Nice to Come Home To

by Rebecca Flowers

  She smiled into his shirt. “A person can’t smell neat,” she said.

  “Well, you can. Neat as a pin.”

  His shirt was soft, and he had another shirt, a thermal one, on underneath it. For some reason, Pru was touched that he thought to layer two shirts together. He smelled like a wood fire, and of soap.

  He kissed her then. It was their first kiss, and it might as well have been her first kiss ever. No: She was glad it was not her first kiss ever. Because if she hadn’t been kissed before, she might have thought that this was how it always felt.

  “John.” They were moving to the area with the couches, near the back.

  “What?”

  “Are you seeing that girl? Gaia?”

  “Gaia?” he said, as if it were a name from a distant past. “Not really.”

  “Not really, or no?”

  “No.”

  “Were you seeing her?”

  “Yes,” he said, as if pleased to be able to answer something in the affirmative.

  It knocked the wind out of her sails for a minute. She wanted him to have been pining for her. Why hadn’t he been pining? An ex-wife, first, to contend with, and then another lover? It was too much. She sat up and put on her glasses, which she’d removed when he’d started kissing her.

  “Listen,” he said, raising himself up on one elbow. “You don’t just decide one day you’re going to run a marathon, right? You have to do some training first.”

  “Aren’t you being a little glib about this?”

  He sighed. “I am. I’m sorry. I’m embarrassed, I guess. I don’t want you to feel bad.”

  His hands slid around her, inside her sweater, touching her naked back.

  Everything in her wanted to melt. Oh, just let it go, she told herself. “Am I the marathon?”

  He smiled and nodded. “The New York Marathon.”

  “The Boston is harder,” she muttered.

  “Okay, you’re the Boston, then.”

  “And what was she? Just a little warm-up?”

  “She was like a 5K,” he said, so near her ear that she got goose bumps. “Well . . . maybe a 10K.”

  He was nuzzling her ear, and shivers went up and down her arms. She could hear the end of “Thunder Road” in her head, the wordless part, the part with bells and exploding riffs. She wanted to laugh—it was the same make-out song she always heard inside her head. But the something pissy inside continued to gnaw at her. She wished she could be the kind of girl who could just let something go. It bothered her, the idea that he had slept with someone else so recently, while wanting to sleep with her. That wasn’t how she’d imagined this going. When was the last time? How had it ended? What did it all mean?

  Then she realized something, as they found each other again: All she had to do, to be the kind of girl who lets something like that go, was to let it go. Let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go. Maybe she’d have to let it go a thousand times. But she’d just do it, over and over. As often as she needed to.

  So she did. She just let go. She all but shoved it away from her, with both hands.

  Sixteen

  She had forgotten what it was like to be so into another person, under a warm coat and entwined together on a junky couch, that nothing else outside of you could possibly exist.

  You forget you have to get up and go home. You forget that people are waiting for you, wondering where you are. You forget that, at any moment and for no apparent reason, the cops could bust down the door and drag you, naked, through the streets. Well, that might be a stretch, she thought, watching John sleep. But they could. There was misery lurking just outside the camel-hair coat that covered them, in its many unhappy forms.

  She managed to slip out of the café before the first customers came, before even the sun was up. She’d never really fallen into deep sleep, as two people who are in the process of discovering each other on a ratty old coffee house couch never really can. Rather, one minute she was drifting off, and the next she was walking down Columbia Road, practically buttoning up as she hurried home. John had kissed her and said they would talk later. Suddenly, two big lights, then four, came around the corner at Connecticut and down Columbia, shining right in her face. They were accompanied by a mechanical roar that seemed deafening, in the silent morning. The plows. They had finally made it to Adams-Morgan, and their headlights came creeping toward her like a slow-moving search party.

  SHE WOKE UP FROM THE FEW HOURS’ SLEEP SHE’D GOTTEN to feelings of bliss, followed closely by feelings of remorse. She really had let herself go. She wanted to laugh, and she wanted to cry. She stayed in her bedroom as long as she could, until hunger forced her to emerge, around noon, to find something to eat. Patsy watched her, suspiciously, but didn’t ask any questions. Pru wondered if it had even registered that she’d spent the night out of the apartment, somewhere, with a someone.

