by A. J. Banner
Keith’s right eyebrow rises. “Are you a paramedic, or a drug pusher?”
“Are you a surgeon, or an asshole?” Nathan says.
“Nathan!” I say in mock horror.
Keith laughs. “This asshole gives dying patients a second chance at life. It’s gratifying to know I’m the one who made it happen.”
“It’s clearly humbling, too,” Nathan says.
Keith’s face clouds over, and an awkward silence follows. Hedra rubs her wrist, her eyes vacant. Anna makes a show of slurping her juice; Lauren’s face turns the pale-eggshell color of the walls.
Jensen clears his throat. “How about Marissa’s cooking? Molto bene.”
“I made a Ligurian minestrone for the next course,” I say, trying to sound upbeat.
“What’s that?” Anna says, wrinkling her nose.
“It’s a soup made with vegetables and garlic—”
“Before we move on to the next course,” Nathan says, “we have an announcement to make.” He pulls me to my feet, looking down at me with such love in his eyes, I lose my breath. My heart thrums; I feel giddy. I’m sure I’ll faint. He’s going to do this—now, in front of everyone.
He drops down on one knee. My face flushes hot. He pulls a small, black velvet box from his pocket and gazes up at me. “When I first saw you at Anna’s school, I fell in love. At first sight.”
“Me too,” I say, tears springing to my eyes. “When I first saw you, I mean.” He told me only much later that he watched Anna and me through my office window. When he strode inside, pretending he had only just arrived, our gazes locked, and that night, I dreamed of him. He entered my head and never left. Even now, as he takes my hand, I feel an ethereal connection between us. The first time he touched me, the first time he kissed me, the first time he wrapped his arms around me. Our first romantic dinner here, in this very room. All the firsts compress into this startling moment of intensity. Even though he has already whispered in my ear Marry me, somehow our engagement didn’t feel real until now.
“Marissa Parlette, will you spend the rest of your life with me?” he asks, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Will you marry me?”
A hush falls through the room, everyone holding their breath. Then someone lets out a gasp. Lauren. I’m aware of Anna furiously texting on her cell phone. I smile at Nathan, then I’m laughing. I’ve wanted this, although it seems like such a cliché. The proposal on one knee, the declaration of love. Still, it’s a perfect moment. “Yes, I will marry you,” I say. “Yes.”
He slides a filigreed gold engagement ring onto my finger, stands and swings me around while the guests cheer and whistle. He puts me down, and I hold up my hand to the light, proudly displaying my new ring. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Lauren hunched forward, the color leaching from her cheeks.
“Congratulations, bro,” Keith says, raising his glass. “You’re marrying a therapist. Maybe she can fix what’s wrong in your head.”
Does he think he’s making a joke? I glance at Nathan as we both sit down again, but he’s still smiling, not letting his brother ruin the evening. “Marissa can fix everything,” he says.
“I’m not a therapist, per se. I’m a speech language pathologist,” I say. “SLP for short. I help kids with speech and language disorders.”
“You’re not a shrink,” Keith says, his gaze piercing me. “I knew that. Too bad. Nathan needs therapy.”
“Keith!” Hedra gives me an apologetic look. “We’re happy for you both.”
“Yeah, way to go,” Jensen says, patting Nathan on the back. “When’s the wedding?”
Nathan looks at me. “We’re thinking . . . late spring?”
“We went on our first date in May; we’ll get married in May,” I say, grinning at him. The first thing I noticed when I showed up at his front door was his T-shirt on inside out, his hair a mess. The look of shock on his face. I was early. But the shock instantly turned to delight. The salty ocean air drifted in, his subtle cologne blending with the scent of pine from the forest. I’m trying to cook, he said, ushering me inside. I hope you don’t end up with a stomachache.
Lucky for me, I have a medic at my fingertips, I said.
I don’t know how to do this anymore. The whole dating thing. I’ve just been Anna’s dad for so long.
You cook for her, don’t you?
Macaroni and cheese, sandwiches. If you call that cooking.
But he did know. The dating thing came to him naturally—his easy laughter, the way he wooed me with that smile and his funny stories.
