Skipping a Beat (18 page)

Michael laughed.

“I rented a National Park building—really more of a cabin—that was surrounded by picnic tables and outdoor grills and soccer and baseball fields. We brought in stuff for old-fashioned games, like three-legged races and horseshoes and softball. Then we served up giant bowls of buttered corn on the cob and watermelon wedges and hot dogs and burgers. When it got dark, all the kids hunted for sticks and made s’mores over the grills. Most of the adults did, too.”

“Were the brothers happy?” Michael asked. “Were they able to find each other again?”

I nodded. “I hired a photographer, and she took pictures all day long. I made copies of one and gave it to each of them afterward. It shows the three of them toward the end of the day, and they’re standing together in front of the fire. She shot them from the back, and the one in the middle had his arms draped around each of his brothers. I paired it with a photo of them as kids and gave them all framed copies.”

“After all those years, nothing had really changed, had it?” Michael asked.

“I don’t know when they’ll see each other again,” I said, and the thought saddened me. “The one in Australia—his wife is from Sydney, and her family all lives there. Their kids are in school and they’ve set down roots. I doubt they’ll move. The brother who lives in England was talking about maybe getting transferred back to the U.S. sometime, but who knows if it’ll happen. I just—I wanted to give them that one day. Maybe it will be enough for them, for the next five or ten years.”

“I wish I’d had that, with my brothers,” Michael said softly.

I looked at him, shocked. Michael didn’t talk about his brothers or family, not ever.

He looked down at his hands and absently rubbed at a smear of dirt on his palm, then lifted his eyes to mine. “Did I ever tell you what I did the day after my company’s stock went public?” he asked. “I had all these reporters calling to interview me, and my day was stacked with meetings. Everyone wanted a piece of me. But I made them all wait. I told my secretary to hold my calls and not let anyone into my office, no matter how urgent they said it was. Then I sat down at my desk and took out my checkbook and I wrote my brothers and my parents one check apiece. But not big checks. I gave them each a thousand bucks. And every month after that, I sent them checks, too, always for the same amount. A thousand dollars.”

He took in a breath, then continued. “I took my time signing them, and I addressed the envelopes by hand. I put them into the mailbox myself on the first of every month and watched them drop in, one at a time. I wanted my family to be reminded as often as possible that I’d done better than them. That I was the only success story in the family. And I wanted them to worry that the checks might suddenly stop coming. That’s why I didn’t send a bigger amount; I wanted them to depend on me, to realize that if they bought a new car or a couch or something, I was all over it. I wanted to be in their faces as much as possible, without being around them.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know how to respond.

“I didn’t tell you because part of me was ashamed,” he said. “I was pretending to help them out, but it was really all about my ego. I mean, when I signed the checks, I even made my signature bigger than usual. It was like, ‘Let’s see you bastards ignore me now.’”

We’d tried so hard to leave West Virginia behind, but we’d failed, I realized. Moving on requires more than a change in geography. As hard as Michael worked, as much as we acquired, our past had been with us all along, breathing over our shoulders and watching our every move. It was a third person in our relationship, and just like any interloper in a marriage, it had driven us apart.

“Are you going to get in touch with them again?” I asked.

Michael shook his head. “I wrote them all letters explaining everything with a final check. And I set up college accounts for their kids. But they haven’t called me. Maybe they’re angry they won’t get any more money. Maybe they don’t know what to say. I don’t know, but I’m not going to worry about it.

“The only person I want to focus on is you,” he said simply.

Damn it, I’d forgotten this; how being with Michael both energized and relaxed me. How the passing hours grew light and slippery as we talked. He’d lulled me in, somehow, and made me forget everything while we talked. But now the uncertainty of our future came rushing back, stronger than ever.

“What if I can’t ever forgive you for giving everything away?” I asked.
Keep calm
, I instructed myself.
Don’t argue with him; just plant seeds to make him doubt what he’s doing
.

“I know you don’t see things the same way I do. I think it would be impossible for you to, without experiencing what I did. I just want us to be together without worrying about money for a while.”

I felt my nails bite into my palms.

“I’m not getting there,” I told him. “What you’re doing is making me focus on money more, not less.”

“Julia, I know what this is costing you,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “I know you better than anyone—at least I used to. I hope I get to know you that way again. And maybe I’m not doing this perfectly, but it’s the only way I know how.”

