Before We Were Strangers

by Renee Carlino

  “Can I have some wine?” Ash asked.

  “Nope,” Tati and I said simultaneously.

  “Just a sip? Dad said he’d let me have some wine at his house when he has me over for dinner.”

  “You call him Dad now?” Tati asked.

  “Well, not to his face, but what else am I supposed to call him? Matt? It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t get to be my dad.”

  “Does he want to be called Dad?” I asked her, carefully.

  “I don’t think he cares. He wants to come to all my school stuff and meet my friends.”

  “I think it would make him feel good to hear you say it. The poor guy has been robbed of your childhood,” Tati said.

  I bristled. “What happened to the man-hater in you?” I shot back.

  “Turning over a new leaf. You should, too.”

  “Call him Dad, if he wants,” I told Ash. I handed my glass of wine over to her. “Just one sip.”

  She took a tiny sip and scrunched up her nose. “Ew.”

  Tati looked up at the ceiling wistfully. “I loved the way he used to dress.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Did you and my dad get along when you guys were in college?” Ash asked Tati.

  “Of course. Your mom and dad were inseparable. If I wanted to see Grace outside of class, then I had to see your dad, too. But we got along well, so it was all good fun back then.” Tati turned to me. “Speaking of the good ol’ days, I think you should come down and practice with us this week after school.”

  “What on earth for?” I said through a mouthful of couscous.

  “We’re looking for a cellist.”

  “You should totally do it, Mom. I can go to Dad’s after school. He’s working from home now and invited me to come over after school whenever I want.”

  “I don’t know, Tati. I don’t think I’m good enough anymore.” I was also worried that Ash was embracing Matt a little too eagerly. It made me realize how desperately she was missing Dan. “And Ash, how is it that you’re already so comfortable with your father? You barely know him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I’m afraid you’re doing this to displace your grief,” I said.

  “I think you’re overanalyzing this, Mom. I look at him and I see myself. I’m just comfortable around him. Plus, he’s so nice and wants to be a part of my life. Don’t ruin that for me because of your screwed-up relationship with him.”

  “I’m going to pretend like you’re not being sassy right now.” Though she was probably right.

  We continued to push the lamb and couscous around our plates. It was as terrible as it looked. Finally, Tati put down her fork.

  “So, you guys wanna get a burger or something?”

  Ash and I nodded eagerly.

  “You should stick to spaghetti,” Ash said. “You’re good at that.”

  “That was takeout, Ash,” I said, as Tati burst out laughing.

  “Oh,” she squeaked, blushing.

  “C’mon,” Tati said. “Let’s get those burgers.”

  * * *

  AFTER SCHOOL, FOR the rest of the week, I went to practice with Tati and the New York Philharmonic. Ash went to Matt’s each day, and then each night, before she went to bed, she would recap every detail of their time together. She was falling in love with him, the way daughters do with their dads. How could she not? I was happy about it, but still, I felt this ache over my own relationship with Matt.

  On Saturday, Tati offered to take Ash to a movie, and I went to dinner alone at a small Italian bistro, where I let the waiter talk me into ordering a bottle of wine.

  “You can have a glass and take the rest home with you. We’ll wrap it up,” he said.

  I agreed, but ended up staying for two hours and drinking at least three quarters of the bottle. From under the little twinkly lights that hung from the awning, I watched people walking along the street, holding hands, kissing on the corner. The Godfather–like music and warmth from the outdoor heater was soothing me right to sleep. “Ma’am?” said the waiter as he reached for the bottle. “Can I wrap this up for you?”

  That must be my cue to leave. Time for the tipsy lady to scram. “Yes, that would be wonderful.” There was only about a glass left, but I took it anyway.

  After I paid, I walked back the four blocks toward my house, but when I passed Matt’s street, I turned onto it.

