"Did you live on Amsterdam Avenue?"
I nodded, turning toward him.
"Did you ever take saxophone lessons?"
"No. Voice." I took another sip of water, imagining I was already starting to feel drowsy. "But there were saxophone teachers in my building."
"I took sax lessons," he said. "Maybe I saw you."
"Maybe you did." I tried to give him his handkerchief back.
"No, keep it. It's yours," he said, and smiled. "But you'll have to give it back. Will you have dinner with me?"
I nodded. He had a nice smile, I thought...or maybe that was just the medication talking. Then I closed my eyes, and when I woke up, we were on the ground at Kennedy Airport and my head was on Ben Borowitz's shoulder. He'd tucked my blanket around me and was having a quiet consultation with the pretty British flight attendant about the best way to remove drool from his leather jacket, which he'd bunched up and placed under my cheek. "Sorry," I murmured thickly. "No, no," said Ben. "Don't worry." He had a car waiting. Could he give me a ride home?
I let him put me in the car. A week later, we went out for sushi. I asked the right questions about his life, his job, his friends, and his hobbies and made myself nod and smile in all the right places, and I only slipped into the bathroom twice to check my messages at home to see if Evan had called. Suitable, I thought, leaning across the table to clink sake cups with the man who, two years later, would become my husband. He is a suitable man. We'll have a suitable life together. I knew that what I felt for Ben wasn't even close to the passion I'd felt for Evan. But look where passion had gotten me. Suitable, I figured, would suit me just fine.
Ben and I honeymooned in Saint Lucia and moved into his apartment, two bedrooms at Sixty-fifth and Central Park West, and for three years we were happy. Well, I was reasonably content, with my job and with Janie. Being married felt a lot like being single, with the addition of a very large, sparkly diamond and the very minor issue of being unable to date other men. Not that I was seeing much of my husband. Ben appeared to have spent all of whatever free time he would ever have wooing me. Now that he'd sealed the deal, he worked nights, weekends, and all summer long, except for the occasional weekend when he'd drive out on Saturday to visit me and Janie at Sy's house in Bridgehampton, spend the whole day poolside, and drive back Sunday with his entire face sunburned, except for the patch of white around his ear where he'd held his cell phone.
Then came Sophie. Ben went back to work two days after she arrived. I didn't complain, but it was hard not to notice that Janie and my father both took more time off than my husband did (Reina flew in long enough to kiss the baby, then flew back to Rome). After ten days, my father went back to the orchestra, Janie went back to New York Night, and I was left alone, exhausted and bewildered, with an eight-and-a-half-pound shriek machine and a supercompetent baby nurse who, regrettably, spoke only Russian.
When Sophie was twelve weeks old, I went to visit Dr. Morrison for my twice-postponed postbirth checkup.
"How are you doing?" he asked genially as I stuck my feet into the stirrups.
"Uh..." Honestly, between dealing with a cranky newborn, a husband who was never home, a mother who kept promising to return, then changing her mind, and Sveta the baby nurse, who communicated via grunts, gestures, and angry shakes of her head, I was having a hard time stringing together more than two words at a time.
"Knees apart, please. What are you planning on doing for birth control?"
I laughed weakly. "Never have sex again?"
He chuckled twice as he rummaged inside me. Then his eyebrows drew down. "Huh."
"Huh what?" I asked. I knew I should have been more worried, but honestly, lying on my back with my colicky baby thirty blocks away was the most restful experience I'd had since Sophie's arrival. It was all I could do not to doze off.
"I think we should step into the ultrasound room."
I struggled to think. "Why? Is there, um, something still in there?"
"Follow me," he said. Five minutes later Dr. Morrison had smeared goo on my belly, pressed the ultrasound wand against it, and located not one but two heartbeats. "Congratulations, Mom!" the nurse had had the nerve to say. Lucky for her, she had quick reflexes. The shoe I threw at the ultrasound monitor barely grazed her shoulder. I'd gone running out of the office and down the hall and into the elevator with my pants pulled on but not zipped or buttoned, my sneakers shoved onto my feet, unlaced, and the examination gown flapping in back and sticking to the ultrasound gel in front.
