love they’d been at first! A form of derangement. Certainly she’d felt deranged after the wedding, stranded at the Margolises’ house, too ill to do much of anything but lie in bed, head roaring with pain, as if her brain were literally on fire. All she could think about was Garrett’s email. She’d read it again and again, committing it basically to memory, imagining that her fever had been caused by it—Garrett’s drunken confession—and not a virus at all. Emerging from her sickness, she’d felt emptied of everything, all the gunk in her brain replaced by a pristine ruthless clarity she hadn’t felt in years. Charlie’s mother, whom she’d always adored—and who’d taken care of her in Charlie’s absence, helping her sip ginger ale through a bendy straw—seemed to her a sad, lonely woman stuck in a moribund marriage, pining for the sons who no longer needed her. Cece had urged Charlie’s parents to fly home on their original flight. It was the height of the tourist season, everything sold out; Cece was stuck there for another week. The thought of flying home, of officially beginning her marriage, filled her with ineffable dread. She lay in bed for two days, staring at the portrait of Charlie’s great-grandfather on the Margolises’ wall (muttonchops, eyes of God). At last, trembling, she’d written Garrett back, ostensibly to ask how his father was; he’d offered to come by with more weed…
Terrible, wonderful, a treachery so deep it felt like being rescued. It really was just as he’d said, like a dimmer switch: you thought the world had a certain wattage, that it would forever be the same, and then suddenly it went even brighter and you thought, What was I missing? Those first weeks in Garrett’s apartment, hiding out on his lumpy roadkill of a futon—Cece remembered them like a single day. The fallout hardly mattered. Or rather, it was atrocious, it mattered immensely, but it was happening on a different planet. They lived on Planet Futon. The place was dingy, it smelled like an old sponge; mice raided the cupboards every night and left their spoor in the rice. But they didn’t need to eat. They feasted on each other. She’d never felt this before, this hunger for another person, as if she might actually starve without him. Parting from him was like pulling a tooth. When he had to go to work, or visit his dad at the hospice, she held on to his wrist so he wouldn’t leave. It was a joke and it wasn’t. She felt delirious, actually had to remind herself that she was a separate person. When they went out together, everything seemed new to her, wondrous. A trip to the IGA was like going to an amusement park; they reeled around the aisles, arm in arm, giggling at the things in other people’s carts. One night they’d gone to a bowling alley—bowling!—and she’d gotten her thumb stuck in the ball. This was not a disaster but the funniest thing ever. To get it off, the guy at the concession stand had to soak the ball in a vat of cooking oil. When Garrett’s father finally died, it made them even closer; their world shrank to the dimensions of his grief. That first winter, he’d taken her down to the bay, where the lake had frozen over. December’s the best, when the ice is expanding. They walked right off the end of the marina, onto the lake. Nighttime: a dome of stars. He told her to put her ear to the ice. What sounds! Like ghosts being shot by a slingshot. She had no idea ice could sing. They lay there face-to-face, listening to the same secret music. Even afterward—eating, say, in comfortable silence—she got marvelously spooked sometimes, felt a bigness between them, as if they were still out there listening to the ice.
And then it dimmed: the delirium, the sense of being in on a marvelous secret. The doubts began. Things Garrett did started to annoy her, just as he’d predicted so long ago: the way he used up the toilet paper and didn’t replace it, the weird silent burping he did after drinking a beer. They began to fight, often over money. And of course Lana, in her “spirited” way, ground them down, depleted the stores of affection they had for each other. Not that Cece didn’t love Garrett. She did! Just that this love failed to solve their problems. Sometimes she’d hear him rant about “the self-help industrial complex,” or watch him do that thing where he sniffed his boots before putting them on, and it would bewilder her—actually seem borderline insane—that she’d chosen him.
Cece closed her eyes, suspended in the heated blanket of water at the surface. When she righted herself again, she could see someone swimming toward her from the dock. Charlie. She could tell by his full head of hair. No doubt he was showing off, eager to prove he’d forgiven her. To flaunt his happiness. Angeliki, who’d perhaps taken Téa back to the house, was nowhere to be seen.
