Before We Were Strangers (29 page)

My face was expressionless. “It’s really good. I saved you a glass.”

He looked at me carefully, probably to gauge my level of inebriation. “Where’s Ash tonight?”

“With Tati. Oh shoot, I need to find out when they’ll be home.”

He removed his cell phone from his back pocket and handed it to me. I dialed Tati’s number. The movie was probably over by now, and I didn’t want Ash to come home to an empty house.

“Hello?” Her voice sounded strange, and then I realized that she wouldn’t recognize the number.

“Tati, it’s me. Where are you?”

“We’re getting ice cream. Everything okay? Whose number is this?”

“It’s Matt’s.”

Without responding, I heard Tati pull the phone away from her ear and say to Ash, “Hey, let’s rent movies and get a bunch of junk food and hang out at my house? Your mom says it’s okay.”

“Okay,” I heard Ash say.

Tati came back on and whispered, “You’re covered. See you in the morning.”

I hit end and handed the phone back to Matt. “What did she say?”

“They’re fine. Ash is staying over at Tati’s tonight.”

“Is Tati a good influence?” he asked, looking at me sideways.

“We’re not twenty-one anymore, Matt; she doesn’t sit around smoking pot all day. She’s a world-class musician and an independent, educated woman. What do you think?”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded immediately. I felt guilty for a second, realizing he was just trying to do what he thought dads should do. “So, to what do I owe this visit?”

Things were not going as I planned. “I don’t know . . . I just need . . .”

“What?” He set the bottle down and moved toward me. “What do you need?” I couldn’t tell yet if he was being seductive or annoyed or both.

When he stepped closer, I could feel his warmth and smell the cardamom-and-sandalwood scent of his body wash. “Did you just shower?”

He blinked. “Why?” He wasn’t budging, wasn’t giving me any clues with his body language as to how he felt about me, but I thought I could still detect a quiet anger or resentment beneath the surface.

And I was just drunk enough to call him on it.

“Who are you angry with, Matt?”

He didn’t hesitate. “You. Elizabeth. Dan . . . Myself.”

“Why on earth would you be angry at Dan?”

His voice was restrained. “I’m jealous of him.” He looked into my eyes. “He got everything I wanted. He got what was mine.”

“But it wasn’t his fault. I’ve accepted that, and you should, too.”

He moved a fraction of an inch closer and looked farther into my eyes. “Maybe. How much wine have you had?”

“I feel sober.”

“You want me to walk you home?”

“That’s not why I stopped here.”

“What do you need, Grace?”

I leaned up on my toes and kissed him. The kiss felt fragile at first, like we would break into a million pieces if we went too fast, too hard. But it only took seconds before we were removing each other’s clothes, our hands in each other’s hair.

We collapsed onto the bed naked, kissing and tugging at each other. When he sat up, I crawled onto his lap and guided him inside me. He moaned from his chest and gripped my waist, my back arching involuntarily, my breasts rising up to meet his mouth. “So beautiful,” he whispered between kissing and sucking and twirling his tongue around my nipple. He was patient but urgent, and he somehow knew where to put his hands, where I needed pressure, where I needed to be kissed.

He had ruined me for all other men. He was ruining me now.

He turned me around on my hands and knees, yanked my hips toward his body, and thrust into me. I felt like he was taking his anger out on me, but for some reason I wanted him to.

“Am I hurting you?”

“No. Don’t stop.”

I wanted to feel it. I wanted to feel like he was sending all the bad stuff far away.

The moment we came, he wrapped his arms around
me, and I could feel his heart beating against my back. He didn’t say anything; he just held me like that until our hearts stopped racing. When he released me, I was suddenly self-conscious and scurried away to collect my clothes.

“Wait, come here,” he said as he moved to sit at the edge of the bed. “I want to look at you.” He pulled me toward him. Even in the dimly lit room, I was nervous. He used his index finger to trace circles in the soft skin of my belly. There were some faded stretch marks on my hips that he leaned in and kissed. “What was it like?”

“What?”

“When Ash was born?”

I laughed. “You don’t want to know about childbirth right now.”

