Measure of Love

by Melissa Ford

  IT’S EARLY in the morning when Adam’s cell phone starts buzzing. He usually turns it off when we go to sleep unless we’re traveling. It vibrates in my hand as I roll over and thrust it against his face.

  “Hello?” he blearily mumbles.

  I immediately hear his sister coming through the line, muffled and far away, as if trapped inside a tin can. “Come pick us up. We’re here in Amagansett by Jack’s.”

  Jack’s Stir Brew is a coffee shop in town. There is no explanation of how Lisbeth has gotten to Amagansett from Chicago nor how she got to Jack’s once she arrived. I look at the clock, noting that she has somehow managed to do all of this before five in the morning. Adam promises to borrow a car and go fetch her, and I roll back over in bed, deciding whether or not to accompany him.

  “You can stay in bed,” he whispers to me, tugging on a pair of jeans. But the truth is that I love Lisbeth, and I’m glad to get to see her again. I rummage through my bag and pull out a T-shirt and shorts, throwing a baseball cap over my messy morning hair.

  Outside is completely silent save for the surf and seagulls. Adam pulls out of the driveway carefully, cringing as the gravel crunches and settles under the tires. “This is just like Lisbeth to wake the neighborhood before five o’clock.”

  “I’m just impressed,” I comment, staring at the dark houses and empty sidewalk. “There has to be a good story somewhere in there.”

  “Just like a writer, always looking for the story,” Adam teases, navigating his way into town.

  I snuggle down in the seat, and he squeezes my hand while he turns the wheel. We spot Lisbeth and her girlfriend perched on the wooden fence at the base of the walkway leading up to Jack’s. Actually, Lisbeth is perched on the plank of wood. Her almost polar opposite girlfriend of six years, Emily, an oncologist who specializes in breast cancer, is leaning against the fence in a neat skirt and top, reading the newspaper on her iPad.

  “Rachel!” Lisbeth calls out, jumping off the fence and running past her brother to grab me in a hug. I squeeze her tight and surprisingly find myself crying. I didn’t expect myself to have such a strong reaction to meeting up with his sister, but seeing her tiny, ink-splattered hands flying at me, smelling her familiar strawberry-scented shampoo, touches off a catharsis. Everything has come full circle seeing her.

  Emily stuffs her iPad into her bag and hugs me too. She is much more reserved than Lisbeth, but I can tell that she also is emotional about seeing me. Lisbeth enters into our hug, and the three of us rock back and forth in this strange huddle, laughing and crying at the same time until Adam sighs loudly. “I know you guys haven’t seen each other in a bit, but it is five in the morning.”

  “And Jack’s isn’t even open!” Lisbeth admonishes as if tiny gourmet coffee roasters should be open at all hours.

  Emily rolls her eyes and starts toward the car. “Actually, how did you guys get out here at this hour?” Adam asks, popping the trunk to stow their suitcases.

  “Well, Emily was actually already in New York yesterday for a meeting at Sloan Kettering,” Lisbeth tells us, climbing into the back seat. “She was supposed to come back at night, but I surprised her at the airport before she could board the flight back to Chicago. I flew into New York and was waiting for her at the check-in desk!”

  Lisbeth smiles at her own resourcefulness while the rest of us stare out the window. She would always prefer to pull off a great surprise than to make a plan. “I didn’t want to bother you guys, so we went to stay with some friends of ours out in Brooklyn that I knew were heading out this way on Saturday. They said we could catch a ride with them in the morning. But then at night, they had this huge fight.”

  “I think they were fighting before we got there,” Emily interjects. “I think they just paused over dinner.”

  “Oh,” Lisbeth says, “well, they started fighting again around two in the morning while we were all still up. Jared got pissed off and said he was leaving, and . . . I don’t know . . . we sort of ended up in the car with him driving out here in the middle of the night. I didn’t want to wake everyone, so I told him that Jack’s would be open soon and to drop us off there. I didn’t realize that it didn’t open this early.”

