I nodded, but my uncertainty must have shown in my face.
“Okay, I can see you don’t like that, either. I’m curious: What do you think I should have said?” His tone was conversational, not defensive, but I still knew I was way out of my depth.
“Neil, I couldn’t even begin to have the right to an opinion about that.”
He shrugged. “I’m asking. That gives you the right.”
“I don’t—”
“Let’s look at it another way. Do you believe in God? I don’t care if you were raised to believe. I mean do you now, personally, believe in the existence of God?”
I only had to think about it for a minute before I answered. “Not really. I guess I believe it’s possible, but no, I don’t actively think there is one. At least, not according to what any of the religions say.”
He nodded. “Okay. And do you believe in an afterlife?”
“I don’t know. Again, I’m not sold on the whole thing with the choirs of angels and Jesus on the big golden armchair, but it seems impossible to me that when we die, we’re just gone. I mean, there are so many examples, millions of them, of ordinary everyday people, many of whom aren’t even religious, and they talk about sensing the presence of loved ones who are gone. I guess…I guess maybe that’s what I would have said. Not that she was in heaven, but that…they’d always carry her spirit inside them. So that they could still feel close to her.”
He brushed my cheek with his knuckles. “That’s a beautiful thought. And I wish I could believe in it, I really do. But I know better.”
“How?”
“I told you I didn’t have siblings because it’s easier to explain that way, sometimes, without getting into everything…but I had an older brother, Jason. He died when I was eleven and he was fourteen. Leukemia. If I could tell you the times I tried to feel his presence around me…tried to talk to him and feel like he was listening…we even had an honorary seat and a moment of silence for him at our wedding. And that’s all it was: silence and an empty chair.”
I stroked his throat, aching. The cruelty of living could steal your breath sometimes, it really could. “Neil, I’m so sorry.”
“So the thing is, I know. I know there’s nothing left of Eva for them to feel, other than what we do ourselves to keep her memory alive. I don’t see the benefit of telling them otherwise. I won’t lie to my kids. I won’t. Not about death, not about heaven, not about Eva.”
The air in the room was too taut, too silent. I wanted to pull him back into the present. “What about Santa Claus?”
He laughed. “There’s been some confusion about that,” he admitted. “Last year I got a letter from one of the moms, accusing me of ruining Christmas for the rest of her daughter’s life because Clara told her Santa was actually just her mommy and daddy.”
“Oh boy.”
“I believe the word used to describe me was ‘joyless.’ ”
“Nice thing to say to a man who just lost his wife.”
“Yeah, well.” He rolled onto his back and rested one wrist on his forehead. “I’ve been wondering if I should reconsider my approach on that one. I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know what any of the answers are.”
“Nobody does.”
“No, I mean, I seriously don’t. It scares the shit out of me. I’m raising girls. Two girls! What the hell do I know about raising girls?”
“You’re doing a phenomenal job.”
“But none of the hard stuff has hit. They’re small enough that the boys haven’t started acting like dickheads yet; but they will. And I’ve got these two tiny women that I have to teach to be strong, and to stand up for themselves, and respect themselves, and to not text people photos of their boobs or sleep with boys to get approval.” He ran a hand over his scalp. “I have to talk to them about their vaginas, Caroline! And their periods! How the hell am I supposed to talk to a young girl about her period?” he demanded, hands flung wide with entreaty.
I couldn’t help it; I started giggling. The panic in his voice. I pulled his face toward me and kissed him. “You are going to do great. Seriously. You’re already teaching them most of it, and as for the sex stuff…did Eva have any sisters?”
He made a wry face. “Yeah, but Rose is…let’s just say a sex discussion with Rose is not going to be any less embarrassing than one with me.”
“Well, you still have some time to figure it out. If all else fails, you can buy them one of those books, throw it in the room with them, and lock the door.”
“Believe me, that’s about what I’m planning on,” he said.
