The guy nodded. He said, “No, not really.”
“You won’t miss it—I mean, you can’t get lost. It’s a canyon, right? Head downstream, stay by the river, and don’t climb. I just sat on a flat rock.”
Jules chimed in with some questions for the shirtless man. “Your friend’s things are still in your camp, right? She isn’t someone who would try to climb out during the night? Or go in the river for anything? By herself, I mean…She wouldn’t…?”
Do something that stupid?
The shirtless man said, “Her stuff’s here. Everything’s there, her pack, her bag. Our water. She’s the one who warned me about the river. She told me not to get fooled, that the river water is really cold.
“She has to go back up today. This morning. Like, now. This trip was just a…you know. Come down. One…night… here. And then…back up. You know.”
Jules said, “And you two were…getting along okay?”
“No. Great. Just great.”
Jack started making some adjustments to Carmel’s pack. He lifted the weight higher on the provocative curve of her hips—the allure of that arc was one to which Jack was completely immune—and pulled at the shoulder straps to encourage the heft to stay where he wanted it to stay. He asked the man, “She works up at the rim? Your friend?”
The shirtless man nodded. “North rim. The cafeteria at the Visitor’s Center? She’s a cook. You may have seen her. Up there, I mean.”
Eric wanted to get started up the trail. He was the oldest member of the group—a twenty-seven-year-old with a law degree who had just finished doing a fellowship at Stanford’s Hoover Institute. If it turned out that a leader needed to emerge for any reason on the march up to the rim, he would be the one the others would look to. He took a long gaze at his watch, as if he were having difficulty making sense of the numbers, then gazed up toward the canyon walls.
A buttery aura had just begun to whisper dawn in the eastern sky, painting the ragged edge of the rim like a spill of diluted watercolor.
He said, “We’re heading up the North Kaibab in a few minutes. When we get to the rim, we’ll let somebody know that your friend may be late for her shift. Okay? It looks like you two are going to get a late start, and it’s going to be slow going today. Make sure you take extra water because of the heat. And take care of that blister first.” He tapped the crystal of his watch. “Come on, everybody, what do you say we go and deplete some glycogen?”
All the other hikers, with one exception, responded to Eric’s call to get moving. The exception was Jules, his girlfriend.
She caught Kanyn’s eyes for a split second. Thought she saw something there.
FIVE
His Ex
Alan didn’t turn to face me right away.
He was talking with a woman I thought was familiar from the old days, but I couldn’t place her. I did think she was a mental health type. She was tall and slender—to be candid, she was the kind of wan and skinny that makes sane people wonder about metabolic disorders—with frizzy hair that must have been a nightmare to manage. Her clothes looked, well, borrowed. None of the pieces she’d chosen were exactly somber, but she’d made enough of an effort at choosing mourning attire that the resulting combination didn’t stray too far beyond the boundaries of grief’s zip code. She should have known better than to have worn so much mascara to a funeral, though.
Talk about the tracks of her tears.
“Alan,” I said. I wished he would have sensed that I was there.
He allowed the woman to finish a most-pedestrian thought about how much she would miss Adrienne’s laugh—I’d always appreciated Alan’s patience with people almost as much as I’d been frustrated by it—before he placed a hand on her wrist and said, “Cassandra? Would you excuse me for a moment?”
Cassandra? Did not ring a bell. I rarely forgot names and faces. Why couldn’t I identify this woman? I watched Alan’s shoulders broaden and his back expand as he filled his lungs with air. He was steeling himself for a fresh gale of grief.
I could see in Alan’s eyes the moment he turned around that he hadn’t suspected I’d be in town. But I couldn’t see much else there. One of my persistent vulnerabilities in our relationship was my inability to read Alan’s gaze. One of his persistent advantages in our relationship was having a gaze that was difficult for me to read.
“Merideth,” he said. Then—after he’d expelled all that air from his lungs—“I’m so sorry.”
That I’m here? That our friend is dead? That you didn’t call to tell me what happened?
My narcissism no longer ambushed me. My troubles seeing beyond my immediate reach had been the source of some significant friction for Alan and me.
I should, of course, have seen the marital storm clouds forming. During the early flare of our mutual passion Alan had chosen the first two letters of my name—it’s “Merideth,” not the conventional M-e-r-e-d-i-t-h—as his endearment for me.
I would come home from work. He’d say, “Hi, Me.”
I’d say, “Hey, you.”
I had naïvely considered the banter to be clever romantic patois. I didn’t realize until long after our separation that the sobriquet served as scarlet letters of my self-involvement, ones that I’d helped hang around my own neck.
In the last few years I had begun to come to terms with who I am, learning to treat my self-centered predisposition like an aggravating trait in a friend I otherwise adored. I no longer berated myself for my propensity toward self-involvement.
In other circumstances—other than me intruding on him during our friend’s funeral—I imagined Alan would be genuinely pleased that my peripheral vision had improved. He could be magnanimous, but to a fault. Another complicated issue for us when we were married.
For a moment, I thought Alan was going to embrace me after he got over his shock. But he held back.
I lowered my voice. “I’m sorry too,” I said. “I know you loved her.”