I started to say something, then abruptly glanced up at the sky as it rumbled a warning. “It’s going to rain.”

“But look.” Michael pointed up to the trees. The thick, leafy branches provided a canopy over our hammock. “We’re completely protected.”

“You want to stay out here?” I asked.

He nodded. “Stay with me?”

“Seriously?” I asked. If the rain came down hard, we’d be trapped—we were a few hundred yards from the house. “We could still make a run for it.”

“Julia, we don’t have to be anywhere, do we? We’ve got our provisions.” Michael held up his mint-spiked lemonade and smiled. “Let’s just wait it out, okay?”

I swallowed a sigh and lay back in the hammock. Before long, I’d forgotten my frustration again as Michael told me stories about the early days of his company, like the time when he was so absorbed thinking about a big meeting that he didn’t see a height restriction sign on a parking lot entrance ramp and crashed the top of a DrinkUp truck into the concrete roof. “The parking lot attendant’s face was priceless,” he confided. “I’m sure he was thinking, This idiot’s a millionaire but he can’t read a giant sign above his head?”

“How’d you get the truck out?” I asked.

“Much more slowly than I got in,” he said.

I laughed, then noticed Michael focusing on the trees overhead.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’ve been counting branches,” he said. “Noah’s right. I keep finding Fibonacci numbers.”

“He’s a great kid,” I said, wondering if talking about Michael’s brothers—his tormentors—had made him think of Noah. He knew firsthand how smart, awkward kids could wind up as targets; I know we were both hoping Noah had it easier.

“Please don’t get mad at me for saying this,” Michael said. “But I keep wondering, if we’d had a son, if he’d be like Noah.”

I waited for the surge of anger, but it never came.

I want a baby
. The thought roared through my mind, and I nearly gasped. I’d buried my hope for years, trying to suffocate it, but it had only grown stronger with the passage of time. Just last month at Starbucks, I’d stood in line behind a young mother holding a little girl, and I couldn’t stop staring at the baby’s liquid brown eyes and fat cheeks. I could almost feel the downy warmth of her head against my own shoulder. The barista had to ask twice for my order, and it was only when the mother turned around to look at me that I broke my eyes away, flushing in embarrassment.

Now I looked at Michael and began to say something, but then a few words flashed in my mind, just as they had dozens—
hundreds
—of times before, and I felt like I’d been sucker punched.

“I want your lips, your hands, your body … can we sneak out early tonight?” Roxanne had written to Michael in an old e-mail. That single line summed up the biggest reason I’d never pushed Michael to have kids. Bringing one into our shell of a marriage wouldn’t be fair.

The rain came down harder, soaking the ground and creating muddy puddles while I thought about Michael’s affair. It had been over between them for quite a while; I was certain of that because I still snuck onto his BlackBerry and reviewed the calls on his cell phone. Such a wonderful marriage we had, I thought bitterly, and I shifted my legs over so they weren’t brushing against his anymore. Being with Michael was an emotional cha-cha-cha; every time we stepped forward together, we marched just as quickly backward. Talking to him made it impossible to ignore our past hurts and betrayals, just as I knew it would.

Maybe Michael had changed, I thought. I studied him as he stared up at the trees. But would it last?

The rain finally tapered off. We were walking back to the house when the world seemed to flip upside down around us.

“I know you need to stay on top of everything at the office,” Michael said. “But you don’t have anything special planned for the next—”

An explosion, loud as a thunderbolt, cut off the rest of his sentence.

My eyes shot skyward as I instinctively lunged forward. Michael was just standing there, frozen, but somehow I knocked myself into him with enough force to send us both sprawling a few feet before we hit the ground. I landed awkwardly on top of Michael, and my jaw smacked into the back of his head. At the precise moment we tumbled to the ground, something crashed down behind us, forcefully enough to make the earth shake.

We lay there in the mud for a few seconds. Then Michael slowly got to his feet and reached out his hand and pulled me up onto my shaking legs.

“Are you okay?” he asked, brushing back my hair to look at my face.

“Not a scratch. You?”

He nodded.

“It would’ve hit me,” he said, staring down at the tree limb, his voice unnaturally calm.

I looked up and saw the jagged break where the limb had ripped away from the tree: twenty, maybe thirty feet off the ground. It was about a foot thick and six feet long, tapering to thinner, leafy branches at the end. But the thickest part—the most dangerous part—had landed near us.

