“You’re so good with Natasha.” Maura put her hand on yours.
And you knew what was going to happen even before she let her hand fall to the small of your back, even before you got the fellowship offer from Northwestern’s graduate program and Maura and your father suggested you live at home to cut down on expenses. And you thought it would be the thing that secured your place in hell, but you didn’t really care, because you never believed in hell, not even when you were a kid and your mother had made you go to Mass. You didn’t care because Phoebe Fisher still haunted your dreams, even though you hadn’t talked to her since freshman year.
It actually didn’t happen with Maura for three years. Not until you left your undergrad apartment on Sherman and Noyes and moved back into your father’s house. Not until you spent a bunch of nights on the couches (new couches, not the ones where your mother had waited to die) in the living room watching The Late Show and jotting down sketches for a generator while Maura folded laundry on the floor. It didn’t happen until you started bringing Giordano’s pizza home for dinner and picking Natasha up from the sitter’s house on days when Maura had to close the animal shelter where she volunteered.
Even on the night it actually happened, it wasn’t until after you went to a Cubs game with Braden, who was in town from Boulder, where he’d gotten a schmoozy consulting gig. It didn’t happen until after you chugged seven Styrofoam cups of Old Style because you could hardly find anything to talk about with Braden anymore, and you remembered how he used to be closer to you than any real members of your family. It didn’t happen until after you stumbled in from the game and found Maura, translucent and sad, drinking cabernet and watching a M*A*S*H rerun.
“There’s Leona’s leftovers in the fridge if you’re hungry.” She muted the volume.
You told her you’d had a hot dog at the game, but you’d take a glass of wine. The remote fell off the coffee table when she got up. Both of you knelt to retrieve it, and the back of your hand brushed her breast. She clasped it there and held it. That was how it finally happened, on an Oriental rug your father had brought back from China.
It wasn’t particularly good or bad, but you fucked like people who needed to. Pressing yourself into her was the same feeling you’d had when you’d almost drowned Braden—surprise you were actually doing something so dark and sticky, so tangibly wrong, you had to question if you were like other people in the world.
Afterward, Maura kissed your forehead, and you were close enough to see the blue veins under her see-through skin. Before she died, your mother had had a road map of lines crossing her body from the operations where they cut into her and took things out piece by piece. At forty-five Maura was older than your mother had ever gotten to be.
You thought it was going to be a one-time thing but weren’t surprised when Maura knocked on your bedroom door a few nights later. You let her in, and you kept letting her in. Though you never told anyone about it, you could almost hear your sister’s commentary: “Ollie, you must realize that this is about Dad. About your need to be close to him … to connect.” That may have been true, but you pushed the idea away, didn’t really think about it until five months later, when you were sitting at the kitchen table eating pancakes with Maura and Natasha, and under the table Maura tapped her knee to yours, the way Phoebe Fisher used to.
“We should take Nat to see the tree lighting tonight,” she said.
You said Natasha was too young to like that, and traffic would be a nightmare.
“Nonsense, my father took me in Cincinnati when I was half Natasha’s age.” Maura put her hand on your thigh under the table. Natasha was concentrating on eating only the chips out of her chocolate chip pancakes, but it still made you uncomfortable. “We can take the ‘L.’”
The year before, Maura had redone the kitchen, and the light blue flowers of the wallpaper were the same washed-out shade as her eyes. The weight of her small hand became oppressive on your leg, and you felt crushed by the faded blue all around you. You wanted to tell Maura you weren’t Natasha’s father and had no desire to be.
“Is Dad going to be home tonight?” you asked, brushing her hand away.
Maura recoiled, and you looked out the window to avoid her eyes and the wallpaper and the hurt that you knew you were causing her.
“I think he’s going to be in Beijing until Tuesday,” she said.
* * *
Your first love:
Phoebe Fisher was assigned as your physics lab partner senior year. She broke a lot of bell jars, got a 39 percent on the kinetics test, and asked you to tutor her. Because her lips looked like satin, and she was nicer than you thought someone like her needed to be, you agreed. For weeks you sat with her in the cafeteria during lunch, trying to explain how to measure velocity. Though she stared at you intently, it became apparent she would never master distance and displacement, so you wrote big on the tests and let her look across the table at your answers.
You still had lunch with her, and one day she leaned across her tray of tuna salad to graze those satin lips against yours.
“I just wanted to do that.” She giggled afterward.
“I wanted you to do that, too,” you said, wishing you’d been the instigator, that you hadn’t made her make the first move.
After four months of snuggling, all-night phone calls, and slightly painful handjobs, she took you to her father’s house and laid you on your back under the white lace canopy over her bed. Lowering herself on top of you, she guided your cock between her thighs. It went fine until you heard the rumble of an airplane outside—your father, the Piper Saratoga when you were seven—and went limp before even entering her.
“No worries, sweetie,” she said, kissing your shoulder and stroking your red hair. “It’ll be better next time.”
It was.
Afterward, she put her mouth on your stomach and blew out air, lips vibrating against your skin.
