The Half Life

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Piper? What are you doing here?”

  She didn’t answer. His keys were in the front door, and through it faintly she could hear a woman’s voice, calling, “Honey? Is that you?”

  Honey, Piper thought, and her heart crumpled. She looked at Tosh and realized that she really was a ghost—that, to her husband, she’d stopped being real months, maybe even years ago.

  She looked at him—his smooth, unlined, unblemished skin, his shiny brown eyes that always looked happy and eager and excited, as if he were a boy who’d just run downstairs and found wrapped presents with his name on them piled high on the table. Lean and broad-shouldered, because he’d never miss a workout, his strong, square hands flecked with scrapes and cuts from the knives and stones and chisels he worked with. Handsome Tosh, her beautiful boy.

  She was probably wrong about Mary, she reflected, as Tosh stammered questions about what had happened to Paris and did her bosses know she wasn’t there. Mary might look small and helpless, but if she was going to take Tosh on, if Tosh was going to let himself be taken on, she was probably, behind the sweet voice and fluttery hands and dithery facade, tremendously competent—because Tosh, her sweet boy, couldn’t balance a checkbook or pay a mortgage or parallel park or remember to keep milk and Children’s Tylenol in the house. He could, under a silvery July moon, make you feel like the most beautiful woman in the world . . . but in the end, he’d leave the bed unmade, his pants inside out on the floor, an unpaid parking ticket curled like a mocking tongue on the dining room table, a series of disasters large and small for you to cope with.

  Tosh was staring at her, the sharpness of his voice cutting through her reverie. “Nola? Is Nola all right?” he asked.

  Piper nodded numbly. She hadn’t planned a speech, hadn’t thought of what to say—Take me back? Go to hell?—so when she opened her mouth, she had no idea what would come out.

  “I slept with someone else last night,” she finally blurted, surprising herself.

  His eyes narrowed. His brows knit together, and his flush, which had faded, deepened as though he’d been slapped. She heard him inhale, then watched as he turned, pulled the keys out of the door, closed it, and put them in his pocket. “Well,” he said, “I guess you’ve got every right.”

  “Tosh . . . I don’t want this,” she said. Sorrow rose up inside her, roaring. She didn’t want to hurt him; she didn’t want him to hurt her. She wanted . . . Wordlessly, she took his hand, and in silence, they walked the short blocks to their row house together.

  They fell together into their old, familiar bed, the one where they’d made their daughter, with a basket full of clean, unfolded laundry on one side and Nola’s Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag on the other. Over and over, Piper ran her hands down Tosh’s back, drinking in the satiny feel of his skin, the way the muscles fit together, and she gasped as he moved into her, like a key into a lock. And as they rocked and she wept into his neck, she felt the ghostliness leave her body and felt herself, inch by inch, limb by limb, one toe and fingertip at a time, becoming real again. She shrieked and bit his neck and, after, she cried into the crease of his shoulder as he murmured into her ear, over and over again, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You deserve better than me.”

  Afterward, she could breathe again. She could accept it, that he was going; that he was in fact already gone.

  She could make herself speak calmly about how her trip would, eventually, be rescheduled, about how she’d pick Nola up this afternoon from Bright Beginnings. Tosh asked diffidently if he could see his daughter tomorrow after naptime—if he could pick her up in the afternoon, take her to the park or maybe Sesame Place, give Piper a break—and she agreed. Dressed again in his jeans and the faded blue hipster T-shirt that left a glimpse of his belly exposed, he stood by the front door.

  “Well,” he said, shifting from one foot to the other as Piper paused on the welcome mat.

  She thought about what she could tell him, what she could say that would actually make some sort of sense to both of them. Good-bye? Be well? Good luck? I’m sorry this didn’t work out? Instead she said, “We’ll be okay.” As she said it, she knew it was true. It would be an adjustment, a hard one; there would be sadness ahead, her own and her daughter’s, but she’d be okay. They both would.

  After he’d gone, she took her third shower of the day, washed her hair and pulled it into a ponytail. She put on jeans, a long-sleeved cotton shirt, the clogs she used for kicking around the house or running errands in the neighborhood. Tosh had left his beer in its paper bag on the kitchen table—lambic, like she thought. She poured herself a few swallows of tangy peach-flavored beer and lifted the glass to the light, admiring its color, before drinking it down. Then she slipped her phone into her purse and her keys into her pocket. She packed what she needed into a grocery bag and went to collect her daughter.

