Cures for Heartbreak (17 page)

“Come on, come inside—I'll make you some coffee.”

“No . . .” I wanted to leave, to forget that this had happened, to go back in time to yesterday, the hike, the complete glee I'd felt on the train home, that now seemed years ago.

“Come on.” He picked up my hand, opened the door, and led me upstairs. Gigi was in the shower, and the coffee was already brewing.

“I think Morty Grossman just hit on me,” Alex said at the reception Tuesday evening. We'd just come from the funeral and the cemetery; we'd cleaned up our house for the occasion, ordered food, and arranged the flowers. When my father had informed the wedding florist of what had happened, she'd sent several tremendous arrangements. Our house was filled with lilacs.

“How could Morty Grossman hit on you? What did he say?”

“He was leering at me over his walker.”

“I think that's how he always looks. Daddy said he's almost blind.” I picked at my pumpernickel bagel. “You would make a nice couple, though.”

“Thanks. As do you and the cancer guy.”

“Don't call him that. I told you. It's mean.”

“See? You
like
him. That's okay. I like him too. I can't believe he's doing the dishes.”

I glanced into the kitchen, where Sasha and Gigi and Kelsey were arranging desserts on trays and washing cleared plates. We'd tried to stop them; they shooed us out and forbade us to help. I watched him lean over the sink, his hair falling into his eyes. It thrilled me to look at him. He still liked me, it seemed. I couldn't believe it. After the episode on his stoop Sunday morning, we'd had breakfast and he'd walked me to the subway, holding my hand. He'd hugged me good-bye for a long time, kissing my head and my cheek
and, very briefly, my lips. It had been so quick I'd practically missed it. Did that count as a real kiss? I hoped it counted.

I wanted to kiss him. For real.

Alex eyed me. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“What?”

“You're gawking at him,” she said. She knew all about the fight and the figurine smashing, and a few details of our hiking excursion. I hadn't told her everything; I hadn't told anyone how much I really liked him, not even Kelsey. I wanted to protect it, curl around it, these strange raw vulnerable feelings.

“I don't think Felix likes you, though,” she said, bringing me back to Earth. “He was looking at you earlier with this odd expression on his face. Like—a sneer, almost.”

“What?”

I'd never told her about the Felix episode.

She shrugged, glancing at Felix in the yard, through the window. He was talking to a crowd of his fashion industry friends, a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. Alex sighed and surveyed the living room.

Our house was packed with people. My father had called everyone from the wedding invitation list. There were mostly people I didn't know—Sylvia's neighbors and friends, the wedding coordinator at Briar Manor, the rabbi who'd been going to marry them. My father brought Omi and Opa, my mother's parents, too. They seemed to have no idea what was
going on. They sat on our sofa and smiled absently at Alex and me. There were some of the same people who had come to my mother's funeral also: our neighbors, the Lillys and Lombardis; my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Lowery; and Lottie Silverberg, our old babysitter.

“Déjà vu,” Alex said, glancing around the crowd.

“Yeah,” I said. I scratched my back; my new wool dress itched. “I still feel guilty.”

“You should. You killed her.”

“That's not funny.”

“If you really believed you did, then you wouldn't be smiling.”

I rubbed the point of my shoe on the floor. “I guess. Still—no more joking about that.”

“Fine.” We watched our father talk to Lottie nearby. “How's Daddy doing, you think?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

His voice was loud and overpowering. “Very nice, every deposit refunded. We still have to return the gifts,” he was telling her. Lottie said something I couldn't hear, and he nodded. “She helped me get over Greta's death. She'd lost husbands. She said she was a pro. She said, ‘At first, you're sad all the time. But then you're sad occasionally.'” Lottie said something else inaudible, and then my dad said, “I'm waiting for occasionally.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned. It was Felix. “
Mama
mia
Mia Mia,” he drawled. He was completely smashed, or stoned, or both. I smiled at him briefly and turned back to Alex, hoping he'd go away.

“What? You're not talkin' to me? Mia Mia Mia Mia!” he shouted; several people stopped and stared.

He looked like he was about to do something; Kelsey appeared at my side.

“Fresh air,” she said to Felix. “I think you could use some fresh air. Have you seen the lovely backyard?”

Felix gazed at Kelsey. “Yer pretty.”

“Good to hear it,” she said, leading him out the door.

Sasha appeared too. “Everything okay?” He touched my shoulder.

“I think so,” I said. I saw Felix back with his friends in the yard.

