chapter forty-five
Vanessa
“FRANKIE, YOU’RE SURE you can take off today?” He hadn’t changed and was still in his suit as we walked east to the promenade around Carl Schurz Park.
“I can,” he said. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. Plenty of people were enjoying the break in the heat wave, walking their dogs and running and lazing on the benches as though they wanted to spend the whole day there. Frankie and I stopped at the railing and pushed our heads into the breeze to watch a tugboat usher a barge down the East River.
It was kind of a marvel. The tug was so small that at first I couldn’t tell that it wasn’t just a section of the bigger barge. It was a victory for tenacity, that little tug, the universe’s way of letting me know that a strong latch could hold, if only in the world of maritime construction.
I didn’t share these musings with Frankie. He didn’t think the universe sent us such messages and would worry that I was obsessing. “You know,” I said, “before we met, I used to walk in the city all the time.”
“Where?”
“If the weather was okay, sometimes all the way downtown. Mostly to avoid the Lexington line. Do you remember how bad the trains were?”
“The murder express.”
“Horrible. Although arguably safer than my apartment.”
“You got mugged in your apartment?”
“Once, I came home from being out late with my friends. My dad was of course on the couch, empties all around him. We just grinned at each other. I’d just started with the drinking and the experimenting and staying out late, and he, prince that he was, had no problem with it. We were in it together. So we shared this father-daughter moment, and then I went into the bedroom and passed out, and when I woke up, the door was wide-open.”
“To the bedroom?” Frankie’s brow creased.
“The front door. He went out to do god knows what and left his fourteen-year-old daughter sleeping at home, alone, with the doors to the apartment unlocked and wide-open.”
Frankie shook his head, met my eyes. “What about your mom?”
“She worked nights then, cleaning offices in Midtown. Which was actually a decent job, but she didn’t get home until morning. Anyone could have come in. Anyone. And it’s not like we lived in neighborhood-watch territory. No one was looking out for shady characters, because everyone was a shady character. I understood it all that morning when I woke up—I had no one to protect me, no one who’d stop me from self-destruction.”
“Whether they’re smart enough to appreciate it or not, your daughters are lucky girls, Vanessa.”
“I’m starting to think that the stronger you grip something, the more you guarantee it slipping through your hand.”
“I think there’s a poem about that.”
“This is why, Frankie. This is why—I can’t keep telling stories like that. It takes me over. You know?”
“Sure.”
“I have to move forward. I have to let it go.”
“So let’s let it go.” We strolled south on the promenade until Frankie stopped right there on the narrow steps down to the FDR Drive walkway. He put his left arm around my shoulders and rested it there.
Runners and dog walkers and commuters, they all streamed around us as we stood, holding each other in a firm grasp.
chapter forty-six
DAVE WAS SLEEPING on the couch, his upper body half propped on the arm, his mouth open and his head cast back. Yesterday I would have covered him with a throw blanket and tiptoed around him, but now I pulled up a chair from the kitchen and watched him sleep.
I kicked him in the knee. Nothing happened.
I pushed harder and his eyes flew open.
“You look awful,” he said.
“Are my eyes red?”
He nodded, propped up on his elbows. “Did something happen on your run?”
“Yes, Dave. You know that ark scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark?”
“The face-melting one?”
“Yeah. I saw too much truth, and now my eyes are all red and puffy.”
He couldn’t tell if I was joking, so he frowned, then smiled, then asked, “What?”
“For starters, I just talked to Nell.”
He swallowed, his thought process transparent for the first time this summer: What does she know?
“Don’t,” I said.
“Don’t what?”
“Spin.”
He swallowed again. An audible, dry-mouth click. “It really was nothing.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It was, like, five times—that’s it.”
I didn’t have a response to that.
“I’ll tell you why too. If you want to know.”
I nodded.
“We were working together all the time. I got caught up. I don’t even know. It’s the stupidest thing. She was just there.” He watched me for a while, and I didn’t respond, pressing into the chair. “We can get through it, though, right? People get through this.”
“What’s that? Marital advice from Herb?”
“What do you want me to do? Seriously. Anything.”
“What do I want you to do? Doing something isn’t going to change this.” Although we would later, neither one of us was crying or screaming. It was flat and colorless, the moment right after impact, when the contusion-to-be is just a white trace on the skin.
“It wasn’t about real emotion.” He stared at me, his fingers distractedly playing with the fringe on the couch pillow. “She was what I thought I needed at a particular moment.”
“You made her your password.”
Dave regarded me with wary, disappointed eyes. Of the two of us, he’d assumed he was the real cheater and liar. “That was . . .” He was debating saying something. “That meant nothing.”