  “Mama!” Nola hurtled herself into Piper’s arms like a guided missile. Laughing, Piper hugged her, brushing a springy curl from her forehead. Nola gazed up at her intently. “But why are you home? Nanna says . . .”—she paused, spread her chubby fingers, each one tipped with pink polish, and considered them—“four more days?”

  “I came home early. I missed my big girl!”

  “Missed you too,” Nola said, and though she wasn’t much of a cuddler—self-contained and self-soothing, she was Tosh’s daughter that way—she threw her arms around her mother’s neck and allowed herself to be kissed and then carried to the rental car and buckled into the backseat for the drive to the hotel.

  Piper slid her key card into the door of the room she booked that morning, and Nola threw herself onto the canopied bed, bouncing vigorously. “None of that,” Piper said, tossing Nola her swimsuit. Her little girl’s eyes got big. “We can go swimming?”

  “We can.” Piper pulled on her own suit, put a bathrobe on top, took Nola by the hand, and walked her to the elevator, then to the locker room and into the warm, shallow waters of the pool. Nola giggled, delighted and wriggling, kicking her plump, sturdy legs as she clung to the silver banister of the stairs, blowing bubbles the way she’d been taught. Piper watched, weary and heartsore but hopeful too, that the two of them would get through this, that they wouldn’t lose Tosh as much as see him reinvented, that they would all come through. All will be well, and all will be well, she thought, which is what her own mother used to tell her . . . and then, when Nola’s kicks flagged, she scooped her girl into her arms and paddled with her through the water, until their fingertips were pruney and the attendant dimmed the lights and Piper knew it was time to go home.

  What if the one you love is the one who got away?

  Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are just eight years old when they meet late one night in an ER waiting room. Born with a congenital heart defect, Rachel is a veteran of hospitals, and she's intrigued by the boy who shows up all alone with a broken arm. He tells her his name. She tells him a story. After Andy’s taken back to a doctor and Rachel’s sent back to her bed, they think they’ll never see each other again.

  Rachel grows up wanting for nothing in a fancy Florida suburb, the popular and protected daughter of two doting parents. Andy grows up poor in Philadelphia with a single mom and a rare talent that will let him become one of the best runners of his generation.

  Over the next three decades, their paths cross in magical and ordinary ways. They make grand plans and dream big dreams as they grow together and apart in starts and stops. Through it all, Andy and Rachel never stop thinking about that night in the hospital waiting room all of those years ago, a chance encounter that changed the course of both of their lives.

  In this captivating, often witty tale about the bonds between women and men, love and fate, and the truth about happy endings, Jennifer Weiner delivers two of her most memorable characters and a love story you’ll never forget.

  Read on for a sneak peek at Jennifer Weiner’s newest novel, Who Do You Love

  Available August 2015 from Atria Books

  Prolog
ue

  Rachel

  2014

  “Rachel?”

  I don’t answer. If you build it, they will come. If you ignore them, they will go away.

  Knock knock knock, and then my name again. “Rachel, are you in there?”

  I twist myself more deeply into the sheets. The sheets are fancy, linen, part of the wedding haul, and they’ve only gotten smoother with every trip through the washing machine. I pull the pillow over my head, noting that the case has acquired a not-so-fresh smell. This is possibly related to my not having showered or washed my face or hair for the last three days. I have left the bed only to use the toilet and scoop a handful of water from the bathroom sink into my mouth. On the table next to my bed there’s a sleeve of Thin Mint cookies that I retrieved from the freezer, and a bag of Milanos for when I finish the Thin Mints. I don’t want to cook. I don’t want to move. It’s spring, and sunny and mild, but I’ve pulled my windows shut, drawing the shades so I can’t see the mom brigade ostentatiously wheeling their oversized strollers down the street, and forty-year-old guys with expensive suede sneakers and beards as carefully tended as bonsais tweeting while they walk, or the tourists snapping pictures of the snout-to-tail restaurants where everything’s organic and locally sourced. The bedroom is dark; the doors are locked; my daughters are elsewhere. Lying on these soft sheets that smell of our commingled scent, hair and skin and the sex we had two weeks ago, it’s almost like not being alive at all.

  Knock knock knock . . . and then—fuck me—the sound of a key. I shut my eyes, cringing, thinking that my mother or, worse yet, my Nana will come storming through the door, full of energy and advice and plans to get me out of bed.

  Instead, someone comes and sits on the side of the bed, and touches my shoulder, which must be nothing but a lump underneath the duvet.

