He was describing “the click,” Kelsey realized, but between pets and owners, not lovers, and it was, quite frankly, adorable. She glanced down at the floor and noticed for the first time he was wearing two different flip-flops: one brown leather, one navy-blue plastic.
“I like your shoes,” she said, trying not to smile. Something about those mismatched shoes, the indication they gave of how quickly he had rushed to her aid, made her want to hug him.
It was another hour until they heard news from the vet that he had performed the endoscopy and successfully removed an entire washcloth from Sprocket’s bowels. Sprocket was coming out of his sedation well and resting comfortably. They wanted to keep giving him IV fluids and watch him overnight, however, so they suggested Kelsey go home and get some sleep and return to pick him up in the morning.
“An entire washcloth?” Josh kept saying, his shoulders shaking with silent mirth as he drove her home.
“I wonder if it was a kitchen washcloth,” Kelsey said, twisting her hair into a giant bun on top of her head. She was so giddy with relief that she couldn’t stop talking. “Like there were some crumbs on it? I can’t imagine what else would possess him to want to eat a washcloth. Although this is the same dog who ate my phone charger, so who the heck knows? Do you think the vet kept the washcloth? I should’ve asked to see it. Maybe I should frame it for posterity.”
“I saw this news story once about a vet who found forty-some socks in a dog’s stomach. Can you imagine?”
“It must have been a big dog if one little washcloth wreaked this much havoc on Sprocket.”
“It was a Great Dane, I think,” Josh said, and they both erupted into uncontrollable laughter for no other reason than it felt good after such a stressful incident and it was late at night and they were glad to be in each other’s company.
They were only a block away from her apartment, and just like after their dinner at Tony’s, Kelsey didn’t want to say good night. She wanted to tell Josh how grateful she was that he had come to her rescue and sat with her until the literal and metaphoric storm had passed. She wanted to convey to him why he had been the first one she had called, but she couldn’t even explain it to herself.
“Josh,” she started, and he turned, fixing those greenish-gold eyes on her, making it impossible for her to remember exactly what she’d meant to say. “Thank you so much.”
“Anytime, K. K.,” he said with his lopsided smile.
It was so cute that Kelsey kind of wanted to nibble on him, and before she could question what she was doing, she was leaning forward to press her lips against his. His smile relaxed into a kiss that felt just as warm and inviting. They sat like that for a long time, kissing but not otherwise touching, until Kelsey thought that if he didn’t touch her soon, she would burst. She gripped his knee with one hand and his shoulder with the other, pulling herself closer to him, and that seemed to give him the permission he needed. He cupped his hand around the back of her neck, caressed her shoulders, and stroked her face. This is Josh I’m kissing, she kept telling herself. This is Josh touching me. But instead of seeming weird or daunting, it seemed only good—crazy good, in fact. She liked how unhurried each of his caresses felt, like he was simply enjoying acquainting himself with her skin. Then a terrible thought occurred to her.
She abruptly pulled away. “Oh my God. I don’t smell like dog vomit, do I?”
“No,” Josh said, laughing. “You actually smell kind of like mashed potatoes. Which just so happens to be one of my favorite foods.”
The shepherd’s pie, she thought and tamped down a guilty pang. Starting the night with one guy and ending it with another? But it was clear whom she should have started the night with in the first place.
I didn’t feel that click right away, Melanie had confided to her about Ben. And it caught me off guard when it finally happened because Ben wasn’t the type of person I had ever pictured myself marrying. But somehow he was just what I needed. Kelsey had written off her sister’s comments as irrelevant because she hadn’t believed that such chemistry existed between Josh and her. But now she understood that it did exist and that it had been there all along, a little spark waiting to burst into a flame. She just hadn’t recognized it as such because it felt so comfortable and easy compared to the manic, tortured relationships she had sought out during the rest of her twenties. Instead, being with Josh felt like reading a really good book she didn’t want to put down. It felt like diving into a lake for a luxurious, lazy swim on a hot afternoon or eating the ooey-gooey center of a pan of warm brownies.