“I mean, were you both healthy?” He ran his hand up the inside of my thigh and looked up at me. I nodded. “You’re a good mom, Grace.”

“Thank you.” Isn’t that all we need to hear sometimes—that you’re a good mom or friend or daughter or wife?

“Were you happy?” His voice was shaky. “The day you had Ash, were you happy?”

“It was the happiest day of my life,” I choked out.

He started to cry quietly. “I wish I was there,” he said, and then his body was wracked with full, powerful sobs as he buried his face against my belly.

I held him, running my hands over his shoulders, through his hair. “I know, everything’s okay,” I said over and over, but I feared there would be no healing us. The scars were too deep.

“I feel like I’m living in a nightmare, like I’ve just woken up from a coma to discover that fifteen years of my life have
gone by. Everything went on without me. I missed everything.”

I continued to hold him all through the night and told him about the day Ash was born.

“We were in Venice when my water broke. They took me by water taxi to the hospital. I remember looking out onto the canals and thinking about you, hoping you were safe. It was uncharacteristically warm for that time of year, so warm that you could feel the heat radiating off the surface of the water. When I think about that day, it was like the sun was kissing the earth, like God was making his presence known.

“I was lucky. My labor was easy—everyone said so. At first, all I could do was stare in disbelief at her trembling little body, covered in blood and white stuff as she flailed around on my chest. I couldn’t believe that you and I had made her. When she quieted down and began nursing, Dan said it was beautiful, that she and I were beautiful.”

“I know you were,” Matt said, and then sighed as he gazed out the window. Maybe he was imagining it and finally feeling a part of it.

“We didn’t have a name for her when we arrived at the hospital. Dan was just a friend then, so I was making all of the decisions, even though I felt totally clueless. But somehow, in the hospital, I knew what to do. When I saw her, I could think of nothing but us—you and me—and how she was the evidence of what we’d had together. After that day, I never looked back at our time in college without joy because I had Ash to represent it for me, and she was perfect . . . poetry in motion—the evidence of a life burning well and bright. Everyone knew why I named her Ash. Tati was furious for a
while—she hated you for not getting back to me—but she got over it. Dan understood.

“Ash was a fussy baby for the first few months, and we were traveling a lot. It wasn’t easy. I was a new, young mom, trying to figure everything out. Eventually, we came back to New York and settled down. Dan insisted that we live with him in his brownstone, so we did. It was a godsend because it gave Ash some consistency and structure, and she had two adults to look out for her.”

Matt made a sound in his chest like that last sentence pained him, but I went on.

“Ash’s personality always shined. She was a rambunctious toddler with wild blonde hair and those sweet, cozy brown eyes, like yours. She talked, walked, and fed herself early.”

“Of course she did.”

I laughed. “Yes, she’s your child, so things came easily to her. But soon she was her own person, and I thought less about what her name meant and more about her individuality. She’s a beautiful soul, different from me and you.”

“I know that. I knew it the moment I met her,” he whispered. “Was Dan’s death hard on her?”

“She was strong, but I knew it was hard on her. He was a good, patient dad, and he loved her more than anything. I was grateful that we had a little time to prepare for it. We took a trip and stayed in a beach house in Cape Cod for a month. That’s where he died, listening to the ocean, with me and Ash by his side. He spent his last days sitting in a chair, watching us play on the beach. At night, we would make a bonfire and Ash would read us stories in the firelight. Dan seemed happy, even though he knew he didn’t have much time left.” I started to cry.

Matt moved up the bed and took me in his arms. “Keep going.”

“It was a Tuesday when he died, just a boring old Tuesday. He was lucid in the morning. We had moved his hospital bed onto the back patio so he could look out on the water. A hospice worker was there. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and watched the waves crashing down as Dan took his last breaths. Ash cried for a few minutes, and that was it. It was over. I never saw her cry about it again.”

“And you?”

“Well, you know me. I’m pretty much a blubbering mess all the time.”

“You didn’t used to be.”

“I know,” I said quietly.

Matt brushed my hair back and wiped tears from my cheeks. “Why didn’t you have more children?”

