Someone Else's Love Story (37 page)

“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “It would be masculine, but so much warmer. So much more like Dad.”

She looked pleased, and she might have said more, but Walcott probably had the car seat moved by now. I was eager to get Natty gone.

“We should go,” I said.

Out the corner of my eye, I saw her smile. It was a secret smile, only for herself. She added, so quietly I barely caught it, “Bethany doesn’t really know him at all.”

As she turned to leave, the smile spread, and there was triumph in her upturned lips, flashing like a victory banner. Triumph, yes, but tinged with other things. The hollowness of it stopped me in my tracks. It was such a bitter, covert smile, too much clandestine feeling for what was a very small win. I recognized it, even as she walked away.

My mother was in love with him. All these years later, she was still so very much in love with Dad.

I followed her, dazed, and saw my half-assed plan was going forward. Walcott was strapping Natty into Mimmy’s car. There was no sign of Clayton Lilli. Our getaway would be complete and clean. Mimmy was already halfway down the steps. I paused to lock the door, still reeling.

I’d always thought Mimmy’s vigilance was a waste: the constant diet, the exercise videos, the moisturizers. The cozy warmth of her house. The gorgeous meals she cooked and served but never ate. I thought she kept her body toned and her face so lovely and her home so welcoming for no one.

I’d been wrong. It wasn’t empty. It was all for him. Whether she knew it or not.

Before I could feel sorry for her, I realized that he was equally pitiful. He’d married Bethany. My dad was charming and generous, funny and successful. Bethany hadn’t been the only single Jewish lady in Atlanta when he went looking for a bride to please his family. He could have had his pick of a hundred warmer-hearted girls who would have loved him so much better. Maybe he knew that he could never love them back? Or maybe Bethany had been an angry impulse. His way of giving his family the skin of what they asked for, wrapped around a hundred and twenty pounds of bitch.

With her, he was as lonely as my mother. Now he was screwing Mim’s facsimile, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Patio Girl had been the first faux Mimmy to pass through his bed.

How stupid. My mom and dad had lost each other, and for what? So they could fit better at their parents’ tables at Christmas and Passover? So their brothers and sisters could be comfortable? The families who had worked so hard to tear them apart had gone smugly back to their own lives after it was over. I didn’t see any of my grandparents more than once a year. I got colorful birthday cards with twenty-dollar bills in them from my aunts and uncles on my birthday.

Meanwhile, my parents spent their lives so lonely. Dad wandered, seeking home in a mistress’s Mimmy-canted face. Mimmy waited, her lamp trimmed, for a day that never came.

Meanwhile, all they’d ever wanted was alive inside the other.

As I came down the stairs, I knew it wasn’t fixable. He’d missed me so much, seeing me only every other weekend. He wouldn’t repeat that pattern with his sons, no matter what the cost, and Mimmy wouldn’t ask him to. But God, I saw it perfectly, and it was such a mighty, overwhelming waste.

“See you back in Lumpkin,” Walcott said. He climbed in his Subaru and started backing out. Mimmy was checking the car seat straps and then she closed the back door. She got in and started her car, and I went to mine. I watched as first Walcott’s car and then Mimmy’s found a break in the stream and slipped into it. Atlanta traffic pulled them away, toward the highway.

Mimmy and Walcott were taking Natty out of here. That was nonnegotiable, but it was also done. I sat in my car, and I knew I wasn’t leaving yet.

I could not leave Atlanta until I’d seen William. I could send Mimmy and Walcott a text later, once enough time had passed to get them safely home. I’d say I’d had to run an errand, and I would be home soon. But I couldn’t leave until I’d gone to William like an adult, and simply told him what I wanted.

A whole and grown-up person didn’t play games with their own heart and their happiness. I’d let Paula and my own fear push me out. I didn’t want to end up seeking substitutions or waiting for the world to change its course and swing my way. A whole and grown-up person would go and simply tell him.
I’m in love with you
. A whole and grown-up person would ask him.
Can you please love me back?