And the two of you were happy ordering Thai food and watching classic movies on the couch. Happy going with Phoebe to her brother’s track meets and helping her stepmother set the table on nights you stayed for dinner. Happy watching her play Emily in the school production of Our Town and going on double dates with her friends, even though you’d gone to school with Evie and Nicole for years and never talked to them before Phoebe came along. You were happy until the third week of May, when your stomach started hurting.
“What’s wrong?” Phoebe asked when you twitched in pain on the couch, your arms and legs tangled with hers.
“Nothing,” you said.
You knew you should see a doctor, but you weren’t about to see a doctor, because that was how it started with your mother: First her stomach hurt, then she was waiting to die.
Though you didn’t die, the next day you did crumple over in the Nordstrom at Old Orchard while Phoebe was trying on bathing suits. She called her father, and they took you down the road to Northwestern Memorial (your mother’s hospital), where a perky brunette surgeon sawed into your abdomen and suctioned out the remains of your ruptured appendix.
Everyone knew Larry Fisher, so they let Phoebe stay past visiting hours. After Braden brought your homework assignments, Chase Fisher brought you magazines, and your own father finally arrived, guilty and groggy from Australia, Phoebe climbed into your elevated bed and squeezed your arm. For the first time, it hit you that she was really leaving, not just going down the road like you. Feeling the tingle in your nose and eyes, you turned away because you didn’t want her to see you cry.
“Do you want me to get that nurse for more pain stuff?” she asked nervously.
The only thing you could say was “Don’t go after graduation.”
She laughed, which would have seemed a lot funnier if something in your chest didn’t cave in every time you caught sight of the back of her head in the hall between classes.
“Ollie, Ollie, Ollie.” She moved her hand from your shoulder to your thigh, the warmth of her palm seeping through the thin fabric
of the sheets. “It’ll work out. You’ll see.”
And you trusted her.
So you helped pack her little dresses and movie posters into her Camry, and the two of you drove across the country. College didn’t start for you until mid-September, so you played house for a couple of months in her studio apartment. The afternoons were spent touring the different neighborhoods so Phoebe could learn the city. You went to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and drove into the Hollywood Hills with a star map from a street vendor; other than a few blondes who may have been models, you didn’t see any celebrities.
Just as in the gum commercials, Phoebe cried and clung to you long after the flight attendant at LAX announced it was time for your row to board when you had to go back.
“I love you, Oliver,” she mumbled into the fabric of your T-shirt.
“Phoebe.” You started to say you loved her, too, but stopped. For months you’d been telling her that, and you needed to say more. “I want to write your name in the sky.”
“Like the Tom Petty song?” She smiled, mascara streaks on her cheeks.
“Sure,” you said. But that hadn’t really been what you were thinking, it had just seemed the most relevant thing to say.
The first few months at Northwestern, you talked to Phoebe every night while your roommate would dramatically slam the door and head to the communal lounge. Phoebe rattled on about the auditions her low-budget modeling agency sent her on and all the almost-famous people she met at parties. You told her about your new friend Chris, who was nice but made you miss Braden, and about the introductory engineering classes you liked.
Without warning, one day you found a hardness in her voice.
“People here are so different than people in Chicago,” she said.
“Yeah,” you agreed. “College isn’t ETHS.”
“It’s not the same.” It wasn’t what she said but how she said it. When she told you she loved you at the end of the conversation, it didn’t have the conviction it had at the airport two months before.
And then Phoebe’s calls dwindled to twice a week, to once a month, to never. You left messages, but she didn’t return them. During the week of your midterm exams, her number was disconnected. You drove down to her father’s neighborhood and circled around, just to see if her car was there. It wasn’t, nor was it there the ten subsequent times you went back to check.
“It will be better in the long run,” your new friend Chris told you over beers bought with fake IDs claiming you were twenty-two and from Kansas.
“It will be better in the long run,” Braden told you when the two of you saw the Eons & Empires sequel over Christmas break.
“I never liked that girl much anyway,” Karen told you on the phone. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but it will be better in the long run.”
But they were all wrong; nothing about it was better. Not the ache you felt in your solar plexus every day you came home and your roommate smirked and told you, “No, she hasn’t called,” not the girls you dated at Northwestern or seeing Phoebe eating strawberry yogurt in a Dannon commercial. Not fucking your stepmother.
Years later, when you didn’t consciously dwell on being over her but occasionally it occurred to you that you didn’t think about her every day, Phoebe Fisher finally did reappear. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Braden was in town and wanted to hit some of the swanky bars on the Gold Coast, which was fine because your father was home and you didn’t feel comfortable being there with both him and Maura anymore.
It was one in the morning, and Braden was chatting up some Loyola senior when you saw her with Evie Saperstein. Her black hair was cropped close to her chin, and she was thinner, but she was most definitely Phoebe. And because you were twenty-six and not eighteen, you went over and set a hand on her shoulder.
“Hey, Phee,” you said, as if you hadn’t spent the last seven years wondering about her. “Long time, no see.”
The truly remarkable thing was how happy Phoebe Fisher was to see you. At her urging, you slid into the booth beside her, and the two of you talked until the bar closed and shards of gold light started to streak the sky.