“Just as long as you give them the talk way before you even think they’ll need it. I think dads tend toward a certain…inaccuracy about that sort of thing.”
He flipped onto his side again, facing me. “How old were you?”
“The first time I had sex?”
He nodded.
“Seventeen.”
He pursed his lips, clearly torn between the sense that this was perfectly normal for the grown woman he was sleeping with, yet alarmingly young-sounding for either of his daughters.
“It was fine,” I assured him, grinning. “I was fine. Hell, we even got married. Although, actually, scratch that. Maybe marrying the first guy you sleep with isn’t such a sterling idea.”
He leaned in to kiss me, like he always did whenever I made some deprecating remark about my marriage. “I don’t think I knew that about you,” he said. “I knew you were together a long time, but high school, wow.”
“Yeah. Adam cited that as one of the reasons he imploded. He never got to explore who he was without me, let alone with another person.” I heard the bitter, mocking tone of my voice and I despised it. “Anyway, he’s exploring now.” I paused for a moment, but remembered the promise I had made to myself, and, though unspoken, to Neil: total truth. “It was Patrick, by the way. That Adam had the affair with.”
Neil blinked, twice. “Who’s Patrick?”
“Patrick Timothy. Rubinowitz,” I added, as a matter of spite. “I found out about it at the gallery opening when I realized the guy Patrick was kissing in one of his photos had a very familiar birthmark.”
“Shit,” Neil said softly. “No wonder you didn’t want to try to exhibit him.” He shifted closer and pressed a lingering kiss to my shoulder. “I have to tell you, I thought about you a couple of times. Before we were dating.”
“You thought about me? What does that mean?”
“In the sexy way,” he said, a soft laugh in his voice. He trailed more kisses down my arm. “Like, I saw you at work looking hot, and then I went home and jerked off while I thought about having sex with you.”
Surprise and self-consciousness flushed my skin with heat, but he kept going. “The first time, I hated myself for thinking of someone else instead of Eva. It felt like a betrayal. And then I came in the next day and there you were again. Laughing, and talking to me. I’d always thought you were so beautiful, and then your sister posted that cute photo of you two with your Jason masks, and I realized I just liked you. And for the first time it felt like maybe it was better…if I didn’t think about sex with Eva. Because here was someone who was actually alive.”
I cupped my palm against his cheek and kissed him, slow.
He eased me back onto the pillow to give himself better access to what he wanted. “I obviously never expected to have the opportunity to act on it,” he said, resuming his chain of kisses along my shoulder. “I would never have wished for Adam to do what he did. But since he did do it…”
The thought of Adam felt very distant now. “I agree with you,” I said. “Since he did do it, I am enjoying a lot of benefits.”
“I’m very happy to be your silver lining,” he said, and lowered his head to kiss me in earnest.
•
“Daddy?”
The tiny voice brushed against me in my sleep, like a soap bubble. “Daddy,” it peeped again, and I groaned in protest, but Neil was already stirring. The roo
m was still dark. The doorknob rattled, but didn’t turn, and I barely had time to feel grateful for Neil’s foresight in locking it before the voice outside escalated into a panicked wail.
“I’m right here, baby, just hang on a second,” he called, whipping his jeans up his legs and tugging on his T-shirt, but the door rattled harder and the wailing intensified.
“Sorry,” he whispered to me with a pained grimace, then opened the door to the small banshee melting down in the hallway. He pulled it closed again behind him, but I could still hear his voice as he soothed her.
“Clara, sweetheart, I’m right here. I’m right here, I’ve got you.”
“I couldn’t find you, Daddy!” she sobbed. “Where did you go?”
I flinched. Oh, how that must have raked him.
“Sweetheart, I didn’t go anywhere, I was just asleep. I woke up as soon as you called me. And here I am, see?”
“But I couldn’t get to you, I couldn’t find you.”
“Baby, that’s only ’cause I locked the door,” he explained. “I was right on the other side, like I am every night. Like I will be always. Now, what’s wrong? Why did you come to get me?”
