“I’ll find out eventually. She’s insane, my mom. You know that.” After a moment he says, “Before I call her, could you please walk me through this? How did this all happen? Did you talk to Blix?”
“No. I got a letter from a law firm.”
“A letter. I’m going to need to know more than that now, aren’t I? What did the letter say, Marnie?”
“Just that I had been left this piece of property in Brooklyn, and that I should come as soon as possible because there were some things that needed doing. Some decisions.”
“Some decisions.”
“Yes.”
“And what kind of decisions?”
“Noah. I don’t know what kind of decisions. Stipulations, I guess. Things I need to know about or do or . . . something. That’s why I’m here. It said I should come as soon as possible.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time after that, simply stares off into space. He’s flicking his thumb against his index finger, a nervous habit he used to display in meetings, back when we were teachers together. Back before everything. When we were still falling in love.
But I remind myself that we are so not anywhere near falling in love anymore. He left me. He’s not sorry about that. And I inherited this house. And why? Because maybe this is all part of the big life Blix thought I should have. I can’t very well tell him that, though.
He gets up and starts pacing in circles around the middle of the room, rubbing his hair. “But were you in touch with her since the wedding? Did you know she was doing this? Have you ever talked to her?”
I sigh very heavily, to show him that I am nearing the end of my patience with this line of questioning. “Look. I talked to her once. One time. But she didn’t say anything about this. I swear. And I didn’t even know she was sick, much less dying.”
“Tell me the truth. Just so I know. Did you somehow get her to do this to get back at me?”
“Noah! You know me better than that.”
“But now you’re going to sell it? That’s what your mother said. ‘Are you going to be able to sell that house?’ Those were her exact words. She was practically screaming it. So that’s what you’re planning, right?”
I don’t say anything.
“Yeah. That’s what you’re planning. Oh my God. And here’s what’s so ironic. If you sell it, then what? You’ll take the money and move to some three-bedroom house in the suburbs, won’t you? You don’t even care about it.” He keeps shaking his head in disbelief. “Too, too unbelievable. Just incredible. But that was my Aunt Blix in a nutshell. Totally zigging when you thought she was going to zag. Always keep ’em guessing.” Then he stops walking and sighs. “And you know what? What I’m most sorry about here? The conversation I’m about to have with my mother. She’s going to have a million things to blame me for in this little scenario. Trust me.”
“Well. I do feel bad for you.”
He laughs. “No, you don’t. This is all fucking unbelievable, you know that? I was the one here when my great-aunt dies, and yet somehow she manages to say nothing to me at all about the house or what’s going to happen, so I of course just assume I can stay here because it’ll belong to my family—and then you show up.”
There’s a loud noise from downstairs. “What’s that?” I say.
He runs his hands through his hair. “I told you. There’s a guy living down there. He has a life. Sometimes he drops things.”
“What’s his name?”
“Patrick Delaney. He’s disabled in some big way. Burn victim. Doesn’t come out much.”
“I think I’m going to take a walk. I’ll see if he’s okay.” I can’t stand looking at Noah for one more minute.
Now he’s pacing again. “Wait. I just thought of something. Do you think it’s possible that she left the house to both of us before we got divorced, and that my letter didn’t come to me yet because I was in Africa, and that what my mom wants is to tell me there’s this letter for me from the law firm? Is there any way that could be what’s happening?”
“Maybe,” I say. “Actually, I have an appointment to meet with the attorney on Monday at ten. Why don’t you come with me, and maybe we can get some answers?”
“Okay,” he says after a moment. “At least I can tell my mom that.”
I get up off the floor and go outside, closing the big heavy door behind me. Even though it’s night, it’s still bright from the streetlights, and there are plenty of people outside, walking their dogs, talking into their phones. There’s a coffee place four doors up the street, filled with people wearing scarves and jackets. I go down the little stairs to the basement apartment. It’s narrow and dark, and probably infested with New York cockroaches and rats, but I bravely knock on the door anyway. I keep my eyes on my feet, just in case something should try to run across them.