Meaning he had changed his password for me, not Nell. It was a calculated move, done in order to keep me out. Something about that explanation made me feel like I was seeing him for the first time.
I tried to access the love that must be deep down beneath the hurt and muddle.
What do you want?
I willed myself to reclaim the certainty: We were a pair. We were a pair.
What do you want?
I waited for that crystal clear realization that I knew Dave. That I understood him and he understood me, and even though things weren’t perfect, having that between us was pure gold. I waited to know that we were enough.
October
chapter forty-seven
IT WAS MY first real run of fall and the air was chilled enough that my breath emerged in smoky puffs. I was happy for the change of season—not just because of the tumult of the summer, but because the first days of autumn for me always evoked thoughts of homemade applesauce and crisp blue skies instead of the bleak winter to come. I’d be disappointed in a matter of weeks—cursing needing a coat and the fact that the park would be dark right after lunch, but I was incapable of feeling that now. I decided to continue walking the loop, my steps padded by the yellowing leaves paving the path.
I fished my mobile out of my pocket and dialed Sloane. “I got the tickets,” I said as soon as she picked up the phone.
“Excellent! We’ve been talking about all the places we’re going to take you.”
“Such as?”
“The shop. And there’s this taco truck that we found . . . oh, and a Japanese teahouse, which is wonderful. And then the Halloween party on the beach that we go to every year.”
“Maybe we can do one of those celebrity bus tours.”
“Maybe not.”
“You’re still planning to come out here for Thanksgiving?”
“I’m not promising anything.” She waited a beat. “She made an
other comment on my blog, you know.”
“What did she say?”
“I’m surprised you don’t know, seeing as you’re the brilliant mastermind behind her finding the site in the first place.”
The first time my mom had commented on Sloane’s blog, Sloane had called me up, furious. “Sounds delicious?” Sloane had said without other greeting or explanation. “Sounds delicious? Can you believe that? Who says that?” Two months later, I believed that Sloane’s complaints were getting less vocal, more begrudging. Or perhaps I had just built up a callus to them. Regardless, I was committed to slowly, subtly pushing Sloane toward our mom. Minds could be changed; ties that seemed broken could be healed. I had seen it.
“You’ll promise to discuss Thanksgiving, though.”
“Whatever.” She shifted her tone back to friendly. “So, did you get the papers?”
I was about to answer when I sensed someone walking beside me. I glanced to my left. “It’s Percy!” I told Sloane, the panic crisp in my voice. “Percy Stahl is here in the park.”
“Tell him hi.”
“Sloane says hi,” I said to Percy.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I repeated into the phone. “I’ll call you back, okay?” I hung up the phone and wiped my palms against the slickness of my running tights.
This was not the first time since July that I’d seen him around the loop—he’d taken to running counterclockwise, in the opposite direction from me, or maybe that had always been his routine. Once or twice I’d looked the other way and avoided his eyes, but on occasion mine would connect with his. I couldn’t figure out his expression.
Over the past few months, I’d told myself that I’d conjured my feelings for him—that Percy Stahl was a nice-looking stranger in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was an argument that apparently required a distance of greater than ten feet between us to be convincing.
“How are you?” I could tell from his loaded tone that Percy was aware that Dave and I had split up.
After all of my weeks of searching and questioning, I had been surprised by the certainty and immediacy of my wanting out: I couldn’t square the man I thought I’d known with what he’d done. I couldn’t get a clear read on him—had I ever?—and within weeks of his moving out, I could barely remember believing that I had.
Percy’s expression was so sympathetic that I suspected he had even heard the details from Sloane and Giovanni: How, when Dave moved out, I cried for a week. How, for about six weeks after that, I barely left the house, too embarrassed at others’ disappointment at the failure of my young perfect marriage. And then, how one day in the not-too-distant past, I started to feel clearer and calmer.
With late August, my clients had returned, and Dave was distracted too—by his firm’s implosion and the kaleidoscope of spin-off firms, which I was, frankly, glad to not have to track out of pretend spousal interest. Maybe that was how we’d managed to agree that we wouldn’t fight or drag out the matter; we would put the apartment on the market, sell to the highest bidder, split the proceeds, cut the cord.
I’d moved out last week and had spent the days before filling up my own boxes, taping and stacking piles of things that I feared I’d always want to forget. I had paused, though, when I got to the box of my mother’s journals.
I had vague romantic notions of sharing them with Sloane someday, but I knew no one was ready for that. Still, I couldn’t throw them out; I liked the idea of occasionally glancing at their neat spiral spines, recalling how the pureness of their honesty had helped both me and my mom, years apart.
My truth about Dave had settled with the finality of a pebble tossed into the stillest pond. He would not be the love of my life; he would be my ex, the guy who was decent during our divorce after that sliver of a marriage. The one who would wind up being shockingly easy to let go.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m going to California in October.”