“The rain must have weakened it,” I said. I rubbed my sore jaw and took a step closer to the limb as I peered down at it. “It was probably rotten.”

“It doesn’t look rotten,” Michael said, bending down to examine it. He touched the jagged end with the tip of a finger, then looked up at the tree again.

“It might have killed me,” he said slowly. “If it had hit me in the head.”

“But it didn’t. Come on,” I said, feeling an overwhelming urge to get away from this spot, fast. I tugged on Michael’s arm. “Let’s hurry before the rain starts again.”

He stared at the limb for another few moments, then we walked back to the house, the air around us thick with words we weren’t saying.

Twenty-four

I WAS STILL TREMBLING a few moments later when my cell phone rang.

“Can you come over?” Isabelle asked after my fumbling fingers found the Answer Call button.

Her voice sounded even shakier than mine. I gripped the phone tighter. “Are you okay?”

“Beth just phoned. I—I’m going to Seattle to see her.” The quaver in her voice that I’d mistaken for sad tears was actually caused by happy ones, I realized.

“Ten minutes,” I promised. “Don’t move.”

“Was that Isabelle?” Michael asked as I hung up.

I nodded. “It’s kind of a long story.” The thought flashed through my mind that it was another example of how far apart Michael and I had grown: he knew so little about my friendship with Isabelle.

He studied my face for a moment, then grabbed my car keys off a hook by the front door and tossed them to me. “Tell me about it when you get back, okay?”

I sped down our driveway, managed to hit mostly green lights (one was reddish green, but definitely more on the green side), and pulled up in front of Isabelle’s house thirteen minutes later. I took her front steps two at a time and pounded on her door. She flung it open immediately—she must’ve been standing there waiting for me—and I gave her a huge hug.

“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Completely. In the best possible way.”

“Come on, I’ll tell you about it while I finish packing.” I followed her upstairs, into her bedroom suite—an area that managed to be both cozy and spacious at once, with scattered rugs in warm earthy colors, a stone fireplace, and a sitting area that was bigger than the entire first floor of the house where I’d grown up. “Tell me what I need. Warm socks, right?”

“And don’t forget an umbrella,” I said. “It always rains in Seattle. Oh, my God, you’re going to Seattle!” My brain had felt so sluggish that I seemed to be trailing a few beats behind in our conversation, kind of like I always used to in aerobics class.

She tucked another sweater into an already-bulging suitcase, then zipped it shut. She opened a matching, smaller Vuitton bag and laid it on her bed. “I probably shouldn’t bring all this,” she said, stuffing in an armful of socks. “I can buy anything I forget, I guess…. I just can’t think straight. I still can’t believe she called. It’s happening so fast.”

“What did she say? Did she just come right out and ask you to visit?”

Isabelle shook her head. “I was the one who suggested it. I didn’t even know I was going to say it. But all of a sudden I blurted out the idea of going to Seattle to meet her. At first she seemed surprised, then she said she’d like that.”

“How long do you think you’ll be gone?”

Isabelle smiled. “As long as Beth wants me. I left the return ticket open-ended. She deserves it, Julia. I have to tell her how difficult it was to give her up, and that it wasn’t because of
her
And I want something more than a few photos. I need to see her. I can’t believe she’s sixteen years old and I’m finally going to see her.”

So that was it, I thought. Isabelle’s life had turned around in the space of a day. Everything she’d wondered about for so long was waiting for her, just an airplane ride away.

“So her family still lives in the same place?” I plopped down, cross-legged, on the bed next to the suitcase.

Isabelle nodded. “They never moved. I didn’t see their house, but there were photos of it in their file in the adoption agency. She’s an only child. They’ve got two French bulldogs. Beth told me”—Isabelle grinned, and I could hear in her voice how much she loved saying her daughter’s name; how she turned that single syllable into a caress—“she told me her father’s mildly allergic, but because she loves animals so much he takes Claritin every day so she can have her pets.”

“You really did it,” I said. “You picked such great parents for her.”

Isabelle ducked her head, almost shyly. “I don’t want to assume too much, you know? I could tell she mentioned her dad because she felt loyal to him. And I’m fine with that; I don’t want to swoop in and act like I’ve got any claim on Beth. But if there’s even a little bit of room for me in her life … I mean, if she wanted to talk to me from time to time, or maybe I could visit now and then and take her out to lunch …”

“You just put in twenty pairs of socks,” I told her, shooing her away from the suitcase. “You’ve got bras, right? Shoes? A coat? Medicines?”

