Garrett and Cece were on the way to Charlie’s house, for the reunion. Brig had brought about the reunion by having a stroke. It wasn’t a funeral, thank god, but definitely not the nostalgia-fueled bacchanal he’d envisioned.
“Can he talk?” Cece asked from the passenger seat.
“I don’t think so. Not very well.”
“So it was a full ischemic? Where was the clot?”
Garrett shrugged. Sometimes he forgot that his wife had gone to med school, that she’d ever imagined she wanted to be a doctor. “I don’t know. It’s the right side of his body, I think, that’s paralyzed.”
Cece looked out the window. The reunion had been Brig’s idea to begin with. He’d been emailing all of them for years. Still, it took his having a stroke to mobilize everyone, for the reunion to become a Thing. They were doing it for Brig now. Charlie offered up the Montana house as headquarters. Next thing you knew it was planned, the whole gang was convening for four days in Salish: Brig, Johnny, Marcus, Garrett. They’d brought their wives, turning the trip into an excuse for a vacation.
Garrett, who’d dropped out of college over thirty years ago, often wondered why the most durable friendships in his life were with some smartasses he’d managed to impress at the age of eighteen. Maybe it was college itself that did this to you: trapped you in a hammerlock you couldn’t escape. Sometimes he envied Lana, who’d managed to dodge it completely, leaving the University of Montana after her first semester and hightailing it to LA. Garrett had assumed the acting thing was a pipe dream—a naïve Montanan fantasy—but it seemed, against all odds, to be working out. She sounded so young on the phone, so much like her old jokey girl self, that he had to remind himself she was twenty-three.
“I wanted to go out to dinner,” Garrett said now. “On our anniversary.”
“It’s okay.”
“I just wish they’d planned this whole thing for another weekend.”
“Are you losing your voice?” Cece asked.
“A little bit.”
She frowned, as if this affliction were somehow his fault. “Gets worse every summer.”
Garrett drove past the Salish post office and crested the hill leading into town—normally their first view of the lake, but they could barely make out the boat slips in the marina, so thick was the haze of smoke. It was a terrible time for a reunion. The AQI had been in the three hundreds all week, so high that they were warning you not to leave the house. There was a local fire in Finley Point—several, too, in the Bob Marshall Wilderness—but mostly the smoke was from farther west, from Oregon and Washington, blowing eastward on the jet stream. Secondhand smoke, they called it around here, joking about migration from “Commiefornia,” by which they meant the entire West Coast. (Even the smoke wants to move to Montana.) July and August were the worst. It was like huffing an ashtray. Your eyes burned; you could taste the smoke; just driving to the store might give you a migraine. Recently, on top of losing his voice—and though he’d never had asthma in his life—Garrett had begun to wheeze, feeling the ghost of his father. No doubt all those summers in the field had taken their toll. The only plus side to the smoke was that the tourists had thinned out a bit, deciding it wasn’t worth leaving Seattle or Portland for a week spent indoors, huddled around the air purifier—health-wise, they were better off in New Delhi—though of course there were always locals determined to recreate on the lake no matter what, blasting music from pontoon boats or doing donuts on their WaveRunners, shrouded in a yellow-gray fog of smoke. Astonishing, what people learned to live with.
But then, out of nowhere, a storm would blow in and clear the air overnight, dropping the AQI into single digits, and the gorgeous world you loved and remembered would be magically restored, Kansas transforming into Oz. It was hard to imagine they were the same place.
You were at the mercy of the gods, or at least the elements. So you planned things—dog walks, college reunions—and prayed for the best.
Though it was over a hundred out, Garrett turned the air-conditioning down, worried it was draining the VW’s range. Some time ago he’d sold the Forester—gifted it to a neighbor’s daughter, basically, for five hundred bucks—and bought this Hail Mary of a car, an EV, which had a nifty Consumer Reports score of 86. God, how much time had they spent researching it together? Then finding the perfect used model, exactly three years old, because that was the Goldilocks age of value versus features? They’d sat side by side in bed, computers on their laps, hours of his life—of his marriage—that he would never get back. Meanwhile, the earth burned.
Now he glanced at Cece as he drove, wanting to tell her that he’d bought her an anniversary present—a vintage solar system model he’d ordered on eBay, which hadn’t arrived on time—but found that she was out of earshot. Not literally, of course, but that’s the way it felt. They’d been married twenty-four years, to the day, and yet these spaces still widened between them, ones they didn’t have the energy to cross. Why did they happen? There was no cause to them, really—they were just a feature of living together, like leaky gutters or joint tax returns. And yet if Garrett thought about them too much, he could pitch into despair. They’d chosen to spend their lives with each other. It had not been easy; it had been the easiest thing in the world. They’d raised a daughter together, struggling at times to stay afloat. He’d held Cece after her grandmother died, when she’d cried so hard it sounded like she’d stopped working, an engine turning over and over—and then again after her father died, of a heart attack, when she hadn’t cried at all. He knew what her snot tasted like. He knew that watching someone eat a banana, even on TV, made her gag. He knew about her fantasies, the sweet ones and the scary ones and the deep dark perverted ones. He knew about the memories that disturbed her sleep, the things she still felt guilty about, like the time in seventh grade when she and Paige called someone named Gretchen Winkelstein and said it was the dog pound and started to bark.
Garrett knew all these things, and countless more. Then out of the blue—on their anniversary no less—he discovered he couldn’t speak to her properly, or really at all. He might as well have married a plant. It was heartbreaking. It broke Garrett’s heart. Sometimes marriage felt like a dazzling present they didn’t want to soil or scratch, didn’t have the courage to actually use, and so they’d locked it up in the garage where neither of them could touch it.
At Charlie’s house, it was like a rainy day at camp, everyone crammed inside because of the smoke. Garrett found himself doing that thing men his age seemed to do at reunions, which was to pair off like dance partners and gawk when the other wasn’t looking. At least Garrett and Marcus were doing this in the kitchen: stealing glances, pretending they weren’t sick to their stomachs—half-nauseated with fear, with the bends of rocketing through the years since they saw each other last—while transferring beers to a cooler. An old friend’s face was like a mirror; worse, because it showed you how the mirror had been lying to you.
“You’re bald!” Marcus said when Garrett took his cap off for a second to air-cool his head.
“Not completely. I shave it off as a public service. So I don’t look like Arthur Schopenhauer.”
Marcus stared at him with concern. “Your voice. Are you losing that too?”
“That grows back. After fire season.” Garrett closed the fridge. “You’re old, too, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I don’t feel old. I feel eighteen.”
“In that case, you look terrible.”
In truth, he looked younger than any of them; except for the hair at his temples, which had turned to fleece, he could have passed for forty. Marcus took out his phone and held it in front of Garrett so he could see the wallpaper. A baby—an infant—with pudding-y folds under its eyes and a wrinkled-up forehead. “Speaking of bald, look at this little fellow.”
“You have a newborn?” Garrett asked in astonishment.
“A grandson!”
