CHAPTER 15
I spend the week trying to reclaim my house. I start with the sunrise, which I try to enjoy but mostly cry through. I find bright green bedding for the tea house and force myself to sit at the table for an hour a day. I don’t write. How did I let this man stop by for three weeks and steal my heart, my house, and my career?
Sometimes I can’t breathe. Like I walk into a space we once shared and the sound of his voice arrests me. I can hear his voice saying something that must not be true. I’ll just stand there, struck by the pain of it. My mind chases its tail—he said he loved me and he was coming back and he’s not calling and he had a third party send cash but he said he loved me and he was coming back.
School pickup is a slow death, thirty minutes at a time. I try to arrive a little bit late so I don’t have to say these things: Yes, it’s exciting about the movie. No, I haven’t heard from him. I’m fine, really.
Kate moves me around like she’s my handler, throwing her body between me and any particularly offensive comments. I’m raw and exposed. I understand what that means now; I feel like I don’t have skin. I should never have been out with him in public. I could have kept this to myself. I didn’t need to kiss him at two P.M. in the middle of town.
People felt bad for me when Ben left, but no one really liked him. No one really thought I was happy either. To have seen me with Leo, probably grinning like a lovesick kid, they must have seen this coming. Leo Vance isn’t going to stay in Laurel Ridge with that woman forever. She’s setting herself up for a fall. Real or imagined, We knew it! is what I see on their faces. Everyone but me saw this coming.
I don’t know where Kate is when I find myself on the receiving end of Vicky Miller’s pouty face. I have to give Ben credit, she really is a very attractive woman. Blond and fit and nicely maintained. “I heard,” she says.
“Oh,” I say, looking over her shoulder for a way out. She’s stepping closer to me and to my horror her arms are reaching out to pull me into a hug. The thought of it is unbearable. “Wait. You’re not going to touch me, are you?”
“Of course. I just want to give you a hug. I feel terrible.”
“Because you slept with my husband? Or about Leo?” That’s how raw I am. I don’t care who on the playground knows. I don’t care if I seem a little crazy. All I know is that if this woman touches me with her self-pity, I will die.
“Nora,” Vicky says in the most maddening way, a cousin of “calm down.”
Kate swoops in from wherever she’s been slacking off and links her arm in mine to drag me away. “She knows,” she says to Vicky over her shoulder. “Everyone knows, and we think you’re gross.”
This makes me smile as she maneuvers me to the other end of the blacktop. “Gross?” I say. “That’s like the kid in school who eats his boogers.”
“Give me a break,” she says. “I’m new to this.”
“You’re a good egg,” I say.
“I have to tell you something,” she says. And she’s nervous.
“Tell me you’re pregnant,” I say.
“No. I’ve been paid off too. By Leo.”
It’s really hot on the blacktop and I am feeling hazy. “What are you talking about?”
“I got a check today for Ready Set for a hundred thousand dollars from Leo Vance’s Charitable Trust.” She gives me a second to hear it. “And I know he’s the devil and he uses money to ease his guilt for being a total creep, but that money could help me double the reach of my program over the next two years. Like, it could change everything.”
“What is wrong with him?” I say, repeating my favorite rhetorical question.
“So you want me to return it?” Kate looks like she’s about to start begging.
“Sorry. No, of course not. Keep the money, that’s amazing. I just don’t know how a guy who has the time to call his charitable trust and initiate a donation doesn’t have time to return my text and say, ‘Hey sorry, I’m out.’ ”
“At least he feels guilty; like, at least he knows he’s a jerk,” she says.
“I don’t know. I didn’t think I could feel worse. But Leo feeling sorry for me is sort of next-level bad.”
When school’s out in June, I decide to take my kids up to my parents’ house in the Adirondacks for two weeks. When my parents moved out of Chesterville and my dad sold his pool-cleaning business, he insisted they retire on a lake. All that water to swim in, he said to anyone who would listen, and no one has to clean it.
I’ve paid this month’s mortgage and taxes, my credit cards are paid off, and I have $8,329 in the bank. I am not ready to go back into the tea house to write. Maybe I’ll be able to write something someplace else. I also hope that with my parents as a distraction for my kids, I might be able to fall apart a little.
My parents make everything seem easy. My mom told me once, “The secret to a happy marriage is that you give a hundred and ten percent to him and he gives a hundred and ten percent to you.” In spite of the maddening mathematical impossibility of this statement, I always liked the sound of it. My parents are like a couple of cartoon magpies, always offering themselves up to each other. They were high school sweethearts, and she worked as a nanny while he started his pool-cleaning business. Everything he has, he credits to her. And vice versa.
It’s possible that growing up watching the fantasy of this marriage is what makes writing romance movies so easy. My parents make me believe that some people really are made for each other and that a joyful, easy marriage is possible. Two people who love each other and are looking in the same direction can build a wonderful life. I’ve caught myself using my parents’ gestures and quirks in movies, making me wonder if they’re the prototype couple I keep tweaking over and over again.
