How quickly things could change, she thought. Henry was back, as a married man. With a kid. And Paul was already starting to think something was wrong. She should call him. She should go home. But, suddenly, she was tired of thinking about things she should do.
Yarrow’s front door closed with a bang, and she padded down the walk in her well-worn Uggs, slouchy and scuffed on the toes.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Yarrow asked as she approached the car.
Olivine nodded, but she regretted coming here, suddenly. She thought she wanted to talk about it. To talk about Henry and the things she felt when she looked at him. But she found, now, that she did not. Sometimes, she didn’t want to see people or to be around them. Not even Yarrow. Sometimes—times like these—she just wanted everyone to be quiet so she could look up at the stars, make puffs with her breath, and stare straight up at the sky.
The two sisters stood at the Jeep. Both staring up. Yarrow on the passenger side and Olivine near the driver’s door. After a time, Yarrow spoke, “Thanks for coming by, Olivine. I can lose myself in my little world. You know?” After Yarrow had spent the day with her kids, taking in all of their energy, her words would sometimes come out all in a rush, as though she were afraid of getting interrupted. “These days, I keep wanting to get into my pajamas right after dinner. And not even wanting to go out.”
“You do?” Olivine asked.
Yarrow nodded, but her head was still pointed up, toward the stars. “Some days, I realize that I never went outside. All day. And I look around at the people, like you, who actually ventured outside, past your driveway, and I feel like you must have conquered something pretty amazing out there in the world. Something I would know nothing about because my life goes on inside the house. Where my kids and my husband live.”
Olivine was glad that Yarrow was in the mood to talk because she was most decidedly not. The more Yarrow talked, the more Olivine determined that, tonight, she would discuss Yarrow’s problems and not her own. They provided a good distraction, at the very least. Besides, Yarrow always made her laugh. She needed her sister’s company, at times, like she needed sleep or vegetables. Even when—especially when—she wasn’t in the mood for company.
Yarrow was still talking, and Olivine wasn’t in a hurry to go inside, to a restaurant or anywhere else. The cold air made her feel alive, vital. She hopped on the hood of the Jeep and rested against the windshield. Yarrow watched her for a moment, then swung her handbag over and leapt up, too. Yarrow rubbed the toes of her boots together where she sat, then took a deep breath, stretched her arms into the sky, looked up and sighed.
After a beat, Olivine spoke. “You may not leave the house, Yarrow, but, still, you have this thing you do all day. This thing that makes you special. That makes you realize you aren’t wasting your time on this earth. You have a natural talent…for making little kids feel amazing about themselves. And you aren’t squandering it. You are living it, every day.”
Olivine could hear Yarrow’s breath, steady and rhythmic, to her right. “Yeah,” she said. “Every. Single. Day.”
“You can’t tell me your kids don’t give you a sense of fulfillment and wonder, all the days of your life.”
“Oh, they do,” Yarrow replied, “but honestly, they distract me so much. They make me so busy with just…life, with the day to day chores…that time just passes. One day, I looked around and I’m 30-something. I have a little belly. And I have crow’s feet. Five minutes ago, I swear, I was…hot.”
“You're still hot.” Olivine laughed. It felt good now to be out here, outside, with Yarrow. Someone who understood her. Who could make her laugh without even meaning to. Who could help her to not be alone with all of the thoughts that kept marching through her mind.
“No, sweetie, I'm not hot. I actually own a pair of jeans with an elastic waistband. Two, actually.”
Olivine laughed.
“I do. They’re so comfortable. You wouldn’t believe. That’s why I own two pairs. And the tallest heel I’ve worn this decade were on my cowboy boots when I chaperoned the Cub Scouts’ trip to the horse ranch.”
“Oh come on! You know, you’re in better shape than you were in your twenties. You work out all the time.”
