She picked at the dark polish on her thumbnail. “You could come visit.”
“New York?”
“My roommate is going to be gone most weekends. Her boyfriend lives in DC.”
“I haven’t gone back since I moved out.”
“So? You’re not banned from the city. It’s not like they’re going to turn you away at the border.”
“Very funny.”
“You have to meet Donald. He’s so great.”
I made some noise of equivocation.
“Come on. What else are you doing up here? It could be good for you, you know—a distraction. Get out of the house.”
“You sound just like Mom.”
“Ugh. Shut up. You know what I mean. It’d be fun. We can go out together.”
“I’ll think about it.”
She sighed. “I’m not tired yet.”
“Welcome to my world.”
Elizabeth lifted a finger and delicately scratched the side of her nose. She was so deliberate, so economical in her gestures. The fidgety tendencies I’d noticed among girls our age—twisting their hair, touching their faces, biting their lips—Elizabeth was completely devoid of. When had she become so mature, so self-possessed? I had been so immersed in my own life the last five years that I had completely ignored hers. I wondered what else I’d missed.
“So Mom’s being hard on you?” she said. “I bet she’s going crazy right now, with you hanging around all day. She probably hates it.”
I laughed. “Yeah, you can tell?”
“Maybe it’s good for her. This will teach her a lesson. Not everyone can have perfect children all the perfect time.” She paused. “But she’s always been hard on you. Did you ever notice that? They were both so tough. They set such high standards. I think I had it easier. They didn’t pay as much attention to me.”
I propped myself up on my elbows, staring at her. “Are you kidding me? You? You are one hundred percent the favorite.”
“I’m not saying that. It’s just—I don’t know. With you it’s like they had to check every box. You were the first kid. Once you did everything you were supposed to do, they kind of let go of me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been great for me. But I always felt kind of bad for you. Everything you did had to be a certain way. Like, do you remember the first time you brought Evan home?”
“Jesus,” I groaned. “Poor Evan. That was such a disaster.”
It had been terrible. A weekend toward the end of freshman year, we took the train up to Boston for the first parental meet and greet. My dad spent the whole night on the phone with a client. Elizabeth had a friend over for dinner, and they did their best to distract us by chattering about high school gossip. But my mother’s mood descended on the table like an unpleasant odor. She decided, instantly, that she didn’t like Evan. That he was all wrong for me. That he would never, ever live up to Rob. Evan was sweating through his shirt during dinner.
So your parents own a grocery store, I hear, she said, eyebrow arched as she dragged her knife through her green beans.
That’s right, Evan said. It’s doing really well. They’ve started stocking a lot more organics lately. It’s catching on even in our little town.
Elizabeth laughed at the memory. “That was great, actually. She didn’t have a clue what to say to him. I still remember the look on her face when you told her you were dating a Canadian hockey player. It was worth it just for that.”
Her laughter stopped as soon as the words escaped her. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—sorry.”
I shook my head. “It’s fine, Lizzie. Tell me more about Donald.”
The night crept by, the house silent around us except for the occasional chime of the hall clock downstairs. Around 3:00 a.m., Elizabeth finally started to yawn. She drifted off while telling me about a new photo series she was working on. I tucked the blanket around her and went back to my own room, to wait for sleep.
And it was the truth. It was, surprisingly, fine. It was the first time I had talked about Evan with anyone since the breakup. My parents pretended it had never happened. Elizabeth, I think, had pieced together most of it, but she had some of our mother in her—she didn’t probe when the topic was too delicate. Whenever Abby brought Evan up, I tended to change the subject. She’d snapped at me once. “Julia. Seriously. Enough of this repressive WASP bullshit. We have to talk about this at some point.” There was a long silence, then she sighed. “I’m sorry. That was unfair.” But where could I begin?
“It’s just…” I’d said. “I just need more time.”
And so to finally say his name aloud was a relief. Like ice shattering. Evan. He existed. He still existed.