Penny and Rick have their own high-powered version of this partnership, though I’ve never really witnessed the joy in it. They both give a hundred and ten percent, and they’re focused on the same things. They just don’t seem all that focused on each other. I got marriage half right. I gave a hundred and ten percent and Ben gave nothing, leaving us at an average of just fifty-five percent, which is a fail in pretty much anyone’s book.
At the cabin, my dad takes my kids out in the boat every morning to water-ski and ride inner tubes. Arthur doesn’t leave my dad’s side, like he thinks he’s the last man in the world. Which he may be.
In the afternoons we play cards and nap and talk about dinner. I take walks and cry, but it’s less raw here. It’s actually a Leo-free zone. No one mentions him, and I don’t have to walk through the room where he kissed me for the first time. I don’t have to see the pity in Mr. Mapleton’s eyes every time I need vacuum cleaner bags.
Or the rage in Mickey’s. Mickey has taken this whole thing personally, like he himself was seduced by Leo and then abandoned. “He said he was staying,” he says, incredulous. “He was going to buy the Big Green Egg and we were going to cook ribs.” Those ribs were Mickey’s forever. I totally get it. We were all duped.
Mom and I are in the kitchen cleaning up the dinner dishes, while my dad and the kids take their food comas to the TV room. “You’re awfully thin,” she starts.
“Am I?”
“It’s not a happy thin either. What’s going on?”
“Nothing. The same. Maybe running too much.”
“No word from Ben?”
“He’s not coming back, Mom.”
“What an asshole,” she says, and we both laugh. My mom saves her swears for special occasions.
“I don’t miss him,” I say. “I’m really much happier without him.”
“That’s good. And all the excitement with the movie and that movie star staying with you, that must have been a real pick-me-up.”
“Yeah, it was something.”
“Mom! It’s Leo!” Bernadette screams from the TV room, and I drop the glass I’m drying.
Mom and I run over, and there he is on TMZ, walking out of a club with Naomi, his arm around her shoulders. I can’t look away, but I can feel my mom watching me. “Oh dear,” she says.
The next day she wants to hike. “Tell me,” she says before we’re even out of the driveway.
“Long version or short version?”
“I’ve got all the time in the world,” she says.
“I think I only have the energy for the short version. We had this big romance, like really big. He got called away to film a movie, and I haven’t heard from him since. And clearly, he’s not dead.”
“That sounds like some kind of a fantasy, like something Penny would have cooked up.”
“If you’re trying to say it doesn’t sound like me, I couldn’t agree more. It’s like I suffered temporary insanity.”
“Sometimes that’s what love is,” she says.
Penny arrives the next day with her family, and as I watch them file out of her square of a Mercedes G-Wagon, two adults followed by two matching children, another square, I am acutely aware that my family is a triangle.
My kids appear out of nowhere and throw themselves into the twins. Ethan and Maxwell are nine and slide in perfectly between Arthur and Bernadette. Whenever he’s with his cousins, Arthur becomes almost manly. He concocts feats of strength as games, and I suspect it’s because they’re the only kids he’s ever known who are less athletic than he. As a result, Penny thinks Arthur’s kind of rough, which cracks me up.
“Hey, Pen. Hey, Rick,” I say, hugging them both. Penny holds me for an extra few beats to convey her love and support and sympathy for how pathetic my life is. I am grateful to receive the sentiment without having to hear the words. Rick points to his AirPods indicating that he’s on a call. Rick’s pretty much always on a call.
“You’re thin,” Penny says, putting her arm around me and leading me away from Rick.
“I’ve heard.”
“So no word?”
“Not a one,” I say.
“If you want, you can let this go,” she says. “Because I hate him enough for both of us.” Penny is fierce, and my whole life I have loved having her on my side. I want to borrow her hatred and inject it into my heart. Anger would feel better than what I’m feeling.
The kids are all going to bunk up in the loft, and they’ve run up there to negotiate beds. I grab some beers and we settle in on the deck, watching the boats go by. Just two summers ago, during this week, Ben was with us. My family was a square too. He was slightly hostile to Rick the whole time, for no reason that I could discern, except for the fact that Rick is rich and pays when we go out to dinner. That’s actually my favorite thing about Rick.
Penny’s initial enthusiasm about Ben and his family faded as she got to know him. Ben was never shy about belittling my work in front of other people, almost as if he was hoping to build a consensus about how pointless it was. She and Rick got excited hearing about his first couple of business ventures, but then just got sort of quiet over the next dozen. The last time the four of us had dinner, Ben droned on about an app he was going to develop with a Chinese guy he met online. “You’re sure lucky you have Nora,” Rick said as he signed the check.
Besides that moment, I’ve never really liked Rick, or more accurately, I’ve never been able to see his humanity. Like he’s formal with his kids, polite to my parents and me. He treats Penny like a business partner, like they’re board members of their family unit. While this part of their marriage doesn’t exactly sweep this romance writer off her feet, I know that at the core of their marriage is an unshakable mutual respect. No eye rolling, no sarcasm. Still, I’ve always had the feeling I’d like Rick more if I saw him cry or throw up.
