“Thank God we’re out of there,” she gasped, still within earshot. “Is that woman a bee-otch or what?”
“Skye, shhh.” This was more of a reflex than an outraged appeal to etiquette.
“No wonder Sally’s in such a bad mood all the time.” She slipped her good arm through my good arm and tugged me toward the patient’s lounge. More variations on the theme of windowless white. “But I’m going to fix all that. I asked her to come bartend at the Roof Rat.”
“Can we afford that?” I asked automatically.
“Oh, sure.” She beamed. “Lars is going to work for practically nothing. He’s such a hunky, upstanding hunk.”
“And yet you’re not up for Modern Bride?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m so not ready to get married again,” said the woman who, not five days ago, had declared that Ian Hammond was ‘her next.’ “At least, not to a good guy. And since I’m sick of bad boys, I guess I’m sick of marriage. But it’ll be interesting to date someone with morals for a change. Do you think I’ll have to start going to church?”
I sat down at the metal card table in the lounge and tried to look enthusiatic.
“Hey? Are you okay?” She frowned at me. “Are you even here? It’s like the light is on at the Motel Six, but the guest has checked out.”
“I’m fine, sweetie. What do you feel like doing? It’s up to you.” I gestured to the game boxes strewn about on shelves and counters.
“What do you want to do? Uno? No, boring. Monopoly? No, you always kick my ass. I know!” She pulled a red-sided jigsaw puzzle box from the middle of a stack of board games and tossed it on the table.
The top of the box boasted a picture of Florence’s Piazza del Duomo, with the cathedral right in the center, arching up toward the sun with that big, brick, herringbone-patterned dome.
She pried the lid off and dumped all five hundred pieces in the middle of the table. A jumbled heap of white, orange, blue, and gray.
I started to cry.
I didn’t burst into tears; it was really more like a traitorous leak that got out of hand.
“Oh no!” She stared at me, hand clapped to her mouth. “What’s wrong? What did I say?”
I put my head down in my arms.
The folding chair scraped against the floor as my sister sat down next to me. She threaded her hand through my hair. “It’s okay, Faithie. Tell me what’s the matter. I can take care of you.”
I pulled away from the hand stroking my head. I couldn’t stand to be touched right now. “Skye. You are such a sweetie.”
She brushed this aside. “I know. But what’s the matter?”
“Flynn and I…” I swallowed. “Flynn doesn’t want to see me any more.”
“Ever?” The girl had quite a way with words.
I nodded. “Ever. He called everything off tonight.” I picked up a piece of blue horizon and pinched it between my fingers.
My sister looked horrified. “Why? I thought you two had finally worked it out.”
I sat up straight. “It’s complicated. Basically, he doesn’t trust me.”
“Trust you to what?”
I shrugged. “To stick around. To be the kind of person he thinks I should be. He doesn’t want to risk anything. He thinks I’m the same person I was when I was eighteen.”
“Well, that’s just nuts,” she said authoritatively. “Look how far you’ve come. All the way back to Minnesota.”
“Against my will,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, but you’re here, aren’t you? Taking care of everything. You seem pretty reliable to me.”
I thought of his flat monotone on the phone. “He doesn’t see it that way.”
“That is so weak sauce.”
We fiddled with the puzzle pieces for a minute, constructing asymmetrical mosaics. She didn’t look up when she said, “Well, what are you going to do now?”
I knew what she was really asking. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t. But I’m thinking about going back to L.A. And I want you to come with me.” I saw the expression on her face and rushed ahead. “I mean it, I want you to come. You’d love it there. We could wait a few months until the Roof Rat’s back in the black, then sell and reinvest out there.”
She pursed her lips, considering this. “But I have everything I want right here.”
I went back to our little mosaic. “Just think about it.”
“I will.” She nodded. “Because you know what? I trust you. I know that doesn’t mean much, coming from someone who trusted Bob, but…I’ll make you a deal. I’ll think about moving to California if you think about staying here. I know you secretly like it here, even though you won’t admit it. Don’t feel like you have to leave just because of Flynn. That’s what you did last time, and look what happened.”