“I’d invite you inside,” she said, suddenly feeling shy, “but I’m worried about all the doggy land mines that Sprocket left on the carpet.”
“Do you want me to help you clean up?” Josh asked, turning off the ignition and pocketing his keys.
“That’s really sweet of you to offer, but no thanks,” she said. “I’d rather you kept kissing me.”
“NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY. Swim at your own risk.” Ben was reading the sign staked in the sand of Harris Beach. “That always sounds so sinister.” He helped Melanie spread out the old quilt they’d brought. “Swim at your own risk,” he repeated menacingly, punctuating it with a maniacal laugh. It would’ve been more humorous to her if she hadn’t known someone had actually died here.
“They used to have lifeguards. My mom was one,” she said. “I guess there’s not as much of a demand now.” She gestured to the handful of families who were building sandcastles and splashing on boogie boards. It was so different from the bustling beach of her mom’s youth. Instead of coming together as a community to enjoy the lake and sun, it seemed like most of her current neighbors preferred to stick to their own little piece of lakefront.
“Why am I having such a hard time picturing your mom as a lifeguard? I thought she hated the water.” Ben peeled off his T-shirt, kicked off his sandals, and flopped down onto the blanket. After eight years together, Melanie had thought she had every detail of his body memorized. But his new, rawboned runner’s physique made him look and feel like a stranger to her.
“She was a much more complicated woman than we gave her credit for.”
“I guess so. The diary?” Ben asked knowingly. Her hypothetical question and all the new information Melanie had about her parents had convinced Ben that she had actually found her mom’s journal and was reading it. She hadn’t corrected him. A diary was a much more practical explanation than the real one.
Melanie settled next to him and began rubbing sunscreen on her forearms. Ben squirted some into his hands and started slathering it on her back and shoulders. He never wore sunscreen but never seemed to burn or freckle. Instead, the more sun exposure he got, the younger and healthier he looked. It was kind of irritating.
“Are you nervous about tomorrow?” He worked the lotion under the halter tie of her bikini top.
“No.” She closed her eyes and leaned against him. “I feel pretty confident that I’ve done everything I can. And Charlene Hallbeck is good at what she does. I think it will go really well.”
The only thing she hadn’t decided on for the open house was if she should remove the Tree of Life tapestry from her bedroom beforehand. Obviously, the room looked more beautiful with it, and it hid the weird closet that wasn’t a closet, which might raise some questions, especially since Charlene didn’t even know about the door’s existence, but it scared Melanie to think what might happen if someone peeked behind the tapestry and wandered into the closet on their own, bumbling into her mom’s past. If her experiment had been accurate, removing the tapestry would prevent that from happening and close off the portal temporarily.
On one hand, it had taken her thirty years to discover the time portal, so the odds that someone touring the house would do so immediately were small. On the other hand, prospective home buyers, especially at open houses, were notorious snoops, and Charlene had offhandedly divulged that rich people were the absolute nosiest. Don’t be surprised if your medicine cabinet is r
earranged, she’d warned.
Ben scooted around to sit cross-legged in front of her. “I’m sure it will be great.” He handed back the bottle of sunscreen. “Do you think you’ll be sad to say goodbye to this place?”
Melanie reached for her black sunhat. “Of course. But I came to terms with my dad selling our house in Elm Grove, and I’ll come to terms with this, too, because it makes the most sense. Logistically, geographically, financially.” Emotionally. Her last few trips into the time portal had persuaded her that her mom had felt almost chained to the lake house—bound by her parents and their expectations of her, bound by her secret relationship with Lavinia, and bound by the shame she felt over the little boy’s death. If she were alive today, Melanie felt certain that her mom would support her decision to sell. It would give her mom the closure she had never achieved in her too-short life. Of course, Melanie could simply ask her, but that, she worried, would be giving too much away about the future.