  John called that afternoon, just to tell her that he was thinking about her. His voice was warm and close, immediately erasing Pru’s feelings of remorse. Patsy had Fiona’s little boy, Sean, over for a play date, so Fiona and Noah could get ready for their annual holiday party. At the moment, Annali and Sean were engaged in a particularly rambunctious game of wrestling on the furniture, so Pru moved into the bedroom and shut the door.

  “What are you doing tonight?” he said.

  “Fiona and Noah’s Christmas party. They decided to go ahead and have it, now that the streets are getting cleared. It’ll be a bunch of NPR people, and moms. My plan is to wander around feeling awkward and ill-informed.”

  “Lucky NPR people, and moms,” he said. “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too,” she said. Her toes curled.

  “Can we see each other later?”

  A thrill went through her. Plans for later. She loved plans for later. “I might could do,” she said.

  “Good. Call me when you get home. Don’t meet anybody at the party.”

  THAT EVENING SHE WORE THE BROWN FLORAL MARC Jacobs dress, with her knee-high lug-soled Frankenstein boots, and trudged through snow to the town house where Fiona and Noah lived. She’d met Fiona when they were both new to D.C. It seemed it was about two minutes later that Fiona had married Noah, quit her job, and started having babies.

  She found Fiona in the kitchen, mixing up sangria. She wore a simple aqua halter top and jeans and she looked fabulous. Fiona had that touch—she could slap a picture she’d torn from a magazine on the living-room wall, and it looked like something from Metropolitan Home. Pru stood with her for a while, listening to the stay-at-home-mom lingo. It was like being in a foreign country.

  “Seven hundred dollars for a Bugaboo!” Fiona was exclaiming. “It better freakin’ nurse the kid at the same time.”

  “I love my Emmalunga.”

  “I have an Inglesina.”

  “I just use the Björn. That’s how I dropped all the baby weight.”

  These were not, Pru realized, the names of Australian tennis stars of the 1970s, but baby transport devices. Nobody mentioned a Peg Perego. Evidently it was no longer the Rolls-Royce of strollers.

  Ferberizing, they said. “I am always, always, always Ferberizing that baby!” “Oh, Gahd, if I have to Ferberize Lucrezia one more time, I’ll kill myself,” cried a sweet-faced woman with frizzy hair.

  “Where do you take them to have them Ferberized?” Pru said to the mom who wore a Nirvana T-shirt and a white belt and looked like she might have a sense of humor. “Is it a drive-through, like Speedy Muffler?”

  “We didn’t have to Ferberize Ezra. Ezra never cried!” exclaimed a statuesque brunette in an orange pashmina. “Never!”

  “Jonah never stops crying,” chimed in another, throwing out her bony chest. “Never!”

  Boys’ names clearly tended toward old Biblical names, among Fiona and Noah’s highly educated set. Pru thought maybe she should invent a baby of her own. Baby Nebuchadnezzar. “We had to take Nebuchadnezzar down to the Ferberizing station, in his Emmalunga,” she might say.
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  “Yasmina licked my breast today,” said the woman in the Nirvana T-shirt. She had a flat, adenoidal voice. “She’s four,” she added. “And then Henry can’t understand why I won’t have sex with him.”

  That’s the dad, right? Pru wanted to say. But she didn’t. She could see why Patsy had never joined a group of moms. She remembered that, at the only community playgroup Patsy ever went to, the group leader asked if they had any requests, after “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” When Patsy shouted out, “Free Bird!” only one other mom laughed.

  Fiona gripped her arm and said, “Come upstairs with me.”

  Fiona pushed open the door to each of her kids’ rooms and peeked in, to make sure they were asleep. At the landing at the top of the stairs, she stopped and sat down.

  “I’m fucking pregnant again.”

  “Oh.” Pru sat down next to her. “Great, right? Great?”

  “Cecily is only one year old. I’m still breastfeeding. Three kids under the age of five? What the hell am I going to do?”

  “You’ll get help. Don’t you have a babysitter already?”