“Not so much, Olivine. Don’t try to make my life sound all glamorous. When you have four kids, you go along and you try to pay your bills and the only way you know it’s even remotely possible is because everyone else seems to be doing it. They seem to be doing it just fine.”
“Seriously,” Olivine said, “You guys don’t struggle financially.”
“Hell yes, we do. At times.”
“But Jon makes good money. Doesn’t he?”
“Sure. He makes alright money. But show me a family of six that doesn’t struggle for money, at least sometimes. Olivine, our health insurance premium is more than a thousand dollars a month, and that still gives us catastrophic coverage only. Huge deductible. Huge. And that doesn’t count eye doctors, dentists, and, soon, orthodontists.”
“Goodness.”
“We can make ends meet. I mean, don’t worry about us or anything, Olivine.” Her voice grew hushed. “It's not so much a struggle as it is something that's constantly on my mind. There's six of us, which means there’s six people who could befall trouble. Who could slip on the ice and break an ankle and rack up that giant deductible on their way home from school.” Yarrow turned her head to look at Olivine. “You know, I’ve never told anyone this, and please don’t tell Mom and Dad, but when Marcus broke his arm on that jungle gym last year, we started falling into debt, and then the construction industry tanked, and we were almost making it, just a thousand or so short each month, so we put things on the credit card because we always knew that, before long, things would turn around. And they did, but now we have all this debt. We don’t talk about it, so please don’t tell Jon I told you. It’s shameful, but it’s something I think about all the time.”
“Wow. Yeah. Okay. I didn’t know.”
“How much is your debt?”
“Enough where I don’t sleep at night.”
“You don’t?”
“Nope. Well, I drink some cough medicine from time to time, when things get really bad. Jon calls it Mommy’s Nighty Night Juice.” She laughed. “Just to me, of course. Never to the kids. Please don’t tell anyone that either.”
“I won’t say a word. To anyone. You know that.”
“I know we’ll be okay, but I also know we won’t take any family vacations for a while, and anytime the kids go outside with their skateboards or their bicycles or, hell, even their sneakers, I hold my breath until they come back.”
Olivine nodded.
“And then, living here, in this resort town, among all of these trust funders, you get to know people who are set up financially. They are on Easy Street. And they are always going off to Tahiti or Norway or New Zealand with all of their kids. My kids don’t understand. I mean, here’s Jon, working so hard, and everyone is so competitive with us, you know? Like some of my friends here, in the neighborhood, they got married just out of college, just like me. And the world, to them, is this endless competition. As though because we started on the same life plan, we have to compete with one another. Even though I don’t have a trust fund. Sometimes, I want to walk into my book club and my mommy group and my Gymboree class and say, ‘I don’t want to compete anymore. You all win.’ The older I get, the worse it gets.”
“I wouldn’t like that,” Olivine said.
Yarrow continued, speaking fast now. “And there are people you have so much in common with. Rebecca Gervais, remember her from grade school?”
“Sure, yeah.”
“Well, she lives right there.” Yarrow pointed to a house down the street. “She has four kids the same ages as my kids, and she was driving around a sixty thousand dollar car and she got these great big fake boobs. And they couldn’t afford all of this, but they just wanted to, so bad, you know? And last winter, she wrecked on her skis, a
nd she popped her boob.”
“What?”
“Seriously. It deflated like a damn balloon and she was walking around all cock-eyed.”
Olivine laughed. “Cock-boobed.”
“Exactly. And she’s freaking out because she has to have it fixed. But her insurance doesn’t cover it and she’s got silicone leaking inside her. And so she has to have her boobs redone at tremendous expense. Meanwhile, the car gets repossessed and the mortgage doesn’t get paid and the neighborhood has a big benefit, and, so, here I am writing a check to help them out. Meanwhile, I’m struggling with my hand-me-down minivan and my teeny-weeny boobs.” She laughed and said, “I mean, you wish sometimes people would just stop pretending to have what they don’t have. Just so everyone can relax a little.”