  From the other side of the street, I could see inside his loft. There he was, sitting on his couch, staring straight ahead. In the darkness below, I stood watching him, thinking it was weird that, between he, me, and Ash, none of us were together that night. He was sipping wine and looking pensively at something, or maybe nothing at all. I wondered what kind of music he was listening to. He stood up and walked to the window. I backed up farther into the shadows so he couldn’t see me. He was completely still as he stood there, watching the occasional car go by.

  What is he thinking?

  Finally, I said, Screw it. I darted across the street and rang the buzzer to his apartment.

  He answered quickly. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Grace.” My nerves were terrorizing my stomach.

  “Come up.”

  When the elevator doors opened, he was standing there, waiting. I looked down at his bare feet and up to his black jeans, his belt and white T-shirt, up farther to his mouth, his neck, and his long, yummy hair, tied back. I shivered. “Hello.” I held the paper bag out to him and he took it.

  He pulled the bottle from the bag, laughed, and then looked up at me with a wry smile, “Thank you, Grace. I’ve never been given an almost completely empty bottle of wine before.”

  My face was expressionless. “It’s really good. I saved you a glass.”

  He looked at me carefully, probably to gauge my level of inebriation. “Where’s Ash tonight?”

  “With Tati. Oh shoot, I need to find out when they’ll be home.”

  He removed his cell phone from his back pocket and handed it to me. I dialed Tati’s number. The movie was probably over by now, and I didn’t want Ash to come home to an empty house.

  “Hello?” Her voice sounded strange, and then I realized that she wouldn’t recognize the number.

  “Tati, it’s me. Where are you?”

  “We’re getting ice cream. Everything okay? Whose number is this?”

  “It’s Matt’s.”

  Without responding, I heard Tati pull the phone away from her ear and say to Ash, “Hey, let’s rent movies and get a bunch of junk food and hang out at my house? Your mom says it’s okay.”

  “Okay,” I heard Ash say.

  Tati came back on and whispered, “You’re covered. See you in the morning.”

  I hit end and handed the phone back to Matt. “What did she say?”

  “They’re fine. Ash is staying over at Tati’s tonight.”

  “Is Tati a good influence?” he asked, looking at me sideways.

  “We’re not twenty-one anymore, Matt; she doesn’t sit around smoking pot all day. She’s a world-class musician and an independent, educated woman. What do you think?”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded immediately. I felt guilty for a second, realizing he was just trying to do what he thought dads should do. “So, to what do I owe this visit?”

  Things were not going as I planned. “I don’t know . . . I just need . . .”

  “What?” He set the bottle down and moved toward me. “What do you need?” I couldn’t tell yet if he was being seductive or annoyed or both.

  When he stepped closer, I could feel his warmth and smell the cardamom-and-sandalwood scent of his body wash. “Did you just shower?”

  He blinked. “Why?” He wasn’t budging, wasn’t giving me any clues with his body language as to how he felt about me, but I thought I could still detect a quiet anger or resentment beneath the surface.

  And I was just drunk enough to call him on it.

  “Who are you angry with, Matt?”

  H
e didn’t hesitate. “You. Elizabeth. Dan . . . Myself.”

  “Why on earth would you be angry at Dan?”

  His voice was restrained. “I’m jealous of him.” He looked into my eyes. “He got everything I wanted. He got what was mine.”

  “But it wasn’t his fault. I’ve accepted that, and you should, too.”

  He moved a fraction of an inch closer and looked farther into my eyes. “Maybe. How much wine have you had?”

  “I feel sober.”

  “You want me to walk you home?”

  “That’s not why I stopped here.”

  “What do you need, Grace?”

  I leaned up on my toes and kissed him. The kiss felt fragile at first, like we would break into a million pieces if we went too fast, too hard. But it only took seconds before we were removing each other’s clothes, our hands in each other’s hair.