No answer, so I knock again. And then again. And again. There are bars on the windows. I shudder.
Finally there’s a muffled voice from inside: “Yes?”
I put my mouth near the door. “Um, Patrick? Listen, my name is Marnie. I’m Blix’s . . . friend, I guess you’d say. Or maybe grandniece-in-law. Friend sounds better, though. Anyway, I was upstairs and I heard a crash. Just wanted to check you’re okay.”
There’s a pause and then the voice says, more muffled than before: “I’m fine.”
“Okay,” I say. “Well . . . good night then.”
Another pause. Then, when I’ve given up on him having anything else to say, I hear, closer to the door this time: “Welcome to Brooklyn, Marnie. Is Noah with you?”
I lean against the door, close my eyes, almost brought to my knees by the question. And the kindness of his voice.
“He is,” I say finally. “Well, not now, but he’s upstairs. I think I’m going to go over to the coffee place and get something to eat. You want to come?”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
“Well, that’s okay. Can I bring you back something then?”
“No. Thanks. Listen, Blix has my number upstairs. Call anytime you need something.”
“Thanks. Can I give you my number? If you need anything?”
“Sure. Slide it in the mail slot, will you?”
When I get back upstairs, Noah has gone into the back bedroom and closed the door. I can hear him talking, though, no doubt on the phone with his mom. His voice is rising and falling, and when I pass by, I hear, “I’m trying to explain to you—she’s here now!”
The larger bedroom at the front of the house, with its sienna-colored walls, is open, so I go in there and close the door. The room is kind of surreal, with posters everywhere, and a big lumpy double bed, a kantha quilt, and all kinds of crazy little knickknacks on every surface, and crystals and banners hanging on the walls, little pieces of art, pieces that Blix no doubt loved and that still seem to hold on to some part of her.
I lie there looking up at the ceiling, which is illuminated by the streetlights. You could shoot a movie in this room it’s so bright.
The ceiling has a crack that looks like a sweet little chipmunk eating a burrito. Don’t give up. Everything is going to be fine, the chipmunk says.
It’s all unfolding just the way it’s supposed to.
It’s a long time before I can close my eyes and go to sleep.
And that’s the end of the first day.
TWENTY-THREE
MARNIE
Noah already seems to be gone when I wake up in the morning, which is nothing short of a divine blessing.
I take a shower in Blix’s fabulous claw-footed tub and then go up to the kitchen, where I have to search for a coffeemaker (she has some press device that seems to be missing some key parts). There’s hardly any food in the refrigerator, just bags of dark chocolate and green mushy things, possibly lentils, and some bottles that look like dietary supplements. And of course beer. Lots and lots of beer.
Luckily, as I’m about to plan a journey into the outside world in search of food, there’s a knock at the back d
oor.
“Helloooo!” calls Jessica. I open it to find her standing there wearing a pink flowered kimono and blue jeans, her wet hair tied up in one of those divinely messy knots.
“Oh, hi,” she says. “I just wondered if you might want to get some breakfast with me.” She makes a sad face. “The truth is that my ex, Sammy’s dad, came and picked him up this morning, and that’s always tough for me, so I could use a little distraction. And I’m guessing you might possibly want to get out of here, too.”
“I’d love to.”
“Well, great. I can show you the neighborhood! Park Slope rocks, you know.”
I go grab my thin, little, good-enough-for-Florida sweater, and she dashes into her apartment to get her real sweater, then she tells me about all the great places around here. As we’re leaving, Lola waves to us from the stairs next door and calls out, “You doing okay, Marnie? Settling in?”
“I’m doing fine, Lola!” I holler, and she says, “Come over sometime! I have stories to tell you!”
Jessica murmurs, “She and Blix—such a pair! Always out on the stoop talking to everybody who came by. Playing with the babies, inviting the old people to come sit with them. Blix knew everybody.”