We gazed at each other for a moment, smiling. She was right. I didn’t have to live my life as a reaction to the mistakes my father or my boyfriend made. I was older and wiser and this time, it was up to me.
“Men.” She shook her head. “Put a tent over that circus.”
Skye and Sally fell asleep around ten o’clock, their faces still bathed in the glow of the Home Shopping Network. I sat next to my sister until I could tell from her breathing that she was down for the count.
I groped for the remote control and turned the TV off. Now I could see the night through the window, but it seemed foreign and distant. Sitting there in the dark, staring at the crack of light under the door, I tried to figure out where to go. I couldn’t stay here—I was already in flagrant violation of all visiting hour regulations. And I couldn’t go back to the apartment. Even if I hurried up the back steps without peeking into the bar, I’d hear the jukebox and the chatter in the parking lot all night. With every muffled glass clink and waft of cigarette smoke, I’d think about the night Flynn found me hiding under the desk and all the things that had gone wrong since then.
So I got in the car and headed for the Goldbergs’. Because nothing in this life was certain except death, taxes, and domestic tranquility at Leah’s house.
Leah threw the door open. “Faith! Thank goodness you’re here! Everything’s gone cattywampus.” Her face was bright pink with exertion and her jeans were streaked with mud.
A pungent odor drifted down the hall. I crinkled my nose. “What is that smell?”
“Hans Gruber got sprayed by a skunk!” howled Rex, sprinting up behind his mother in Winnie the Pooh pajamas and stocking feet.
“Rex, honey, I told you not to leave him alone in the bathtub.” She looked like she’d spent her day on the front lines of a swamp war. “That stupid mutt somehow got out of the yard and ran into a skunk, and I had to chase him all over the neighborhood through the woods and the creek, and I don’t know how I’m ever going to air the house out.”
“Hans is skunky! Hans is skunky! Pee-eww!” Rex hopped around his mother’s legs with his black hair flopping all over his face. The child was clearly wired. He looked ready to throw his hands up in the air and jitterbug.
“Rex, get back in that bathroom, now,” Leah ordered as she ushered me inside. “Anyway, you couldn’t have picked a better time to come over. I’m in desperate need of an extra pair of hands. Stan had to run out and get more dog shampoo and supplies. Do you have any idea how much tomato juice and vinegar it takes to wash a shepherd mix?”
“No,” I said truthfully.
“A lot. And it’s way past Rex’s bedtime, but I needed someone to help me with the darn dog.” She wiped her hands on her jeans, grimacing at the state of her outfit.
It was nice to know people with normal, real-world problems. Man pitted against nature, dog against skunk. Bedtime truants and tomato juice droughts. I shifted gears from intense self-pity and frustration to a dog-grooming frame of mind.
“Okay.” I started pulling my hair back into a bun. “Show me to the victim.”
“He’s in the bathtub!” shrieked Rex, a veritable human superball.
“Eli! Bathroom! Now!” He scampered down
the hall, and she turned back to me. “Faith, what’s the matter? Is Skye okay?”
“Her collarbone’s broken, but she’s doing fine. I think she and Sally may actually become friends.”
“Then why do you look like death warmed over? Is this about Flynn?”
“I guess.” I squared my shoulders and summarized the evening’s phone conversation.
“…And he told me not to call him again.” I twisted my watch around and around my wrist. “Ever.”
She exploded into a mother-bear rant. “That’s the most passive-aggressive thing ever! To lead you down the primrose path and then dump you like that? That’s the most vicious, angry, hostile…”
My watch band tore, leaving me with two ragged straps of black leather. “Don’t say that about him. He wouldn’t do that. He would never string me along like that. He had a good reason for what he did.”
“Oh really? And what might that reason be?” She put her hands on her hips, indignant as only a mom caked in mud and eau de skunk can be.