Ben lay back on the quilt. “It all makes sense to you, Miss Left Brain,” he said. “Are you sure it makes the most sense to your sister?”
“As much as it can, I think, with someone like Kelsey, but honestly, we’ve talked it to death. She just keeps clinging to this fantasy that we’ll both have daughters one day and bring them here in the summers, I guess. Which you and I both know won’t happen.”
Ben didn’t respond, and Melanie wondered if she’d finally succeeded in striking a nerve. A perverse thrill raced through her. But after a while, he draped his arm over his eyes and said only mildly, “And why is that?”
“I’m not talking about this here, Ben.”
“Fine. But I happen to think it’s a very nice fantasy, and I don’t blame Kelsey for holding on to it one bit. You two should definitely talk before anything with this house sale gets too serious, though. You know, just to make sure you’re both on the same page.”
“What’s with you and pages lately? You need to get a new metaphor.” Melanie frowned and stuck her toes into the sand. “Besides, what do you mean by ‘too serious’? How much more serious can it get? The house is listed. Showings and an open house are happening imminently. I’d say that’s pretty damn serious.”
“Yes, well, you should still talk to her some more about it.” He dug into their beach bag and tossed her a People magazine. “Here are some pages for you. No decoy this time, though.”
“Thanks.” Unfortunately, the magazine seemed like the unofficial baby issue. One TV actress was pregnant with twins. Another was smiling with her newborn son in her arms. A Hollywood power couple was adopting a baby from Haiti. She glanced up to see that Ben was watching her. “What?”
“Do I need a reason to look at my wife?” The crinkles around his eyes were deeper than she remembered them.
“You do if you keep looking at me like I’m some kind of chemical compound you’re trying to puzzle out.” She tossed the magazine onto the beach blanket in frustration.
Ben looked away.
“Kelsey put you up to this, didn’t she? She asked you to intervene on her behalf, right? Try to get me to see reason and not sell the house? And because I’m such a tyrannical Wicked Witch of the West, she had to go through my better half, huh? My... my keeper.” She had stood up without realizing it and was towering over him where he was still lying on the quilt.
“For Pete’s sake, Mel, your sister didn’t put me up to anything.” He shielded his eyes from the sun and squinted up at her. “It’s not a secret that she doesn’t want to sell, all right? Will you just sit down and relax, please?”
“No. I’m tired of you and everyone else acting like I’m so difficult and unreasonable all of the time. This is who I am. This, unfortunately, is who you married, and I’m sorry if you’re starting to regret that.” As soon as she spat the words out, she instantly wished she could swallow them because they were so close to the truth she most feared.
“No, this isn’t who I married,” Ben countered, sitting upright. “I married a girl who could be a little OCD at times and as stubborn as hell but who was stubborn about the good things, the important things in life. The kind of stubborn you wanted fighting in your corner. But you’re not fighting in my corner anymore. You’re trying to fight this battle all by yourself, and even worse, you’re trying to make me the enemy, but for the love of God, Mel, I am not the enemy.”
“I know you’re not. It’s been clear to me for a while now that I’m the enemy. My body especially.” A hot gush of tears flooded her eyes, and she was suddenly grateful for her sunglasses and Audrey Hepburn sunhat. She glanced over her shoulder at two preteen boys, but they were too intent on bonking each other with their boogie boards to care about her hysterics.
“Will you please just stop?” Ben draped his angular elbows over his even more angular knees. His calmness was provoking. “Yes, you might just be your own worst enemy right now with how you’re trying to shut everyone out and shoulder all the blame, but your body is not the enemy.” He lowered his voice. “Your body is fricking amazing, whether or not it’s capable of conceiving and carrying a baby to term.”
“Well, you can say that because it’s not you that’s the problem. It’s me.” She snatched her cover-up tunic from their beach bag and, with it, tried to discreetly wipe away the tears that had dripped down her cheeks.
“But that’s where you’re wrong. It is me, too, Melanie, because we’re a couple. For better or worse, remember?”
