The Half Life (5 page)

The waitress came with their lunches. Sarah took a sip of her soup, then set the spoon down and said, “So what are you going to do?”

“I don't know.” Piper's voice was soft. She'd felt so good that morning, euphoric after the sex and the swimming, competent and in control, but now her whole body was shaking, as if it would fly apart. She clenched the muscles of her legs, twined her fingers together, and tried to still the tremor that had started rattling down her spine.

“What would you do,” she asked, “if you found out Rob was cheating? If he was in love with someone else?” Piper swallowed hard, feeling as if there was a shard of ice caught in her throat. “Would you fight for him?” It was, of course, a ridiculous scenario—Sarah's Rob, an amiable teacher of social studies, would no more leave her and their children than he would grow another head. “Never mind,” Piper said as her friend opened her mouth. “It's apples and oranges.”

“I'd fight for him,” Sarah blurted. “For Tosh. He's Nola's father, and you love him.”

“He doesn't love me.” Piper gulped again at the sound of those unthinkable words hanging in the air, then pressed on. “He said he didn't. He's been saying it for months. I just didn't want to listen.”

“Oh, honey.” Sarah reached across the table and took Piper's hand. “I don't know. Maybe couples therapy?”

Piper shook her head. She could imagine how that would go: Some patient, well-intentioned person with a couch and a box of Kleenex, asking them questions. Piper would talk and Tosh would get quieter and quieter, sitting perfectly still and self-contained, his handsome face impossible to read, probably counting the moments until he was free and could go to his Mary. Suddenly she was consumed with a desire to see him, to haunt him the way a ghost could, to see who he was when he didn't know his wife was watching.

She murmured an apology to her friend, left money on
the table over Sarah's protests, and walked briskly across the park, back to the garage where she'd left the car. Sarah knew Mary's last name and had a vague idea of where she lived. It took Piper only a few taps at her BlackBerry to find an address; a bill slipped into the hands of the lot attendant brought her rented car roaring around the corner, and then she was on her way again.

Twenty minutes later, Piper pulled the car up to the corner; a corner that was, in her opinion, an embarrassingly short distance from her own house. She'd provisioned herself with a gossip magazine, a jumbo cup of coffee, and a turkey sub, in case she had to wait. She'd also taken the opportunity to use the ladies' room at the coffee shop where she'd bought lunch, so she'd be good to wait for hours, even until the night. But it took less than an hour before her husband rounded the corner. Her heart stuttered when she saw him, walking with a bounce in his step and a brown paper bag—from the Fooderie, she bet—tucked under his arm. He was wearing his My Morning Jacket T-shirt and the jeans they'd bought together at Bloomingdale's, the day the store had a special consultant—“the jeans doctor”—there to tell men which cuts and rinses to buy. “He says I need them shortened,” Tosh had reported, and Piper pointed out that she'd been telling him the exact same thing for years. “Yes,” Tosh had said, “but you don't have an advanced degree in denim.” For years, that had been a joke between them—“Oh, yeah?” Tosh would say when she said she knew how to cook a duck breast or which preschool was best for Nola. “Where'd you go to denim medical school?”

Piper groaned out loud, wrapped her arms around her torso, and bent forward as if she were going to throw up, thinking that this hurt worse than labor or the time she'd broken her arm playing lacrosse when she was fifteen, that it hurt worse than anything: the loss of their jokes accrued over years of time together, the way his defection ended their history with the finality of a page being ripped in half. She could hear the bag sloshing as he walked. Tosh used to bring her beer from the Fooderie when Nola was tiny, bottles of peach- and raspberry-flavored Belgian lambic, because his mother had told him that beer was good for nursing women and Piper hated the way most beer tasted. Her fingers were on the handle, ready to fling the car door open and confront him, call him out right there on the sidewalk, but he looked so light, so unburdened, that all she could do was watch and feel sick with grief.

She slipped quietly out of the car and walked behind him, hoping he wouldn't turn around, and knowing somehow that he wouldn't . . . because she wasn't there, not really. Really she was in Paris, sitting quietly in the corner of a conference room with a translator murmuring beside her, or on a plane flying over an ocean . . . or maybe even on a plane that was no longer flying, a plane that had sputtered and coughed and then spiraled down into the sea. When he stepped to the front door of Mary's house, keys in one hand, the brown paper bag tucked tight in his other, she stepped up behind him, whispering his name.

