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For everyone who has dreamed of running away, and longed for home
Prologue
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I blew up my life a year ago and now I wanted it back.
I knew I didn’t deserve it. But there I was, standing at my own front door, hoping for a second chance.
We painted the door red when we moved into this house ten years ago. Karl and I loved the idea of a door the color of a fire engine, or a brothel, a door completely incongruous with the rest of the navy and slate-gray entryways on East Eighty-Second Street.
A red door was meant to be cheerful and welcoming . . . maybe a little scandalous.
But standing there, after being gone so long, it intimidated me. It conveyed anger and urgency, like a siren, a warning.
I told myself it was just a door.
I tentatively reached to touch the peeling paint near the brass door knocker while my other hand gripped my house keys in my pocket. The metal warmed as I rubbed my thumb and forefinger back and forth, over and over. How easy it would be to pull the key from my pocket and open the door without knocking, wander into the foyer and up the stairs where Karl would just be waking up, where the girls would be stirring in their beds, kicking their quilts with their tiny feet and peering out at one another, daring the other to be the first to get up, to run and wake up Daddy. This was the Saturday-morning ritual I’d missed for so many Saturdays.
I didn’t have a suitcase, just a heavy canvas duffel slung over one shoulder, the strap slipping toward the crook of my elbow. When I left here I brought along one of our expensive pieces of luggage, the kind with wheels that spin in all different directions, a part of a set, a wedding present. It lost its wheel in the middle of the jungle and I traded it for this duffel, which was stuffed to the point of barely closing with presents for the girls.
I wished I had taken more time to fix myself up in the taxi from the airport, but at least my clothes—jeans, a white T-shirt, and an old cardigan—were clean, if hopelessly rumpled.
I dropped my hand from the door knocker and ran it through my hair. It was duskier than when I left, the roots darker than I’d ever seen them, though the ends remained a sweet honey blond.
What the hell am I doing? The thought seized me. What kind of woman thinks she can leave her husband and her daughters and then just waltz back into their lives? What would Karl say when he saw me? I knew in my bones that I deserved every terrible thing he could say to me. If he told me to leave and get the hell out, I would deserve that too.
But maybe, just maybe, I thought, he’ll understand.
I pulled a large manila envelope out of my bag. What he chose to do with the stack of paper in the envelope would decide our future together.
I reached out again to knock, and this time my hand made contact. The sound echoed through the tall entryway and traveled up the stairs. I knocked like a stranger, or the Seamless deliveryman, slow and tentative, as if apologizing for the intrusion, for my presence. I’d never knocked on my own door before.
No one came.
A part of me was a little relieved. A part of me thought this was a ridiculous idea. I took a small step away from the door and then a larger step that put me on the stairs of the stoop.
I thought about going to the coffee shop down the street, ordering an espresso, texting Karl, and asking him to meet me on his terms. I should have done that in the first place, but I wanted the element of surprise when I arrived unannounced. I thought if he was surprised when he saw me then maybe his expression would reveal how he really felt about me coming home. If he were to meet me in a coffee shop he’d have time to collect himself, time to put on a mask.
The duffel was getting heavier. I had bought too many presents, silly trinkets my children would definitely forget about in less than a week. I tried not to think of them as bribes to regain their affection. As the bag slipped from my shoulder, I stumbled a little on the last stair and heard the door swing open.
“You’re back.”
I was still staring at the ground as I turned around, which was why the first thing I saw were Karl’s plaid pajama bottoms.
My bag slid off my shoulder and fell with a thunk onto the ground. If we were in a movie, Karl would smile. I’d throw my head back and laugh as tears ran down my face while I dashed up the three cement stairs and collapsed into his arms. He’d press his body into mine and I’d tilt my face toward his for a long and passionate kiss, the pain, tension, and resentment of the past year, the past ten years, really, melting off us onto this stoop. His hands would slide down my hips and cup my ass. If this were a movie we wouldn’t even make it up to the bedroom.
Then again, if this were a movie I would probably be a man, the husband returning from a long trip away. Wives and mothers, in fiction and in real life, don’t leave their families.
But it wasn’t a movie. It was my life and I was fucking terrified. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying and straightened awkwardly as I looked up to see Karl’s face, his eyes heavy with apprehension. He looked back at me. “You’re here?” he asked.
I handed him the envelope.
* * *
Eleven months earlier . . .
* * *
Chapter One
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I’ve always loved a good wedding—the perfectly average food, the worse dancing, the over-the-top flowers, the open bar, the sense of possibility that comes when two people are surrounded by everyone they love and still naïve enough to believe the best is yet to come.