Ben had answered his phone on the third ring. "Ben Borowitz speaking."
"Motherfucker!" I'd yelled so loudly that the flock of pigeons on the corner had taken flight and the homeless guy going through the garbage can and mumbling to himself had looked up and said, quite lucidly, "Lady, you nuts."
"What?"
"I'm pregnant," I said, and started crying. "Again. With twins!"
"You got pregnant..." His voice trailed off. "I didn't think you could get pregnant when...I mean, it's so soon!"
"Tell me about it," I sniffled.
He cleared his throat. "So what are we going to do now?"
I shoved my hair back from my cheeks and pulled the gown tight against my shoulders. "Have three kids, I guess. But you're going to have to help me."
"I will," he promised.
"You can't just say you're going to come home early and not come home, or that you're going to do the laundry and not do it. I'm..." I wiped tears off my cheeks with the hem of the gown. "I'm kind of not making it here."
"I'll help you, Kate. I promise I will."
He'd meant it at the time. At least, that's the belief that I'd clung to after the boys came along and the baby nurse returned and my mother was once again missing in action. Ten days after my C-section, Janie and my father were once again back at work and I was alone in the apartment with a very unhappy eleven-month-old and two newborns. The trouble was, as Ben patiently explained to me over and over again, he was building a business, cementing his reputation, setting himself up for the halcyon, hazy days somewhere in the future when he wouldn't have to work every day and most nights and almost every weekend. "I'm doing this for us," he'd say, and I'd nod and say, "I understand."
As long as I had New York, and my father, and Janie, I thought I'd be fine. The kids would grow up eventually. They'd go to nursery school, then school school. Someday I'd get to the point where I could talk to them and they'd answer back. I could work part-time. I could reclaim my pre-baby life and have some kind of balance again.
Then I got stroller-jacked.
The kids and I were on our way back from the Museum of Natural History, where we'd spent twenty educational minutes inspecting the exhibit on life under the sea, an equal amount of time changing diapers, and forty-five minutes in the gift shop. It was unexpectedly warm for February, with a clear blue sky and a gentle breeze that promised the joys of spring. Sam and Jack, who'd emerged from my womb good-natured and easygoing and hadn't changed much in the intervening years, were in their stroller, fast asleep. Sophie, who'd emerged from my womb red-faced and shrieking inconsolably and hadn't changed much either, was wide awake and standing on the board I'd affixed to the back of the stroller.
"Mommy, why are wheels round?" she asked as we strolled along Central Park West.
"Because if they were square, they wouldn't turn!"
Sophie considered this. "Why?"
"Well, they turn because that's what wheels do! That's how they get you places!"
"But why--"
But before Sophie could finish, a man in a stained baseball cap popped out from behind a dumpster, grabbed the stroller's handlebars, and wheeled it swiftly into a dark alley I'd never noticed before.
"Hey!" I screamed as Sophie hopped nimbly off the board and wrapped her arms around my legs.
"Be cool, be cool," he said, pushing the stroller against the dumpster and fumbling in his pocket. My heart froze as I saw the gun.
"Gimme your bag."
I peeled Sophie off my legs, held her against me, bent over, and fished the diaper bag out from underneath the stroller.
"No, your purse."
"I don't have one!" I said. "I don't carry a purse, I just stick my wallet in the diaper bag." I thrust the bag out at him, feeling dizzy and sick. "Please don't hurt my babies."
He dumped the diaper bag out on the pavement. Wipes and diapers and boxes of raisins came tumbling down, along with my wallet, which he shoved in his pocket. "Jewelry." I handed over my watch and bracelet, and tried to yank my wedding band off while forcing myself to look at him, his face, his body. He was five ten or so, maybe a hundred and sixty pounds, a pale white guy with dirty blond hair in faded jeans and a leather jacket.
"Now give me the stroller."
"What?"
He glared at me. "Get the brats out of there and hand it over."
"Stand still," I whispered to Sophie. She grabbed my legs again, and I lurched forward and unfastened the boys with shaking hands, still unable to quite believe that this was happening.
I lifted the boys into my arms. The thief pressed the red button underneath the handlebars. Nothing happened. He peered at the print on the foam grips.