Sasha unrolled his shirtsleeves. “I need to run out—we're out of half-and-half,” he said.

“I'll go to the store,” Alex said. “I need a break.”

“Want me to come?” I asked her.

“No—I'll be fine.” She smirked.

“What?”

“Your taste has improved since Jay Kasper.”

Shut up
was lingering on my tongue, but I held it back, not wanting to say it in front of Sasha. Alex winked at me like a bad comedy skit and left.

“Who?” Sasha asked.

“Oh, never mind.”

“You could use a break too,” Sasha said. “How about an escape to the roof?”

“Good idea.” I hadn't been on our roof in ages. I wanted to be alone with him, to be away from everybody else. I watched him walk in front of me up the stairs, his strong legs in creased black pants. On the second floor of our house I showed him the ladder, next to the bathroom.

He climbed up and moved the heavy hatch door. An old woman waiting outside the bathroom glanced up, muttered, “
Meshugeneh,
” and looked away.

He was on the roof already, staring down at me. “Coming up?”

I managed to get up the ladder even with my heels on, pressing my insteps on each rung. He helped me scramble over the top edge and onto the tarry black surface, holding my hand. The trees shimmered around its edges. An airplane like a moving glowing star roamed above.

“Wow,” he said, seeing the view of Manhattan. It was different from the view from Brooklyn; midtown was more prominent from here, with the Chrysler and Citicorp buildings, and the Empire State Building was lit up in blue tonight. We stood at the roof's edge. The buildings looked so near it seemed you could reach out and run your hands across their silky glass.

“How are you?” he asked.

“I'm okay. Much better.”

He smiled that warm, direct grin. It felt strange seeing him in our house, our private home, unrecognizable with the people and food and flowers.

He bent toward me, placing his hands on the sides of my face until I was looking straight at him. He kissed me. His lips were warm and firm, and my brain started searching for adjectives, to record every millimeter of this kiss, its imprint, its history, to preserve it forever.
Warm, wet, strong.
The adjectives floated, as did my entire body, pressing into his, thinking,
I want to be you. I want to stay like this.

Something in me hesitated.

“What is it? What's wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“The kiss? I'm a bad kisser.”

“You're not—you're very, very good.” I held his hand and felt the thin skin of his wrist under my fingers. “I was just thinking that I wish we could stay like this—that it wasn't all a constant state of change or whatever.” I was thinking once more of the future—college, other countries, other people, growing older, losing him.

He paused and touched my shoulder. “Maybe that's not the whole story, though. It could be—or maybe it's like your dream.”

I smiled. “You mean in five or twenty years I can peel back the earth like a layer of carpet, and we'll still be here on the roof?”

He didn't answer. He kissed me again and wrapped his arms around me. His shirt smelled dark and sweet, like his jacket on the mountain. My insides began to lift as he held me, his hands tracing circles softly on my back, my stomach pressed to his, my face resting on his chest.

Everything changed. I knew that. Then why did I feel some trickle of hope, some blind, faithful belief telling me that what I felt at sixteen I would feel forever? That this feeling might stay here on this roof, wrapped up like a package, like the packages of love for my mother that dwelled in the house below our feet, in every room, every closet, in its very walls and furniture and floors and air?

If grief had a permanence, then didn't also love?

We stood on the roof, under the starless sky, standing still.

M
y mother died on January 26, 1991, of melanoma, nine days after the diagnosis. I was a few years older than Mia, but her feelings of grief on these pages are based on what I experienced.

I started writing this book five years after my mother died, and completed the first draft in two years. A month later, my father died of a heart attack. He was very much like the father in this book—he'd had two previous heart attacks, and triple bypass surgery when I was fifteen—and we'd become extremely close in the years after my mother died. Despite having spent ages thinking and writing about grief, despite believing I'd shone a light in every corner of the experience of losing a parent, I was devastated by his death. What was the point of writing about it anymore? What was there to say about loss except that it sucked, that I was depressed and miserable and missed my father and mother and wanted them back? Even my working title seemed to mock me:
Cures for Heartbreak.
I put the draft aside.