And there are actually few things I love more than attending weddings with my husband. After ten years of marriage and two children, attending someone else’s wedding brings out the very best in Karl and me. We both put in the effort. I shave my legs above the knee and Karl wears that cologne I like, the one that smells like burnt oranges. Unlike the stuffy social obligations we attend together for his job, at weddings we can both drink as much as we want and laugh too loud. My husband is a remarkable dancer. You wouldn’t know it to look at him walking down the street in Manhattan with his broad shoulders and slightly lumbering gait. But at weddings he’s suddenly Fred Astaire, twirling and dipping me, amid a sea of other middle-aged men doing their dad moves—karate kicks, the sprinkler, and a sad running man. I delight in watching other women watch Karl and then wrapping my arms around his neck and drawing his face down to mine to remind them that he’s with me. This graceful, handsome, perfect man chose me. In those moments I felt as lucky as I did the day he proposed to me.
But right now there was a gaping Karl-size hole next to me. I was at this wedding alone, and my husband was three thousand miles away. I tried to shake off my disappointment at this fact, determined to make the best of it.
My stomach churned with a mix of wistfulness, nostalgia, and nerves as I looked around the immaculate grounds of the rented Victorian mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean, where two of my oldest friends in the world—Beth and Lauren—would imminently tie the knot.
A young waiter wearing jaunty suspenders and a pubescent mustache smiled at me as I snatched a glass of pink champagne off his tray. I was hoping the bubbly would help fortify me. As clichéd as it was, it felt simultaneously like yesterday and another lifetime that we were getting our MFAs at Columbi
a, ready to take on the world with our sparkling prose. And now, seeing all my old grad school friends had for some reason put me on edge. I felt like I was living that dream where you show up naked for an exam that you never studied for.
It didn’t help that neither Beth nor Lauren informed me that the dress code for their wedding in Big Sur was an aesthetic that could only be described as bohemian chic and would be downright unacceptable anywhere but Northern California. Everyone, the men included, wore loose linen clothes in rich earth tones or Moroccan print kimonos. I’d translated “cocktail attire” on the invitation to mean a royal blue wrap dress and gold statement necklace—the kind of thing I would wear to an actual cocktail party back home in New York.
Getting dressed alone in my room I thought I’d looked nice, pretty even, but here now, in this sea of boho haute couture, I looked like a real estate agent, the kind who flashed you a toothy smile from the back pages of New York magazine and tried to sell you a pied-à-terre with a view of New Jersey.
I’d flown into San Jose this morning and driven the few hours south alone in a rental car. I’d arrived at the preceremony cocktail hour only fifteen minutes ago, but already every interaction with all of my old friends from grad school, the ones I thought I’d be so excited to see, had become a minefield of questions that made me feel anxious and insecure.
“What have you been up to?”
“How’s the writing?”
“You’re so fucking brilliant, Kate. You were always the best of us.”
I smiled until it hurt and said a lot while saying very little, a skill I had honed over years of hosting dinner parties for a never-ending parade of Karl’s colleagues and authors.
Telling them the truth about what I was up to would bore them to tears.
I just found myself repeating the same thing to everyone: “Oh, you know, just raising my girls. They’re four and six now. Mom stuff.”
The looks I received in return were at best polite disappointment and at worst barely disguised disdain that after going into debt to get a graduate degree in writing from an Ivy League university I would choose to be a stay-at-home mom. If Karl had been here it would have been easier. He was a champion at small talk, and with him by my side my life choices felt more easily justified. Also, given that he was one of the most powerful publishers in New York, putting him in a roomful of writers would be like paparazzi on a Kardashian.
As for my own writing, it had been at least five years since I’d actually put pen to paper. Writing was probably the only luxury I could no longer afford.
I hastily finished my first glass of champagne and then grabbed another, sticking to the edges of the party and avoiding eye contact with anyone I knew. I made light chitchat with a relative of one of the brides, Aunt Peggy, a husky older woman from Houston with a bleached blond perm, too-white teeth, and a jewel-toned tunic—the only other person who also looked like a real estate agent at the party.
When I spotted Nina it was like seeing a mirage in a desert. It was hard to believe I hadn’t seen my old grad school roommate in more than ten years. She carried two glasses of tan liquor, almost the same color as her perfectly bronzed shoulders peeking through her off-white bandage dress that left nothing to the imagination.
“Solo at a lesbian wedding?” Nina grinned as she sauntered over to me and finished one of the tumblers in a single gulp. “Want to make out later?”
I excused myself to Aunt Peggy and hugged Nina tightly, inhaling her rich, spicy smell of clove cigarettes, jasmine, and the charcoal natural deodorant she began using years ago before everyone started using natural deodorants and you could find them at Whole Foods. I marveled at my old friend’s bright red lipstick, which stood out boldly against her skin and sleek dark lob. It wasn’t that I didn’t wear makeup. I wore plenty of masks, lotions, and extracts of snail slime that Vogue promised to smooth, de-wrinkle, and highlight, but lipstick hadn’t been a part of my repertoire since I’d had kids and developed the uncontrollable habit of kissing them on their heads and faces and hands and feet every time they were within my reach.
I stole a gulp of Nina’s remaining drink.
“Have you met Aunt Peggy’s date?” She dropped her voice to a sultry conspiratorial whisper.
“She’s not here with Uncle Martin?”