I thought I had rid myself of any feeling for him, so that when the break came, it would be clean and easy. Just like the switch from Rob to Evan four years earlier. Adam would be waiting, baton extended, and I would simply reach for it and keep going. But this wasn’t to be. Adam wasn’t there (how could I have ever thought he would be?), and, more important, Evan wasn’t someone I could leave behind so painlessly. At this age perhaps we take change for granted: you can adopt and discard different identities as easily as Halloween costumes, and from that comes the arrogance of thinking that you can decide when, and how, you get to change. Evan had been one chapter of my life, I thought, but for the next—for Adam—I was going to become a new kind of person.
But when everything washed away in the ensuing mess, I was left with something not so easily discarded after all: the girl I had been before everything started. The girl who had loved Evan, who had finally understood that the past didn’t have to determine what would come in the future; the girl who had learned to be happy. It seemed that I had her back now, but I worried it was too late. She doesn’t fit in anymore. But this is me. This is the real me. I so desperately don’t want to lose it, that tender flame of being.
* * *
I spent that December weekend trying very hard not to think about my outpouring to Adam. Through my pounding hangover that Saturday, I cleaned the apartment. I beat the rugs on the fire escape, washed the windows, scrubbed the bathtub until it shone. That night I went to Abby’s holiday party. Her apartment was cheery and cozy, garlanded with lights and tinsel, mulled cider bubbling on the stove. I drank only water, still feeling sick from the night before. Evan had mentioned the party. I’d texted him to ask if he was coming, but he didn’t respond. Whenever a wave of noise announced an arrival, I found myself hoping—for the first time in months—that it would be Evan walking through the door. I wanted something beyond our stilted interaction on the stoop that morning. I felt it dangling in the air, like a sharp blade, the danger of what we hadn’t said.
By 2:00 a.m., as the party was emptying out, I gave up and left. Evan came home later and slept for a few hours before heading back to work early Sunday morning. I woke up nervous and jittery, needing distraction from my ballooning guilt. (But guilt over what, over which part? I still didn’t quite know.) I went to the Met that afternoon, but I couldn’t focus on the art. My lack of concentration seemed like a failure, and it gave the museum an oppressive air: another reminder of my inability to engage, to find a passion, to figure it out. A tour was wending past, and I clung to it, sheltering myself in the monologue of the leader. It was dark by the time I left the museum, and I went to bed early, falling into a shallow sleep. Evan got home past midnight, and I awoke wondering if I ought to turn on the light and try to talk to him, actually talk to him. To offer a real apology. But he lingered in the living room, and I fell asleep again.
Monday morning brought a new sting. Maybe I could pretend things were fine over the weekend, but on a weekday my unemployment was impossible to ignore. I went to the coffee shop down the block and looked online for job openings. I couldn’t concentrate. The whirring and banging of the espresso machines, the tinny jazz, the yoga-toned mothers with their lattes. Distractions everywhere. I was waiting for something, but I didn’t know what. Adam hadn’t called or texted. He
hadn’t said a thing since Friday night. I reach back and try to remember what I was thinking about Adam at that moment, but I can’t quite say. My memory of that time is so infected by what I feel now. Or perhaps it’s that I was starting to realize the scope of my mistake. I wasn’t fixated on Adam anymore, because Adam wasn’t the person I’d have to reckon with. Evan was.
But that can’t be entirely true. Later that Monday night, after I ventured out into the rain to pick up dinner, some thought of Adam had driven me to open my computer. At home, I shook a packet of oyster crackers across my container of too-hot soup while I navigated to the New York Observer’s website. Maybe I was curious to see whether Adam had been working all weekend. Maybe I wanted to check the news after ignoring it for a few days. Or maybe an alarm bell was already ringing in my subconscious, finally forcing me to acknowledge the trigger on which I’d been resting my finger for months. I had only lifted one spoonful of soup to my mouth before I saw the headline strung across the top of the website in big, bold black letters for the whole world to see.