Garrett did his best to hide his shock. He had not imagined he was that old: that his friends would begin turning into grandparents. But of course he was that old. Fifty-five. He might have been a grandpa, too, if Lana hadn’t decided to mainly date women—might even have had one of those terrifying names: Boppa, PawPaw, Gramps.
He’d never seen a baby with wrinkles before. It looked like a bell pepper forgotten in the fridge.
“Isn’t he a cutie?” Marcus said.
“Did you really just say ‘cutie’?”
“Maybe. Yes. You can say that as a grandpa.”
Johnny entered the kitchen, carrying a can of Diet Pepsi. Marcus showed him the picture on his phone.
“Whoa. Is that one of those bog mummies?” Johnny said, then glanced up at Garrett and Marcus. His face fell. He examined the photo again, sliding his glasses down his nose. “Hey now. Very cute. I’m still getting used to these progressive lenses.”
“Want a beer?” Garrett asked, changing the subject.
“I’m saving my brain cells for science,” Johnny said, hoisting his Diet Pepsi. The can was ergonomically crumpled, as if he’d been carrying it around for a while. Johnny nudged past the cooler and disappeared into the bathroom.
“Am I hallucinating,” Garrett said, “or did Johnny just refuse a beer?”
“The guy’s in recovery.”
“Since when?”
“Oh, like ten years ago,” Marcus explained. “You need to spend less time in the wilderness.”
This news saddened Garrett, though whether it was because he was so out of touch with everyone or because the hilarious exploits of Johnny’s youth had turned out in hindsight not to be hilarious at all, he couldn’t say. Certainly Johnny had fared better than Brig, who was sitting on the porch in a wheelchair, smoke be damned. Garrett watched him now through the window. He looked okay at first glance, at least with sunglasses on, but on closer inspection things started to unravel, his mouth strangely out of place, as if it had been turned a squeak too far with a screwdriver. He’d collapsed last February after a morning jog, forced to crawl up the front steps of his Tudor revival. The whole journey—sidewalk to house—had taken an hour. Garrett had heard all this from Charlie, who’d heard the details from Soledad, Brig’s second wife. She’d found him scratching at the door, like a cat. Six months of physical therapy, and still Brig’s toes were curled up, his speech a drunken slur only Soledad could interpret. Brig Latin, she called it. She was a brisk, fearless woman, a commercial airline pilot, who treated Brig’s tragedy as if it were a smoking 737 she had to steer safely to the ground.
In other words, a godsend. Soledad had put some marbles on the deck and was making Brig pick them up with his toes and drop them, one by one, into a bowl. She’d brought the marbles from New Jersey, to make sure he practiced.
“Thank god for Soledad,” Marcus said, watching as well.
“Where the hell did he meet her?”
“Airport bar, where else?”
“Poor woman,” Garrett said. “She certainly didn’t know what she was getting into.”
“I don’t know,” Marcus said. “It’s part of the contract, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Marriage. It’s a whole-life insurance policy. Especially at our age.”
“That’s why you married Gabby?”
Marcus glanced behind him. “To be perfectly honest? I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind.” He popped a beer from the cooler and toasted marriage, mortality, possibly both. “And it will be us, not them, who cash in first.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Anyway, it’s not Brig I’m worried about,” he said.
Marcus nodded at an old picture, enshrined on the fridge, of Charlie and his kids on the dock. Garrett knew the picture well; he’d taken it himself, maybe fifteen years ago. “Two ex-wives,” Marcus said. “At least one of them riding the alimony pony. His daughter refuses to talk to him at all. And his eldest, Jackson—”
“Jasper.”
“Jasper. First the heart stuff, bad enough—and now what? Kid’s an addict? What a nightmare.” Marcus swigged his beer. “I mean if someone had asked me which one of us would have ended up old and alone…”
“You would have thought it was me,” Garrett said. “I know.”
He continued loading the cooler, sticking beers into the ice. It was the same, no doubt, for all their friends. They wouldn’t admit it, probably, but they’d never really forgiven him. Somewhere in the depths of their hearts they blamed him, Garrett, for Charlie’s woes. The failed relationships, the prodigal children, the whiff of despair that seemed to follow Charlie around like cologne—it was all because Garrett had stolen his wife away from him, a quarter century ago.
Garrett grabbed beers for Cece and Charlie, meaning to join them in the living room. How enlightened it was that the three of them could do this now—that they’d been doing this for years. At least his best friend, the guy whose life he’d destroyed, had forgiven him long ago. And in fact Charlie looked okay from the doorway. Better than okay. He sat on the couch next to Cece, tanned and smiling, fiddling with one of those watches big enough to eat off—every inch the kind of doctor who could absorb two ex-wives and still spend a month every summer away from home. You’d never know his son was doing his second stint in rehab up near Whitefish, at some wilderness treatment center, or that Charlie had left a silent voicemail on Garrett’s cell phone last month at three in the morning, purporting the next day to have dialed him by mistake.
And yet there was something awkward about him too, a forced heartiness. He leaned into Cece’s every word, laughing too loudly at her jokes. Did he know about their anniversary? Garrett had decided not to make a fuss about it, once he’d realized the reunion had been scheduled for the same weekend; the date of their wedding was probably not something Charlie chose to keep in his head.
It was nothing, two old friends chatting. So why couldn’t Garrett move, struck by a familiar disquiet? Even now, after so many years, he could still feel this vague, radioactive misgiving. Cece pointed at Charlie’s teeth, which must have had some food stuck in them. To help him find it, she slid a fingernail between two of her own teeth; Charlie copied her, as if staring into a mirror.
Cece made up an excuse—she wanted to track down her drink, though she didn’t have one—and fled the living room. Even in Charlie’s loneliness, there was always a force that tugged at her, some chink of possibility that yawned into regret. But she knew that Garrett was watching from the door of the kitchen. After a quarter century together, Cece could sense him in the next room, like a phantom limb.
It seemed impossible that he’d never suspected anything, but of course he was away so much, stalking animals with his radio receiver. Looking for other kinds of signals. If Lana knew anything, she had never told her father.
He didn’t know Cece had come a hair’s breadth, at least in her own mind, from leaving him. Just picturing the bed upstairs terrified her. She was afraid to go near the staircase, as if a sudden wind might blow her up it, might sweep her into Charlie’s bedroom against her will. How she’d hated Montana that night at the store, still zonked on Ambien: hated the life that felt to her like a wrong turn, a compass error. Seven years already, since that fiasco with Gail Tippler. It didn’t seem possible. The memory still mortified her. She’d sent Lana home with Kayla, telling them she needed to scan some books on Edelweiss, then had taken a Lyft to the Margolises’ house. Charlie had been waiting for her on the porch. Ten minutes? Eighteen years? Thicker in the middle than he used to be—every man’s curse to turn into his father—but the breadth of him had felt good to her, nestlike; it had felt like comfort. It was as if she’d never left him, as if they’d gotten married last week. He’d even smelled the same. They’d gone inside the house, ducking under the lintel on their way upstairs. So easy, so natural, like stepping back into her youth.