“Tosh.”

For a moment, she thought he wouldn't hear her, that he wouldn't turn, that somehow she really was in Paris and this was all a dream. But Tosh spun around, dots of color flaring in the smooth brown skin of his cheeks, eyes bright with shock.

“Piper? What are you doing here?”

She didn't answer. His keys were in the front door, and
through it faintly she could hear a woman's voice, calling, “Honey? Is that you?”

Honey
, Piper thought, and her heart crumpled. She looked at Tosh and realized that she really was a ghost—that, to her husband, she'd stopped being real months, maybe even years ago.

She looked at him—his smooth, unlined, unblemished skin, his shiny brown eyes that always looked happy and eager and excited, as if he were a boy who'd just run downstairs and found wrapped presents with his name on them piled high on the table. Lean and broad-shouldered, because he'd never miss a workout, his strong, square hands flecked with scrapes and cuts from the knives and stones and chisels he worked with. Handsome Tosh, her beautiful boy.

She was probably wrong about Mary, she reflected, as Tosh stammered questions about what had happened to Paris and did her bosses know she wasn't there. Mary might look small and helpless, but if she was going to take Tosh on, if Tosh was going to let himself be taken on, she was probably, behind the sweet voice and fluttery hands and dithery facade, tremendously competent—because Tosh, her sweet boy, couldn't balance a checkbook or pay a mortgage or parallel park or remember to keep milk and Children's Tylenol in the house. He could, under a silvery July moon, make you feel like the most beautiful woman in the world . . . but in the end, he'd leave the bed unmade, his pants inside out on the floor, an unpaid parking ticket curled like a mocking tongue on the dining room table, a series of disasters large and small for you to cope with.

Tosh was staring at her, the sharpness of his voice cutting through her reverie. “Nola? Is Nola all right?” he asked.

Piper nodded numbly. She hadn't planned a speech, hadn't thought of what to say—
Take me back? Go to hell?
—so when she opened her mouth, she had no idea what would come out.

“I slept with someone else last night,” she finally blurted, surprising herself.

His eyes narrowed. His brows knit together, and his flush, which had faded, deepened as though he'd been slapped. She heard him inhale, then watched as he turned, pulled the keys out of the door, closed it, and put them in his pocket. “Well,” he said, “I guess you've got every right.”

“Tosh . . . I don't want this,” she said. Sorrow rose up inside her, roaring. She didn't want to hurt him; she didn't want him to hurt her. She wanted . . . Wordlessly, she took his hand, and in silence, they walked the short blocks to their row house together.

They fell together into their old, familiar bed, the one where they'd made their daughter, with a basket full of clean, unfolded laundry on one side and Nola's Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag on the other. Over and over, Piper ran her hands down Tosh's back, drinking in the satiny feel of his skin, the way the muscles fit together, and she gasped as he moved into her, like a key into a lock. And as they rocked and she wept into his neck, she felt the ghostliness leave her body and felt herself, inch by inch, limb by limb, one toe and fingertip at a time, becoming real again. She shrieked and bit his neck and, after, she cried into the crease of his shoulder as he murmured into her ear, over and over again, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You deserve better than me.”

Afterward, she could breathe again. She could accept it, that he was going; that he was in fact already gone.

She could make herself speak calmly about how her trip
would, eventually, be rescheduled, about how she'd pick Nola up this afternoon from Bright Beginnings. Tosh asked diffidently if he could see his daughter tomorrow after naptime—if he could pick her up in the afternoon, take her to the park or maybe Sesame Place, give Piper a break—and she agreed. Dressed again in his jeans and the faded blue hipster T-shirt that left a glimpse of his belly exposed, he stood by the front door.

“Well,” he said, shifting from one foot to the other as Piper paused on the welcome mat.

She thought about what she could tell him, what she could say that would actually make some sort of sense to both of them.
Good-bye
?
Be well
?
Good luck
?
I'm sorry this didn't work out
? Instead she said, “We'll be okay.” As she said it, she knew it was true. It would be an adjustment, a hard one; there would be sadness ahead, her own and her daughter's, but she'd be okay. They both would.