  “It opens at seven,” Adam tells her.

  “Well that is soonish!” All’s well that ends well in Lisbeth’s world. I try not to laugh at Adam’s exasperated expression because this story is so typically Lisbethian. The surprise visit that requires her to fly across several states, the friends who end up fighting while they’re staying with them, a middle-of-the-night drive across Long Island. I’m not sure how Lisbeth and Emily work since they are such polar opposites, but somehow they do. Emily only seems amused, and Lisbeth—believe it or not—seems more grounded with her.

  Adam’s parents are still asleep when we creep into the house and get breakfast going in the kitchen. Emily excuses herself to catch up on a few hours of sleep, but Lisbeth helps me crack a few eggs and scramble them along with the scallions I found in the vegetable crisper drawer. Adam attempts to figure out his parents’ complex coffee system.

  Eggs finally piled high in a bowl and toast crisped in Anita’s stylish and almost-never-been-used toaster, I lean against the counter as we wait for the coffee to be ready, playing with the cluster of rings on my finger with the edge of my thumb.

  “Oh crap!” Lisbeth exclaims, suddenly grabbing my hand. “I forgot about your great news. Congratulations!”

  “Thank you,” I say, fiddling with the handle of my waiting coffee mug. It feels like she’s waiting for me to say something more. “We haven’t really planned out what sort of wedding we’re having yet, but I hope you’d be willing to be a bridesmaid again.”

  Lisbeth examines the rings and snorts at her brother. “Too cheap to get a second diamond?”

  “Are you kidding?” Adam admonishes. “You think this woman is worth a second diamond?” He gives me a small kiss on the cheek. “Anyway, she has always wanted jewelry from Me&Ro. But where is your old engagement ring?”

  “It’s in a drawer at home,” I admit. So it wasn’t an accident; he really did remember that I have always wanted jewelry from Me&Ro. That thought makes me return the kiss, long and deep on his lips, which he greets with a look of happy surprise, not quite understanding what brought on the moment. “I should probably be more careful with it.”

  “Or wear it again,” Lisbeth says. “I would be honored, by the way, to be your bridesmaid. Again. Who knows, maybe I’ll even do it better this time.”

  Adam pours us each a cup of coffee, and we sit down to eat. I can hear someone moving upstairs, and we all know that Anita is awake but won’t come down until she has “put on her face” for the day. Not even the arrival of her only daughter can get her to come downstairs into the kitchen without a fresh coat of lipstick, eyeliner, and mascara.

  “This is amazing,” Lisbeth tells me, pointing to her eggs with the tines of her fork. “I’ve been bookmarking recipes on your blog. Not that I’m going to cook or anything. That’s Emily’s thing.”

  It’s a little strange to know that my sister-in-law-to-be-again is reading my blog. I mean it’s a public, well-known Internet space, so I don’t fool myself into thinking that it’s a secret. Yet there’s a difference between intellectually knowing that it’s possible that Lisbeth is reading and receiving confirmation that the person sitting across from me is reading what I’m posting on the Web. I’m fairly circumspect, but my mind races back through the last few posts, worrying about what I’ve put on the screen when someone in my face-to-face world informs me that they just read about my visit to the doctor or a shopping excursion to Trader Joe’s.

  “It’s just funny to think about how much life changes,” she continues. “You two went from being married to not married to engaged again. You went from being a non-cooking graphic designer to a food blogger with a book about to be
published. And Adam went from being the most peevish lawyer in the world to an English teacher. All since we last sat at Anita’s table.”

  Lisbeth always calls her mother by her first name, a fact that drives Anita crazy. It is clear that Anita has heard this as she sweeps into the kitchen because she is in the process of hiding the annoyance on her face. She pretends to jump backward and puts her hand over her heart, as if she is shocked to find Lisbeth in her kitchen.