Charlie swam to where she was treading water and stopped right in front of her. But he didn’t look happy. Quite the opposite. He was trembling, his mouth wide as a gash. The water had done something to the sunscreen on his face, turned it filmy and opaque, as if he’d been painted with primer. Cece’s heart stamped in her chest. For the rest of her life, replaying the scene in her head, she would see each and every detail of it, as vivid as a clip from a movie: His white-painted face, the tiny pink coastline of his gums. He peers into Cece’s eyes. Then he grabs her arm, right above the wrist, making it hard to tread water. He keeps his grip on her, squeezing so hard that it hurts. He dips below the surface, yanking her with him. Cece doesn’t struggle. Somehow she knows he won’t drown her. And yet it seems possible he might try to, given how angry he looks underwater, how pale and strange and alien, his hair floating above him, as white as his face. It looks like an old man’s. Through the prism of her swim goggles, he seems to age before her eyes, turning older and older, his face growing stranger by the second, more wrinkled and toothless, his grip on her arm weakening to a pinch. He’s frail, shriveled, ninety years old. The air leaving his mouth looks to Cece like his own soul. And she can feel herself aging as well. She’s turning into an old woman, her body shriveling like his. She can barely breathe. He’s holding her; they will die in each other’s arms.
He let go of her and she swam to the surface, gasping. She could have broken his grip earlier but didn’t. She’d stayed down there with him. Cece began to swim back with her head above water. At the dock, Lana and Jasper were fighting over Garrett, who was waist-deep in the lake, looking brown and beautiful in the dampening sun. He watched Cece swim back, ignoring the kids tugging at his arm.
Then they were packing up to go home, herding Lana into the car and bidding farewell to Charlie and Angeliki. Charlie hugged Cece gently, smiling in his new avuncular way, as if the episode in the lake had never happened. Someone, Angeliki no doubt, had managed to get the sunscreen off his face. Yes, so much fun! Let’s see each other soon. They waved from the car and then were on the road again, the house disappearing behind them, driving into a magic-hour sky. The clouds glowing in the west were like the way Cece once imagined them as a kid: purple airships, powered by great sails or mechanical wings. The lake seemed to brighten as the daylight faded. A transference, a Magritte painting, as if the lake and sky had traded places.
Garrett drove without speaking, distracted by something or maybe just tired. Three kids at once had been too much for him, and his mood, as sometimes happened, had turned. He was thinking of disappearing back into the mountains, to his wolverines.
“Angeliki is beautiful,” Cece said, mainly to break the silence.
Garrett glanced at her. “If you find Muppets beautiful, I suppose. She’s like Jim Henson’s wet dream.” Cece flicked her eyes toward Lana but was too pleased to care. “Big eyes. And all mouth. And those cheeks! I thought she might start subtracting cookies. Lana, doesn’t Angeliki look like a Muppet to you?”
“Who’s Angeliki?”
“Jasper’s mother!”
“I liked her,” Lana said. “She let me trade Baltic Avenue for Park Place.”
“Also Muppet-like, in terms of IQ.”
Lana giggled. Cece had been completely wrong about Garrett’s mood. He was a total mystery to her, after nine years.
“What’s a wet dream?” Lana asked.
Cece and Garrett looked at each other.
“It’s a dream you have,” Garrett said, “but extra intense.”
“About Muppets?”
“They’re not typically about Muppets. No.”
“Good. I despise Muppets. All they do is complain about their life. Mom used to make me watch their show.”
“I never made you watch anything,” Cece said.
Lana started to hum the Muppet Show theme song. Actually, she’d loved the show and used to beg to take out the DVDs from the library. Why did her experience of something have nothing to do with her later opinion of it? Cece felt a disconcerting poke of recognition.
“Well, Charlie at least seems besotted with her,” Cece said to Garrett. “Muppet or no.”
Garrett shook his head. “That wasn’t Charlie.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It was like a play he was putting on for us. He’d spent a long time casting it, blocking out the scenes, but I think he realized about halfway through that we weren’t buying it.”
“Maybe it was the goop all over his face.”
“Stage makeup!”
It was almost dusk now, only a thin flare of pink on the horizon. Her throat swelled a bit. This is partly why she’d fallen in love with Garrett to begin with: that he could see into things this way, confirm what had already been half-formed in her heart, written in a kind of invisible ink. Garrett had the magic light. And it made sense to her, as it sometimes did—often did—that she’d run away with him. Upended her life.
She slid over in her seat and put her hand on Garrett’s leg. It was lean and whittled, from all the time he was spending in the mountains. She could feel his thigh muscle, the animal shape of it. She loved these moments, when she was certain that the choice she’d made—easily the riskiest thing she’d ever done in her life, and hands-down the bravest—was the right one. Cece squeezed his leg. This was the life. This one. It was precious, this certainty, because she knew it wouldn’t last.