  “It’s not just that. It’s everything else.” Fiona sighed and put her head in her hands.

  “You know, I lose two years of my life with every baby. Two years. I feel like we were just getting to a normal life again. You know, we could actually go out to dinner without agonizing about a baby the whole time, or me running home to nurse. I was going to get certified to teach yoga. I was starting to paint again. Forget all that, now.”

  “You’ll just do it, Fi. There’s lots of time to teach yoga.” Pru started to touch her back. Then she remembered that Fiona didn’t like to be touched, especially while she was still nursing a baby. Which was pretty much all the time, in recent memory, Pru had to admit. She floated her hand to rest on the floor, as if that was what she’d meant to do all along.

  “You’ll just do it. You’ll be fine. Two years isn’t that long.”

  “I will be forty-one,” Fiona said, mournfully.

  “But you know,” Pru said, bracingly. “A baby.”

  “Three babies. You just can’t imagine what that means. It would be nice if even one of them could, you know, tie their own friggin’ shoes. Imagine, getting the two oldest ready for school while I’m still nursing the third . . .”

  “Can’t you not nurse this one?”

  “Oh sure.” Fiona rolled her eyes. “I’ll just tell him when he grows up that I nursed the first two, and not him. Maybe I’ll have the other two baptized and leave them trust funds, while I’m at it.”

  “Well,” Pru said, delicately, “have you thought of, you know . . .” There was one thing that hadn’t changed in twenty years, she thought: “You know,” the universal euphemism for abortion.

  Fiona closed her eyes and sighed. “I don’t know if I could. It’s not just mine to do with whatever I want anymore, you know? I mean, before, when I didn’t have any children, that was one thing. But now, I don’t know. It’d be weird. I already know the date this one is due, you know? I’ve already pictured telling the kids. But thanks for asking. These moms, you know”—she gestured downstairs, toward the kitchen—“I feel like if they knew I was even considering it, they’d have me forcibly sterilized.”

  “I know what,” Pru said, brightening. “I’ll be your nanny. It’s not like I have anything better to do.”

  “Still no work?”

  She lifted up her empty hands, shrugging. “I think soon I may qualify for Meals on Wheels.”

  She wanted to tell her about John, and last night, but it didn’t seem like the right moment to spring fresh, hot new love on Fiona. They went back downstairs and Pru moseyed into the living room, the other conversational black hole. The talk among the NPR people was all snow-removal budgets, federal funding for the arts, and digital versus analog tape.

  Noah was talking to one of the better-known on-air personalities, and clearly flirting with her. Fiona knew that he had a big crush on the personality. When Pru had asked her if this didn’t bother her, Fiona had shrugged and said, without a smidgen of doubt, No, it’s cute. Pru secretly coveted Fiona’s relationship with Noah. It was a tacit understanding between them that she did. A husband like Noah would love his wife so much that it’d be okay for him to flirt with other women. Fiona, however, coveted the time Pru had for manicures and movies. At least, Pru hoped it was a tacit understanding. The problem with tacit understandings was that they might all be in your head.

  Pru pictured herself and John here, in Fiona and Noah’s fashionable row house. That was her in the kitchen, putting more lemon in the hummus and complaining about the cost of preschool. That was her husband, John, flirting with the NPR personality. Well, maybe not flirting but talking with her in his amiable, friendly way. It was their baby upstairs, in her crib. Her stomach lurched. What if she was pregnant? It seemed unlikely, but it was possible, of course. It was the first time she hadn’t been flash-frozen with fear from the inside out, thinking of that possibility. Maybe the timing wasn’t ideal, but they could handle it. Just like being stranded out at Shenandoah, they’d make the best of it. They’d learned that much about each other during that night in the woods. It was something they’d always have going for them—no matter what happened, they could count on each other to try to make the best of things. It wasn’t such a small thing, either. With Rudy, she’d believed in her own abilities to make things work. With John, she trusted him, too. Trusted him absolutely.