“No summer wedding for Nathan,” Hedra is saying now. “A rebel as always. What are you going to wear? Your uniform?”
“I’ll opt for a tux,” he says, winking at me.
“But I’m thinking I’ll go unconventional.” I show her a photo on my iPhone of me in a full-length, elegant silk dress in pale blue. The gathered waist, flowing skirt, and scooped neckline flatter my figure. “Lauren gave it to me in college.” Her last true gift of friendship.
“It’s exquisite,” Hedra says.
Lauren’s eyes light up. “Marissa and I—we used to go junking together. You know, thrift shopping.”
“You found that dress in a thrift shop?” Hedra says, leaning in.
“It’s a rare find from the eighties,” Lauren says.
“Wow,” Anna says, furiously texting with her thumbs. “That’s a movie-star gown. My mom sells dresses like that in her shop.”
Hedra draws in a breath. “It’s gorgeous.”
“We both fit into it,” Lauren says. “But it looked better on Marissa.”
She’s lying; the dress fit her perfectly, and she wore it twice before giving it to me. She loved the shiny blue, the designer stitching. She stares at the photograph, a look of longing in her eyes. A long-dormant feeling of betrayal awakens in me, slowing the blood in my veins. If she asks me to return the dress after all this time, I will refuse. She has already stolen enough from me.
“Why didn’t you wear something like that at our wedding?” Keith says to Hedra.
“You picked out my gown, or don’t you remember?” Her cheeks redden.
“It was perfect for you.” He reaches for her hand, but she scrapes back her chair and stands abruptly.
“Will you all excuse me?” She strides down the hall toward the bathroom.
“Well, cheers,” Jensen says, raising his glass.
The air buzzes with Hedra’s absence, despite the clinking and toasts that follow. Anna’s thumbs tap her cell phone screen, and Keith appears to be texting, too. He looks up at her and grins, and she grins back. He tucks his phone into his pocket.
I get up to carry plates to the kitchen, and when I turn toward the hallway, I see Hedra stepping out of the bathroom, the mascara smudged beneath her eyes. Nathan walks toward her and whispers something briefly. She nods and frowns. He keeps going into our bedroom. Hedra returns to the dining room. A dark feeling floats up inside me, but I push it down.
I leave the dishes in the sink, and when I sit at the table again, Nathan is back in his seat, watching Anna devour her minestrone. How did we make it to the main course? I vaguely remember retrieving the serving bowl from the kitchen, placing it on a trivet in the center of the table.
Anna pushes back her chair and bounces to her feet. “May I go to my room now? I’m done. I’m so full.”
“Are you okay?” Nathan’s brow furrows. “It’s still early.”
“I have things to do. Homework and stuff.”
“Shooting more squirrel videos?” Keith says.
“Wildlife documentaries. But I’m not allowed out after dark.” She dashes around the table to kiss her dad on the cheek before rushing off down the hall. No complaint about our announcement. But I wonder about all the texting and her abrupt exit.
“She’s a regular Jane Goodall,” Keith says. “Next she’ll be off to Tanzania to live with the chimpanzees.”
“Don’t say that aloud,” Nathan says. “She just might try. T
hat whole sitting still in the forest thing. She’s always done that. Caught her following a line of ants when she was three. Fascinated by them.”
“Where does she get her focus?” Hedra says.
Nathan spreads butter on a roll. “From her mom. They can both obsess over one thing for hours.”
Hedra lowers her voice. “When she used to stutter. Was that inherited too?”
“It can be genetic,” I say. “Stuttering is a neurological condition. It could be a problem with speech motor control.”
“She was upset about her parents’ divorce, too,” Hedra goes on. “She probably—”
“Stuttering from emotional trauma is rare,” I say.
Hedra nods, her face flushing a little as she stirs her minestrone. Keith keeps glancing at her bowl, as if monitoring its contents.
Lauren looks down at her cell phone, then up at us. Her face is white. “Oh, uh, emergency. I’m afraid I have to run.” She is up in an instant.
Jensen grabs her wrist. “What’s going on?”
