The Half Life (2 page)

“Where you heading?” the man asked.

My life is over
, Piper thought dimly. But of course she couldn't say that. That was the kind of talk that got you shipped to what her family inevitably called the Bin—as in, Bubbe's in the Bin again. Dad's spending spring break in the Bin. Mental illness ran through her family like the veins of mold in blue cheese. Maybe that was why Tosh had gotten cold feet. Maybe that was why he'd said . . .

The man was staring at her expectantly. “Paris,” she said, surprised at how normal she sounded.

“Ah.” The man's face softened, and his eyes took on a nostalgic shimmer. Piper could imagine the airport, with its sterile beige walls and thrum of noise, staticky PA announcements, the sound of a thousand wheels moving across miles of tiled floor, dissolving, as he imagined . . . what? The Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, some romantic bistro, a stroll through the Jardins de Luxembourg or along the Seine, arm in arm with his beloved? “Paris in the springtime.”

Piper felt the need to clarify. “I'm working.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asked. “What do you do?”

“Consulting.” Nobody knew what that meant. Tosh had told her that repeatedly after she'd gotten the offer. “Pipe, nobody knows what that means.” Once she'd taken the job (and really, with the money they'd offered, there was no way she could have
not
taken it), they'd gone away for a long weekend in the Bahamas, funded by her signing bonus. She'd spent one afternoon on the beach trying to explain the work that would fill her days, but Tosh just kept saying, “So you're going to fire people,” until Piper was forced to concede that it was so. In reality, during the ten years she'd worked for Brodeur Williams, she'd never actually fired anyone herself. She went in; she observed. She sat in on meetings, listening and taking notes, fading into the background, and then she delivered a report to the managers who'd hired her as to how the company could best streamline its operations. She never stayed for the actual firing. That wasn't in her contract.

“Poor you.” Finally the man seemed to see her face, its pallor, her sorrow. He opened his mouth to say something else, but the line jerked forward again and split into six sepa
rate lines in front of six separate metal detectors, and her inquisitor was gone. Piper handed over her ticket and passport for a woman in a uniform to inspect.

“This way, please. This way,” droned the security guards. Piper ended up behind a young mom pushing a baby in a stroller. A diaper bag hung from the handlebars, and the woman was fumbling with her purse and a bottle half filled with what Piper recognized as breast milk.

“Can I give you a hand?” Piper asked.

“Oh, no, I'm good,” said the woman, who seemed cut from a more competent cloth than Piper. She lifted the baby into her arms and plopped the car seat on the belt, along with the diaper bag and her purse. She tried to fold the stroller one-handed, with the baby balanced on her hip, before giving up and looking at Piper. “Actually, if you wouldn't mind . . .”

Piper figured she needed help folding the stroller, and was surprised when the woman handed her the baby. “Hi, honey,” Piper said, jiggling the warm weight of the baby in her arms, marveling at how fast it came back—the curve of a bottom in the crook of her arm, the jiggle. With Nola she'd felt all thumbs and left feet, flipping through the stack of baby books at her bedside, trying to decipher every cry and coo and whimper. If she could do it again . . . but she caught that thought in the steel jaws at her brain's perimeter. She nipped it with her mental gardening shears, sending the bud tumbling toward the dirt. No more babies. Not for her.

“Next!” called the guard on the other side of the metal detector. Piper handed over the baby, pulled her computer out of her bag, slipped off her shoes, and walked through the doorway. Something beeped. Of course it did. All night, all day, she'd clung to the idea that travel could help her—a reboot, a fresh start, a little time away from home, and Tosh would miss her enough to change his mind—but the certainty settling into her bones told her otherwise. Her husband was not given to changing his mind. A man of his word was her Tosh. When he was just twenty-three, he'd made up his mind to marry her, and he had. Now that he'd made up his mind to leave her, she could only expect that he'd do that, too.

“Cell phone, jew'ry, iPod, BlackBerry, belt buckle,” the guard droned. Piper wasn't wearing a belt or any jewelry besides a single gold bracelet, her wedding band, and her engagement ring. Her phone and iPod were in her bag, along with a letter from Tosh that he'd held out to her while the cab idled at the curb. “Read it when you're on the plane,” he'd said. She hadn't taken it, had turned away, refusing to open her hand, but he must have tucked it in her bag when she wasn't looking.