Afterward, Charlie had gotten up to use the bathroom, and Cece had listened to the splash of urine in the toilet, feeling wide awake for the first time in hours. She thought helplessly of Garrett. How, when Lana was a baby, he’d get up in the middle of the night to pee and actually sit on the toilet like a woman, worried the sound of it might wake her. Number one and a half, he’d called it. At some point his go-to lullaby for Lana, “Goodnight, Irene,” changed to “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”
It was the ease of it that had frightened Cece away: how easily it reopened for her, this enchanted door, as if the most momentous years of her life had never happened, vaporous as a dream. She’d gotten dressed while Charlie showered and then escaped downstairs, hiking up Route 35 a ways before requesting a Lyft.
Cece felt suddenly claustrophobic, trapped inside on a summer day. She joined Brig and his new wife on the porch, braving the smoke, which had turned the boats on the lake into flat gray silhouettes, like the targets at a shooting gallery. One hundred and four, was it? It just got hotter and hotter. Even the birds were lying low. The only sign of life was a plastic owl perched on the crossarms of a telephone pole, meant to scare away ospreys from nesting there, though it had been years since Cece had seen a nest.
“The smoke doesn’t bother you?” she asked Soledad.
“Brig has trouble with crowds. He gets overwhelmed.”
Cece walked over to Brig in his wheelchair and smiled at him, but he gave no reaction whatsoever, focusing on the bowl of marbles at his feet. Her heart sank.
“He can’t see you from that side,” Soledad said.
“Oh?”
“It’s called ‘one-sided neglect.’ ”
Cece looked at her helplessly. “Better than two-sided, I guess?”
“Now we’re discussing my childhood.” Soledad, laughing at her own joke, flapped a hand at her. “Come over here, to the right side of him.”
Cece did as commanded. Sure enough, Brig’s face lit up with recognition: the hidden stagecraft of a smile. It was like the changing of sets behind a curtain. He garbled something that Cece didn’t understand.
“He says it’s good to see you,” Soledad said. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“You understand everything?” Cece asked, after Brig had wheeled himself inside for a drink.
“If I don’t, he sings it.”
Cece stared at her. She seemed to be serious. “Sings?”
“It’s one of those things—mysteries of the human brain. He can communicate perfectly that way.”
“Wow.”
“Apparently it’s pretty common.”
“Garrett and I have enough trouble communicating. I can’t even imagine.”
“How long have you been married?” Soledad asked politely.
“Twenty-four years! It’s our anniversary today, in fact.”
Soledad seemed impressed. “Congratulations. That’s a real accomplishment.”
“Well, I’d rather not think of it like that.”
“Did you get him a present?”
“It’s right here in my carryall,” she said, choosing not to elaborate.
Eventually, the smoke was no match for a cooler of beer, or at least nine half-drunk vacationers cooped up inside, forty yards from the deepest lake in Montana. Marcus was the first to change into his suit, and then Johnny did too, singing “Smoke on the Water,” though his wife, Cynthia, seemed more worried about swimmer’s itch, which with the record temperatures had become a scourge. The last time they’d gone swimming together, she’d gotten blisters on her legs. Brig said something in response, but even Soledad had some trouble understanding it.
“Why don’t you sing it, honey?” she suggested, slipping off his sunglasses.
Brig looked at her. He seemed embarrassed. He turned to Johnny and opened his mouth, silencing the room. Outside, the wake from a speedboat splashed faintly against the dock.
“Your first two wives,” he sang to Johnny, “were allergic to you too!”
He had the voice of a country star: deep and sonorous. Everyone was speechless. It was like an Old Testament miracle. Brig sat there impatiently, waiting to be insulted back.
“How many beers have you had?” Johnny sang back at last, in a dreadful voice.
Brig’s eyes lit up. “You don’t need to sing too, you dumbass!”
Brig wanted to go swimming with everyone else, so Soledad took him into the bedroom to get changed, confessing to Cece—who helped her find the way—that she didn’t know how to swim. Cece offered to help out. She changed into her swimsuit and led the partygoers down to the lake, as if she lived there herself. The smoke burned her eyes. No one whooped or joked or threw off their shirt. It was too hot for it—or maybe they were just sheepish about their bodies, the love handles and biopsy scars and herniated belly buttons. Soledad had some trouble getting Brig to the water, struggling with the wheels of his chair, which bogged down in the stones of the beach. His legs were as white as a baby’s.
Cece took a swig from her water bottle. She carried it everywhere now, because of the heat. What was the term they used in med school? Insensible loss. The evaporation of water from the body, a loss you can’t feel.
“It’s hotter than the hinges of hell,” Soledad said.
“How long can a heat dome last?” Johnny said.
“Maybe it’s a permanent thing,” Marcus said. “Like the Astrodome.”
“The Houston Astrodome? Does that still exist?”
No one could answer this. Like other totems from their childhoods, it seemed like a figment of their imaginations.
Soledad got Brig into a life vest, one arm at a time, and then Cece hoisted him out of the wheelchair—how little he weighed!—and walked him carefully into the water, carrying him like a sleeping child fetched from the car. The hard stones of the lake bottom hurt her feet. He was still a lot to manage, the vest bulky and hot from the sun, and Cece was worried she might slip. She’d never liked Brig all that much—of Garrett and Charlie’s friends, he’d always seemed the most obnoxious to her, most obliviously privileged—but holding the diminished banker in her arms moved her strangely. She was sure this was a preview of some kind: a sneak peek from the future. Already Garrett had lost his voice; god knew what all that smoke, those fire seasons, had done to his lungs. Dressing your husband every morning, making him pick up marbles with his toes, wiping him no doubt when he used the toilet—Cece wasn’t sure she’d be capable of it. It would be like getting turned into a saint by mistake.
Cece waded into the lake, nearly stumbling from the burden in her arms. It was appalling, what love expected of you. She wasn’t sure she’d have the courage to do it. Not just the courage: the desire. She was not yet done with her own life. Life! People talked about it all the time, as casually as the weather, but Cece suspected they were as confused about it as she was. It was supposedly right in front of you, speeding by—something to be gotten, to be grabbed bravely by the horns—but she’d never mistaken this daredevil thing for Life. Life was something else entirely. She’d gone on a hike once with Garrett, some unmarked route he’d found on a satellite map—Hidden Meadow, it was nicknamed—and they’d wandered a buggy spur trail for hours, searching for their destination. Life seemed like that hike to her sometimes: forever peering through the trees, waiting for a glimpse of flowers. Where was it? Where? She was beginning to suspect it didn’t exist.
Brig began to float, buoyed by the life preserver, then drifted from Cece’s arms, pitching gently in the waves. He glanced at Soledad—for reassurance?—but seemed to be enjoying himself, grinning his offstage grin. A wave from a pontoon boat splashed over his head. Cece sneaked a look behind her, where Charlie and Garrett were watching from the lawn. Her husband’s face, hidden behind an N95 mask, was inscrutable.