She grimaces and yanks her arm away from him. “It’s Brynn. I have to pick her up from a party in town.”
“I’ll go,” he says.
“No, you stay.”
“Lauren,” he says. “You shouldn’t drive.”
“Yeah, stay a while,” Nathan says.
“I’ll be fine. Congratulations, both of you, on your engagement.”
I get up and follow her to the foyer. “Is everything okay?” I pull her raincoat from the closet.
“I need some air. Come see me out.”
I go outside with her, into the cold. The rain has stopped. We move a few yards away from the house. The night flings up the scents of kelp and salt and fir. “Is Brynn okay?”
“She’s sixteen. Everything feels like the end of the world to her.” Lauren glances over my shoulder toward our house. The rising moon defines her features, pulling them out of the darkness and shaping them within its beam. “Thank you for dinner. Marissa—I really am happy for you and Nathan.”
“You could’ve fooled me. What were you doing, coming on to him?”
“I know I had a bit too much to drink. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, you never do.” I cross my arms over my chest in the cold. “I thought you and I could be friends again, but—”
“We can. There’s more going on than you know. I need to explain—”
“What is there to explain?” I’m struck by the image of Lauren falling all over Nathan. I’m not feeling charitable toward her right now. “I should get back inside—”
“I know you have guests. But . . .” She steps toward me, her voice urgent as she grips my arm. Her fingernails dig into my skin. I shrug off her hand. “I need to talk to you.”
“Marissa?” Nathan calls from the doorway. He steps out beneath the porch light. “Are you coming back?”
“I have to go inside,” I say.
Lauren glances toward him, then she looks at me. “Could we talk tomorrow? Alone?”
“Tell me now. What is it?”
“Marissa?” he calls out.
“I’ll be right there!”
He hesitates, then goes back inside.
“Tomorrow,” Lauren says, watching him retreat. “It’s important. You’ll want to hear this. It’s about Nathan.”
“What about him?”
“In the morning,” she says, turning on her heel. “First thing.”
“Wait!”
But she is already hurrying home.
CHAPTER TWO
I consider running after her, but there’s nothing she can tell me about Nathan that I don’t already know. But as she crosses the fifty-odd yards between the houses, she has already set me off-kilter. The mist swallows her, and I hear the distant slap of the screen door. I linger outside to quiet my thoughts.
Anna’s silhouette appears at her bedroom window, the soft song from her jewelry box wafting toward me. The theme from Swan Lake. The haunting melody gives me the energy to go back inside and play the gracious host, newly engaged to a man who swept me off my feet. While I was treating Anna, I never imagined he would walk into my office and throw me for such a loop. He was in his blue uniform, just off afternoon shift. He said something like, Cool decor. His deep voice mesmerized me. That was it. Anna flew into his arms. Her problem was more difficult than most—she stammered midsentence and often lapsed into silence. But I worked with her on fluency shaping, focusing her breathing, alleviating anxiety, and slowly, over nearly a year, she improved. I hope she will accept me into her home. I hope she loves me as much as I love her. As much as I want to love her, if she will let me.
For now, I savor a few more minutes in the fresh air. I follow the stepping stones back through the garden to the edge of a dense forest. Past these woods, the hillside drops gently to the beach, with a wooden staircase leading down—I’ve counted 115 steps. A great cardio workout. No staircase exists on the Eklunds’ property next door. The bluff rises there, the cliff much steeper, treacherous. Beyond the Eklunds lives Arthur Nguyen, a sixtysomething, divorced family-law attorney. The irony does not escape me. His much younger ex-wife and three daughters left him and moved to California. He consoles himself by walking his cairn terrier, Bert, and pretending to fish in the large man-made pond in his backyard. More of a mini lake. Nathan invited him to join us for dinner tonight, but he declined the invitation.