When Alan failed to step in for an embrace I held out my left hand toward him, palm down, as if offering to grasp his hand in a restrained gesture of compassion. The move was calculated. And no, it wasn’t that I was worried that I wasn’t at the top of his hug list that day. Most days, the man would hug anyone. I didn’t want to move in because I wanted to give him a chance to spot my new engagement ring. I preferred not to have to tell him.
That was insight.
Insight is a lovely thing. Like the diamond adorning the fourth finger of my left hand, it is often useless. But lovely nonetheless.
I thought Alan would take my hand, but he didn’t. His right hand and wrist were encased in a sky blue cast. He reached out for me instead. I shouldn’t have been surprised—he usually did. Reach first, that is. We embraced, an act at once habitual and unsettling. Slipping into his grasp was as familiar as sliding into a hot bath. As his arms wrapped around me, and his fingers—at least those on his uncasted hand—pressed across my shoulder blades, I could feel his body shudder a little.
That brought back memories too.
He said, “It’s such a tragedy. What happened in Israel. I miss her so much.”
He hadn’t noticed the ring. “I know,” I said. “You have a cast on your arm.”
“I broke my hand. It’s nothing.”
I wanted to tell him about the baby. And about the wedding.
My narcissism governess—she was a psychological fiction I’d created to assist with my ego-observation challenges—awoke from her slumber just in time to spare me from myself.
“Later would be better,” the Bitch whispered in that gravelly, aggravating, know-it-all voice of hers.
The Upper West Side therapist that I’d started seeing a few months back—he was a young guy, only a couple of years out of his residency at Johns Hopkins—would be pleased that the governess had intervened at that moment. Creating the Bitch had been his prescription to help me internalize the monitoring of my self-centering tendencies.
Her role? She was
my psychological dominatrix. She was the coach who knew the moves that helped me tame my too-buff sense of entitlement. She was the town crier for the somnolent burg of my superego.
She was helping me get ready to be a wife, and a mother.
SIX
Her Ex
Merideth’s arrival in my home for Adrienne’s reception had ambushed me.
I hadn’t thought to invite her. Or to send her a note about the funeral. I hadn’t called about Adrienne’s death.
My oversight lacked consideration. And it certainly lacked compassion. If my plate hadn’t been so full of other things at the time I might have turned double-barrel shells of recrimination upon myself. But my plate was beyond full. I’d screwed up in so many crucial ways over the previous year that I shrugged off the sleight to Merideth. I had a plethora of worse sins on which to spend my store of mea culpas.
With Marty in the picture, the immediate future looked no less complicated than the recent past.
Merideth and I talked for a while before we moved on to other conversations.
I spotted Lauren diagonally across the crowded room. She was eyeing Merideth, who was in the midst of an animated discussion with Diane Estevez. Diane was my partner in clinical practice, and a dear friend whose tenure in my life exceeded that of both of my wives. Lauren, my current wife, had seen photographs of Merideth, my ex-wife. Lauren knew at whom she was staring.
It might have been prudent for me to turn away sooner. But I became mesmerized watching the drama. My wife shifted her gaze, searching, until she caught my eye. With a raised chin and a slight tilt of her head, she gestured for to me to follow her down the hallway toward our bedroom.
“Is that Merideth?” she asked when I was within whispering distance.
She knew it was Merideth. “Yes,” I said.
“Did you know she was going to be here?”
Her question didn’t feel accusatory. “No,” I said. “I’m as surprised to see her as you are.”
She searched my eyes for prevarication. Satisfied, she said, “Okay.” She’d said it in a then-we’ll-deal-with-it voice.
“You holding up?” I asked. I was asking her about her MS, and her energy.
She nodded.
Didn’t mean much. I translated the nod to mean that she would make it through the reception. It might take her twenty-four hours to recover, but she would make it through.
“Seen the kids?” I said.
“They’re downstairs with Mona. They’re fine.”
Mona had been Jonas’s latest nanny. She was still on the payroll, helping us out.
Lauren said, “We should get back to our guests.”
I touched her arm. “I think Marty is going to try to take Jonas from us,” I said. “We need to watch what we say to him, and to Kim.”
“He said that? That he’s going to try to take Jonas?”
“Not in so many words,” I said.
Her eyes got fierce. “Let him fucking try,” she said.
She marched back to the reception.
Contemplating another loss was too much for her. It had been a tough spring for all of us.
Although I suspected that Merideth would linger until the very end of the event, she left the reception along with the second wave of departing guests. As she said good-bye to me on our small front porch she asked me if I had “just a moment.” Before I had a chance to say I did, she took my casted hand and led me away from the house about ten yards until we were standing on the valley side of the garage, looking southwest toward the Flatirons and Eldorado Springs.
A breeze carried the buzz of traffic from the nearby turnpike. I gazed at Merideth. She was trying to squelch a smile. “Yes?” I said.
Her eyes lit up in a way that I had seen less and less as our marriage had disintegrated. “Today is about Adrienne,” she said. “I know that. Before I leave, though, I want you to know that I’m pregnant,” she said. “And engaged.”