The water was too shallow to jump into, at least safely, so Marcus waded in behind Cece and took over with Brig, propelling him around the lake like a kickboard. Cece dove underwater—it felt like a heated pool, nothing to whoop about—then swam out to rescue an inflatable raft drifting past the dock. The lake was so crowded now that relics often washed up on the Margolises’ beach. Cece did not swim the raft to shore, as she’d planned, but instead scrambled on top of it, looking for an excuse to escape Garrett and Charlie. She was suddenly sick to death of them both. Why hadn’t they just fucking married each other? They clearly belonged together. Loved and hated each other, like any couple.
She was not supposed to sunbathe at her age—who in their right mind would want to, in this smoke?—but Cece indulged herself anyway, floating through the yellowish haze. Her throat burned, not unpleasantly. It reminded her of smoking a joint. She hadn’t smoked one in years. Buzz, buzz went a Jet Ski, invisible as a mosquito. Somewhere a tuber yippeed, like a cowboy, but lost to the fog of smoke the cry sounded ghostly and forlorn. Cece drifted away from the dock. It occurred to her that she might get killed by a watercraft, sliced in two like the fish that sometimes washed up on the beach—or used to. Despite the heat, the sun was no brighter than the moon. She could look right at it. It was orange and lurid and round as a dodgeball.
Cece’s eyes itched. It was more than just the smoke. She was in mourning. The summer was gone. Not just this summer: but the next one, and the next. The smell of cherries. The blue skies that almost squeaked. The leaps off the dock and the fairy-tale raspberries and the sun flickering through the pines. That feeling she got just looking at the lake, a kind of treehouse freedom, like a breeze from childhood…So long, spacious skies! Cece floated in the smoky haze. “Smaze,” they called it. The word offended her. And yet also—how weird, how fucked-up—Cece was in no hurry to get out of it.
They’d had plans to barbecue—eight pounds of hamburger meat!—but Charlie scrapped them because of the smoke and ordered pizza instead. Everyone gathered around the TV to stream the latest episode of Lana’s show, which was called Houdini, PI. (Watching it was Garrett’s idea, though he pretended it wasn’t.) The premise of the show was that Harry Houdini comes back to life after being cryogenically frozen and decides to devote his life to solving crimes. It was as stupid as it sounded, but Lana had a bit part in several episodes, playing a tenant who lives in Houdini’s apartment building and keeps encountering him in odd places after he’s performed one of his magical, death-defying escapes. The encounters were typically played for laughs. The part wasn’t going to win Lana any Emmys, but she was still young.
Garrett left a spot open on the couch for Cece, but she perched next to Soledad instead, on the arm of the recliner. Had she actually snubbed him? He couldn’t say. Anyway, it was just as well: she got so nervous waiting for Lana’s brief appearances that Garrett was just as happy sitting apart.
Though Lana had told them, neither Garrett nor Cece could remember when she was supposed to come on, so they watched for a good twenty minutes or so before she finally appeared onscreen, whistling to herself as she pushed one of those rolling laundry hampers into the elevator; Houdini popped his head out of her dirty clothes, his mouth covered in duct tape, and Lana’s character screamed in fright. Everybody at Charlie’s house laughed and cheered. Garrett hadn’t watched TV for years—basically thought shows like this were the nuclear dust of capitalism, softening people’s brains while the world ended—but felt ridiculously proud of her. He beamed and beamed.
The only one who didn’t watch was Charlie. Garrett spied him sitting on the porch by himself, smoking a cigarette, which shocked Garrett less than the fact that he didn’t seem to care if anyone saw. Even in college, there’d been a furtiveness about it, sneaking Viceroys on the roof. Garrett wondered if it was painful to think about Lana, if she reminded Charlie of Jasper. The kid was a dropout too, but not because he was following his childhood dreams: he’d flunked out of the University of Utah, his second stab at college, then moved back in with his mom, who’d kicked him out after he’d stolen some of her jewelry. And so he’d moved in with Charlie, whose condo looked like a nursing home. He’d taken all the doors off their hinges and stored them in the garage. There were puzzles on the table, a schedule of activities on the fridge. Cece and Garrett had gone to see them in LA, the last time they were visiting Lana. Charlie had begun talking in the straw-grasping argot of the damned, claiming that Jasper’s pacemaker might actually be a good thing. The kid was at greater risk of infection, sure, but it ironically might save him from OD’ing—or at least lower his chances.
Now the boy was in rehab again, at age twenty-three. Charlie, Garrett knew, had sacrificed a lot for him—passed over a division chief job at Johns Hopkins so that he could stay near Jasper, avoid destabilizing his son’s life when his hold on it was so precarious to begin with. Recently he’d left research behind and gone into private practice, partly to help pay for Jasper’s treatments. He’d wanted to be a great doctor, even a famous one—in college he’d talked about making “a permanent contribution”—and yet he’d turned out to be just another anesthesiologist. Well respected, wealthy, obscure. No one rewarded you for that, least of all your own children. In the end, they might even hold it against you.
What had Garrett been thinking, showing Lana off to their old friends? In Charlie’s own house, no less? He hadn’t been thinking at all.
He walked onto the porch to see if Charlie was all right, but his old friend was busy prising a beer from a six-pack at his feet. A tidemark of gray stained the part of his hair. It wasn’t the gray that perturbed Garrett but the fact that Charlie had been dyeing it to begin with. His eyes took a while to focus on Garrett’s face.
“Hey, how many of those have you had?” Garrett asked.
Charlie shrugged. “I can’t drink a drop when Jasper’s at home. Nothing in the house at all. This is like Rumspringa.”
“How’s Jasper doing?”
“No idea. Won’t let me visit. That was the deal I made, to get him into treatment out here: I’d leave him alone. Doesn’t mean you or Cece can’t drive up there.” He popped the beer in his hand, which sprayed all over his shirt. “In fact, I kind of told him you would.”
Was he serious? Garrett, whose inpatient memories still drunk-dialed his dreams, did not relish the idea. “I looked it up. The website. Looks like a terrific program.”
“Better fucking be. Forty-five grand. For six weeks.”
The cigarette dangled from his lips, as if he’d forgotten it was there. Charlie tried to suck the foam off his beer with it in his mouth, then resolved the quandary by removing the cigarette. He peered into the blowhole of the can, as if daring it to spray him again.
“Not enough smoke in the air for you?” Garrett asked.
“Have a Marlboro,” Charlie said, offering the pack.
“No thanks. I shouldn’t even be out here without a mask on.”
“Come on. Don’t be a doormat.”
“I haven’t smoked since your…”
“My what?”
“Bachelor party.”
Charlie jerked his hand back, as if he’d been bitten. Finally, Garrett thought, it’s coming. They’d talk about it at last. The wedding; Garrett’s betrayal; the whole dreadful mess. Garrett had been rehearsing this moment for years. But Charlie merely peered into his beer can again, smoke venting from his nostrils. The moment, if it had ever existed, was lost.