I inhale the salty air, listen to the soft rush of the sea. We’re fifteen minutes beyond the outskirts of Tranquil Cove, a sleepy town of ten thousand residents, west of Seattle on the shores of Enchanted Bay, on the Olympic Peninsula—a protected, curved inlet meandering in from the Pacific Ocean. Idyllic, peaceful. I didn’t anticipate that Lauren and Jensen would buy the house next door to Nathan, but the dominoes fell in quick succession—a house up for sale with a view, a shortage of homes on the market, and the Northwest architecture about which Lauren had dreamed when we were kids. Exposed cedar beams, log cabin, vaulted ceilings, to die for, she told me. I want this house. The same architect built both homes—Nathan’s and the Eklunds’. Arthur Nguyen’s squarish, modern bungalow stands out on the corner, an incongruous anomaly.
Jensen’s voice drifts through the air as the kitchen door opens. “Thanks, man—say thanks to Marissa.” He doesn’t see me out here in the dark. Hunched in his overcoat, he rushes home to join Lauren. He couldn’t stay away from her, after all.
I head back inside and take off my coat. I put on a smile and bring out homemade chocolate cake for dessert, and later, after Keith and Hedra have gone to bed, I’m exhausted but can’t close my eyes. I see Lauren’s troubled face in the moonlight. Maybe I should have followed her home. But I didn’t want her to usurp the evening.
I reach back for better memories of her, from a long time ago. When we were maybe eight years old, she helped me build sand sculptures at the beach. Together, we created two mermaids, fishtails intertwined in the sand. We’ll come out of the sea, Lauren said. And marry humans. And live happily ever after. Mermaid sisters.
We were best buddies then, sharing hopes and dreams. Exactly when did our friendship crack apart? Was it years later, when we were young adults in college, driven by hormones and ambition? Or did a rift form between us earlier? After all this time, my memory blurs.
In the master bathroom, I reach into the back of the medicine cabinet, find the sleeping pills hidden there. My doctor prescribed them three months ago for a bout of unexplained insomnia. But I only took one pill—it knocked me out cold. I shouldn’t take another one. I should be able to turn off my worries, and these last several years, I’ve mostly succeeded. I’ve excelled at my profession, treating over fifty students a week at the elementary school. I’ve helped thousands of kids overcome speech and language disorders. I’ve fallen in love with a loyal, caring man. My history does not rule me.
I down the tiny pill with a glass of water, and in the living room, I kick off my shoes and collapse on the couch. I’m not ready for bed just y
et. The house sings a soft lullaby in the breaths of heat from the ceiling vents, in the distant hiss of running water. Nathan must be brushing his teeth. The sounds relax me, and my eyelids grow heavy.
A few minutes later, Nathan saunters into the living room in his blue-and-white-striped pajamas.
“You’re clothed,” I say. “What a disappointment.” Usually, he sleeps in the buff.
“Regretfully. We have company.” He sits next to me and pulls me into his arms.
“They’re right down the hall,” I whisper, pressing a finger to my lips.
“They can’t hear. Keith sleeps like a log, when he’s not acting like an asshole.”
“He’s your brother.’
Nathan lowers his voice. “In DNA only.”
“What, you don’t love your family?”
“Love. Such a strong word.”
“I know he was cruel to you, but kids are like that.”
“You don’t have any brothers or sisters,” he whispers. “You have no idea. You know what he did once? Locked me in the shed when he was supposed to be watching me. He wanted to go to some skate park with his friends. He threatened me with death if I told on him.”
“Did you?”
“Hell no. I was only seven and he was thirteen. I thought for sure he could kill me.”
“We didn’t have to invite him—or any of them,” I whisper.
“Let’s ditch them and get married tomorrow.”
I interlock my fingers with his. “But we need time to plan . . .”
“What’s there to plan? Let’s get married on the lawn.”
“You don’t have a lawn. You have moss and trees.”
“So, we’ll get married in the moss and trees.”
“What should I wear? The blue dress I showed everyone? It’s daring . . . blue instead of white.”
“I prefer you in nothing. It’s what I thought the day I met you.”
“You were in that sexy uniform. But I mainly noticed your eyes. You were wearing those amazing eyes.”
“I chose them just for you.”
“You mean you have others?”
“Take your pick. You were in your gorgeous body. And some gauzy fabric.”