The “and engaged” tag came out in a more hurried fashion than I think she had intended. My eyes caught the glint of a diamond on her finger. The rock was the size of an extra-strength Tylenol. The ring and setting were either white gold or platinum. I was guessing platinum.
“Congratulations,” I said. “Twice. It’s nice to hear some good news, Merideth. That’s wonderful.”
“I’ve had three miscarriages already, so nothing’s certain where my uterus is concerned.”
Although no DNA laboratory had ever confirmed my role, it was likely that I’d had something to do with the conception phase of the first of Merideth’s three miscarriages. The responsible, and irresponsible, coupling had occurred many years before, during the separation that preceded our divorce.
That particular lapse in judgment aside, I’d never questioned the appropriateness of the outcome. Of that particular pregnancy. Of the long story of my relationship with Merideth. Of our marriage. Certainly not of our divorce.
“You excited about the baby?” I asked. Merideth’s enthusiasm about being a mother wasn’t a given. Any maternal instincts had always been buried under a thick blanket of insulation woven from her professional ambition and what I perceived, fairly or not, as an inability to place anyone—like an infant—reliably ahead of herself in any important queue.
“I am, Alan,” she said. “I’m ready to be a mom. I really want this baby. I’ve grown a lot.”
She looked at my eyes for an indication of how dubious I might be of her self-assessment. I tried to make sure that there was nothing there for her to see. I wanted to believe her. “Well, I hope your luck has changed and that this pregnancy goes perfectly. I’m…truly happy for both of you. All of you.”
She held up both hands, fingers crossed on each, doubling her plea for good fortune. “I’m at ten weeks now. I’ve never made it to ten weeks before. This one feels right. It’s different. I don’t know why, but biologically, it feels…more real, like it’s truly part of me. I think this one will be my baby. I can’t believe I’m going to be a mom.”
She seemed genuinely pleased and excited at the prospect of becoming a mother. Although I wanted to trust in the transformation, I also knew that where Merideth was concerned my reading comprehension skills were not legendary. At least not legendarily good.
She dropped her hands so that her fingers were laced and cradled low across her abdomen. Her flat belly—Merideth was no stranger to vanity, and she had never been someone unwilling to pay the price in crunches and Pilates sessions that were necessary to keep her abs on an uninterrupted vertical plane—belied no contour indicative of pregnancy.
As the weeks, and her pregnancy, progressed, I thought Merideth would display the constitutional evidence of procreation reluctantly. When her belly did begin to bulge in a way she could no longer fashionably disguise, she would make certain that her maternal silhouette was presented to the world to its best advantage. The designer maternity salespeople at Bergdorf and Barneys and in the boutiques on Madison Avenue would salivate when they spotted her rounding belly preceding her in their doors.
“Who’s the lucky father? And…future husband?”
“His name is Eric. Eric Leffler?” She paused, waiting for me to nod or, even better, raise an eyebrow.
Merideth had expected me to recognize her fiancé’s name. She hesitated when it was apparent that Eric Leffler was unfamiliar to me.
Based on history, I thought she would try to find some way to offer more clues. She did. “He made his name during the ’04 election. He was one of the youngest consultants in the party, but he called the outcome of the House races better than anyone on either side. And he was the contrarian of record in ’06. We know how that turned out.”
I shrugged. I knew how the election turned out, and how little had changed because of it. I didn’t know much more. “I don’t follow that kind of thing. Sorry.”
“His early work was on the myth of democratization. Now everybody wants to know what he’s thinking about the Middle East.”
; I shrugged again. I still didn’t think I knew who he was, but I was weighing the wisdom of pretending that I did.
“He’s on leave from Columbia. He’s a fellow at the Freedom Trust Endowment? A consultant? He’s a regular on cable. That’s how we met.”
I tried not to subject myself to the kinds of shows on which my ex’s fiancé was likely to appear. For me, watching partisans argue had become a form of torture that should have been banned under the Geneva Conventions. When the water-boarding sessions proved futile at Guantánamo, I assumed the most hardened prisoners were subjected to nonstop cable news.
The man had an impressive CV. Although I knew where Columbia was, I didn’t think I’d heard of the Freedom Trust Endowment. Given the context, I assumed it was a think tank of some kind. Given the size of the diamond the man was able to afford to adorn my ex-wife’s finger, the man either made a pretty good living or came from money.
“Are you happy, Merideth?” I tried to ask the question in a way that might bring the conversation back from the coasts, back down below the stratosphere. The events of the previous few weeks, culminating in Adrienne’s death, had left me in desperate need of gravity. I didn’t have any energy to spare for celebrity guessing games with my ex.
“Eric’s younger than me. Us.” She laughed. “He helps me feel young. Yes, I am happy.”
She stressed the verb form of to be in a way that I thought was overdetermined—rather than convincing me, the odd emphasis with which she colored the word ended up injecting some doubt into my appraisal of her actual contentedness. I cautioned myself that all the historical complications of my time together with Merideth might have been altering my perceptions. She and I had baggage.
I think she sensed my reaction, because she quickly changed the subject. “Diane told me that you’re going to raise Jonas,” she said. “I don’t know Lauren, of course, but I certainly understand why Adrienne chose you.”
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