“Divorced. He ran off with his gardener, Rico. Apparently it’s Uncle Martha now. He’s been stealing Aunt Peggy’s control-top grandma panties and padded bras for the better part of two decades.”
“Poor Aunt Peggy!”
Nina laughed a low throaty chuckle. “Well, Aunt Peggy’s getting her own. See that tall drink of cocoa by the bar.”
It was hard to miss the nearly seven-foot-tall black man and not just because he was towering above a sea of pasty white people, but also because he was jaw-droppingly gorgeous.
I burst into a delighted cackle. “I wouldn’t have thought Aunt Peggy had it in her.”
“Oh, she’s had it in her.”
I swatted her. “Nina!”
“That’s why she walks with a limp.”
“I just figured she had a bad hip.”
“She probably does. I’ll bet he’s moved everything out of joint. His name’s Alex. She claims he was her Zumba instructor. Oh, and she likes to be spanked.” Nina offered these two improbable facts with the conviction of a Fox News anchor.
I tried to picture demure Aunt Peggy, who had just given me her recipe for tart lemon squares, bent doggy-style over a bed being smacked with Alex’s massive hand.
I threw back the rest of the scotch in Nina’s glass to get the visual out of my head. “I need another drink.”
As we stood in the interminable line at the bar Nina switched gears to her favorite subject—Nina. She caught me up on her life with a succinct highlight reel of the past decade she appeared to have perfected with repetition—recounting with false modesty how she’d barely squeaked onto the Young Lions 40 Voices Under 40 list, how the New Yorker called her “our generation’s Anaïs Nin with a dash of Hunter S. Thompson,” how her latest book nearly spent more weeks on the bestseller list than Gillian Flynn’s, which was a triumph since, according to Nina, “Everyone buys that kind of slasher trash in airports.” She concluded with how exhausted she was. She landed in California the night before, arriving straight from Norway, where she’d spent the previous three weeks aboard an icebreaker ship bound for the magnetic North Pole. “God, Kate, it was cold enough to freeze your clit off . . . but luckily I found ways to keep warm.”
That was the shtick of Nina’s writing—hard-hitting adventures and sexual escapades in 122 different countries. Not too long ago, I’d spent a week furiously reading all of Nina’s books from her debut—She Comes First—to the most recent, She Comes Everywhere—and enviously devouring the glowing profiles written about her.
Now, I marveled at how quickly we settled back into our old roles, even after all this time—Nina the self-anointed star, me the attentive audience and sidekick. Although in this particular moment, I was grateful for her self-involvement and her chatter because it meant I didn’t have to talk about myself.
We hurried to grab our dinner table assignments before making our way to our seats. I tried to crumple the piece of paper that read KARL CARMICHAEL—TABLE 3 before Nina could see it, but Nina noticed everything.
“Why did Karl ditch you?” she asked with a self-satisfied smile. I knew from reading Nina’s books that she considered marriage a bear trap around the ankle of the modern woman. She wrote about married couples with a smug condemnation usually reserved for ruthless dictators and Taylor Swift.
“He had to work. He had a hysterical author. You know how it is.” I could only imagine that Nina had caused an editor or two plenty of drama along the way.
“Yeah, he’s got a lot going on. I saw a profile of him recently in Poets and Writers. They had a picture of him from the National Book Awards. He’s as hot as ever. That must be so annoying having a husband who just keeps getting bette
r-looking with age.”
Leave it to Nina to offer the pitch-perfect backhanded compliment.
The truth is, I didn’t find it annoying. I found it remarkable and a bit of a cliché, and slightly unfair, but not annoying.
What was annoying was the thought of sitting down at our table for eight and having a conspicuously empty seat next to me. Until three days ago Karl had planned to come, so I didn’t even have time to alert the brides. It would have been our first real time away since our girls came along, and I had been so looking forward to it. We needed to shake things up. Our sex life had become routine but serviceable, like the many Italian bistros of the Upper East Side.
Karl and I once promised ourselves that we would never be the couple who had to schedule sex on their Google calendars and I never thought I would be a wife who would have trouble remembering the last time she had sex with her husband. But here we were. Actually, I do remember the last time we had sex, and that’s the problem. It was over two months ago. We had to end our dry spell.
But then something came up at work—one of his big-deal authors had a meltdown, shaved her head Britney Spears–style circa 2007, took a handful of prescription diet pills, and threatened to erase her manuscript from her hard drive if Karl didn’t take a meeting with her in her bathroom on Friday morning. I’d held out hope that the situation would be resolved by Friday afternoon, but the tabloid-worthy crisis continued until the moment I finally boarded the plane alone this morning.
“She has an editor and a publicist, an agent, and three ex-husbands who can talk her off the ledge,” I’d argued, even though I knew it was useless. Karl promised he would make it up to me, but he was distracted and frustrated. There was no way to explain to him how much I needed this trip now. How much we needed this trip now. I couldn’t find the right words to say that maybe a wedding would help us reignite our spark, that it might give us the time and space to talk about the emptiness I’d begun to feel now that both girls were in school.
Marriage Vacation Page 1