“Try again,” said the guard, and Piper, head bent, stepped gingerly through the doorway. More beeping. Back in line, a very important businessman gave a very important sigh. Instinctively Piper pulled off her bracelet and her rings, set them in a plastic dish, and pushed the dish through the belt. She walked through the doorway once again—no beep this time—and shoved her jewelry into her pocket as she made her way to the business lounge by the gate.

At the Admiral's Club, Piper handed her card to the uniformed woman behind the desk. “Very good, Ms. DeWitt,” the woman said. She pressed a button. The etched-glass doors slid open. Piper collapsed on a gray love seat, her bag beside her, her wedding rings in her pocket, a letter from her husband that she didn't want to read in her purse. From the cash bar, she purchased a glass of white wine. She never drank when she flew—it only worsened the jet lag—but if ever a day
called for wine at four o'clock in the afternoon, today was the day. Thus fortified, she pulled her phone out of her purse and dialed her mother's number.

Deborah picked up on the first ring. “Piper?” she asked. “Where's Tosh?”

Piper's heart crumpled. “He's not home yet?”

“Is he teaching?” Deborah asked. (Piper had never gotten around to telling her that Tosh was no longer an employee of the Philadelphia College of Art.) She could hear her mother pausing, then plunging ahead. “Nola's asking for him.”

Piper thought it wasn't possible to feel any worse. At the sound of her daughter's name, she discovered that she was wrong. It was as if she was a piece of Wonder bread, and the world—no, not the world, just Tosh—had become a giant rolling pin that had gone back and forth over her until she was nothing, invisible, gone. She lifted her wineglass, empty now, and held it to her eye as her mother's voice, full of concern, said, “Piper, what's wrong?”

He left me
, Piper thought.
He left us.
The words rose in her throat, swelling like balloons, choking off her air supply until she couldn't speak, couldn't breathe. “Piper?” said her mother. She pressed her lips shut. If she spoke, if she let those words go free, then it would be true . . . but here, in the half-world of the airport, the Land of Between, a place where everyone was on his or her way someplace else, maybe she could keep it a secret. Eight hours on the airplane, two weeks in Paris, and then . . .

“Piper?” Her mother's voice, no longer concerned, had taken on a familiar nagging edge.

Words burst out of her mouth like clear water flooding past a dam. “He's got a seminar!”

Deborah drew in a breath—a suspicious-sounding breath—but before she could say another word or ask another question, Piper said, “It's in New York. At the New School. He's probably going to stay with Jeff and Rebecca, you know, in Brooklyn, instead of going back and forth every day with his pieces . . . you've got his cell, right?” she babbled. “You can always call him. I'm sure he'll be back by Friday night, maybe Saturday morning . . .”

She could picture her mother, her short cap of straw-colored hair, loose no-color cotton tops and elastic-waist pants, barefoot even though Piper had warned her that sometimes there were tiny shards and scraps of metal on the floor. Deborah had been resolutely single for thirty years, ever since she discovered Piper's father had been seeing his secretary. She'd piled his belongings into suitcases, set the suitcases at the curb, and informed him that he was welcome to rejoin the family once he'd given up his extracurricular activities. Instead of giving up the secretary, her father had married her, and the two of them had settled in Oregon, and had twins . . . and how might things have worked out if, instead of giving him the boot, Deborah had tried to convince him to stay? Piper had never asked, but she knew for certain that her mother would have had little patience for Piper's situation.

“Call Carleen,” Piper said. “I meant to do it before I left. See if she can come help out.”

Her mother's tone grew marginally warmer. “Where's her number?”

“On the fridge.” Piper waited, the telephone clamped in one icy hand, until Deborah reported that she'd found the number and would call Carleen and then call Piper back. Piper hung up, turned her phone off, and tucked it into her bag beside the letter. “I won't be here when you come back.”
The words clanged in her head. She closed her eyes.

Piper Garroway met the man who would become her husband just the way the self-help books said she would. She met him when she wasn't looking for a man or, really, for anything at all.