It’s a beautiful day outside—warm for October first, Jessica says, and the sidewalk is filled with people: kids in soccer uniforms heading off to games, families with strollers, groups of young guys all wearing black clothing decorated in zippers, a man on the corner who seems to be lecturing a brick building, a guy setting out buckets of flowers in front of a little grocery store. Cars lurch along the streets, then come to screeching halts as people double-park and jump out to run into various shops, setting off spates of annoyed honking and swearing—and although everything that happens makes me jump, Jessica pays no attention to what’s going on.
I keep wanting to slow down and soak it all in, pause somewhere and just watch for a while, but Jessica is walking along, at a brisk thirty-miles-per-hour pace, cheerfully ranting about Sammy’s father, who cheated on her while they were married, and who is now living with that woman. And now the judge has said that Jessica is supposed to be sharing custody with him! Can I even imagine? She has to share weekend time every other week? The precious time she has to be alone with her own son, the time when they’re free from work and school responsibilities—and now she has to share that with her ex the scumbag, the guy she calls Creepasaurus?
“I know what you’re probably thinking, and you’re absolutely right: I should get over it already. He’s Sammy’s father, and Sammy needs to see him, but—and this is a big but—he lost some of his privileges when he betrayed me, and how can I get over that? Anyway!” She looks over at me, and I see that she is puffed up with anger, puffed up and beautiful in her outrage. “You’ve had some complicated stuff, too, I gather. All of Blix’s people have. I mean, you were with Noah, for starters.”
“Complicated, yes,” I say, and she says, “Hey, what’s your policy about waiting on line for a table? There’s this excellent place I love, but it takes monumental patience because it’s so awesome, and also it’s got hundreds of reviews on Yelp.”
“I’m fine with waiting,” I say, even though my stomach is growling. I’m surprised she can’t hear it.
“Great. Because it is the place for eggs in Park Slope! You like eggs, I hope? And it’s Southern food, which I know you’ll like. Goes with your accent. Oh, here we are! See how cute? It’s called Yolk!”
Sure enough, we’ve arrived at a tiny little place that has about thirty people milling around outside, sipping mugs of coffee and chatting. Inside, I can see that there are approximately five tables we’ll be competing for. But we put our name on the list and then she suggests we walk around, look in the shops. I try to resign myself to the fact that I won’t get breakfast until sometime in the middle of next week.
“I know it must be so much worse for you, but I still can’t believe Blix isn’t here any longer,” she says. “I miss her so much, it’s like my own grandmother died or something. I saw her every single day! Sammy couldn’t leave the house without stopping by her place. She was everything.”
“Did you know her for a long time?” I say.
“Since Andrew left. I met her that same week. So, yeah, three years? But it seems so much longer because she was always the person I could talk to about anything. She was like my guru and my grandmother and my therapist and my Reiki master and my best friend, all rolled into one. Even while she was sick, she kept up with everybody.”
“I-I didn’t even know she was sick. I met her last Christmas and then she came to my wedding . . . but that’s it.”
“Oh my goodness, she loved you a lot. She told everybody about you! The whole borough of Brooklyn probably knew that you were coming. And then Noah showed up right before she died, so I thought that might mean you weren’t coming after all. But I couldn’t ever get her alone to ask her, you know? I hope you don’t mind that I know all this. That’s the way it is when you’re one of Blix’s people. We all seem connected somehow.”
“I have to admit that I didn’t know I was one of Blix’s people.”
“No? There are a bunch of us. I met most of them at the wake slash good-bye party she gave for herself. Did you know about that?”
“Sadly I am way out of the loop on everything.”
“I’ll fill you in, then,” she says. “There’s Patrick downstairs. He’s an amazing person, an artist and sculptor, but he doesn’t come upstairs anymore since she died. Have you seen his sculpture in Blix’s living room—the woman holding her hands up near her face? Incredibly beautiful. Too bad he doesn’t do that anymore.”