Having already endured the heartbreak of losing my
mother, I knew what I was in for after I lost my father. I thought of the countless nights I'd wished I could call her and tell her about a breakup with a boyfriend or about failing a class at school, and the leafy feeling in my stomach when I realized I couldn't; I thought of how my heart would almost squeeze itself out of my chest every time I saw a girl and her mother on the escalator at Bloomingdale's or casually sipping coffee together in a café on Mother's Day; already I couldn't bear to even walk by Wendy's, the site of so many grilled chicken sandwiches shared with my father. My father's death only seemed to compound the grief I still felt for my mother. I felt a sense of dislocation so severe I sometimes felt seasick, as if I'd stepped onto a ship's deck in a storm and couldn't find the door to go back inside. I was prone to dramatic statements such as “I guess I can never get married now, since neither of them will be there at my wedding”—even though at the time there wasn't a husband, much less a boyfriend, anywhere in sight. But I was certain of my future just the same.

Years passed. The waves of seasickness became less frequent. I finally began to feel ready to work on this book again. Four years after my father died, I met a man (he's gentle and sweet, with a character similar to Sasha's), we fell in love, he asked me to marry him, and lo and behold, we decided to have a wedding. A week before the event, as I was preparing to leave for Vermont—we'd planned a weekend wedding outside, near a lake—I started to cry. It seemed an unbelievable mistake, an
omission, that here I was marrying the love of my life, and my parents wouldn't be there. How had this happened? How could I possibly get married without them? What was I doing? Would they approve? Would they like my soon-to-be husband? How could neither of them be there to walk me down the aisle?

I cried for a while, and then my sister (who had the bad luck to get a writer for a sister, since she's been forced to endure her friends' saying, whenever they've read excerpts of this book published in magazines, “I feel like I know you so much better!” So I have to say: she's nothing like Alex. Really. No likeness whatsoever. Even if she disdains makeup and loves hiking boots and we still argue perpetually over whether the 46th Street or 52nd Street subway station was closer to our house) calmed me down a little, and we drove to Vermont together. Unfortunately, my spirits only grew darker once I saw the weather reports for our outdoor event: rain, and lots of it.

Then, the day of the wedding, a half hour before the ceremony, the clouds retreated. The sky turned unfathomably blue. My sister walked me down the aisle, and the rabbi read a quote from the Book of Zohar, which says that when a parent has died God personally invites him or her under the chuppah, the wedding canopy.

I've never felt my parents' presence as strongly as I did that day. I'm certain they were with us, under the chuppah, on the green hill overlooking the lake.

It doesn't mean that I'm over their deaths, that I will ever get over them. In some ways I'm still that girl crying on the subway platform or in the hospital bathroom; I'm still the girl who has a brick in her chest every time she sees a daughter shopping with her mother in Bloomingdale's and whenever she walks by Wendy's. And at the same time I am grateful that I had my parents as long as I did, and that I can keep them alive in a dream, at a wedding, in a story.

Thank you to my amazing agent, Emily van Beek, and my wonderful editor, Alexandra Cooper, for giving this book a new life. I'm grateful to the fantastic team at Harper: Rosemary Brosnan, Kate Engbring, Erin Fitzsimmons, Victor Hendrickson, Kate Morgan Jackson, Alyssa Miele, Kim VandeWater, Lauren Kostenberger, Olivia Russo, Andrea Pappenheimer and the Sales team, Susan Katz, and Suzanne Murphy. Thanks to Thomas Burden, the artist behind this cover and the cover of
Kissing in America
.

Thank you also to the magazine editors who were willing to pick a new writer out of the slush pile, and who first published parts of this book: C. Michael Curtis at the
Atlantic
; Ben Schrank, Darcy Jacobs, Melanie Manarino, and Tamara Glenny at
Seventeen
; Linda Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown at
Glimmer Train Stories
; R. T. Smith at
Shenandoah
; and Alan Davis and Michael White at
American Fiction
. I'm grateful to the people who read early drafts, especially Anna Sabat, Allison Moore, and Becky Hagenston, and the students and faculty of the MFA program at the University of Arizona. Thank you to Allison Amend, Dalia Azim, Judy
Blundell, Edward Carey, Elizabeth Everett, Carrie Fountain, Deborah Heiligman, Devon Holmes, Marthe Jocelyn, Sheri Joseph, Dika Lam, April Lurie, Elizabeth McCracken, Helen Reid, Rebecca Stead, Hannah Tinti, Cecilia Ward, Lara Wilson, and Jennifer Ziegler for all their support and encouragement. A special thank-you to Jodi Keller, and to everyone at the MacDowell Colony for providing the time and space to work on this book.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my sister, Jackie, who is such a part of these pages, and to my husband, Marshall Reid, for taking my broken heart and putting it back together again.