“You guys have fun,” Olivine countered. “You have a great family life. You certainly don’t need a fancy car or new boobs.”
“Oh I know, honey. We just don’t do things. Sometimes I wish we could go and do things.”
“Well, then go and do things.”
“You know, we wanted to go to Disneyland this summer, so we thought we would make the fourteen hour drive in the August heat, and we just decided Jon couldn’t take that much time off work.”
“So take a plane.”
“To fly us all somewhere would cost us thousands, and then I’ve got to rent a car and haul everyone’s car seats all over the place and who wants to go anywhere that bad? And so, we snuggle in our homes. We mend things, so we don’t have to buy new ones. We watch television shows about how to make cupcakes and we look up the recipes and we bake them and we just go along with our simple life, because that’s all we can really do.”
Olivine nodded and made patterns with her breath into the night sky. Three puffs out, a pause and two more puffs. Yarrow continued. “I remember a time when I wanted to be rich and I wanted to be super successful, and I thought it would be so easy. Go out and do your best in your job. Speak your truth, I thought. That’s all it would take. But then you realize there are people who cheat and who sometimes win when they cheat. And there are people who are just way better than you at what you are setting out to do. You have to be in that tiny top percentage point of achievers in this competitive world. And in order to do that, you need to give up everything. Everything. And then you look around and you realize that is not what makes you fulfilled either. That’s not where love and meaning and fulfillment come from anyway. And it’s times like these that I’m glad I had a family. I’m glad I have children, because, at the end of the day, I look at their sleepy little faces and I tuck them into their fuzzy coverlets, and I feel something deep. A gladness, from my sheer irreplace-ability.”
“Is that a word?”
“Nope.” Yarrow went on, “But sometimes, I find I want to be something more important, more valued by the world at large, than simply being my children’s mother.”
“So if fulfillment doesn’t come from a career,” Olivine said, “And it doesn’t come—entirely, at least—from your children and your family, where does it come from?”
Yarrow laughed and shrugged.
“I’m only asking you because you’re my big sister, Yarrow. You’re supposed to know these things. Pass on your wisdom.”
“I think people have been trying to figure that out for decades. Centuries,” Yarrow said. “I suppose I would like to say that the answer is to just love. To love as hard as you can in your own little space. Whether it’s occupied by birds and ferrets or dogs or little people or grandparents or little boys who can’t find their gym sneakers at school. People who have grand careers and they focus on making life meaningful and better for others; mothers who focus on making life meaningful and better for others. I think, in some way, the answer lies there. Just loving someone else. Whoever is in front of you to love.”
Olivine was silent. She looked up into the stairs and inhaled. Exhaled.
“I guess the night sky has made me sort of sentimental,” Yarrow said.
“Philosophical,” Olivine corrected.
“Corny.”
“No. I like what you said,” Olivine replied. “Honestly, I feel like my heart races all the time. I feel like I’m racing, racing to get somewhere. My heart races when I wake up in the morning. It races when I go to sleep at night. I wake up in the middle of the night, wide awake, my mind and heart racing, racing, racing.”
“Maybe you should lay off the coffee.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Olivine laughed. “But I keep thinking that if I do something, if I find the right thing to do, it will go away. I will finally be at peace. I will know that I am doing the right thing. On the right path. Not wasting my life.” She sighed and watched her breath float above her into the dark sky. “When does it go away, Yarrow? When can a woman finally relax?”
“For me, I suspect it will be when my work is done. All my chores. And when enough money is coming in, at least enough to get us through the first of next month, and when everyone is sound asleep in their beds.” Yarrow sighed again. “But when my kids are safe and the money is coming in, I will probably worry that it will stop coming in. So I guess maybe you never really relax. Maybe, for me, the answer is to work on calming myself down instead of trying to control everything around me. You’ve always been good at that, Olivine. Way better than me.”
Silence followed for a moment. Olivine’s fingertips began to ache with the cold. She crossed her arms in front of her. “I saw Henry.”