Isabelle nodded distractedly.

“You definitely don’t need these,” I said, pulling a pair of fishnet stockings out of the tangle of socks.

“Present from an ex,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “He wanted me to install a stripper pole in my bedroom. He saw something about women doing it on
The Tyra Banks Show
.”

“But it would go so well with your décor,” I told her. “Did you dump him because of the stripper pole or because he watches Tyra Banks?”

“Both,” she said, frowning absently at her suitcase. “Anyway, after I visit Beth … I don’t know, but I feel like something has been missing for a while now. I don’t know if I can do this anymore.”

“Do what?” I asked, taking out some socks and standing up to toss them back in her drawer.

“This!”
Isabelle spread out her arms, like a little kid who was pretending to fly. “My life! I’m thirty-four, and what do I have to show for it? I spend the money my grandfather made—not even the money, I just spend the interest on his money—and I dabble in charity work. I play tennis and go to parties and shop and travel. I’m busy every day of the week and it’s not enough. I’m bored, Julia. I’m bored out of my fucking mind, and I have been for a while. I didn’t think my life would turn out like this. I don’t even know how it happened. I’ve just been drifting along, and suddenly, almost half my life is gone.

“I don’t know what I’ll do when I get back. Maybe I’ll get involved in a charity—really involved; not just show up at a benefit in a pretty dress and write a check—or hell, maybe
I’ll
adopt a child and bring all of this full circle. You’ve got a job you love, and you’ve got a good man who adores you. And he does adore you now, Julia, no matter what happened before.”

I ducked my head and busied myself folding clothes into her suitcase so Isabelle wouldn’t see the emotions flooding my face. She didn’t know everything that had happened between Michael and me; maybe she wouldn’t sound so optimistic if she did.

“I need something more in my life, too,” she was saying.

I nodded slowly. “Can I take you to the airport?”

“I’d love it,” Isabelle said. She stood up again and opened another dresser drawer, adding a pair of drawstring pajama bottoms decorated with little red hearts to her suitcase. I’d given those to her for her birthday last year, I remembered, and then we’d gone out to a belly-dancing class and laughed so hard that the instructor’s face had tightened and her shockingly flexible middle had stopped swiveling and she’d asked us to leave.

“What else do I need?”

“Socks?” I suggested, and she threw a pair at me.

“Maybe pack some pictures of you at different times in your life to show her? She might like to see a childhood photo of you.”

“Great idea. I’ll just grab an album,” Isabelle said. She started to leave the room, then turned back to look at me. “Families come in all shapes and sizes these days, don’t they?” she said. “It wouldn’t be so strange if Beth wanted to have a relationship with me, too, would it?”

I saw the uncertainty and longing on her face, and I stood up and walked over to Isabelle and hugged her.

“She’s going to love you,” I whispered. “And her parents … they sound like the kind of people who’ll welcome you into their lives if that’s what Beth wants.”

“I’m scared,” Isabelle said.

I thought of the days stretching before me without my friend’s constant phone calls and funny texts. I imagined Beth and her family reaching out to Isabelle, and folding her into their lives. I was so happy for Isabelle, but if she started spending a lot of time in Seattle, especially if Michael and I separated … I’d just miss her so much.

We were splitting into different directions, like Stephenie and I had long ago.

I’m scared, too
, I thought but didn’t say.

* * *

It was dusk by the time I arrived home. I turned off my Jaguar and sat in the sudden silence, rolling my neck around in slow circles to work out the kinks. Then I paused, my head tilted back, to stare up at our house. Our lush lawn, such a brilliant shade of green that it almost looked like the fake stuff they put on miniature golf courses, stretched out to both sides for an absurdly generous distance, by D.C. standards, before meeting the neighbors’ property lines. A few floodlights had turned on automatically, and they illuminated the marble columns and grand steps flanking our front door. The play of stark white light against the shadows made our entranceway appear even more imposing than usual. All that space, all that silence … so different from my house in West Virginia, where our neighbors lived so close by that all Mom had to do if she needed to borrow a lemon or a scoop of Tide was bang open the screen door—we never kept our front door shut in good weather, and neither did anyone else—and call out. If I was running late to school, I scrambled over our picket fence and cut through the yard behind ours, stooping to pet the fat little mutt who lived there. Sometimes, if he woke up from his morning snooze to look at me with mournful brown eyes, I’d slip him a bite of my biscuit with bacon. We didn’t have much of a backyard to speak of, but in the front, Dad had tied a rope around a thick branch of our oak tree and hung a tire swing. Neighborhood kids gathered there while Dad pushed us so high that, if we stretched out our legs, our feet almost grazed the roof of our house.