  We collapsed onto the bed naked, kissing and tugging at each other. When he sat up, I crawled onto his lap and guided him inside me. He moaned from his chest and gripped my waist, my back arching involuntarily, my breasts rising up to meet his mouth. “So beautiful,” he whispered between kissing and sucking and twirling his tongue around my nipple. He was patient but urgent, and he somehow knew where to put his hands, where I needed pressure, where I needed to be kissed.

  He had ruined me for all other men. He was ruining me now.

  He turned me around on my hands and knees, yanked my hips toward his body, and thrust into me. I felt like he was taking his anger out on me, but for some reason I wanted him to.

  “Am I hurting you?”

  “No. Don’t stop.”

  I wanted to feel it. I wanted to feel like he was sending all the bad stuff far away.

  The moment we came, he wrapped his arms around me, and I could feel his heart beating against my back. He didn’t say anything; he just held me like that until our hearts stopped racing. When he released me, I was suddenly self-conscious and scurried away to collect my clothes.

  “Wait, come here,” he said as he moved to sit at the edge of the bed. “I want to look at you.” He pulled me toward him. Even in the dimly lit room, I was nervous. He used his index finger to trace circles in the soft skin of my belly. There were some faded stretch marks on my hips that he leaned in and kissed. “What was it like?”

  “What?”

  “When Ash was born?”

  I laughed. “You don’t want to know about childbirth right now.”

  “I mean, were you both healthy?” He ran his hand up the inside of my thigh and looked up at me. I nodded. “You’re a good mom, Grace.”

  “Thank you.” Isn’t that all we need to hear sometimes—that you’re a good mom or friend or daughter or wife?

  “Were you happy?” His voice was shaky. “The day you had Ash, were you happy?”

  “It was the happiest day of my life,” I choked out.

  He started to cry quietly. “I wish I was there,” he said, and then his body was wracked with full, powerful sobs as he buried his face against my belly.

  I held him, running my hands over his shoulders, through his hair. “I know, everything’s okay,” I said over and over, but I feared there would be no healing us. The scars were too deep.

  “I feel like I’m living in a nightmare, like I’ve just woken up from a coma to discover that fifteen years of my life have gone by. Everything went on without me. I missed everything.”

  I continued to hold him all through the night and told him about the day Ash was born.

  “We were in Venice when my water broke. They took me by water taxi to the hospital. I remember looking out onto the canals and thinking about you, hoping you were safe. It was uncharacteristically warm for that time of year, so warm that you could feel the heat radiating off the surface of the water. When I think about that day, it was like the sun was kissing the earth, like God was making his presence known.

  “I was lucky. My labor was easy—everyone said so. At first, all I could do was stare in disbelief at her trembling little body, covered in blood and white stuff as she flailed around on my chest. I couldn’t believe that you and I had made her. When she quieted down and began nursing, Dan said it was beautiful, that she and I were beautiful.”

  “I know you were,” Matt said, and then sighed as he gazed out the window. Maybe he was imagining it and finally feeling a part of it.

  “We didn’t have a name for her when we arrived at the hospital. Dan was just a friend then, so I was making all of the decisions, even though I felt totally clueless. But somehow, in the hospital, I knew what to do. When I saw her, I could think of nothing but us—you and me—and how she was the evidence of what we’d had together. After that day, I never looked back at our time in college without joy because I had Ash to represent it for me, and she was perfect . . . poetry in motion—the evidence of a life burning well and bright. Everyone knew why I named her Ash. Tati was furious for a while—she hated you for not getting back to me—but she got over it. Dan understood.

  “Ash was a fussy baby for the first few months, and we were traveling a lot. It wasn’t easy. I was a new, young mom, trying to figure everything out. Eventually, we came back to New York and settled down. Dan insisted that we live with him in his brownstone, so we did. It was a godsend because it gave Ash some consistency and structure, and she had two adults to look out for her.”

  Matt made a sound in his chest like that last sentence pained him, but I went on.

  “Ash’s personality always shined. She was a rambunctious toddler with wild blonde hair and those sweet, cozy brown eyes, like yours. She talked, walked, and fed herself early.”