  “When did you get here?” she asks, bending down to kiss her daughter’s cheek. For all of their differences, Anita and Lisbeth are obviously mother and daughter. The same fine bone structure, the same feathery brown hair, the same determination. Perhaps the largest roadblock in their relationship is that both are accustomed to being able to charm their way to anything they wish; except with each other.

  “Adam and Rachel picked us up this morning. We were in New York.”

  “We. Is Emily here too?”

  “She’s upstairs sleeping,” Lisbeth tells her. “I was going to wait until everyone was awake to tell you our big news, but I don’t think she’ll care.”

  “Big news?” her father repeats as he walks into the kitchen and heads straight for the coffee maker. Adam has apparently done something wrong even though the coffee tastes fine, because his father pauses to press several buttons on the machine.

  “Emily got a job at Sloan Kettering,” Lisbeth says proudly. “We’re moving back to the city. Which is why I also came out this weekend. I thought we could get a head start on apartment hunting.”

  “Sweetheart, you can stay at our place until you find your own,” her mother tells her. “Really, no one is using it right now.”

  “Maybe,” Lisbeth says in a voice that means that she won’t consider this option at all. “We were thinking something close-ish to the hospital so Emily could run home between things.”

  Their parents’ apartment is also on the Upper East Side like the hospital, though I’m not sure how Lisbeth and Emily will afford an apartment near the park. Anita mentally notes this too and purses her lips, too proud to offer something a second time and too much into appearances to point out the obvious.

  I am thrilled that Lisbeth will be nearby and imagine her popping over to our apartment for brunch. She may be flaky and sometimes a bit too spontaneous for my taste, but she’s also fun and easy to be around. I can tell that Anita is steeling herself internally with the exact opposite reaction. She likes her daughter halfway across the country. They can get along fine over the phone. It’s face-to-face where things start to get hairy.

  EMILY IS most definitely not happy that their joint news was told while she was upstairs asleep. There is a strange tension between them on the beach. Emily reads a book on her iPad while Lisbeth strokes her arm as an apology, but it’s almost as if their respective skins are oil and vinegar. Lisbeth’s fingers skate over Emily’s inner elbow without really reaching her.

  Adam closes his eyes and places his baseball cap over his face, and I stare at the ocean, trying to tune out my mother-in-law-to-be-again’s story while appearing to be interested. I believe Lisbeth when she mutters that she had no idea that Emily would take her blurting out the news in this way. Emily’s reaction is certainly out of the ordinary since Lisbeth’s impulsive moments generally roll off her back, though I suppose everyone has an invisible limit. A limit that they may not even know exists until they reach it.

  Watching them makes me think about my own reservations on marriage; shoots it out of its resting place in the city to land back in my lap in Amagansett. I can feel the weight of the engagement as if it’s tangible, a particularly annoying cat who is begging to be stroked.

  I don’t know if I’m more uncomfortable that I’m engaged or that I can’t put my finger on what about marriage makes my stomach twist inside. It definitely isn’t Adam himself, so maybe it’s the idea that all relationships have these little land mines you might step on as you navigate your day. Could that be it? I sit with this idea for a moment. If there were signs posted reminding you to be careful crossing the field, you’d remain on the road or bypass the area altogether. But there are few signs in relationships and certainly no handbook. A person has no idea sometimes that they’re doing something wrong until they’re dealing with the consequences of their actions.

  It’s not that these land mines don’t exist in friendships—certainly Arianna set one off in me when she told me about her coffee date with the Nightly writer. But the difference is that while losing Arianna would be like going through life with a missing limb, severing Adam from my life again would be like going through life with a missing torso. I simply can’t wrap my mind around the idea of untangling our lives again, therefore, I don’t even want to start down this road where an unknown land mine could possibly be set off, necessitating that untangling of lives.

  It’s a remote what if, but we all know that lightening absolutely has the possibility of striking twice despite what proverb writers would have us believe.