“This used to be a sleeping porch. My grandparents would come down here to sleep when it was hot.” Charlie dropped his cigarette into one of the beer cans at his feet. “Now everyone wants to sleep inside, where the A/C is.”
“It’s the American way,” Garrett muttered. Central air was a new phenomenon up here; animals sometimes mistook the condensers for free housing and got chopped up by the blades. Weasels, ground squirrels, you name it. People came home from the grocery store and their entire house smelled like death.
“Remember hood ornaments?” Charlie said.
“On cars? Yeah, of course.”
“Where did they go?”
“Same place as sleeping porches.”
“You know what I milly riss?” Charlie asked.
“Milly riss?”
“Car keys. You had to stick them in the door and actually turn, remember? Once I got stuck at LaGuardia because my car doors froze and the lock wouldn’t turn. In the long-term parking lot. It was like zero degrees.”
“That was the Burlington airport. Sophomore year of college. I borrowed Johnny’s car and drove out there to pick you up. I saved you from freezing to death. Believe me, you didn’t find it so charming at the time.”
“Maybe that’s what I miss. You coming to pick me up.” Charlie glugged some beer, tilting his head back. “What do you miss?”
Garrett shrugged. He didn’t want to play this game. He stared at his friend’s beer-soaked shirt, feeling a junk punch of despair.
“Wait, let me guess,” Charlie said. “Mountain rhinos.”
“Black rhinos, you mean?”
“Whatever. The one that’s extinct. Who can keep track?”
“Mountain rhinos might have some trouble leaping between rocks.”
Charlie threw his empty beer can at the corner of the porch. “What else are kaput? Sea turtles?”
“So far just the hawksbill.”
“Poor hawksbill. See you on a stamp.”
“Jesus. Do you want them to be extinct?”
“Of course not,” Charlie said. “On the other hand, does it really matter?”
Garrett looked at him. “Of course it matters.”
“Face it—no one gives a shit about rhinos. Or hawksbill turtles. Or wolverines.” Charlie opened the cooler for another beer, and Garrett shut it with his foot. “In fact, we prefer them extinct.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t feel a little bit relieved. Poor hawksbill turtle, what a tragic loss! Nothing to be done! On the other hand, nothing to be done! We’re finally off the hook. We can remember them how we want to, without all the guilt. Just look at the dodo bird.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?” Garrett said angrily. “Because it’s not.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“We’re driving evolution back four million years.”
“I know. I watched your TED Talk. Or whatever it was.” Charlie mimed like he was driving and then pretended to do something: bump over roadkill? He dropped his hands without meeting Garrett’s eyes. “Do you honestly think you’re making the slightest bit of difference up there, chasing wolverines around? How many years have you been doing it now? Twenty?”
“Eighteen.”
“Wouldn’t that time have been better spent, I don’t know, with your wife?”
Garrett stared at him. He had not expected this, such viciousness. Or rather: he’d been expecting it for years but had been tricked into letting down his guard, thinking he’d been forgiven. Charlie bent over to get another beer. Garrett left him alone and went inside the air-conditioned house, which felt like entering heaven—or maybe a Starbucks. Seething, he stood by the air purifier for a minute, breathing deeply, detoxing not so much from the smoke outside but from Charlie’s bitterness. Garrett questioned his life’s work every day. One look at the news, its blithe inventory of outrages against the earth, and he felt seasick with discouragement, as if he might actually throw up. Last thing he fucking needed was Charlie questioning it for him.
Soledad noticed Garrett by the door and beckoned him into the living room, where everyone was still gathered around the couch. They’d decided to play a game of Charades, the old-fashioned kind with actual slips of paper. This was Soledad’s idea. She liked party games. They called Charlie in from the porch, oblivious to his mood, then broke into teams and wrote down the names of movies or books or TV shows and folded the answers into a bowl, which they gave to the opposing team. It soon became clear that couples who’d managed to end up on the same team were at a distinct advantage, having learned telepathy long ago. Cynthia guessed Johnny’s right away, just as Johnny guessed hers. Even Soledad seemed to rely on Brig, who sang out the answer to her pantomime, Blade Runner, before anyone else. While acting out The Norton Anthology of Poetry—what asshole, sadist, had come up with that?—Garrett found himself feeling weirdly forlorn, trying not to interpret Cece’s baffled silence as some kind of verdict on their marriage.
When it was Charlie’s turn, he rose stiffly from the couch and walked to the middle of the rug, puffing his chest out like a rooster’s and taking short deliberate steps. Garrett felt a stab of foreboding. Charlie fumbled into his shirt pocket and pulled out some reading glasses. Garrett wondered for a second if he’d forgotten where he was, so transfixed did he seem by what was written on his card, but then Charlie looked up and found Cece in the crowd, staring at her for so long that people shifted in their seats.
Eventually he stuck the card in his pocket, and Cynthia flipped over the plastic hourglass they were using for a timer. After making the book sign with his hands, Charlie pretended to grip something in his fingers and then brought the pretend something to his mouth.
“You’re drinking a beer,” Marcus said.
Charlie ignored this, repeating the motion.
“Okay, you’re brushing your teeth,” Soledad said.
“Oh my god. No. He’s performing fellatio.”
“Multiple fellatios!”
“Steve Jobs!”
“It’s a book, you idiot.”
Charlie staggered around, bumping into things.
“Is he pretending to be drunk?”
“He’s actually drunk.”
“The Lost Weekend.”
“It’s like a what-do-you-call-it,” Johnny said. “A Buddhist koan.”
“Under the Volcano!”
“Oh, oh, are you the Shakespeare guy? Merry Wives of Winter?”
Charlie stopped in the middle of the rug, swaying in place. He lurched up to Cece and began pointing at her face, jabbing the air with his finger. His face gleamed with sweat. Everyone watched him, speechless. Marcus, who’d been filming Charlie, lowered his phone. Cece seemed as stumped as everyone else. Glaring, as if he’d been saddled with the stupidest teammates in the world, Charlie held up a finger—“First word”—and tugged at his earlobe. Then he walked over to the ceramic lamp next to the couch and swatted it to the floor, where it shattered. Garrett shot up from the couch. Charlie admired the shattered lamp for a second, a look of gaudy satisfaction on his face. He was panting.
“Disaster,” Charlie said.
“I’ll say,” Gabby said.
“The Master and Margarita. It’s Cece’s favorite book. Tell them, Ceece!” He looked at her desperately. “Her favorite drink too: margaritas.”
Cece wouldn’t meet his eye from the couch. Garrett, who’d never seen her drink a margarita in her life, wondered if this could possibly be true. Charlie stared at her, rocking gently on his feet.
“She doesn’t like cocktails,” Garrett said finally.
“No one asked you.”
“Also, that’s not her favorite book.”
“How about we play something else,” Marcus said.
“Tell them, C,” Charlie said. “In med school, at that Mexican cantata place.” Someone laughed, which seemed to bewilder him. His reading glasses were askew, as if he’d just stepped off a roller coaster. “Where was it, on Fleet Street? You used to down them like water.”
Cece shook her head.