After he'd gone, she took her third shower of the day, washed her hair and pulled it into a ponytail. She put on jeans, a long-sleeved cotton shirt, the clogs she used for kicking around the house or running errands in the neighborhood. Tosh had left his beer in its paper bag on the kitchen table—lambic, like she thought. She poured herself a few swallows of tangy peach-flavored beer and lifted the glass to the light, admiring its color, before drinking it down. Then she slipped her phone into her purse and her keys into her pocket. She packed what she needed into a grocery bag and went to collect her daughter.

“Mama!” Nola hurtled herself into Piper's arms like a guided missile. Laughing, Piper hugged her, brushing a springy curl from her forehead. Nola gazed up at her intently. “But why are you home? Nanna says . . .”—she paused, spread her chubby fingers, each one tipped with pink polish, and considered them—“four more days?”

“I came home early. I missed my big girl!”

“Missed you too,” Nola said, and though she wasn't much of a cuddler—self-contained and self-soothing, she was Tosh's daughter that way—she threw her arms around her mother's neck and allowed herself to be kissed and then carried to the rental car and buckled into the backseat for the drive to the hotel.

Piper slid her key card into the door of the room she booked that morning, and Nola threw herself onto the canopied bed, bouncing vigorously. “None of that,” Piper said, tossing Nola her swimsuit. Her little girl's eyes got big. “We can go swimming?”

“We can.” Piper pulled on her own suit, put a bathrobe on top, took Nola by the hand, and walked her to the elevator, then to the locker room and into the warm, shallow waters of the pool. Nola giggled, delighted and wriggling, kicking her plump, sturdy legs as she clung to the silver banister of the stairs, blowing bubbles the way she'd been taught. Piper watched, weary and heartsore but hopeful too, that the two of them would get through this, that they wouldn't lose Tosh as much as see him reinvented, that they would all come through.
All will be well, and all will be well
, she thought, which is what her own mother used to tell her . . . and then, when Nola's kicks flagged, she scooped her girl into her arms and paddled with her through the water, until their fingertips were pruney and the attendant dimmed the lights and Piper knew it was time to go home.

What if the one you love is the one who got away?

Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are just eight years old when they meet late one night in an ER waiting room. Born with a congenital heart defect, Rachel is a veteran of hospitals, and she's intrigued by the boy who shows up all alone with a broken arm. He tells her his name. She tells him a story. After Andy's taken back to a doctor and Rachel's sent back to her bed, they think they'll never see each other again.

Rachel grows up wanting for nothing in a fancy Florida suburb, the popular and protected daughter of two doting parents. Andy grows up poor in Philadelphia with a single mom and a rare talent that will let him become one of the best runners of his generation.

Over the next three decades, their paths cross in magical and ordinary ways. They make grand plans and dream big dreams as they grow together and apart in starts and stops. Through it all, Andy and Rachel never stop thinking about that night in the hospital waiting room all of those years ago, a chance encounter that changed the course of both of their lives.

In this captivating, often witty tale about the bonds between women and men, love and fate, and the truth about happy endings, Jennifer Weiner delivers two of her most memorable characters and a love story you'll never forget.

Read on for a sneak peek at Jennifer Weiner's newest novel,
Who Do You Love

Available August 2015 from Atria Books

Prologue

Rachel

2014

“Rachel?”

I don't answer. If you build it, they will come. If you ignore them, they will go away.

Knock knock knock, and then my name again. “Rachel, are you in there?”

I twist myself more deeply into the sheets. The sheets are fancy, linen, part of the wedding haul, and they've only gotten smoother with every trip through the washing machine. I pull the pillow over my head, noting that the case has acquired a not-so-fresh smell. This is possibly related to my not having showered or washed my face or hair for the last three days. I have left the bed only to use the toilet and scoop a handful of water from the bathroom sink into my mouth. On the table next to my bed there's a sleeve of Thin Mint cookies that I retrieved from the freezer, and a bag of Milanos for when I finish the Thin Mints. I don't want to cook. I don't want to move. It's spring, and sunny and mild, but I've pulled my windows shut, drawing the shades so I can't see the mom brigade ostentatiously wheeling their oversized strollers down the street, and forty-year-old guys with expensive suede sneakers and beards as carefully tended as bonsais tweeting while they walk, or the tourists snapping pictures of the snout-to-tail restaurants where everything's organic and locally sourced. The bedroom is dark; the doors are locked; my daughters are elsewhere. Lying on these soft sheets that smell of our commingled scent, hair and skin and the sex we had two weeks ago, it's almost like not being alive at all.