  “Of course she did.”

  I laughed. “Yes, she’s your child, so things came easily to her. But soon she was her own person, and I thought less about what her name meant and more about her individuality. She’s a beautiful soul, different from me and you.”

  “I know that. I knew it the moment I met her,” he whispered. “Was Dan’s death hard on her?”

  “She was strong, but I knew it was hard on her. He was a good, patient dad, and he loved her more than anything. I was grateful that we had a little time to prepare for it. We took a trip and stayed in a beach house in Cape Cod for a month. That’s where he died, listening to the ocean, with me and Ash by his side. He spent his last days sitting in a chair, watching us play on the beach. At night, we would make a bonfire and Ash would read us stories in the firelight. Dan seemed happy, even though he knew he didn’t have much time left.” I started to cry.

  Matt moved up the bed and took me in his arms. “Keep going.”

  “It was a Tuesday when he died, just a boring old Tuesday. He was lucid in the morning. We had moved his hospital bed onto the back patio so he could look out on the water. A hospice worker was there. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and watched the waves crashing down as Dan took his last breaths. Ash cried for a few minutes, and that was it. It was over. I never saw her cry about it again.”

  “And you?”

  “Well, you know me. I’m pretty much a blubbering mess all the time.”

  “You didn’t used to be.”

  “I know,” I said quietly.

  Matt brushed my hair back and wiped tears from my cheeks. “Why didn’t you have more children?”

  “We thought we might, but then Dan got sick and it just didn’t make sense. Ash would have been such a good big sister.”

  “Yes, she would be,” he said drowsily.

  We fell asleep in the early-morning hours. I got a text from Tati around eleven saying that she and Ash were going to lunch and then she would be taking her home. I quietly snuck out of Matt’s and made sure I was home before Ash got there.

  Neither of us texted or called for days after that.

  25. Come Back to Me

  GRACE

  Over the next week, Ash got into the habit of making plans with her dad and not telling me. When I would scold her for it, she would say, “Parents are supposed to communicate wit
h each other. Even nonmarried ones.”

  That was Ash, always being the grown-up.

  I knew Matt and I couldn’t go on like this, conflicted and torn. We deserved more from each other, but I wasn’t sure if either of us was ready.

  Finally, one afternoon, Matt came by to pick up Ash. I answered the door and invited him in. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen, watching me as I dried the dishes.

  “How are you?” he asked, a little formally but not uncomfortably.

  “Good. I’ve been practicing with the Philharmonic after school. I might be sitting in for their cellist, actually, but I would have to leave for two weeks in the summer. I’m not sure if I want to leave Ash behind for that long.”

  “That’s fantastic, Grace. I could take Ash; maybe we could plan a trip to California for then.”

  Ash called down from upstairs, “Give me five minutes, Dad!”

  “Okay,” he called back.

  “Where are you guys off to?” I asked without looking up.

  “We’re going to the Met and then dinner.”

  I glanced at the clock; it was five fifteen. “You’ll never make it up there before it closes.”

  “They’re open till nine on Fridays.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” I suddenly realized we were having the most normal conversation we’d ever had: just two people discussing the quotidian details of our lives.

  Ash came into the kitchen wearing a crop top, and my eyes bugged out. “Excuse me, do you have a sweater to go with that?”

  Ash rolled her eyes.

  “That eye-rolling business has to stop. Your mom just asked you a question,” Matt said sharply.

  Whoa. I hadn’t had that kind of backup in a long time.

  “I know, Dad, I just . . .”

  “Nope. Go upstairs and get a sweater.”

  Ash huffed and left the room. Matt and I stared at each other for a few seconds before he walked over to me. “You look different. You seem happier.”

  I hadn’t realized it before, but I think he was right. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “You’re welcome to come with us, if you want.”

  “That’s okay. I have some papers to grade.”