“Tell them!”
“I don’t like cocktails,” Cece said without looking at him.
Charlie stared at her in disbelief.
“Maybe it’s time for bed,” Soledad said to him.
“What?”
“Do you want some help upstairs?”
“Okay, Mom. Are you going to change my diaper too?”
Charlie grinned at the room, as if he thought he was being funny. It seemed to dawn on him, gradually, what he’d just said. His eyes snagged eventually on Brig, who was staring at him from his wheelchair.
“Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,” Charlie yelled at him.
“Okay,” Garrett said, grabbing him under the armpit. “Okay.”
He expected Charlie to put up a fight, but he seemed to deflate as soon as Garrett touched him, as if whatever spell had been cast on him had suddenly evaporated. Garrett helped him upstairs to bed, where he lay in the position in which he’d been dropped, one hand thrown over his heart, like someone taking the Pledge of Allegiance. What a pigsty his room was! The drawers of the dresser were pulled out, sagging in their runners; draped over them, as if migrating upriver, was a pair of red sweatpants. In college, he used to fold his clothes when they were dirty, laying them carefully in the hamper though he knew they’d be stuffed into a machine.
The poor guy was breathing in that way that drunk people do, like a Doberman after a walk. Garrett had a vague memory of what this was like. Why on earth had they ever confused it with fun?
“What was that story about the guy?” Charlie demanded, without opening his eyes. He sounded even drunker now. Garrett hoped he wouldn’t remember any of this tomorrow.
“What guy?”
“Dammit, the guy! Who carried the finger in his mouth like a Jolly Rancher?”
“You mean the vet up at Waterton?”
Charlie nodded. Garrett had no idea why he was thinking of this now. It was one of those war stories that wildlife biologists tell, to impress people; Garrett had to search his brain to remember it properly. Two volunteers on the project had been building a wolverine trap, using a chain saw to cut up logs, and one of them had slipped and taken off a finger. The injured guy had gone into shock. And Henderson—that was the wildlife vet’s name—found the finger and put it in his mouth and kept it there for two hours while they waited for an SAR copter to come. It was a way of keeping it clean, or cool, something like that. Garrett didn’t recall the reasoning.
“That’s what I call friendship,” Charlie said. He opened his eyes and stared at Garrett—accusingly, it seemed.
“You should apologize to your guests in the morning.”
“Would Cece suck on your member? If it was dismembered?”
“There’s something wrong with you,” Garrett said seriously.
“No shit, Dr. Freud.” Charlie scowled. “Anyway, guy’s an idiot. The human mouth has more bactria than a toilet.”
“Bacteria?”
“Bacteria!” he said, snapping his fingers in Garrett’s face.
Some laughter drifted upstairs, a burst of applause. Someone had put on a Prince song. Charlie beckoned to Garrett, who leaned over him carefully, thinking Charlie wanted to whisper something in his ear. Instead, Charlie reached up with both hands and seized him gingerly by the throat. A stranglehold. Reluctantly, Garrett played along and did the same to Charlie, clutching his windpipe. Garrett would humor him: enact this dopey thing they used to do in college, a pledge or promise or test of love. They hugged each other’s throats. And in fact, feeling the long-lost sensation of Charlie’s hands on his throat, their clumsy drunken squeeze, Garrett felt transported for the first time that night, freed from the larger game of Charades he’d been playing all day, pretending to be joyously reunited with his friends and not saddened by how old they looked, how tame and befuddled—by the feeling that even though Brig hadn’t died, they’d all found themselves at a funeral anyway. Charlie squeezed Garrett’s throat harder, choking him a little bit, and so Garrett squeezed harder too.
After dinner—served at five thirty, because apparently addicts were toddlers—Jasper walked down to the stables with his therapy group. He liked to think they were worse off than he was, though maybe that was one of his patterns of denial. Minimization, they called it. Still, he couldn’t help comparing himself favorably to the other residents. One of them, a former Miss America contestant, had fallen down the stairs while holding her baby. One of them had been Narcanned so many times his parents had started planning his funeral. One of them was so hooked on Oxy that he’d stuck his hand in the garbage disposal, hoping a doctor would write him a script. These were his pals at Whispering Pines Ranch.
As for Jasper, golden boy of the ranch, he’d never even injected. There was always a line he wouldn’t cross. He’d started by taking benzos. Then Vicodins. Then Roxys. Only twenty milligrams, but no more. Then, okay, forties, but not eighties. Then, when the high wasn’t quick enough, he was rubbing the coating off eighties and crushing them up to snort. Then he was snorting heroin—buying sniffer bags in Isla Vista—but not smoking it. He wasn’t an idiot. Anyway, it wasn’t serious: an ice cream habit. Then he was smoking it, but no needles! Needles were for burnouts, the walking dead. Then, surprise surprise, he was skin popping. But he’d never stuck a needle into an actual vein, not even once!
It wasn’t until he’d shared all this in group, seen the familiar haze of sadness and concern on everyone’s faces—mixed with a pitying scorn for the pride he felt at not injecting—that he recognized how ridiculous it was. His sense of superiority.
You’d think since this was his second stint in rehab, he would have learned his lesson: he belonged with the desperate fuckups of the world.
The sun never seemed to go down in Montana. It warmed Jasper’s face in that way that felt weirdly cold at the same time. A goose-pimply kind of heat. This was a new sensation, or a new-old sensation, one of many he’d rediscovered since detoxing. He stopped for a second to wipe his face, which was drenched in sweat. The Suboxone did this to him, particularly after dinner. His roommate had started calling him Old Faithful. Compared to being dopesick, a walk in the park.
They hiked along the gravel road to the corral, where the horses were grazing in their pasture, silent as ghosts. Their chestnut flanks rippled in the sun. The smoke had magically cleared—a brief rain, it seemed to come in cloudbursts up here—and the funk of manure was stronger than usual. Just smelling it lifted Jasper’s spirits. He’d grown to enjoy equine therapy, the one part of the day he looked forward to. Every morning he was woken at six, greeted by a schedule that had been slipped under the door. Yoga, therapy (group), therapy (individual), lunch, therapy (CBT), therapy (art or music), dinner, therapy to process the therapy you had in the morning. The horses they saw when they could, depending on the smoke. The general philosophy was: NO ESCAPE. You were supposed to confront yourself, your own addiction, twenty-four/seven. It was like being stuck in one of those mirror mazes all day long. How Jasper longed sometimes to sneak back to his room and take a nap!
But he loved Nutmeg, the horse he’d been matched with, drawn to her from the start: a mare with a white diamond between her eyes, symmetrical as the one on a playing card. She can sense your heartbeat from ten yards away, the equine therapist had said. Jasper found this hard to believe, but then Nutmeg had done something startling. She’d come right up to Jasper and nuzzled his pacemaker. Sniffed at it through his T-shirt. That first time he’d met her, Jasper had done everything wrong; he’d tried to bridle Nutmeg but she’d seemed nervous and skittish, ducking away from him and pinning her ears. He’d laughed it off, turned his crummy horsemanship into a kind of comedy routine. Later, when they were integrating in circle, Shauna—a woman in his group—had said watching him try to bridle Nutmeg made her sad. Jasper had been completely absorbed in himself, his own failure, when it should have been about Nutmeg’s experience. He needed to subjugate himself to her needs.
