by Laura Hankin
“Is it true, what you said at the photo shoot, about her being in that famous band?” Whitney asked, and Amara nodded. “I guess I never really asked her much about her life outside the job. And then I screwed her out of that job. Literally.”
“Yeah, in retrospect, telling everybody her private business at the photo shoot was not my finest moment either,” Amara said. Again, they looked at each other in silence. “Shit,” Amara said. “I’ve got to go see Claire.”
Chapter 35
Claire spent much of June and July out of town, thanks, in a weird twist of fate, to Gwen.
About a week and a half after everything blew up, Gwen called to ask if she could take Claire out for tea. They met at a little café over on First Avenue, and Gwen insisted on paying for Claire’s pot of Earl Grey. Reagan napped in the stroller beside their table. Gwen brushed off Claire’s tentative attempt to ask if she was doing okay with a brisk shrug of her shoulders. “I’d rather not talk about it. I’ve been thinking about myself too much lately. I want to help you,” she said. “You’re an important part of our lives, after all. You’ve been so instrumental in Reagan’s development.”
“Gwen! Great pun,” Claire said.
“Sorry?” Gwen asked.
“‘Instrumental’?” Claire said as Gwen tilted her head and furrowed her forehead. “’Cause I’m a musician?”
“Oh, my goodness!” Gwen said, and gave a brief laugh. “But really, what are you thinking of doing now?”
It was strange, Claire thought, to spend time alone with Gwen. She had never done it before for more than a minute or two. Unlike Amara and Whitney, and even Ellie and Meredith at times, Gwen had never sought her out one-on-one for conversation, never developed a special rapport with her, never patted the empty seat next to her as an indication that Claire should sit. Now that they were trapped across a table from each other, Claire found something disconcerting in Gwen’s gaze, a hint of off-putting intensity in her smile. It was grief, Claire decided, the grief of a woman who had invested all her energy in raising a perfect family only to have it blow up in her face. There must have been total, obliterating sadness underneath Gwen’s surface even as she tried to carry on, and that was what was making Claire feel uncomfortable. God, the poor woman. Claire swallowed her tea and tried to relax.
“Well, I was thinking of looking into other playgroups or maybe some early-childhood-education places like Gymboree,” she said.
“Claire, I don’t mean to overstep here, but I think you can do so much more,” Gwen said, pouring a packet of stevia into her own tea, then delicately stirring it in. (Did this café even have stevia, or had Gwen brought this all the way from home?) “I know you don’t want to sing to children. It’s a bit embarrassing for you, isn’t it? I looked up your old band, and honestly, I think you’re much more talented than they are. You just need the right resources, a patron of sorts. So, here.” She pulled her classic Chanel bag up onto her lap, reached in, and took out a check, which she handed to Claire. “I know it’s probably not enough to make any real difference.”
Claire blinked a few times as she looked at Gwen’s neat handwriting, how it spelled out both her name and what must have been an error, an extra zero that Gwen couldn’t possibly have intended to add, turning a check meant to be for four hundred dollars into four thousand dollars. “I thought it might help you get away for the summer,” Gwen was saying. “Rent out your place here, take yourself on an artist’s retreat and write some songs, and then maybe there will be some left over to start recording. At least you won’t have to work any day jobs for a while.” She pulled out of her purse a paper with pictures of a rental apartment, covered in notes. “I found this well-reviewed rental place online, and they’re willing to give special artist rates if you book the whole summer. They’re holding it for you for the next twenty-four hours. I think you should take it.”
“Gwen,” Claire said. “Thank you so much.” She was having trouble wrapping her head around this unexpected gift. She wanted it. Oh, God, she wanted it. Her mind flashed to an image of her returning from a triumphant summer away, ready to go with music far superior to anything that Vagabond was doing now (and also, improbably, two inches taller and with bigger boobs). But, maybe because she couldn’t quite believe this good fortune was happening to her, something seemed off. “I can’t take this. It’s too generous.”