She sat back down, hugging the tunic to her chest. “Yeah, but that was before you knew this about me, right? So I’m sure it won’t be long now before you decide that you would rather be with someone else. Someone who isn’t so stubborn and difficult. Someone who can easily give you your own biological child.”
Ben didn’t respond, and Melanie’s world froze. Is this where he admits that he agrees with me? That he’s through with me and wants a different, better wife? But when she turned to look at him, she saw that he was yanking his T-shirt over his head and clasping his Ironman watch on his wrist. She had finally done it. He was leaving.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“For a run,” he said, turning his back on her as he bent down to jam his feet into his sandals. “Don’t expect me back until late.”
“The showing is at seven thirty,” she offered feebly.
“That’s fine. I’ll stay away until after.” He stalked away from their blanket before she could even fathom what words she could say to make him stay. But he stopped midstride and returned to her. “You say you’re tired of everyone treating you like you’re difficult?” He squatted down so he was close to her but without actually touching. “Well, I’m tired of you acting like you’re the only person who feels things deeply. Other people are hurting too. Other people are shattered. It’s not just you.” Then he was ducking under a game of Frisbee between a middle-aged couple and their daughter, and then he was simply gone.
She sat very still for a long time, goose bumps rising on her arms and legs despite the warmth of the day. A text message pinged on her phone. It was Kelsey. Have I got a story to tell you about dog poop! it read. Are we still on for dinner Sunday night? Can I invite someone?
Melanie hurled the phone away from her. It landed facedown in the sand.
A blond woman in a blue tankini was sitting in the shallow water, playfully splashing a little boy in water wings. Melanie squinted to see if it was Jess and Noah. But the woman looked too young, the child too freckled. Melanie hadn’t seen any sign of her neighbors since the day of her spying on Marie and Lavinia in their driveway. She was starting to wonder if they were the type who only came up for holiday weekends.
She trained her eyes on the young mother and son, who were tossing a tennis ball into the lake and watching it bob back to them on the current. The little boy giggled and reached for the ball.
After Melanie’s initial visits with Dr. Maroney, at which point her chart had read “You Were Diagnosed With: Infertility, Female, Primary,” she had serious
ly tried out the idea of never having children. As a biologist, she knew not reproducing was the more responsible thing to do in terms of the environment, anyway: not contributing to overpopulation and excessive consumption and carbon emissions. But the negotiator within her knew that she would agree to forsake disposable diapers in favor of cloth and bike everywhere or drive an electric car and garden and compost for the rest of her life if she could only have a baby.
Several of her friends, like her coworker Aimee, were forgoing parenthood in favor of more dynamic lifestyles. Aimee and her husband had recently gone on a three-month-long rainforest ecology field expedition in Ecuador, and she’d suggested Melanie apply for the same program. However, the application process was long and arduous and booked out eighteen months in advance, and Melanie had thought hopefully, I can’t. I might be too pregnant to travel or even have a newborn by then. But nothing was holding her back now. She thought of Ben and his obsessive running regimen and all the ways they could fill their life together without children. But would it ever be enough for me? Would it ever be enough for him, despite what he claims? Or would the cold, hard seeds of blame and resentment grow into something large and thorny between us, cleaving us permanently?
The prospect of rowing back to the other side of the lake on her own exhausted her almost as much as the prospect of attempting to repair things with Ben, so she lay down, closed her eyes, and tried to focus on anything except his angry exit. The memory of the night before her mom’s death inadvertently came to her. She and Ben had come to visit for the weekend, and her mom had insisted on cooking a big dinner—homemade garlic bread, lasagna, and tiramisu—to celebrate the competitive Agatha P. Jacobson graduate award Melanie had just received for her research project. “I am so proud of you, honey,” her mom had said as she embraced Melanie with more vigor than usual. It was a memory she clung to whenever she was particularly missing her mom, but now she couldn’t help seeing it with new eyes.
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