  “Rachel,” says Brenda, the most troubled and troublesome of my clients. Oh, God. I’d given her youngest son, Dante, a key the year before, so he could water the plants and take in the mail over spring break, a job for which I’d promised to pay him the princely sum of ten bucks. He’d asked me shyly if I could take him to the comic book store to spend it, and we’d walked there together with his hand in mine.

  “Sorry I missed you,” I mutter. My voice sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a clogged drain. I clear my throat. It hurts. Everything hurts.

  “Don’t worry,” says Brenda. She squeezes my shoulder and gets off the bed, and then I hear her, moving around the room. Up go the shades. She opens the window, and a breeze ruffles my hair and raises goose bumps on my bare arms. I work one eye open. She’s got a white plastic laundry basket in her arms, which she’s quickly filling with the discarded clothing on the floor. In the corner are a broom and a mop, and a bucket filled with cleaning supplies: Windex and Endust, Murphy’s Oil Soap, one of those foam Magic Erasers, which might be useful for the stain on the wall from when I threw the vase full of tulips and stem-scummed water.

  I close my eyes, and open them again to the sharp-sweet smell of Pine-Sol. Brenda fills the bucket to the top with hot, soapy water. I watch like I’m paralyzed as she first sweeps and then dips her mop, squeezes it, and starts to clean my floors.

  “Why?” I croak. “You don’t have to . . .”

  “It isn’t for you, it’s for me,” says Brenda. Her head’s down, her brown hair is drawn back in a ponytail, and it turns out she does own a shirt that’s not low-cut, pants that aren’t skintight, and shoes that do not feature stripper heels or, God help me, a goldfish frozen in five inches of pointed Lucite.

  Brenda mops. Brenda dusts. She works the foam eraser until my walls are as smooth and unmarked as they were the day we moved in. Through the open window come the sounds of my neighborhood. “The website said Power Vinyasa, but I barely broke a sweat,” I hear, and “Are you getting any signal?” and “Sebastian! Bad dog!”

  I smell hot grease from the artisanal doughnut shop that just opened down the block. The scent of grass and mud puddles. A whiff of dog shit, possibly from bad Sebastian. I hear a baby wail, and a mother murmur, and a pack of noisy guys, probably on their way to, or from, the parkour/CrossFit gym. My neighborhood, I decide, is an embarrassment. I live on the Street of Clichés, the Avenue of the Expected. Worse, I’m a cliché myself: almost forty, the baby weight that I could never shed ringing my middle like a deflated inner tube, gray roots and wrinkles and breasts that only look good when they’re stringently underwired. They could put my picture on Wikipedia: Abandoned Wife, Brooklyn.

  Brenda’s hands are gentle as she eases me up and off the bed and over to the chair in the corner—a flea-market find, upholstered in pink toile, the chair where I sat when I nursed my girls, when I read my books, when I wrote my reports. As I watch, she deftly strips the sheets off the bed, shakes the pillows free of their creased cases, and gives each one a brisk whack over her knee before settling it back on the bed. Dust fills the room, motes dancing in the beams of light that stream in through the dirt-filmed windows I’d been planning to have cleaned.

  I huddle in my nightgown, shoulders hunched, knees pulled up to my chest. “Why are you doing this?” I ask.

  Brenda looks at me kindly. “I am being of service,” she says. Which means she’s sober again, in some kind of program, or maybe she’s just read a book. She carries her armful of soiled linen out of the bedroom and comes back with a fresh set. When she struggles to get the fitted sheet to stay put, I get up off the chair and help her. Then she goes to the bathroom and turns on the shower. “Come on,” she says, and I pull my nightgown off over my head and stand under the water. I tilt my head to feel the warmth beating down on my cheeks, my chin, my eyelids. Tears mix with the water and wash down the drain. When I was a little girl, my mom would give me baths when I’d come home from the hospital, with Steri-Strips covering my stitches. She would wash my hair, then rinse it, pouring warm water from a plastic pitcher in a gentle, carefully directed stream. She would wipe the thick, braided line of pink scar tissue that ran down the center of my chest. My beautiful girl, she would say. My beautiful, beautiful girl.

  My sheets are silky and cool as pond water, but I don’t lie down. I prop myself up against the headboard and rasp out the question that I’ve heard hundreds of times from dozens of clients. “What do I do now?”

  Brenda gives a rueful smile. “You start again,” she tells me. “Just like the rest of us.”

  Coming Summer 2015, Jennifer Weiner's latest novel is a sweeping, modern day fairy tale about first romance and lasting love.

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