“Well, it was generous of you to tell me the truth, even though it cost you,” Gwen said.
“I . . . ,” Claire said, staring down at the check. The strangest thought came into her mind. If she went out of town for so long, she and Amara would never have a chance to make things right between them. She shook her head. That crazy idea shouldn’t be a consideration.
“Please, Claire,” Gwen said, her voice catching. “I just want to make something good happen, after everything bad lately.”
“Then, wow,” Claire said. “Thank you. This is amazing.”
* * *
—
Claire took a bus to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. The rental place Gwen had found for her, a basement apartment in a turquoise-painted house, was a twenty-minute walk from the center of town. She laid down her luggage and her guitar in the bedroom, eyeing the twin bed, which was covered with a thin green-and-pink-flowered quilt. Well, she guessed she wouldn’t be having any overnight guests there. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.
She went into town to get groceries and then stopped in front of a liquor store, ready to buy a few handles to get her through the week. She paused with her hand on the doorknob. Maybe it also wouldn’t be a bad thing to try a night totally sober. She could come back tomorrow. Her groceries were pretty heavy anyway.
By nine thirty P.M., she’d realized that she could only get intermittent access to the Internet by holding her laptop up above the bed in one particular patch of air, and she was desperate for a drink. She ran to the liquor store as a drizzle of rain turned into a downpour. Her stomach dropped as she approached the darkened windows, as she read the sign on the door announcing that they only stayed open until nine. Fuck, she’d forgotten that places outside of NYC closed at reasonable times. She wanted to cry. That, or break a store window, vault herself over the broken glass, grab a handle, and make a run for it.
Instead, she pulled out her phone to look up the nearest bar. Then she paused. She’d been so self-righteous with the playgroup women when she couldn’t even get through one night alone without drinking herself into a stupor? Screw that. She’d go dry for one week, like a mini Lent, just to prove to herself that she could.
The mini Lent week was awful. She alternated between feeling bored out of her mind and far too anxious. But once she’d waited one week, she decided she might as well wait two. And then waiting two weeks turned into a month. It turned out that when she wasn’t numbing herself with alcohol and the Internet and didn’t have any playgroup to take up all her energy, she had nothing to do except channel her feelings into songs. With no distractions from the terrible feelings that came up, she just had to sit with them and then turn them into something else. She was a useless lump for a while, and then she wrote and wrote.
At the end of July, she had a hundred false starts, and five full songs. She played them all through and knew in her bones that, even if she got really lucky with connections and timing, these songs would never make her famous like Vagabond. Her music didn’t have that sort of mindless catchiness, that danceability.
But maybe she liked what she had made anyway. Maybe she could be okay with a life in which Vagabond never watched her light up their TV screens as they choked on their own jealousy, a life in which the great wrong they’d done to her was never righted and karma never kicked them in the ass, a life where they had everything and she just had—what was it that the Rolling Stone profile of Vagabond had said, with a certain degree of scorn?—a solid career of quietly doing what she loved. Maybe that would be amazing.
&n
bsp; But to do that, it would help to have the money she deserved. She thought of Amara, the way she’d said, “You wrote the only good part of the number one song in the country?” Claire had, and it was about time she got some credit. Once the idea came into her mind, she couldn’t get it out, so she bought a bus ticket out of Jim Thorpe a month earlier than she’d originally planned. Gwen might be upset at the squandering of her gift, but Claire didn’t have to tell her. On a sweltering Saturday morning in August, Claire came back to the city and met up with Thea.
They made the mistake of going to Bethesda Terrace in Central Park, under the incorrect assumption that August in New York City was a nice time to be outside, instead of a time when the trash reeked more than it ever could any other month. (They’d lived in New York for years now and should have known better, but each long winter created a kind of memory wipe. Claire thought she should get a Memento-style tattoo to remind herself.) They sat by the lake on a bench, glistening, and fanned themselves. To Claire’s slight surprise, Thea wore a loose white shirt and athletic shorts, different from her normal, structured wardrobe.