"This says, 'Easy one-hand fold.' "
"Yeah, well..."
He pushed the button again and jiggled the stroller up and down. Still nothing. He kicked the cross-braces.
"No, not that way," I said, trying to adjust approximately sixty-three pounds of toddler in my arms. "No, Mumma, no!" Sophie wailed as Jack's foot bounced off her shoulder. "No more baby touch!"
"You've got to press and push up on that bottom bar at the same time."
"This one?" he asked, gesturing toward one of the crossbars with his gun.
"No, no, the one underneath." I pointed with my chin. Jack and Sam, unbelievably, were still asleep, but Sophie seemed to have figured out what was happening.
"Mumma, why dat man takin stroller?"
"He needs it, I guess," I said, shifting the boys in my arms. Sophie shrieked at a volume that would have done her grandmother proud.
"Uglydoll!"
Shit. Chapter Forty-three, I thought to myself. In which I am sold into stuffed slavery and Sophie is left inconsolable.
"Um, excuse me? Sir?"
"Uglydoll!" Sophie blatted as both boys opened their eyes, looked at their sister, and started to wail. The mugger had finally managed to collapse the stroller and had lifted it over his shoulder.
"Could I just get my daughter's toy out of the basket?"
"Buy her another one, rich bitch!"
"Uglydoll is special!" Sophie wailed.
"Uglydoll is special!" I repeated. "I mean, I can't just buy her another one!"
He heaved a sigh and stopped. I hurried forward as fast as I could with Sophie still attached to my leg, worked one hand free, and rummaged through the basket underneath the folded-up stroller as quickly as I could. Juice box, deflated toy basketball, plastic container full of cheddar cheese crackers...
"Uglydoll!"
I finally located the doll and handed him to Sophie. She popped her thumb in her mouth and clutched the doll, glaring up at our mugger, who cocked an eyebrow at the four of us.
"Anything else?"
I slumped backward against the Dumpster. "No," I said, watching my four-hundred-dollar German-engineered stroller vanishing from my life forever. "No, that'll be all."
Rich bitch, I thought, shaking my head. I shoved what I could back into the diaper bag, carried the kids to the sidewalk, hailed a cab, and called my husband.
By three o'clock that afternoon, Ben had collected us at the police station. His brow was furrowed, his lips were pinched, and his eyes were furious. "That's it," he said. "That's it for the city. We're leaving as fast as I can get us out of here."
I opened my mouth to protest and found I was too wrung out and shaky to come up with coherent arguments as to why we should stay. By four o'clock Ben was on the phone with real estate agents. The next week he put our apartment on the market, and the week after that he ushered me into our very own Montclaire and handed me the keys. Goodbye, New York City; hello, Upchuck, Connecticut.
Even before we'd moved here, but certainly more since the great relocation, I'd find myself daydreaming about how my life could have turned out differently. What if I'd tried harder with Evan? What if I'd held out for the big love instead of settling for a man I merely liked?
No point in wondering, I thought, dragging myself out of bed too early the next morning as my kids clamored for pancakes and my husband clamored for his dry cleaning. If there was no Ben, there'd be no kids, and I couldn't imagine my life without them. Still, as I distributed plates and clean shirts, I couldn't keep from thinking about what would have happened if the British Airways computer that had assigned me my seat had put me one row forward or one row back, or if I'd gone to Paris or Miami Beach instead of London to tend to my broken heart, or if I'd slipped my eye mask on a minute earlier and Ben Borowitz had never seen my face.
Twenty-Two
The Upchurch Town Hall, according to the plaque set in a hunk of granite in front of the building, had been built in the Year of Our Lord 1984. But whoever had done the construction had taken the town's Colonial history seriously: instead of padded flip-up auditorium seats with armrests and cushioning, the high-ceilinged room was lined with high-backed hardwood pews that would have done a luxury-averse Puritan proud and that were, judging from the shifting and squirming going on, a tad too narrow for the modern-day behind.