  The sole other person at the party who seemed to be unattached was an unpublished novelist named Elliott Barstow. She met him while he was anchored at the buffet table, mowing through Fiona’s baba ghanoush. He was a stocky, hairy man, and Pru had never heard of him. She asked him what he wrote, and he said he was working on a series of detective novels based on “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

  “You have to have a gimmick like that,” he said, gesturing with a triangle of pita bread. “Stand out from the crowd. The letters of the alphabet, numbers, the cardinal virtues—already taken. But no one’s done the Twelve Days yet.”

  He’d said it as though that was what everyone called it, the Twelve Days. She wanted to remember that, to tell McKay.

  “Will you hold my drink?” Elliott said. “I’ve got carpal tunnel, so it’s hard for me. From all the typing, you know.”

  He handed Pru his drink and she stood there, holding both his drink and her own.

  “It’s an automatic twelve-book deal, see?” Elliott continued. “It can’t lose.”

  “Are you starting at a partridge in a pear tree? Or—what’s number twelve?”

  “Drummers drumming. Yes, from twelve to one, to mimic the song. Each holiday season, see, I come out with another. Oh, and I have the TV ad already worked out. Can’t you just hear it? Clink clunk. That prison-door closing sound. Clink clunk. A quiet band camp in a sleepy upstate hamlet is ripped apart by a series of mysterious teen murders. Clink clunk. Twelve Drummers Drumming. The latest Sydney Pearson murder mystery, from crime writer Elliott Barstow.”

  He took his glass from her hand and drank. “Available this Christmas at fine bookstores everywhere,” he added thoughtfully.

  She spent half an hour listening to the plot outlines of Elliott’s books. Although Five Golden Rings, about brutal murders in the porn industry, was certainly titillating, her personal favorite was Ten Lords A-Leaping. “Why are members of the British Parliament committing suicide by jumping off London Bridge? Detective Sydney Pearson investigates,” Elliott recited, in a low voice.

  “Clink clunk,” Pru added.

  She danced with Elliott when Noah put on some music, then called it a day and walked home by herself. She felt charmed by everything, Elliott and his funny ways, the moms, who’d gotten quite loud and drunk, the Christmas lights and the snow-peaked houses. Her apartment was dark and quiet when she let herself in. Whoop and Jenny both padded over quietly to greet her. She called John’s cell and left him a message that she was home. She had to struggle to st
ay awake. She hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before, and had had a little too much sangria at Fiona’s. John must have been having a busy night, she thought. It was after midnight, and she still hadn’t heard from him. Had she missed him? Was he expecting her to call earlier? She was just mulling over the options when the phone in her hand rang. She picked it up quickly.

  “It’s me,” said John. “Can you talk?”

  “Hold on,” she said. Patsy was asleep on the couch, so she took the phone out to the hall.

  “I’ve been thinking of you all day,” he said. “I really want you to know how much last night meant to me. How great it was. You know, I forgot about everything. About the fact that, well, I can’t just do anything I want to.” He stopped talking. Pru sat down. She felt this could not be going in a good direction. The elevator doors opened and some people stepped out, their noses red from the cold. Pru pulled her feet back as they walked past.

  “I just hung up with Lila,” John said. “I have to tell you something.”

  “Okay,” said Pru, trying to keep her voice neutral.

  It seemed that Lila was unhappy. She claimed that she had made a terrible mistake leaving him. Being alone in the snow-storm forced her to do some thinking. She’d broken off her other relationship. She wanted John’s forgiveness. She wanted to fix their marriage. She was willing to do whatever it took. She had left him only because she couldn’t handle losing the baby. But now she realized she needed him. That they needed each other. John’s voice was sad, and quiet. Pru listened quietly. She didn’t say anything.

  “Hello?” he said, after a long pause.

  “I’m here.” She could hear the sounds of a TV on her floor. Someone was watching Seinfeld. She wondered if she could figure out which episode it was. She thought maybe the one with man hands. She tried to parse the voices on the laugh track, decide what each of the laughers would look like, if they were real people.

  “Are you still there, Pru? Will you talk to me?” he said. It was heartbreaking, the way he said it.

  “I’m still here.” Her throat was dry and the words stuck in her throat. “Here,” she said again. Googly googly googly, she thought, would be a tall man with adult acne.