I started my car and slid myself into the traffic, but heading the other way. I drove myself to Morningside.

I pulled over by the little square of park near his house and sent my texts. Then I drove on. As I crested the hill in my Beetle, I saw William in his yard. I hit the brakes, surprised. He was walking down his driveway, opening the driver’s-side door to his SUV. He was carrying an ax. A real one, long and thick, like something for a fireman. It paused me. Not only the ax, but his body language. He moved like he was in a fury, with such fast, contained grace. I could see a world of tension in his shoulders as he loaded the ax into his car and climbed in after it. He backed out of the driveway and sped away.

I followed him. Not trying to be creepy. Not at first. A sunshine yellow VW is about the least stealthy car on the planet. I kept thinking he’d have to notice me and pull over. I would drive up beside him, and we would both roll down our windows.

I wasn’t sure what I would say. Maybe leap right to
I love you
. Or maybe I’d get stage fright and only squeak,
Hello
. Maybe I would say,
Hey, William, have you got time to make hot love to me in the road here, or are you off to someplace vital with that ax?

He didn’t notice me, though. He drove more than five miles, all the way into Decatur, squeaking through yellow lights so that I shamelessly ran red ones, barely pausing at the stop signs. Now I was officially creepy stalkering, because he was obviously blind to the ball of yellow car in his rearview.

He turned off into a web of tiny, residential streets, not slowing for the wide speed bumps. His big car had better shocks than mine, and he got a couple of blocks ahead of me.

I rounded a corner and thought I’d lost him. I randomly picked to go right at the next turn, then came to a T intersection. I saw his SUV stopped half a block up on my left, in front of a painted brick bungalow with a cheery purple door.

He was already out of the car, striding across the lawn with such purpose that I was glad he didn’t have the ax. As he walked, he pulled a square of white out of his pocket. A folded piece of paper, I thought. He walked to door and pressed the note against it, and it stuck. He must have had a tack or tape. I wasn’t close enough to see.

He turned around, but still he didn’t see me, though his face pointed briefly at me as he spun. He walked back to his SUV, got in, and drove away, the SUV bouncing high over the first speed bump. He was heading in the wrong direction to be going home, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up. I stayed where I was, looking at that house.

No one came out to get the note. I hadn’t seen him knock or ring the bell. I pulled forward and stopped in front of the buttercream house. It was low and sweet-looking, with a lot of flower beds and a postage stamp of rich green lawn. On one side, a wrought-iron arch stood, covered in wisteria vine, with a pretty garden bench in front of it. I couldn’t imagine who might live there. It wasn’t Paula. She had a loft downtown. Who else could it be? I couldn’t think of anyone who would matter enough to rate notes and all this purposeful stomping, much less the ax.

I turned the engine off and got out, walking up across the lawn toward that purple door. It wasn’t gaudy. It was a rich, plummy color, and the paper—I saw now it was an envelope—looked very white taped to it.

There was a single word printed on it in William’s economical handwriting. I went closer still, to read the word:
Bridget.

William had left a note for a dead woman, taped to a purple door.

The hand on the end of my arm reached out and pressed the bell.

I waited, looking at that impossible word, hearing footsteps. The purple door swung open.

She was a few pounds heavier than she had been in the picture on the news. She wasn’t grinning all happy, either, as she had then, sitting with her husband and her child on a cheery picnic blanket. She had only a polite smile for me, her eyebrows raised in inquiry.

The envelope, so white against the door’s deep color, caught her eye. She turned to it, already reaching, and then she paused. William’s dead wife paused, looking at her own name in his writing, looking at it with her dead-wife eyes.

“You’re Bridget,” I said to her.

“Yes,” she said. She took the envelope down, running her fingers across the way he wrote her name. “Did you bring this? Did William send you?”