“Did he stop because she died?”
“Oh, no. Even before she died he had stopped.” She looks at me and laughs. “I am talking way too much. Sorry. So! But Blix left you the house—am I right? She left you the building?”
“Surprisingly, yes.”
She stops walking so abruptly that two people nearly run into her. “How’s Noah doing with that?”
“It’s kind of a mess,” I say. “Noah and his mom believe that she should have been the one who got the house, and I kind of agree, if you want to know the truth. And no offense, but I don’t really want to live here, so I guess I’ll just sell it.”
“Oh, no!” Her face changes. “You’re just going to sell it and go?”
“Well . . . yeah, I mean this isn’t really home, you know. I have a life elsewhere. In Florida.”
She is searching my face. “I hadn’t even thought about that. Of course you have a life! Oh, man! This would be like somebody in—oh, I don’t know—Oklahoma or somewhere leaving me a house and expecting me to pick up and go there.”
“It does feel kind of random.”
She shifts her bag over to her other shoulder and purses her lips. “I have got to tell you that this is so Blix-like. Doing something like this. No warning, no explanation. We all call this ‘getting Blixed.’ Although mostly it works out for the best once the dust settles.”
“Ha! So I’ve been . . . Blixed?” I say.
“You, my dear, have been sooo Blixed. And you probably haven’t even finished processing your breakup with Noah. That takes forever to get through, and you’re going to have to start the whole thing all over again, now that he’s all up in your face again and reminding you of the past. Is he being—weird? He is, isn’t he? He’s being weird. I can tell. Just from the way he was last night.”
“He is being a little weird,” I say. “But I get it. He’s in shock.”
She frowns. “Can I tell you something, even though I probably should just keep my big mouth closed and keep out of it?”
“Okay.”
“She didn’t want him or his family to have the building. She left it to you on purpose.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, she wasn’t all that happy when he showed up.” She comes to a full stop in front of a shop like she’s slammed on the brakes. “Hey, this is one of my favorite s
tores,” she says in the same chirpy tone of voice she’s been using all along. “Want to go in and look at the coats? You might need one.”
“Okay,” I say, “although Florida doesn’t really call for a lot of coats.”
“Well,” she says in a singsong, “but you never know what’s going to happen when Blix is involved! You just might find she wants you to stay here.”
“Since she’s dead, though, she doesn’t have much of a way of getting that to happen,” I say.
“So you’d think,” she says.
We go inside and she goes over to the coats, starts flipping through all the shades of gray, black, and brown. And then suddenly, without warning, she stops moving and looks straight ahead, stiffening.
I follow her gaze and see that a man is staring at her and making his way over to us, and behind him is Sammy. If Jessica were a cat, her back would be arched, and she’d be hissing.
“Andrew!” she says, and her face has turned angry. “What in the world are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be on the way to Cooperstown?” She looks around. “And where’s your girlfriend, huh?” She reaches over and puts her hand on Sammy’s arm, protectively. Sammy has a stricken expression on his face; I see him mouthing to her, “It’s fine, Mom, it’s fine.”
The man looks abashed, as though he’s been caught at something, which is exactly how she sounds. Sammy, pushing his mop of too-long hair out of his eyes, scoots out of her range and says, “Easy, Mom. It’s okay. We just wanted to get some food first, and now we’re looking at gloves.”
She turns to her ex. “If I had known, Andrew, that your girlfriend wasn’t going to cook for you, I could have fed him breakfast.”
“It’s fine. We had a nice breakfast down the street. I always like eating in this neighborhood.” Andrew puts his hand on Sammy’s head, which I see Jessica register as some possible violation, and Sammy looks down miserably and kicks at something on the floor.
“So where is she?”
Andrew mumbles something, and then the two of them glare at each other, and then he dips his head, smiles, and steers Sammy over to where they were before, the glove section.
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