“I heard about that plan.”
“How are you?”
“Good. Just filing my toenails. Polishing my one table. Washing my jeans, you know.”
I laughed. “The important stuff.”
“Right. By the way, Selena really thinks you’re helping them.”
“I’m glad.”
Sloane had asked me whether I could stomach being a marriage counselor in light of the demise of mine. “Of course,” I’d automatically responded before reflecting that she did have a point. Fundamentally, though, I still believed in the institution—its beauty and its ability, in the right case, to tether people together through hardship. I still asked people what they wanted. It was a good question, I had concluded, as long as you knew not to impute too much permanence to the response.
A yellow leaf spiraled off a tree and landed in our path. “I’m happy it’s fall,” Percy said.
“Me too,” I said. “The best transitions are ones where you know exactly what to expect. The same every year.”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “I bought a lamp. Spur-of-the-moment purchase. It’s given me no end of joy.”
“Wow. What’s next?”
He shrugged. “I’m thinking a bar stool or two.” Before I could respond, he stopped and stood directly in my path, right where the leaf had landed. “I’ve thought about you.”
“Oh.”
“I haven’t wanted to intrude. I figured you were dealing with what you were dealing with.”
This was the hard part: to recognize my pull toward Percy and will against it. If I hadn’t known my husband, how could I trust myself with someone who was essentially a stranger? Without warning, he reached out his fingers and brushed my cheek. “Eyelash,” he said, holding it out for me to make a wish. We both glanced at his finger, and I let myself feel the bolt of certainty.
We think that truths are immutable—we rely on them like bedrock—but they last for mere moments, shifting and changing and dragging with them our lives as we’ve known them and sometimes, those whom we love. In that moment, I wanted—I trusted myself enough—to risk it, whether I turned out to be right or wrong about Percy.
Percy’s eyes focused on mine the way they had that night in the hammock. Just like that night, I felt a charge in the air as we stood in the public openness of the park road. I hesitated, because after the contracts and sworn statements that I’d signed in the past three months, with the newsprint still darkening my fingernail beds from a week of packing up my belongings, a kiss seemed rushed, too much.
He didn’t lean forward, though. He stepped aside and one pace ahead and turned, holding out his hand. “Let’s just walk,” he said.
So I held out mine.
Photo by Anne Joyce
L. Alison Heller, a divorce lawyer and mediator, lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughters. The Never Never Sisters is her second novel.
CONNECT ONLINE
lalisonheller.com
facebook.com/lalisonheller
twitter.com/lalisonheller
A CONVERSATION WITH L. ALISON HELLER
1. What was the original inspiration for the story?
It all started with Dave and his betrayal. If you think you know someone better than anyone and then you learn something that disrupts your narrative about that person—what do you do? Your choices are either to change your narrative or do backbends trying to smoothly incorporate the new fact so that it fits into what you’ve previously believed.
I think people probably do both—and maybe degrees of each every day, and I wanted to explore that. The story grew to encompass Paige’s relationship with not only Dave but also Sloane and Vanessa and even Franklin. But Dave was the springboard for that more global examination of how trust is earned and of what we tell ourselves about the people in our lives whom we think we know.
2. There are a lot of communic
ation problems in the book—occasions where characters either don’t say what they’re thinking or say too much or build walls in the face of someone else’s admission: Paige and Vanessa, Paige and Dave, Sloane and . . . almost everyone. How do you see conversation (or lack thereof) fitting into the development or erosion of connection between characters?
Obviously conversation—and more specifically the exchange of crucial information—is a key to connection. The right information communicated between the right people is how intimacy is formed. Don’t you feel closest to the people with whom you can be completely honest, and who you feel can be honest with you? Navigating this—what you share with those close to you and what you keep for yourself—is, I think, definitely more art than science for most people. We share because we’re moved to by a moment or someone else’s admission, but there are also times when we divulge—or don’t—as a matter of strategy and, of course, those choices help relationships move along or stall.
At the beginning of the story, Paige would claim that she knows everything that matters about both her mom and her husband. She’s willing to accept certain areas of silence between them because they’re not critical to her here and now, but as she delves deeper into family secrets, she starts to see that those silences have had a great impact. And that she’s troublingly capable of maintaining her own strategic silences too.
When you really start to think about it, there’s a necessary leap of faith in all relationships. You can’t know everything about a person, and even when you think you know someone’s heart and soul, you can’t know all of his or her thoughts.
3. And the corollary to that leap of faith seems to be the ability to forgive. At the end of the book, Paige has loosened the strings of some of those crucial relationships and reinforced others. Without giving too much away, do you agree with her choices on what can be forgiven?
The Never Never Sisters Page 28