“You’re Bridget,” I told her. “You died.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Oh! I see. I’m sorry. Yes, I did. Did you come to ask me about that? About where I went when I was dead?” She glanced at the envelope again, then put it away in her jeans pocket. When she looked back up, her eyes on me were so warm and so kind. “Usually Father Lewis talks to me before he sends someone, but I haven’t checked my messages since yesterday.” I stepped away, blindly moving backward, and she followed me out, putting out a hand to me like I was a skittish, homeless kitten. “No, no, it’s fine. I have some time.”

From the house behind her, I heard a man’s voice call, “Honey?”

She called back, “It’s someone from the church to talk to me, Dad. I’ll be in in a minute.” She closed the front door behind her. She took my arm in her warm, alive hand, drawing me across the lawn. I went with her like a thing with no weight, a balloon tugged on a string. “Did you lose someone recently?”

I nodded, because I had. Very recently. I’d just lost William.

“How long were you dead?” I asked her.

“Not quite three minutes,” she said. She’d led me to the garden bench and sat down, pulling me to sit beside her. The bench was small, so that our knees touched. “It’s subjective, though. To me it seemed much longer. Who did you lose?”

I couldn’t think of a good answer. It was hard to look at her, my living rival, strange and estranged, and still think.

“I’m not here about that. I came because—” I had no way to finish that sentence. “I followed William.”

“Oh,” she said. Her hand went to her pocket, resting over the note for a second, digesting that. She was trying to change gears again. “How do you know William?”

“I was in the robbery. We were in a robbery.”

“Ohhh,” she said, and this time it was a dawning sound. “You’re Shandi.”

I blinked, but before I could ask, I had the answer. Paula. No wonder Paula was so set against me. I saw myself as she must see me, a pushy little girl in a Marilyn dress, moving in on a lonely man who was separated from his wife. A wife he’d once loved so much he’d stormed a convent for her. In Paula’s eyes, I’d tried to slip myself between a broken couple who had lost their child. My face burned as I remembered myself saying awful, callous things about shoes and Columbus and fresh starts. Paula could have saved everyone so much trouble if she’d just said,
Hey, dummy, Bridget is alive.
I suppose it hadn’t occurred to her that I thought Bridget was dead.

After the robbery, I’d heard the talking heads tutting about a tragedy, and I’d looked at that picture of his wife and child up on the screen. I’d picked the tragedy that suited me, and I’d ignored all other possibilities. I was good at that, ignoring truer possibilities, once I found a narrative that pleased me.

This, like many, many things, was partly due to Bethany. God, but that woman had an endless tab of shit she owed me! Bethany’d screamed at me all through that newscast. But it was my fault, too. I’d willfully chosen the tragedy that meant he could be mine. I’d safely buried her, mentally moving her out of my way. But William was married.

“How is he?” Bridget asked. “I came to the hospital, after he was shot. He didn’t want to see me then.”

She touched her pocket with the envelope again, and in that moment we were both together thinking the same thing. I knew it. We were wondering if he wanted to see her now.

“He acts like you stayed dead,” I told her. “Anyone would think it, if they saw his house. I’ve never even heard him say your name.”

It hurt her, when I said these things. I was glad and horrified to hurt her. She looked at her alive bare feet in the grass. I looked at them, too, and they were calloused, serviceable feet, wide and bony, without a pedicure.

“Are you in love with him?” she asked, and then she changed it, asking the thing she really wanted to know. “Are you in love?” She meant both of us. She was asking if William and I were in love with each other.

“What does Paula say?” I asked.

“Oh, well, Paula. She says he isn’t, but she’s my oldest friend. What else would Paula say?” Bridget told me, and it hurt even though she qualified it. Her eyes on me were still so unreasonably kind.

“Well, she’s right.”

I was happy that she’d hurt me back, though of course it didn’t make us even. We would never be even, and that was something else Paula had right. I wasn’t Bridget. I wasn’t even half a Bridget, yet. She leaned toward me, being gracious and so gentle, while I sat, a raging, red-faced child, viciously thinking that my feet were prettier than hers.