Rick finishes sending an email and surveys us all, as if remembering where he is. “So, Nora, how’s Hollywood treating you? Big time, right?”
“Yeah, well we’ll see. The movie comes out in October; I hope people like it.”
“So’d you get a two-movie deal or anything? What’s next?”
“Nope. But I was thinking about a second beer,” I say, looking to my mom to change the subject.
Penny gets excited. “You know what you should do now?” Oh brother. “You should write an epically romantic, big-screen love story. Like a fantasy romance, with scenes like those two paddling through the rain in The Notebook. Like the kind we’d cry all the way through.”
“I’m not sure I’m cut out for that,” I say.
“Just think of the most romantic moment of your life and build a story around it. This is what you do. It doesn’t need to be formulaic, just make it real.”
There’s something about Penny’s use of the word “just” that always reminds me how much easier her life is than mine. It’s not only her money and her supportive husband. Penny is prone to doing without overthinking. Just hire a cleaning lady. Just meet someone else. Just whip up another movie. But in this instance, she’s onto something. I can feel it tingling on the top of my head. What if I could write the story of Leo and me? What if by writing it, I could be rid of it, stop ruminating on it? What if I could write my way out of this hole?
After the Fourth of July we are back in Laurel Ridge and settled into the slow soupy routine of summer. Arthur has turned eleven and is sleeping later, leaving Bernadette and me to our morning routines. Bernadette has an all-day soccer camp that starts at nine. Arthur has an acting camp that starts at noon. I have time for my run between drop-offs, but there is no real time to settle in and write.
I decide not to fight the situation, to give myself a real summer vacation from work. I’ll be broke by the end of September, and I’ll probably have to run up a little debt before I sell another TRC movie. The thought of going back into any debt at all makes me feel like my hair has been set on fire, but the thought of going back into the tea house is worse.
Even just standing at the sunroom window and seeing those gorgeous hydrangea at either side of the tea house door, the ones that Leo is not, in fact, here in July to see, is too much for me. It’s ridiculous but I look at them and see a lie: He did not wait around to see what would bloom in July; he did not stay. Bernadette likes to cut them and bring them into the house, which is normally the joy of our summer, open windows and giant blue hydrangea covering every surface. This year I suggest she put them all in her room.
I consider trying to write at the library, but the truth is I’m not ready to write at all. I’m not ready to make light of love affairs and heartbreak. I certainly can’t see myself moving toward a happy ending. I know that I need to build my world back up around me. My schedule was my armor and I need to reconstruct it. I need new routines so that I don’t see Leo every time I roast a chicken. Plenty of people don’t roast chickens, and I will be one of them.
I’m not entirely focused on self-improvement. During the quiet hours when both of my kids are gone, I curl up on the couch and watch Dr. Phil or reality shows about people who have it worse than me. The idea here, I tell myself, is that it will help me feel better about my life. At least I didn’t send my life savings to a fake online boyfriend. At least I don’t have a compulsion to eat my own hair. In the end, I don’t feel better about my life. I just feel depressed that these people have it so bad.
At night I get in bed and scroll through his Instagram account. I know he doesn’t post his own stuff; I don’t even think he has Instagram on his phone. But whoever his agent hired to entertain Leo’s thirty million followers has to be getting his photos from somewhere. There are photos from the set of Mega Man, a few from around his house in L.A. Leo’s hair is longer. Leo’s wearing pastels now. There’s a happy birthday post to Naomi, a candid shot of the two of them on the set of The Tea House. I zoom in on Leo for clues as to who he is. One of these nights there will be a photo of him that reveals a trace of malice or, better, heartache on his face, and it will all make sense to me.
There’s one photo of the sunset that I swear he didn’t take. I don’t know how I know this, but I just know it isn’t how he would have captured it. This thought sets me back. It bothers me that I knew him so well. It bothers me that I can jump right back into his head and know what he’d think, when I actually have no idea who he is now. Maybe he did take that photo, I think. Maybe that’s how he sees things now. I vow to delete Instagram from my phone in the morning. I don’t delete Instagram.
My kids and I are careful with one another. They don’t know how to talk about this situation with Leo, and I suspect it’s because they don’t know what it was. All they know is that everything feels different without him, especially me. I try to bring Leo up in passing to keep him from being such a loaded topic. I try to talk about him as a thing that happened, a little excitement, but not a thing that we are bringing into the future.
Arthur’s camp is putting on a production of West Side Story to be performed for the whole town in mid-August. He can’t stand the director. “It’s like he doesn’t know anything about acting. He’s a gym teacher the rest of the year. All he ever does is tell us where to stand.” The main problem with this guy, I suspect, is that he’s not Leo.
I decide to take the opening. “That’s disappointing. But it was pretty unusual that you had a real movie star directing your last play.”
“I guess.” Arthur looks out the car window.
I try again. “Good thing you didn’t promise Leo you’d never pursue acting. Seems like it’s starting to be your thing.”
“Yeah, like Leo’s so big on promises.”