“So,” Claire said, “if I wanted to ask Vagabond for my share of the royalties for helping to write ‘Idaho Eyes,’ would you be my lawyer?”
“Oh, hell yes, I would,” Thea said. “It would be my pleasure. If they don’t cooperate, I will help you sue the pants off of those bastards.”
“Thank you,” Claire said. “Obviously, I’d want to handle it all quietly, if we could, but I think they would too. And I’d like for us all to be in the same room as little as possible. And I don’t need a lot from them, just what’s fair.”
“We’ll start out by asking for a lot, though,” Thea said, and Claire could almost hear the whirring inside her brain as she calculated percentages and profits. “I’d want to get this hammered out soon. Because, actually, I have something I want to talk to you about too.” She leaned forward and folded her hands on her lap, an unfamiliar note of uncertainty and excitement coming into her voice. “I know I’ve been hard to reach lately. That’s because Amy and I are having a baby. I’m pregnant.”
For the briefest moment, Claire felt a pang of sadness at how things would never fully be the same between them again. And then joy came and kicked that pang out the door. “Thea!” Claire screamed, and threw her arms around her.
“You’ll be Aunt Claire, of course,” Thea said, and then they went off on a spree talking about baby names and how this was the first morning in weeks that Thea hadn’t thrown up, and although she didn’t want to jinx it, she thought she really might make it through the day vomit-free.
Then Claire’s phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen, a thrum starting in her chest as she registered what she was seeing. A message, with Amara’s name at the top: Hey there. Any chance that you’re free? Can we meet up and talk?
“What?” Thea asked. “Is it a man?”
“It’s nothing,” Claire said.
“That is not the kind of face you make when it’s nothing.” She plucked Claire’s phone away from her, entered the pass code (they’d long known each other’s passwords by heart, like neighbors exchanging spare keys in case of emergency), and looked at the screen. “Who’s Amara?”
“She’s just . . . she was one of the women from the playgroup. The one who was the asshole at first.” Claire had kept Thea updated on the early stages of playgroup and about her growing closeness with Amara (“I think I’m a little jealous,” Thea had said at one point), but had told her nothing about the destruction of it all.
“Oh, right, I want to meet her,” Thea said, and started typing something on the phone.
“What are you doing?”
Thea just shrugged and, when Claire reached out to try to grab her phone back, said, “You’re not allowed to grab things from a pregnant woman.”
When Claire went ahead and grabbed the phone anyway, she looked down at the screen to a series of new texts.
I’m hanging out at Bethesda Terrace, Thea had written. Come on by.
On our way, Amara had written back.
“Are you kidding me?” Claire asked Thea.
“What’s the big deal?” Thea asked. “I thought you loved her. It’s nice that you made a friend, and I want to meet her so I know whether or not I approve.”
“You’re such a control freak. Let’s go,” Claire said, standing up, so Thea shrugged and rose quickly to her feet. Then she paused, steadying herself on the bench.
“Hold on,” she said. “I may have jinxed it.” She walked to the nearest park trash can and braced herself on the edge of it, taking a series of deep breaths.
“Are you doing this on purpose?” Claire asked, and Thea shot her a look of pure fire. “Shit. Do you need a ginger ale?” Thea swallowed and nodded, so Claire ran to a nearby cart, waited in the long line, and paid the ridiculous three dollars for a soda, cracking it open and holding it out to her cousin. Claire watched Thea sip the drink slowly and patted her on the back as her adrenaline pumped. She could just text Amara back and tell her not to come after all, but curiosity was unfurling inside of her.