After that first encounter, he was slow and patient around Nutmeg, and the horse warmed to him abruptly. He felt a calmness—an effortless click—that he never felt around people. She demanded nothing from him, never asked him to love her back or remember her birthday or feel sufficiently grateful for the amazing wondrous life he’d been given. Currying her down sometimes, leaning one hand on her coat while he circled the comb, Jasper felt something inside her he couldn’t explain. A force bigger than himself. Once, when he was a little kid, he’d heard his grandpa use the word “horsepower” while mowing the lawn and had had no idea what it meant. He’d imagined something magical, a godlike thing, like “higher power” but in the form of a horse with glowing laser-beam eyes. And that’s what he felt sometimes inside of Nutmeg. Not the superhero eyes, but a Horsepower, a great lonely strength telling him he was there. He was real. It couldn’t be faked.
Today they were doing Horse as Mirror. Everyone paired off with their “healing companion,” dispersing across the pasture and approaching them like eighth graders at a mixer, sparks of grasshoppers shooting from the grass. Jasper volunteered to go first. The idea was that Nutmeg was an emotional Einstein, more attuned to his feelings than he was himself. Jasper believed it. The mare watched him approach, whinnying softly. There was nothing so flattering as a hello from a horse. She sniffed at the legs of his jeans, which were soaked from the damp grass of the pasture. He waited for Nutmeg to rest her head on his shoulder. Maybe even blow on his face, her sign of affection. Instead, she eyed him carefully, swishing her tail.
Babs, the equine therapist, asked him to describe Nutmeg’s behavior.
“She’s feeling wary,” Jasper said. “Suspicious.”
“Why do you think?”
“Maybe because I’m tense.”
“And why are you tense?”
He looked at Nutmeg, as if she might tell him what to say. “My dad’s in town. In Salish, I mean. He called me during Phone Time.”
“Did he say something to upset you?”
“He’s throwing a party. As we speak. The Movie Star’s parents are there.”
Babs, who had red hair and the kind of freckles people find adorable on little kids but disfiguring on adults, seemed intrigued. She propped her sunglasses on the brim of her cap. She generally stuck to the script—most of the staff did, in their vaguely Christian, tour-guide-of-the-soul way—but this had piqued her interest.
“Who’s the movie star?”
“A girl I know. Used to. Her parents are planning to visit me.”
Babs laid a hand on his shoulder. Probably she thought Lana was a user, an ex who’d gotten him hooked. “It’s entirely in your rights to refuse visitors.”
“My dad asked them to. He loves them. Particularly the Movie Star’s mom.”
“Do you have to do what your dad wants?”
“Well, he’s paying for rehab.” He gestured at the grazing horses. “For this.”
Babs didn’t answer him. This was a popular strategy at Whispering Pines. He looked at Nutmeg, who seemed to be warier of him than ever—another thing his dad had mysteriously ruined for him. “I feel like it’s the least I should do.”
“You’re shoulding on yourself again,” Babs said. “If you’re doing something out of obligation, not because you want to, you start to resent yourself, others, the whole idea of staying clean. We know what that leads to, right?”
Jasper nodded, though he couldn’t remember what particular thing this led to. A victim mentality? Negative self-talk? He couldn’t always keep them straight, though he knew he was supposed to be using coping strategies. One of these was not to say Lana’s name. He called her the Movie Star. Or sometimes the Vampire Star. This was something he’d learned about in college, in Intro to Astronomy. (He’d wanted to be an astrophysics major, even declared it on some form or another, which seemed hilarious to him now.) Sometimes you get these two companion stars that are kind of like siblings—they’re actually called that, “sibling stars”—except one of them ends up feeding off the other, sucking all the energy out of it and using it for fuel. It does this for many years. The vampire star gets big and fat and powerful, while the other, the fed-upon star, dwindles into nothing. You can barely even see it.
It didn’t seem just. She was the weird one, the one who’d called him “brother dear” and drawn her initials in menstrual blood on his chest, who’d seemed to have a crush on his fucking pacemaker. If anyone belonged in a facility, it was her.
Of course, it wasn’t really fair to blame Lana for all that, for making a success of her life. For the fucking shitshow—shit carnival—that was his own. Babs would have called this “a pattern of distortion.” Or was it “a pattern of blame and shame”? (Jasper had patterns coming out of his patterns.) He hadn’t exactly been a model friend himself, had he? It’s just that they’d lived in that special place, that perverted sibling land, for so many years. They were going to be famous together, move to a fishing village where they could grow old in peace. They weren’t supposed to leave each other behind.
It was her mom that he hated. The helpless dying-trout face his dad got whenever she was around, like he was waiting to be thrown back in the water.
Jasper had brought all this up in group once, god knows why, but no one seemed to get what he was talking about. Probably he hadn’t explained himself very well. They were supposed to write a letter to their addiction, breaking up with it, but he’d spent a whole page of the letter talking about the Movie Star and the whole thing that had happened between his dad and her parents, how his dad had actually invited them back into their lives. Her parents had done this awful shitty thing, a quarter century ago, and his dad was too much of a chump to cut them off. Why couldn’t Lana’s family just leave them alone? Her mom had already ruined his parents’ marriage—wasn’t that enough? He was so sick of paying for things people had done—to each other, themselves, the entire fucking planet—before he was even born.
Or maybe his dad was just obsessed: with the Movie Star’s mom, obviously, but also with some vision of how things were supposed to have panned out for him. He wanted to have had a different life completely. The whole thing made Jasper feel like he should never have been born. He’d tried to explain this to his addiction counselor—that he felt like a ghost sometimes, like he didn’t really exist—and his counselor had thought he was talking about being an addict. “Do you want to spend your life like that, walking around in a dream?” But life had already felt like a dream to him, well before he was using. Everyone on their phones all the time; grown men spraying people—kids!—with machine guns; the whole planet burning up and no one seeming to care…it had never seemed fully real to him. A machine, a dinky little battery, was keeping him alive. (He still had nightmares about the pacer pads in the ICU, waking with a coppery taste in his mouth.) Coasting on heroin was the one time the dream made sense to him, when he felt like he was in the same state as the world.
He approached Nutmeg again, who still seemed a bit uneasy, stiffening when he touched her withers. How afraid she was! He tried to scratch under her chin, her favorite spot, but she jerked her head out of reach. Jasper felt rejected—bereft even. His eyes glazed with tears. Of course, the horse could read his mind, knew he was filled with thoughts of the Movie Star, who’d left him behind to rot. But he missed her. Oh god. He missed her too. She’d done something to him, when they were kids: found his loneliness and turned it into a place, a shelter, a hideaway in the woods.