  I decide that this must be the reason my insides have been twisting like a wrung towel since Adam proposed, even though the thought doesn’t feel completely baked. We’ll just have to do a better job at defining our land mines, I think.

  My mother-in-law-to-be-again stops talking and fans her face. “It’s getting too hot out here. I’ll be inside. Rachel, I always love talking with you.”

  She pats my lotion-smeared leg absentmindedly before she retreats to the house. Lisbeth purses her lips at her mother’s comment, but Anita doesn’t bother talking to her since she has made it perfectly clear that she’s not interested in hearing about the neighborhood clambake or the goings-on at the club. Plus, I am excellent at looking attentive while daydreaming.

  “I’m going to take a walk,” Emily announces. Lisbeth gives me a pleading look, one that begs me silently to fix things, so I offer to join Emily by the water.

  “Lisbeth is gutted that she blurted out the news to us,” I begin, unable to stop myself. “She wanted to wait, and then it just sort of came out.”

  Emily sighs and shrugs. “It’s not even the news. I mean, telling about the job and move isn’t that big a deal. It’s just that it’s typical Lisbeth.”

  I nod because while I’m supposed to be fixing things, even I can’t deny that the moment was typical Lisbeth. Telling Emily that she’ll wait and then charging ahead anyhow. She’s like a puppy who has been told that they’ll go on a walk, and now she can’t stop lunging at the door, unable to wait for even the leash to be fetched from the drawer.

  “Except that her worst traits are also her best traits,” I nudge. “Her impatience and her stamina all stem from the same energy.”

  “My God, that sounds positively yoga of you,” Emily says dryly. “I know that, and I love her, blurty-mouth and all. But sometimes I wish that I could go take a nap and wake up to find that the world is exactly as I left it.”

  I stoop down to pick up a shell, mostly whole. It’s the curvy kind that I like—a nautilus. I pocket it, intending to find a few others and fill up a vase with shells for decoration.

  “So Sloan Kettering. Do you think that’s going to be a change? Being around cancer everywhere you turn?” I ask, regretting the words right after they leave my mouth.

  “Working at a cancer center is the best way to remind myself how lucky I am that I don’t live around cancer everywhere I turn. Just 60 hours or so a week.” Emily bends down to get a shell and hands it to me. A perfect scallop. “I’m actually excited about the job, excited to have more hands-on time with patients. My job at the hospital hasn’t really afforded me a lot of time to see people.”

  We pause to watch the waves, the sand underneath our feet in a constant fight to return to the ocean. We need to keep taking small steps in order to keep our ankles from being buried. Emily is very beautiful, very peaceful, as if she has discovered all the secrets to li
fe though is too kind to pity that you haven’t. I understand exactly why Lisbeth needs things to be okay with Emily. She is her torso, her organs, her heart and muscle, her skin and bones. I can’t imagine Lisbeth continuing to exist without Emily nor the other way around.

  Suddenly, an additional thought occurs to me. “Does it terrify you, working so closely with these families that are all facing down cancer, to give your heart to someone? Knowing that even if you never separate, relationship-wise, you will lose the person at the end of their life? I mean, we all lose the people we love, one way or another.”

  My throat closes up like a tapped oyster shell, and I blink several times, trying to concentrate on a kite dipping over the water as a man tries to control the line. Maybe that is my biggest fear of all in facing the altar again. There will be an end at some point in the future, and I’ve already tasted it once. I can’t imagine going through it a second time with death.

  “Well, you could die first,” Emily says, seriously. “Yes, it terrifies me. But it also terrifies me to think about what life would be like not loving Lisbeth. When you are marginalized by society, when your love is always silently in question, you take a lot of time to think about the worth of it. And as much as that woman drives me insane with her spontaneous plans, she also brings me to sanity with her brilliant ideas. So I’ll keep her. If that was what you were asking.”

  “That was exactly what I was asking,” I lie.

  “Then we should probably go back so I can kiss and make up,” Emily tells me, handing me a second scallop shell that was dragged in by the waves.