“I think he finally gave up on me. I pushed him away too many times. I’m paranoid and emotionally stunted.” I dug my sandal toe into the carpet. “But the problem is that, somewhere along the way, I fell back in love with him and now I’m really up a creek without a paddle. Because I think it’s really over this time. You should have heard his voice.”
She reached out to hug me, but I shied away.
“Sorry about the smell,” she said. “Rex and I are probably as bad as Hans by now.” She turned toward the bathroom. “Prepare to get wet.”
At that moment, Hans Gruber raced out of the bathroom, a furry streak of brown and red headed for the living room. Rex was in hot pursuit. “Mama! Mama!”
“Nooo!” screamed Leah. “Not the living room! I just had the carpet cleaned!”
All three of us dashed after the dog, but we were too late. We froze in the doorway and looked on in horror as Hans, leaving a damp red trail in his wake, leapt atop Leah’s one “good” cream-colored sofa and shook himself dry. Droplets of skunk-scented tomato juice spattered the walls, the ceiling, the furniture, and the curtains.
And Rachel started wailing upstairs.
Leah covered her eyes and groped for an appropriate, family-friendly expletive. “Oh…no.”
“Hans Gruber, how could you?” yelled Rex, arms akimbo. “Who’s gonna pay for all this?”
Leah and I looked at each other and started to laugh, the kind of degenerate cackle heard in mental institutions.
“Don’t worry, Mama. I’ll get him.” Rex tugged at the dog’s collar, which only prompted Hans to collapse and roll on the embroidered sofa cushions.
Leah dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her T-shirt. “I’ll get Hans, honey. Go grab some paper towels, okay?” She turned to me. “Faith, could you go up and get Rachel back to sleep? She’s teething these days—she probably just needs to be rocked back to sleep. There’s a teething ring in the freezer.”
I had never in my life put a baby to bed, but this hardly seemed like the time for such petty objections.
Holding Leah’s daughter brought me back to myself. She smiled when she saw me, even though her eyes were still glistening with tears.
“Hi,” I whispered, waving the teething ring.
The light from the hallway caught her silky brown curls and huge brown eyes, and she reached for me, so I picked her up. I sat down in the old-fashioned rocking chair, cradling her warm little body against me. We settled into the shadows, rocking and humming to each other while she gummed the cold plastic ring.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the chair. Rachel smelled like baby powder, applesauce and sleep all rolled into one. Downstairs, there was barking and splashing and yelling, but up here there was only the whisper of the summer breeze through the tree branches by the window.
She curled up sleepy and heavy against my chest. This, then, was why people liked babies—the symbiosis of souls, the bridging of gaps too big to fill with words.
I felt both completely trusted and completely trustworthy for the first time in recent memory. The simple truth of this surprised me. I was not someone who deserved to be given up on.
The baby stirred against me and looked up. Our eyes met in the dark, and she replaced the ring in her mouth with her thumb, waiting, I supposed, for me to sing her a lullaby. Sadly, my lullaby repertoire was quite limited, so I settled for singing “Copacabana” and “My Cherie Amour” in the most soothing way possible. She seemed satisfied and surprisingly uncritical of my choice of material. Score another point for the infants of the world.
The plan was to sleep over in Leah’s guest room and regroup tomorrow. The guest room part went off without a hitch, but sleep presented more of a challenge. We got Hans Gruber cleaned up and banished to the basement by midnight. The Goldbergs were all asleep by twelve-thirty. I lay in bed and watched the digital clock next to my bed tick off the minutes for the next two and a half hours.
By three A.M., I was thrashing around with pernicious insomnia. Despite my best efforts to distract myself by rattling off state capitals and decorating my fantasy beach bungalow in Malibu, my mind kept wandering back to Flynn. He kept popping up, unbidden, in Sacramento, Honolulu, Boise, and in the sunny yellow bedroom of my beach house.
I threw in the towel at three-fifteen. Careful not to wake the family, I slipped out the front door and into the night. The minute I opened the door to my car, I knew where I wanted to go. I wanted to go back to the beginning, back to where I had taken that first, fatal wrong turn that had redirected the entire course of my life.