* * *
Last night I thought about calling Evan. It was near midnight, and I was driving down the empty roads in our neighborhood, killing time, the changing colors of the stoplights cascading and reflecting like a beat on the wet surface of the pavement. I pulled over, the car idling askew in a parking lot while I dialed his number. My pulse skittered. I wanted so badly to hear his voice. My finger was hovering over the button when my mind flashed to him, two hundred miles south in New York, his phone vibrating on the surface of his desk or on some bar. Lifting it to check the caller and grimacing at the sight of my name, silencing it without a second thought.
What could I say? What could I ever say that would explain what I had done? I switched off my phone and turned back toward home.
* * *
I read the article on my computer through blurring vision. What stood out the most was the byline at the top of the story. Adam McCard.
It was so obvious. I was so stupid. Through confidential sources within the company. Everything I’d chosen to ignore or dismiss or rationalize through the fall—every sign had been pointing to this outcome. Adam had been playing me all along.
I called Adam over and over. It rang before going to voice mail, then eventually it went straight to voice mail. Why bother answering? He knew exactly why I was calling. And I had served my purpose. I sent him a string of texts, my hands shaking. Call me back. WTF?? What the hell is this? I felt a hot bellow of anger at him, but especially at myself. I had done this. This was my fault.
I stared at my phone from across the room, wanting to smash it into a hundred pieces. I couldn’t think straight. I needed to go somewhere, out, away. In my rush to leave, grabbing a raincoat and enough money to get myself a drink, I left my phone sitting on the coffee table. I realized my error belatedly, in a bar five blocks from home, halfway through my first drink. But I wonder now if I did it on purpose. Evan would have seen the article, would be searching for an explanation, wondering who the betrayer was. He deserved an answer. Maybe I wanted to give Evan the final pleasure of catching me in the act, and myself the punishment of finally being caught.
* * *
Yesterday Elizabeth waved good-bye through the open window of the taxi that was taking her to the station, for her train to New York. She insisted on taking a taxi, saying she was too old for a big scene at the train station. I was walking back up the stairs to the front porch when my phone rang.
I could picture Abby on the other end, taking a break from her usual Sunday run around the reservoir, hair pulled back in a ponytail, dodging strollers and dogs. I sank into the wicker chair that my parents’ interior designer had artfully placed in the corner of the porch, where it caught the summer breeze and a view of the blooming hydrangea. The yard was brilliantly green. Abby had only a few weeks of teaching left in the school year, then a summer of freedom. She and Jake, who had finally quit his job, were planning a trip to Spain, maybe Morocco, maybe Greece—a wandering months-long itinerary.
Abby cleared her throat. “I have to tell you something.”
I wondered for a flash if she and Jake were moving in together. I never would have predicted that she’d wind up with a preppy finance guy, but they just clicked. The rule book, as far as I could tell, had been thrown out the window. She was happy, and I was happy for her. I had decided, some months earlier, to bury the secret of me and Jake somewhere deep and unfindable. It was something I was glad to let go of.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Jake’s parents are getting a divorce.”
I wasn’t surprised. Perhaps a little that I was hearing this from her—surely my parents had known?—but the Fletchers hadn’t seemed happy for a long time.
“Oh, Abby, I’m sorry. That sucks. How’s Jake doing?”
“He’s okay. But that’s not really—it’s not just the divorce. It’s—well. Dot found out Henry has been cheating on her.”
Of course. He and Eleanor weren’t exactly subtle.
“What? Really? That’s…that’s horrible.”
“With your old coworker, actually. Eleanor. I guess it had been going on for a while. Apparently Dot always had her suspicions. There’s been a whole string of women from the foundation who Henry’s slept with.”
“That’s awful.”
Abby was silent on her end. I could hear honking and traffic in the background, a barking dog, a faraway siren. The sounds of the city.
“You there?” I said.
“Okay, Jules, this is going to sound really weird. But I feel like I have to tell you.”