Not that there was any room for me to squeeze mine in. Kitty's memorial service was slated to start at ten a.m., but evidently, all the other citizens of our fair town had gotten a memo instructing them to show up no later than nine forty-five. By the time I rolled into the room at a very respectable nine fifty-three--with my hair combed, and wearing lipstick I'd applied in the rearview mirror--every seat of every row was taken, as was each of the three dozen or so folding chairs set up around the room's perimeter.
I circled the room, then edged my way into a corner. Carol Gwinnell waved to me from her seat three rows back from the podium. She was wearing a dove gray skirt, a white silk blouse, black pumps, and, in place of her usual clusters of bangles and bells, a simple pair of diamond studs. Next to her was Sukie Sutherland, in a pale beige suit and a double strand of pearls. Next to Sukie sat Lexi Hagen-Holdt, with her hair neatly French braided, in a long-sleeved light brown T-shirt dress that stretched against her shoulders and tights that showed off the curves of her calves.
I stood in a corner in my black skirt and dark blue sweater and wished I'd gotten the memo about muted earth tones. "Let us pray," intoned Ted Gordon, the town's Congregationalist minister. Everyone dropped their heads. I dropped mine too, so fast that I could hear my neck creak. "Oh, Lord, we ask that you welcome our sister Katherine Cavanaugh into your arms. We ask that you comfort her grieving family, her loved ones: her husband, Philip, her daughters, Madeline and Emerson, her parents, Bonnie and Hugh..."
Parents? I couldn't remember whether any of the obituaries had mentioned parents. The "she is survived by's" had only included her husband and her daughters. Tara Singh's website had featured Kitty's maiden name and hometown but had said nothing about a mother or father...and Bonnie was the name I remembered from the postcard in Kitty's bedroom.
I raised my eyes as far as I dared and scanned the crowd. There were a dozen couples who were the right age to be her mother and father. I looked in the front row, but I could only see Philip, and the girls in matching navy dresses, and a well-preserved older couple whose male half was the spitting image of Philip, if Philip were thirty years older and had spent a good portion of that time enjoying marbled steak and twelve-year-old Scotch.
"Lord, we ask you to lift up this community," Reverend Gordon continued. The reverend had curly hair, round shoulders, and an earnest look on his full face. He looked, I thought, struggling mightily to keep from bursting into inappropriate laug
hter, exactly like the guy who'd played Flounder in Animal House, which made it a little difficult to take him seriously. "Let us be a light to one another, a comfort to the grieving family," he said, cheeks quivering with sincerity. "Let us be patient and loving as we travel through this terrible time as a community, and as the police continue their quest to bring the perpetrators of this horror to justice."
Reverend Gordon leaned forward and gripped the edge of the podium tightly. His gold wedding band twinkled underneath the lights.
"What can we say about Kitty Cavanaugh?" he asked. "A brilliant thinker. A loving mother. A caring, devoted spouse."
A ghostwriter. A woman who spent three afternoons a week in New York City doing God knows what.
Reverend Ted paused and and looked down at us all warmly. "What can we say," he asked, "about a thirty-six-year-old woman who died?"
I think that my jaw must have sagged open. I know my eyes widened. I am certain that I whispered the words Oh, no, he didn't! under my breath. A murdered woman's funeral, and Flounder's quoting Love Story? Didn't Kitty deserve better than that? I looked around for someone who I could share that observation with, but all I heard were quiet sobs and genteel sniffles.
As it turned out, there was a great deal that Reverend Ted had to say about a thirty-six-year-old woman who died. He praised Kitty's warmth as a mother, her skills as a homemaker, the excellence of her homemade strawberry rhubarb pie, which had twice taken ribbons in the church's annual Spring Fling Bake Fair. He spoke in only the broadest, blandest terms of the "thought-provoking articles" she'd written, left out entirely the fact that she'd written them for somebody else, and made a single passing reference to Kitty's book, "which has died along with her." I eased my right foot out of the high-heeled pump I'd foolishly chosen and waited for any mention of Kitty's pre-Upchurch life--a college friend, a hospital newsletter editor, a New York City roommate. It never came. There wasn't another word about her parents, or a single mention of anyone from her childhood or college or New York City. It was like she hadn't existed until she married Philip and moved to Upchurch; like she'd written herself into being. Or rewritten, I thought, putting on my right shoe and slipping off my left one.
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