“I made the bed wet again,” she snuffled.
“Is that all? That’s no big deal, baby. Come on, let’s go find you some clean sheets.”
The crisis seeming to have been averted, I sighed out my breath and sagged back onto my pillow. The malevolent red numbers on Neil’s alarm clock stated it was 5:54 in the morning. I had no idea what to do. Should I get up and help him? He seemed to have it well under control, but I felt a little useless just lying there.
A few minutes later, he shuffled back into the room, scuffing a hand over his head and yawning. “Clara’s back down, but now Annie’s up. And when Annie’s up, she stays up. So that means I’m up,” he said, leaning across the bed to kiss me. “But you should stay here. I’ll try to keep her quiet so you can sleep.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, and Caroline?” he said as he straightened. “As much as I love having you naked in my bed, PJs would probably not be a bad decision.”
I stared at him and slowly shook my head. “Neil, I didn’t bring PJs to your house.”
“Right,” he said, nodding once as if remembering something. “Of course you didn’t.” He crossed to his dresser and pulled out a T-shirt and a pair of plaid flannel PJ bottoms.
“Plaid,” I muttered as they landed in my lap. “Damn New Englander.”
“Damn New Yorker,” he said. “You think the plaid is bad? I could have given you my Brady jersey.” He winked at me as the door closed behind him.
22
•
I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion….
—Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera
I woke again to an explosion of giggles as a herd of very small elephants thundered barefoot down the hallway.
“Annie, your turn!” A squeal, then more giggling. Then more elephants.
I squinted one eye at the clock: 7:37. It was still pretty painful, considering we hadn’t gone to sleep until after two, but at least the sun was up.
As I extracted myself from under the covers, I heard Neil’s voice.
“Guys! I told you, no running. You can play in your room, but you cannot play out here.”
“But whyyyyyy?” It had to be Clara.
“Because I said so. Enough.”
The sounds drifted away again, but I was up. I needed some sort of sweatshirt, though: Neil’s apartment was chilly now that winter had really settled in. I creaked open a likely looking drawer in the big dresser from which he’d retrieved my PJs, and grinned at what greeted me inside. Gray sweaters, navy sweaters, oatmeal sweaters: The drawer was overflowing with rugged, manly wool. I grabbed the first one off the heap and tugged it over my head. The cuffs were so long they covered my fingertips.
Neil was nowhere in sight when I emerged from his bedroom, so I followed the sounds of muffled laughter down the hall toward the girls’ room. The door was ajar, so I knocked and nudged it open a little further. Annie and Clara were sitting in the middle of a large, colorfully striped rug, their Disney dolls strewn around them like victims of a shipwreck.
“Hey, ladies, whatcha doing?” I said.
“We’re playing princesses,” announced Annie. “Wanna play?”
“Sure,” I said, settling cross-legged on the floor. Presumably Neil would reappear before long from wherever he’d gone and rescue me.
“Here, you be Belle,” said Annie, thrusting a yellow-gowned brunette toward me. I thought of King Kong with Fay Wray in his fist.
I retrieved Belle from her, but I wasn’t sure what precisely one was supposed to do when playing princesses, and Annie did not give immediate direction. I studied Belle, who had some severely snarled hair and a permanent expression of dimwitted surprise. Well, I knew what to do with the hair, at least.
“Do you have a brush, so I can brush out her hair?” I asked Annie, but it was Clara who passed it to me, unsmiling.
I tackled Belle’s bedhead in silence for a few minutes while Annie chattered. She and Clara seemed to be setting up some sort of tea party for the dolls, and I couldn’t help noticing that amid a passel of blondes and redheads, and a couple of brunettes with a hint of a tan, there was only one princess who looked like these two little girls. And not only that, but pinned on the wall above the twin beds on either side of the room were posters of the ethereally blond heroine of the latest merchandise juggernaut disguised as a children’s movie. I was absolutely certain that Neil, understandably, despised it, and equally certain that, if Annie and Clara were anything like my other friends’ kids collectively, the noble intentions he must have started with had been slowly but helplessly ground down by the glacier-like weight of his daughters’ craving for princesses. There was something adorable about that.