She was twenty-two years old. She'd just graduated from college. On a whim, she'd taken over her friend Sarah's share in a summer house at the Jersey shore after Sarah unexpectedly got into the Teach for America program and had to pack up and ship out to Louisiana posthaste. Sarah had paid twelve hundred dollars for the privilege of being one of eight people in a three-bedroom house, but she'd given Piper a break, accepting eight hundred bucks, plus the tent Piper had bought for Outdoor Orientation freshman year and hadn't used since.

The house was a disappointment, even at its bargain-basement price: A tumbledown ranch with vinyl siding, it had thin walls, sandy shag wall-to-wall carpeting, a shower that produced a grudging trickle of rust-colored water that rarely made it past lukewarm, and a single toilet that flooded at least once per visit. Worse, Piper arrived to find out that her eight hundred bucks didn't even get her into one of the bedrooms. Eight hundred bucks, she learned, got her a spot on the pullout couch in the living room, next to a stranger, a strange man with the strange name of Tosh.

“Don't worry,” said one of her housemates, a girl named Lisa whom she vaguely remembered from her residence hall. “He's hardly ever here.”

“Where does he go?” Piper asked.

Lisa lifted her eyebrows and gave a knowing smirk. “He makes friends easily.”

Piper met him on the beach that night. There was a bonfire, the obligatory keg of beer, and even though normally after a day in the sun and the water nothing would have made her happier than to shower, have a dinner of tomatoes and sweet corn, and curl up with her book, she'd decided that the only way to get through her weekends would be to spend as much time as possible
out
of the house. She'd waited in line for the shower, rinsed her hair and washed the salt and sand off her body as fast as she could, then pulled on a loose cotton skirt and a tank top, twisted her wet hair into a bun, and carried her flip-flops, her copy of
Pride and Prejudice
, and a can of Off! down to the beach. She was sitting on the dune, her legs tucked underneath her, marveling at the girls prancing around in string bikinis and wondering if there was enough light from the bonfire to read by, when the most gorgeous man she'd ever seen plopped down beside her.

“I hear we're sleeping together,” he said.

Piper stared at him, feeling every bit of moisture disappear from her mouth, along with every word she'd ever known. His skin was as smooth and brown as polished sandalwood; his hair, black and glossy, was gathered into a short ponytail at the nape of his neck. Almond-shaped eyes glittered, curving enticingly upward as he looked at her. His hands, wrapped around his knees, were strong, the fingers long, the nails short and curved, neatly clipped. As Piper tried not to stare, he reached out one warm, square-shaped hand. After a moment, remembering what was expected, she took it, sliding her palm against his warm one, feeling, for the first time, those strong fingers against her skin.

“Hello, roomie,” said Tosh DeWitt, whose father was African-American and whose mother was Japanese, who'd majored in fine arts at NYU and who would, two weeks later, take Piper's virginity on an old comforter that they spread on
top of the warm sand, underneath the stars. She surrendered it joyfully, in love for the first time in her life, intoxicated by everything about her boyfriend—his chest, bulging firmly into her hands when she slid them underneath his shirt, the way his hair was so glossy that it always looked wet, his brilliantly white teeth against his full lips. Tosh wasn't just handsome, he wasn't even merely gorgeous or any of the words that typically applied to men. Tosh was beautiful, beautiful in body and face and spirit too, the most beautiful man she'd ever seen or imagined, and somehow, through some miracle, he loved her too, loved skinny, freckled, slightly-bucktoothed-in-spite-of-the-braces Piper Garroway, who knew, even at twenty-two, that there was nothing exotic or alluring about her with the possible exception of her first name.

“Ma'am?” A woman in a blue suit was patting her shoulder. Piper sat up, cotton-mouthed, foggy-eyed, blinking.

“I'm so sorry,” the woman said, “but your flight has been canceled.”

“What?”

“There was a volcanic eruption in Iceland.” Piper stared. Was this a joke? Were there even volcanoes in Iceland?

“The ash from the volcano has been spreading across Europe. No planes are landing in Paris right now.”

“Tomorrow?” asked Piper. Her heart was sinking. She'd have to go home, to her empty bed; she'd have to face Tosh's absence, to tell her mother and Nola the truth.