23
I saw him silhouetted in the headlights before I even cut the VW’s engine. He was sitting in the wet grass under the huge white summer moon, watching the river rush past and tossing a baseball up in the air. Just tossing it and catching it, tossing it and catching it.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with insomnia tonight.
He didn’t turn around or interrupt his solitary game of catch, but he knew it was me. Who else could it have been at this hour of the night, at this particular latitude and longitude?
I turned off the headlights and got out of the car. The summer night was hushed but alive with crickets and mosquitoes and the cool breeze rising off the river. Blades of grass tickled my toes through my sandals as I stood on the overgrown dirt road I’d taken to get here. Our old stomping ground.
I took two steps toward Flynn and waited.
I could see the tension straining the shoulders of his T-shirt, which was bleached even paler than usual by the moonlight.
Given the fact that it was the middle of the night and I hadn’t expected company, I was decked out in a pair of Leah’s old white seersucker pajamas and a terminal case of bedhead. I smelled vaguely of shampoo and wet dog, and my left arm was wrapped in a fresh bandage.
It was just me, shipwrecked but salvageable.
I walked up behind him and plucked the baseball out of the air, mid-toss. “You remember when we tried to learn how to play out here?”
He didn’t look up. “I remember you hitting the ball into the river every single time you made contact with the bat. I had to wade in with you to get it because you were scared of leeches.”
My smile surprised me. “That fear was not unfounded. Remember the first time we went skinny-dipping in here? When you…” The sentence died in my throat, because it brought to the surface the things that had gotten us here in the first place. The sex on this sand and the quicksilver panic of the morning after and the rest of our lives without each other.
“I remember a lot of things we did out here,” he said.
I looked at him. He looked at the water.
I sighed and sat down next to him in the rich, damp dirt. I rolled the baseball between my palms. “Well. What now?”
He still refused to turn away from the river. “I specifically asked you not to contact me.”
“It’s not like I stalked you down,” I countered. “This
river was my idea, not yours.”
“Right. That explains why I got here first.” We listened to the water lapping at the sand by our toes. “Let me ask you this, Geary. Were you even planning to say good-bye?”
I stopped fidgeting with the baseball and looked him right in the eye. “Knock it off.”
“I guess that answers that question.” He nodded and got to his feet. I couldn’t see his eyes, but his posture was casual. He seemed to consider breaking my heart a jeans-and-T-shirt kind of event.
I stood up too, wiping my palms on my dirt-streaked pajama bottoms. “Don’t just dismiss me like that. I think I deserve a little better from you after everything we’ve been through.”
The moon reflected in those deep autumn eyes. “You know, I used to be able to read you like a book,” he said. “You couldn’t hide anything. The worst poker face in the world. I really liked that about you. But I guess you got better at hiding or I got a lot worse at finding, because I really misjudged you this time. I really thought you had changed.”
“I have. And if you can’t see that…”
But he was shaking his head, his expression one I hadn’t seen for a very long time. He looked stark and stripped down to the essence of himself. “I just can’t keep breaking up with you.”
“Then why the hell do you keep breaking up with me?” My voice broke on the first word, so I let my temper take over.
“I don’t. But it’s kind of a moot point—you leaving me, me leaving you. It still leaves us both in pretty much the same place, doesn’t it?” He gestured to the vast expanse of dark wilderness. “Right here, having this same old conversation. Tell you what. I’ve been sitting here all night, collecting mosquito bites and trying to figure this whole thing out. Why don’t you try it for awhile?” He turned and started to walk away.
“That’s it? ‘Tag, you’re it’ and you cut and run?”
“Smarts, doesn’t it?”
“Flynn, just give me—”
“More time to decide what you want?” He stopped and turned back to face me. “I gave you ten years. And we’re right back where we started. Except now I feel like twice the jackass, because I’m older and wiser and you got me again.”
My Favorite Mistake Page 21