I could sense Clara watching me, so I offered her a friendly smile, but the only response was a frown. It was such a peculiar sensation to look at her—her beautiful eyes and the shape of her face were so familiar, it was all Neil—but the hostility made her a stranger.
“Did you sleep here in our house last night?” asked Clara after a while.
Ruh-roh. “Oh…um, yes, I did,” I said.
“You weren’t in the office room,” she said. “And I didn’t see you on the couch where Uncle Colin sleeps when he stays over. Where did you sleep?”
I pressed down on my panic, reminding myself that this wasn’t an inquisition; she was just a little girl and she was curious because I had apparently spent the entire night in her apartment and she had no idea where I had been. I didn’t see a way to lie, or a reason to. “Oh, well…I, uh…I slept in your daddy’s bedroom.”
The frown deepened. “But that’s Daddy’s room.”
“It is, you’re right. But he said it was okay for me to sleep there.” God damn it, where the hell was Neil?
“That used to be Mommy’s room, too. Why did Daddy let you sleep in Mommy’s room?”
I was losing ground, quickly. “You know, I think…I think maybe that’s something you should talk about with your daddy. And he can tell you about it.”
“What’s something she should talk about with me?” said Neil, appearing in the doorway and crossing his arms with a lazy smile. I had never been happier to see him.
“Why she slept in you and Mommy’s room,” announced Clara, landing hard on each angry syllable.
“Oh, that’s easy,” said Neil. He swept some of the flotsam and jetsam out of his way until there was room for him to sit down next to her. “Caroline is my sleepover friend.”
“Your sleepover friend?”
“Yeah.” He selected one of the other abandoned dolls—I think it might have been Ariel the mermaid—and started fastidiously straightening her outfit. “You know how some of the older girls have their friends come and stay over at their house for the night?”
“Yeah…”
“And they sleep in their rooms so they can talk about stuff?”
“Yeah…”
“So that’s why Caroline slept over. And every once in a while, I sleep over at her house, too. We’re sleepover friends.” As he delivered this coup de grâce, he shot me such an intimate smile that I was sure steam had to be rising from my skin.
“Daddy, can I have a sleepover friend?” asked Annie.
“Sure you can, sweetheart, when you’re a little older.”
And exactly how MUCH older depends on which sort of sleepover friend we’re talking about, I thought, unable to repress a smirk.
“All right, princesses,” said Neil. “It’s Sunday morning, and you know what Sunday morning means—”
“Pancakes!” shouted Annie, leaping to her feet and charging out the door, her doll dangling wildly from her hand. Clara followed behind, laughing, her concerns about my lurking behavior apparently forgotten for the time being.
“Nice save, sleepover friend,” I said, shimmying against Neil for a kiss as his arm slipped around my waist.
He grinned. “Oh, I had that one ready. I knew that was going to come up sooner rather than later.”
“Pretty and smart,” I said, between little nibbling kisses. “And they said it couldn’t be done.”
He gave my flannel-clad butt one last lingering rub, then herded me toward the door. “Come on. Pancake time.”
Sunday pancakes, it turned out, were something of an event in the Crenshaw household. Until Neil told them to knock it off, the girls ran laps around the kitchen island like it was the hippodrome; then, once quelled, they sat in their spots at the counter and chattered at him nonstop. He’d clicked on his iPod—a bright, infectiously rhythmic Cuban band this time—and he was punctuating his movements around the kitchen in time to the music. I don’t think he even realized he was doing it, but it was cute as all hell. And the actual pancakes themselves were no ordinary pancakes—these were made with lemon juice and ricotta cheese, moist and delicious, drizzled with maple syrup from a farm in Vermont a few miles from where he’d grown up.
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