“What is it?”
“Promise you’ll stay calm, okay? Deep breaths.”
“Abby? You’re freaking me out.”
“So all these women Henry slept with, they were always girls who worked at the foundation. And they were usually—ugh—they were usually Laurie’s assistants. I guess Laurie often hired friends of the family as a favor to the Fletchers. They were always the young, pretty ones. Henry’s type, I guess. He went through them fast. Eleanor was the exception.”
“Creepy.”
“Dot found this out a while ago. Back in November or December, around the gala. Dot confronted him, and she made Laurie clean house. They fired Eleanor around Christmas. And—God, Jules. She made Laurie fire you, too.”
“Abby? What—”
“Dot’s going to keep the foundation after the divorce. She’ll have plenty of money to keep it running. But she wanted to get rid of anyone she suspected might have slept with Henry. Which included you. So she made Laurie fire you. The story about having financial problems was a cover.”
I barked out a hybrid cough-laugh-sob. “Oh, my God.”
“I’m so sorry. I thought you should know.”
“Jesus.”
“Jules, for what it’s worth, this is only Dot’s paranoia. I told Jake that Julia Edwards is not like that. You just wouldn’t do that. Never, ever. You’re way too good a person. She’s a total bitch for thinking that about you.”
I felt a sick pain in my stomach. Maybe at one point I had been a good person, but not anymore. I couldn’t pretend to be offended or outraged at the insinuation. For so long I’d been able to cling to this purity, at least: my firing had been unjust. I was justified in my complaints—until now, suddenly, I wasn’t. I was a liar. I was a cheater. Maybe Laurie had seen that about me all along. This explained her cold attitude all those months. The things she must have thought about me. The roses on my birthday. Sucking up to Dot at the gala. Another pliable, too-eager-to-please young woman making a fool of herself.
The whole time, I’d thought I was too good for that place. But at last I knew the truth, and while the suspicion was wrong, the underlying moral lapse wasn’t. Abby was going on, trying to convince me it was going to be fine, fuck them, they’re terrible for thinking that about me. The knife twisted. That was the worst part, the unearned sympathy. Abby, my best friend, the person who saw only the good
in me, who believed I was innocent. I hung up before she could realize how hard I was crying.
* * *
The 2nd Avenue bar that rainy Monday night was nearly empty. The bartender saw my wet hair and distraught expression and gave me one on the house. I felt like I was in the last stage of a long race, pushing for the finish line, trying to outrun whatever was chasing me, but I realized—after my second or third vodka soda, I can’t remember—that it was pointless. It was done. It was already over.
Evan was sitting on the futon when I opened the door, his head cradled in his hands, a weary cliché. My phone was sitting on the coffee table. He looked up.
“Julia. How could you do this to me?”
I was silent. I had no defense, no excuse. Only pathetic tears, invisible in the slick of rainwater that streamed down my face.
“How long?”
“Two months. Evan, I—”
He shook his head. It was almost like pity. He stood up, put on his coat, and picked up a duffel bag that was sitting by the door.
“I’m going to a hotel for the rest of the week. You can stay here, but you need to be out by Friday. I’m going to call the landlord and get you taken off the lease.”
I should have apologized. I should have at least tried to explain myself, should have thrown myself at his feet, but the expression on his face said he didn’t want to hear it. He looked like a person who knew better than to waste any more emotion on something that had been dead for so long.
He paused, one foot propping the door open. A memory flashed—the day we moved in together, Evan turning to me before going down for the boxes that hot June morning. “Julia,” he said finally. “It’s over. I don’t want to see you again.”
* * *
“Mom? Dad?” My voice echoed in the front hall, the screen door slamming behind me. Abby’s words were running through my head, loud and clamoring.
“We’re in here,” my mom called from the living room. She and my father were sitting on the couch, the Sunday paper spread out between them. My father looked at me over the top of his glasses. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
The Futures Page 24