Yarrow sat up straight and popped her eyebrows. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“So how does he look?”
“Hot.” She laughed. “As ever. Beautiful. Fit. Strong. Also, married. And a dad.” Olivine’s final word hung in the air.
A few moments passed and when Yarrow spoke again, her tone had changed. It became louder, less breathy. “So he’s no longer yours to have.”
“Right.”
Yarrow turned her head toward Olivine and rested back on the windshield. “You know, if you want to have a family, of your own, you have to look at things as an adult,” she said. “You have to plan some things out. You can’t just be all romantic and follow your heart around all the time, like I did.”
“You have regrets?” Olivine asked, turning her head to watch her sister’s reply.
“‘Regrets’ might be too strong a word. I love my life and my kids and my husband to the depths of my toes, but you are at a crossroads, Olivine. I can see it on your face. I know you are looking at your situation more or less romantically, which isn’t altogether like you. And the decision you make will decide the direction of your entire life.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake.”
“Hear me out, Olivine. You have to plan and you need to have decent medical insurance and you need a good man with a good job. You need the sure thing…not the exciting, bad boy thing. It will make your life easier. Better. Otherwise, you’ll be stressed out and in debt and sad. You, too, will need Mommy’s Nighty Night Juice. And it tastes terrible.”
“Yuck.”
“Like black licorice.”
Olivine laughed, and Yarrow continued. “You know, I don’t think you have ever had much need for money. But if you have children, you’ll see. It becomes important. I mean, I know that you could backpack across Europe with an extra pair of underwear and a bar of soap, but when you have kids it will be different.”
“Would it have to be?”
“You have no idea how expensive they are, Ollie. Just getting them to Europe will cost you ten grand. Just buying shoes for them will cost you a few hundred bucks.”
“You know, Yarrow, you used to be such a hippie. I like your hippie ways better. It’s almost like you’re saying money is more important than love. But money can’t buy love. Everyone who has ever watched a Disney movie knows that.”
“Money can’t buy love. But you have love. That’s all I’m saying. You have love from a good, good man who can buy you a lovely lifestyle. One where you can sleep at night and
you know your kids are paid for, and you can afford to show them things, and you won’t send them off to college accruing debt as they go, which will push them into a job that they hate for the rest of their lives. You constrict your children’s choices if you end up with the wrong man, Olivine. Just don’t mess this up.”
“Oh, I won’t.”
“I know that Henry is…”
“Yes?
“Tremendously hot.”
Olivine giggled. She bent her head toward Yarrow. “Tremendously,” she agreed.
“But that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Paul is the total package. And you’ll never want for things. You’ll never have financial stress.”
“Jeez, Yarrow. Seriously. Do you need a loan?”
“Just answer me this. Since you’ve been dating Paul, how many times have you vacationed somewhere you needed a bikini?”
She thought for a moment. “Seven or eight. Nine, maybe.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
*****
The sisters dined at Olivine’s favorite café, tucked behind the post office on Main Street. Olivine ate their last scone, loaded with butter and homemade raspberry jam, and Yarrow nibbled on a slice of French silk pie, and they tried to talk of things besides men and finances and children. And when Olivine dropped Yarrow off in front of her house again, she skittered up the front walk, turning to wave from the front porch.
Yarrow was right. She did feel like she was at a crossroads. There was Paul. A beautiful man who adored her. Who would make sure she would live a good life, doing good, important things. And there was Henry. A man who once left her without so much as a phone call. And a man who was no longer hers to have. So why couldn’t she stop thinking about him?
And she remembered sitting on a park bench with Henry, ten years before, in the middle of downtown when the clock tower chimed five o’clock, and, a few moments later, a swarm of people buzzed out of an office building. Women in skirts and pantyhose and jewelry and men in white button-down shirts and brown shoes.
The One Who Got Away: A Novel Page 11