“We thought we might, but then Dan got sick and it just didn’t make sense. Ash would have been such a good big sister.”

“Yes, she would be,” he said drowsily.

We fell asleep in the early-morning hours. I got a text from Tati around eleven saying that she and Ash were going to lunch and then she would be taking her home. I quietly snuck out of Matt’s and made sure I was home before Ash got there.

Neither of us texted or called for days after that.

GRACE

Over the next week, Ash got into the habit of making plans with her dad and not telling me. When I would scold her for it, she would say, “Parents are supposed to communicate with each other. Even nonmarried ones.”

That was Ash, always being the grown-up.

I knew Matt and I couldn’t go on like this, conflicted and torn. We deserved more from each other, but I wasn’t sure if either of us was ready.

Finally, one afternoon, Matt came by to pick up Ash. I answered the door and invited him in. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen, watching me as I dried the dishes.

“How are you?” he asked, a little formally but not uncomfortably.

“Good. I’ve been practicing with the Philharmonic after school. I might be sitting in for their cellist, actually, but I would have to leave for two weeks in the summer. I’m not sure if I want to leave Ash behind for that long.”

“That’s fantastic, Grace. I could take Ash; maybe we could plan a trip to California for then.”

Ash called down from upstairs, “Give me five minutes, Dad!”

“Okay,” he called back.

“Where are you guys off to?” I asked without looking up.

“We’re going to the Met and then dinner.”

I glanced at the clock; it was five fifteen. “You’ll never make it up there before it closes.”

“They’re open till nine on Fridays.”

“Oh, that’s right.” I suddenly realized we were having the most normal conversation we’d ever had: just two people discussing the quotidian details of our lives.

Ash came into the kitchen wearing a crop top, and my eyes bugged out. “Excuse me, do you have a sweater to go with that?”

Ash rolled her eyes.

“That eye-rolling business has to stop. Your mom just asked you a question,” Matt said sharply.

Whoa.
I hadn’t had that kind of backup in a long time.

“I know, Dad, I just . . .”

“Nope. Go upstairs and get a sweater.”

Ash huffed and left the room. Matt and I stared at each other for a few seconds before he walked over to me. “You look different. You seem happier.”

I hadn’t realized it before, but I think he was right. “Yeah, maybe.”

“You’re welcome to come with us, if you want.”

“That’s okay. I have some papers to grade.”

He looked at me steadily for a couple of beats and then shrugged. “All right, see ya.”
He leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, as if he had done it a million times before.

Once Ash came down the stairs, I followed them out of the front door and watched as they walked toward the subway. They were laughing . . . and it sounded like music. A part of me wanted to join them, but another part told me to stay. As much as I loved seeing Matt, and as much as I loved spending that night at his apartment, the endless rejections over the years—and the way he had taken the news about Ash—had scarred me so thoroughly that it was hard to believe he was there with us, like I had always wanted.

I never really doubted his love for me, but it scared me that he was keeping a safe distance. I needed to protect myself.

WE BEGAN SPLITTING
our weekends up. Ash would go to Matt’s on either Fridays or Saturdays, and we alternated Sundays.

The New York Philharmonic officially offered me the cellist seat for two weeks, so I spent my time away from Ash practicing the music and preparing for my two-week trip abroad.

Ash finished her freshman year of high school with phenomenal grades and received an award of overall excellence. Both Matt and I attended the ceremony, and he was beaming the entire time, like the proud dad that he was. When we left the auditorium that day, he hugged me for a long time and whispered, “You did good with her. Thank you. I’m so proud of my girls.”

My heart ached at his words. I didn’t know if anyone had ever told me they were proud of me, and there was no one in the world I wanted to hear those words from more than him.

The summer began and I knew Ash would get bored, so I signed her up for a summer photography workshop. As soon as Matt caught wind of it, he signed up, too. I knew he could have taught the class himself, but he just wanted the time with his daughter. Ash told me that once all her classmates found out who he was, he became a rock star to everyone, including the instructor. Ash told me he was even dabbling with a more artistic style from the documentary style that had made him famous.