Finally, you drove her home in her father’s car, and she took you upstairs, where you talked more in her gauzy white bedroom that looked the same as it had in high school. She told you about the commercial she did for a used-car dealership in Orange County, and you told her about your work with Advantage Electric and the undergrad courses they let graduate students teach at Northwestern. Then neither one of you spoke for a long time.
Setting your glasses on the bedside table, you went in to kiss her. Phoebe stopped you and began to offer the apology that you’d desperately needed eons and empires ago. But you didn’t want to hear it anymore. It couldn’t change all that time you had stayed in the Chicago suburbs while everyone else left.
“Shhhh.” You traced her collarbone with your fingers. “Things happen; I could never hate you.”
Making love to Phoebe after so many years of wanting to make love to her—all of her body parts alien yet familiar—everything seemed meaningful and slow motion. The only light was the eerie orange glow of Chicago from the south-facing window, and you wondered if the two of you were real at all or if you were ghosts haunting a glitch in the space-time continuum.
You fell asleep, her bare, pale back against your chest.
And you were happy in the time warp, until the next morning, when she told you she was only in town a few days.
“I didn’t even bring a coat.” She melted in velvety laughter, very different than her old giggle. “That’s how long I’ve been gone.”
She was still spooned into you, and you spun her around, had sex with her again, less gentle than before. Maybe you did hate her, just a little.
Afterward, Phoebe walked you downstairs to the kitchen, where her father and stepmother, who looked exactly as you remembered, were eating breakfast at the island.
“Oliver.” Her father nodded, and Gennifer asked if you still took your coffee with cream and sugar, as if their daughter bringing her old boyfriend down from her bedroom on Thanksgiving Day was a completely normal occurrence.
Phoebe’s kid brother, who had grown into his features and looked nothing like you remembered, gave you a huge hug and asked about your life with authentic interest. Next to him was a girl in a slim skirt and heels. With her blue eyes and black hair, she could have been the Fisher siblings’ younger, less exotic cousin. But from the way she leaned into Chase, you knew they were lovers. You suspected that the girl, who introduced herself as “Sharon Gallaher only one G,” cared more about Chase than he for her. It was subtle, the way her body tilted into his while he faced straight ahead reading the Tribune’s business section. Feeling an instant kinship with Sharon, you wanted to warn her what it felt like to love and lose a Fisher.
* * *
By the time Phoebe drops you home, it’s nearly one, and Maura and your sister are bringing holiday dishes (dishes that had been your mother’s, even though she never used them) to the dining room table.
“Nice of you to join us,” your father says, which is so ironic you briefly forget to feel guilty about Maura.
“Fun night?” Karen jokes, setting down a plate of sliced turkey and licking gravy from her thumb. “I ask because your shirt is on inside out.”
From the kitchen you can feel Maura’s colorless eyes on you. Not once during the entire meal do you look directly at her.
Three days later—when your encounter with Phoebe feels like a fever dream, your father is back in the sky, and you still haven’t talked to your stepmother—you’re in your bedroom trying to grade student papers when the outline of Maura’s slippers appears through the slit of light under your door.
“Ollie?” she whispers. “Are you awake?”
It occurs to you that you don’t want to deal with avoiding Maura anymore, that she’s your father’s anchor to Evanston, not yours. That you don’t care about thrust and hydrostatic lock and helpin
g other people jet off to faraway places nearly as much as you thought you did. That maybe you are sick of the gray Chicago sky and of unconsciously waiting for everyone else’s return.
Holding your breath until Maura is gone, you take the backpack from the back of your closet, fill it with a week’s worth of jeans and T-shirts, and call a cab to the airport for 6:00 A.M.
“What airline?” the middle-aged driver asks as he makes the turnoff to O’Hare.
United offers free standby tickets to pilots’ families, but you can’t run away from home on your father’s airline.
“Maybe Delta?”
“Sure ’bout that?” the driver asks, and you tell him you are. Domestic or international, he wants to know, and you desperately wish you’d had an occasion to get a passport at some point in the past twenty-six years.
The terminal is busy, swarms of travelers scurrying to make early morning flights; other than a guy in a Bears sweatshirt, they could be people from anywhere going anywhere. You line up for a ticket agent, studying the electronic board above the counter listing times and gates for departing flights. Anchorage, Atlanta, Cleveland, Rapid City, Seattle—all the different varieties of the country. Places you never go because you’ve been stuck in a permanent holding pattern in Illinois.
Across the terminal a tall airline pilot strides by in a navy blue uniform. It’s not your father, even at this distance you can tell, but something about the man reminds you of him—confidence.
After twenty minutes in the queue, a uniformed clerk smiles at you, asks, “What can I help you with today, sir?”
“What’s the farthest place from here I can go right now?”
Her brow crinkles, and she asks if you’re kidding.
Taking out a credit card, you smile with all the authority you didn’t have in the Piper Saratoga when you were seven. “Yes, I’m ready for a change.”
4 we don’t get today
NEW YORK CITY
In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel Page 9