He closed his eyes. Nutmeg snorted in the heat. He was supposed to reframe his thoughts, use one of the mantras they’d taught him in CBT. I am capable of change.
He was going to a sober house in Palm Springs in two weeks. Palm Springs! The place with the golf courses. He was going to stay clean this time, it was a hundred percent in his power, because he was stronger than his addiction.
Jasper kept his eyes shut, waiting for Nutmeg to approach. Her heart, Babs had told him, was enormous. Weighed as much as a one-year-old girl. If he could regain her trust, this thing with the girl-sized heart, then his hope was real. There was love and light in him still. Yes, he could feel her approaching. Was that her in front of him? Her warm grassy breath? He raised his face to her, waiting. The past does not define me. The past does not define me.
Charlie tightened his grip on Garrett’s throat. Garrett, whose back was killing him from leaning over the bed, returned the favor. Charlie seemed encouraged by this, as if Garrett were giving him an excuse to continue. Was the man finally, at long last, going to kill him?
“I slept with Cece,” Charlie said in a pinched voice.
“I would hope so. You were engaged to be married.”
“No! I mean after that. Seven years ago? While you were off being Jeremiah Johnson.” Charlie looked at the dresser. “Only once. One time,” he said proudly. “I swear to God.”
Garrett stared at him. A price tag was poking out of the neck of Charlie’s shirt, as if he’d bought a new one just for the party and neglected in his nervousness to cut it off. What shocked Garrett, more than Charlie’s confession, was that he wasn’t shocked at all. If anything, he felt a strange electric calm. What was wrong with him? He had no idea. The hairs on his arm seemed to move, tickled by a breeze from the A/C.
Charlie closed his eyes, as if he were waiting for Garrett to punish him—to strangle him for real. Eager for it even. And Garrett should have felt that way: furious and betrayed.
He let go of Charlie’s throat. Charlie, ashamed or just shitfaced, rolled to the other side of the bed, turning away from him. Another song came on—“Only the Good Die Young”—and the guests downstairs cheered. Garrett could hear Cece singing along, accompanied by Brig’s beautiful baritone. She had a terrible voice, was in fact irredeemably tone-deaf, but this fact had never once occurred to her. She sang lustily in the shower and the car and while doing the dishes. Sometimes, to Garrett’s embarrassment, she belted along to the old-time bands that played at the Wild Mile Café, startling even the musicians. It touched him deeply: not the singing itself, but the self-deception she’d managed to cling to for fifty-two years and that even marriage had failed to set straight.
Charlie had fallen asleep, snoring the way Elias had in college, like bathwater suctioning down a drain. (Elias! He was always lurking.) Garrett covered Charlie with a blanket. Then he turned off the lights and went downstairs to join the party, remembering not to brain himself on the lintel though the ancient duck drawing had faded to a petrograph. In the living room, Cece was dancing with Soledad and Gabby and Marcus, doing that thing with the pointer finger of each hand where she wiggled them in the air like antennae. It should have been ridiculous, but somehow Cece managed to make the move graceful, sincere, even sexy. Her hair, tinseled with gray, swung back and forth as she danced, whipping her face. Her face! How young and beautiful and unfamiliar it looked, bright as a stranger’s. Somehow Charlie’s confession had transformed her. That lovely freckle on her cheekbone, shaped like a top hat. He hadn’t noticed the freckle, it seemed, for years. Was this possible? Garrett bumped Gabby aside in a way that made Cece laugh and they danced together—“Just Like Heaven” was the song now, because you never grew old on Spotify, you were always sixteen—and she smiled at him, tenderly, in that affectionate mocking way she did when he tried to dance. Strange as angels, dancing in the deepest oceans. He remembered singing along to this on the radio once, thinking the lyrics said “deep explosion,” and Cece laughing at him so hard that Diet Coke sprayed out her nose. Now the floor was covered in popcorn, which crunched underfoot. Midtwirl, Cece grabbed a handful from a bowl on the coffee table and stuffed it into her mouth, dropping half the kernels on the floor. He stuffed his face, too, raining popcorn. When was the last time they’d actually danced?
Between songs, Garrett grabbed Cece’s elbow and pulled her into the guest room, where Mr. and Mrs. Margolis used to sleep. The sun was setting, the windows beginning to turn off like lanterns. They sat on the bed together. Garrett wanted to give voice to the feeling inside of him. To say it in a new way, just as Brig had managed to express himself in song. It seemed to require that—a new voice—but he only had one of them, the same old voice she knew to death, worn to a rasp now from the smoke.
“I’m sorry we didn’t get to go out on our anniversary,” he said lamely.
“We are out,” Cece said.
“I meant somewhere special.”
“We are somewhere special. The place where we met.”
Garrett looked at her.
“Anyway, I brought these.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a Ziploc bag, inside which were three sets of novelty teeth. Garrett laughed. They each put a set in their mouths, ceremoniously. Everything that had seemed newly beautiful about his wife vanished in a second. She looked like a syphilitic pirate. Garrett kissed her, or tried to, but his teeth bumped into hers and her mouth was full of drool. His love for her could not overcome his disgust.
Cece took out her teeth and peered around the room. “You know, I don’t think they’d be very happy about our being in here.”
“Who?”
“The Margolises.”
“Luckily, they’re both dead,” Garrett said.
This hadn’t come out exactly the way he’d intended it to. Cece looked at him: a bit sadly, a bit happily. Never one without the other. If she’d been a simpler person, easier to love, probably he would have been bored a long time ago.
“We’ll be dead too someday,” she said.
“That’s true.”
“I don’t know why we get like this. Like, I don’t know…we can’t even see each other.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing? I mean, with our teeth.”
“You always joke,” Cece said defeatedly. She put her novelty teeth back inside their bag. “Maybe you were right about marriage all along. ‘The only adventure open to the cowardly.’ ” Frowning, she grabbed the teeth he’d been wearing off the bed—squeamishly, between two fingers—and dropped them in the bag with the others. “I wanted us to have a happy anniversary.”
“I am happy,” Garrett said.
It was true. She’d cheated on him with Charlie, most likely in this very house, and yet the news had…made him want to dance? In fact, it had not felt like news at all. Perhaps he’d known for years—known that something had happened between them—but hadn’t admitted it to himself, the way you might feel all the symptoms of a flu before piecing together that you were sick. He hadn’t wanted the burden of being wronged.
He should have felt that burden now. So why did he feel the opposite? Unburdened, as if a weight had been lifted?
They were even at last. Him and Charlie. Or at least more even. He could stop feeling so fucking guilty.
And Cece had returned to him. Chosen Garrett once again. What’s more, he’d had nothing at all to do with it.
“I got you a present too,” he said, remembering the vintage orrery he’d bought. “It hasn’t come in the mail yet.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a surprise.”
She frowned. “Give me a hint.”
Garrett laughed. Classic Cece: she’d be mad if he told her—furious, really—but would spend the whole time before it came trying to get it out of him. “It’s sort of like a clock, but for the universe.”
“A clock?”
“Yeah. You move the hands yourself.”