“Where do you summer?” someone asked me at the first dinner party Michael and I ever hosted. I can’t remember who asked—we had a woman named Holiday and another named Etienne at our table, and I was still trying to recover from it—and I’d taken a careful swallow of my lemon sorbet before answering.

“I’ve always summered on a tire swing,” I thought about saying grandly, imagining the women murmuring to each other, “Did she say Charleston?” “No, no, it must’ve been the name of their yacht.”

Instead I mumbled something about staying in town, and I saw, or rather
felt
, Michael’s awareness of the conversation from his seat at the other end of the table. A month later, Michael bought the house in Aspen, sight unseen. We sometimes managed to go there for a full week in August—but since Michael always brought along a laptop and cell phone and his BlackBerry, it wasn’t a vacation, just a relocation. Once we’d even flown in around noon, only to have Michael get a call from the office right after lunch. He’d jetted out within the hour, meaning he’d actually spent far more time in the air than on our vacation.

Now I opened my car door and stepped out onto the grass, still gazing up at our house. What would it be like to leave all of this? I wondered as my eyes traveled over the peaked roof and elaborately constructed decks and sprawling side patios. Would I miss it during every single moment, or would I adjust? I wouldn’t miss having a full-time maid, I decided. Even if I’d worked at a reception until 3:00
A.M.
the night before, I always felt too guilty to relax when I knew she was nearby, cleaning toilets or hand-washing my lacy bras. And despite the fact that we’d had a sommelier come to our house for a dozen winetasting sessions, I still couldn’t taste the difference between a twenty-dollar chardonnay and one that cost ten times as much.

Some things I wouldn’t mind giving up, but I’d probably glance around our—or
my
—new place, seething with resentment as I noticed chips in the plaster walls and the overflowing laundry basket. Every time the dishwasher broke or my car overheated, I’d mentally curse Michael.

I didn’t know what it would feel like to step back toward our old life, but I did know that moving here, to this breathtaking mansion, wasn’t anything like what I’d expected. It was the first time I’d admitted it, even to myself. I’d thought living in this house would erase my fears, heal my old wounds—that my new setting would transform me into the kind of confident, poised woman who
should
live here—but somehow, I’d always felt as if everything was only temporary, a rug underneath me that could be yanked out at any time. I’d never felt like I truly belonged here.

Still, that didn’t mean I wanted to give it up. Certainly not my Jacuzzi and heated tiles.

I headed up the front steps, but Michael swung open the door before I could fit my key in the lock.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

His eyes looked strained, with dark shadows underneath. It was the first time I’d seen him truly agitated since he’d come home from the hospital.

“It’s noth—” Michael started to answer, then he looked at me and shook his head. “I made this vow when … when everything happened. I want you to know everything about me, even the stuff I’m ashamed of. I’m never going to lie to you, not ever again. Julia, I’m worried.”

I just looked at him and waited while my mind clutched on to those words,
not ever again
. Exactly how many times had he lied to me before?

“After you left for Isabelle’s, I kept thinking about Dale’s call. I had this feeling that something was really wrong, so I had the papers faxed over. This kid got injured on the job a few months ago. Dale handled it; no, I
let
Dale handle it. That’s what Dale does; he makes problems disappear. The kid got into an accident when he was driving one of our trucks, and we paid him off, Julia. He injured his brain. Something is wrong with his short-term memory now. He’s twenty-four years old, and we pushed him to settle fast. He didn’t know what he was doing. His family is poor and unsophisticated, and they took the money.”

I took off my coat and silently hung it in the closet as I processed what Michael was saying. “How much did you give him?” I finally asked, turning to face him.

“Seventy-five thousand. We’re covering all his doctors’ bills and he’ll get a little workmen’s comp, but he’s not going to be able to get another job—not one that pays much, anyways. Maybe he could wash dishes or something. Bag groceries. I don’t know. We screwed him, Julia. This kid isn’t going to have a normal life, and it’s because of us.”