A few minutes later, the women appeared over the top of the hill, pushing their strollers, Whitney unexpectedly at Amara’s side. An invisible fist squeezed Claire’s heart in her chest, one quick, sharp pulse—had something bad happened? Or had she done something bad that she hadn’t even realized, and that was why these two women who by all rights should never have spoken to each other again were bearing down on her now, a hesitant team, here to accuse her of . . . what? Telling on them? But she’d kept her word about that, at least. She hadn’t even told Thea. (Oh, no, Claire thought with a jolt. Thea would soon be a New York City mom in a pretty high-income bracket too, thanks to her job at a fancy law firm. Would TrueMommy target her? Thea would never fall for it, but then again, Claire wouldn’t have expected Amara to fall for it either.)
It didn’t seem like Whitney and Amara had come to yell at her, though. They scanned the crowd with a tentative air, looking a little softer, a little sloppier, their faces also glistening in the August heat. They could go fuck themselves, Claire thought while simultaneously yearning to run up and throw her arms around them both and their children too.
“I’ll be right back,” Claire said to Thea, and walked ten feet forward to meet them.
“Claire,” Whitney said while Amara just hit her with that thrilling, piercing look of hers.
“What’s going on?” Claire asked, her arms folded across her chest.
“We . . . ,” Whitney said.
“We fucked up,” Amara said. “Massively. In terms of how we treated you.”
“And we wanted to say that we’re sorry,” Whitney said.
“What, are apology cleanses the newest trend?” Claire asked, identifying something strange and new within herself. For the first time, she felt herself to be an equal with these women. She’d viewed herself as their subordinate plenty of times, but at other moments, she’d actually thought of herself as superior. They’d saddled themselves down with children, giving up their jobs, not seeming to have a passion beyond what they’d brought forth out of their own bodies, and then on top of that, they’d gotten accidentally hooked on drugs, leaving her to mother them. But as Whitney and Amara stood in front of her now, asking for her forgiveness, these glorious, screwed-up, monstrous angels whom she had feared and hated and loved and disdained and worshipped seemed suddenly to be no inherently better than she was, but also no inherently worse. They were just human, through and through, and she was too.
“Is there any way we can make it up to you?” Whitney asked, and Claire knew exactly how they could.
“Tell Thea,” Claire said.
“Thea? Your cousin?” Whitney asked.
“Yeah,” Claire said, indicating Thea by the trash can, where she seemed to have decided that she didn’t need to vomit after all (had she been doing
it all on purpose, then?), and was now Purell-ing her hands, not at all subtly trying to listen in. Thea waved. “She’s going to be a mother soon.”
“If you have impending motherhood tips, please,” Thea said, smiling and walking over, “I am all ears.”
“Thea,” Whitney said as they shook hands, “I’m Whitney. We e-mailed a long time ago about the playgroup.”
“We also took an art history class together at Harvard,” Thea said.
Whitney put her hands to her mouth. “I’m so sorry—”
Thea laughed. “Don’t worry about it.”
“She’s looked out for me, and I want to look out for her. I don’t want her getting taken advantage of,” Claire said, and Whitney and Amara understood.
“Wait. What?” Thea asked, her smile fading, that brisk get-shit-done expression coming back onto her face. “‘Getting taken advantage of’? How?”
Amara and Whitney exchanged a look and then, slowly, nodded at each other. “If anyone tries to get you to take these wellness vitamins called TrueMommy,” Amara said, “steer clear.”
“We heard that they’re a big, expensive scam,” Whitney said.
“TrueMommy,” Thea said. “Got it. Thanks.” She picked up her phone and began typing something.
“Thank you,” Claire said quietly to Whitney and Amara. “And for what it’s worth, I screwed up too.”
Amara looked at her, a helpless smile coming over her face, lost for words for the first time in Claire’s experience with her. “So . . . ,” she said, “how was your summer?” Claire laughed, and Amara joined in. Claire bent down to Charlie’s stroller and held up her hand for a high five, and he actually gave her one.
“It was . . . well, you know,” Claire said. “Gwen paid for me to go away on an artist’s retreat.”
“What?” Amara asked, raising an eyebrow. “That’s quite generous.”