No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (11 page)

“After the gold came to Ireland, the people became greedy,” he said. “They learned to love their home improvements, and their clothes, and their handbags, and they forgot about the things in their past that were good. And that's why they tried to build the motorway through Tara and the ancient land punished them.”

For that was the truth about Ireland, he said. “You don't own the land, the land owns you.” Then he bought Christy a half of green Guinness. To the girls' amazement, as she was a pinot noir woman exclusively, she sipped it.

“It doesn't taste too bad.” She smiled. There was froth on her upper lip. Without thinking, he wiped it away with his thumb. She had often wondered what the word “frisson”
meant. Now she knew.

After that, John Paul always seemed to be around when she was coming in and out of the lobby. He hand-delivered packages to the penthouse and, once Vaughn was back in the office, swept outside their door several times a day. She thought it must be exhausting for him, because he had to do the same for everyone, in case anyone noticed. For her part, she usually managed to do her morning errands at precisely the time he took a coffee break, and he would often fall into step beside her as she bought flowers, had a coffee, or, if she was desperate to see him, collected the dry cleaning instead of Loretta the Housekeeper. They found they were able to continue conversations across days or even a whole week when they talked about their childhoods. She supposed this was what it must be like when you met someone you really wanted to be with. She finally understood what all the fuss was about.

After she collected Sorcha and Sinead from school, if it was nice outside, they would sit in the small patio garden and he would throw tennis balls to the girls, who ran about and caught them. Miss Sorenson would sit next to her, and they talked about Elizabeth Street in the 1960s and how she had known Rudolf Nureyev. Everyone was happy, apart from the French teenage girls, who were incredibly sulky, and raised an eyebrow only when John Paul took off his sweater and exposed a thin line of black hair running down his torso.

And the amazing thing for Christy was that she never once lied to Vaughn about anything. She would say she had bumped into the doorman in the street, or he helped carry up the groceries, and soon Vaughn had decided to recommend they make him permanent at the next co-op board meeting. She was delighted. She had convinced herself that she had made a new friend, and she needed a new friend, as Julia was going through a difficult time again, and had become hypomanic, staying up all night writing and occasionally ringing her, sobbing, saying she hated herself, she missed Kristian and the children,
what sort of a woman was she
? Christy did what she always did and took her to the doctor, who immediately signed the insurance forms and sent her to a residential therapy hotel in Connecticut, where he hoped she might find the answer to this question. It crossed Christy's mind that perhaps she should go, too. And then it was spring break, and she told Vaughn she didn't want to go to Turks and Caicos; she would take the girls for day trips instead. And Sinead invited the doorman to come to Coney Island.

•   •   •

J
OHN
P
AUL LOVED CHILDREN.
He had a niece he doted on, a champion Irish dancer, and he had a relaxed, easy manner with the girls, chased them, teased them, but always with a lightness of spirit. Christy could see people staring at the four of them as they played on the beach.
What a perfect family
, she knew they were thinking. She watched the sand running through her fingers, and allowed herself six hours to think it, too.

Of course, the loss of Vaughn would be devastating. How would she react? She realized her only knowledge of how to deal with death had come from films. She imagined herself being told the tragic news. Would she fall to her knees? Howl at the sky like Sally Field in
Steel Magnolias
? Or would she be impassive, think only of the children, people murmuring “She's been a tower of strength”
as she, the tragic young widow in designer black, led the children, a tableau of perfectly realized grief, behind the coffin out of Saint John the Divine. Where did you find caterers for wakes? Did you pay a funeral organizer like you did for a wedding? She was reassured by the idea that although there was no one in her family she could turn to, Julia either would know how to do this sort of thing or would certainly know someone who did. And then things got more difficult. She realized she had no idea what music Vaughn would want, what his favorite religious readings were, or where he wished to be buried.

She refused to admit to herself that she had little or no sense of what her husband was like at all, whereas she knew already that John Paul wanted to be laid to rest in the family plot in County Galway, his favorite song was “A Stór Mo Chroí,” the Bonnie Raitt version, and, though people made fun of it, he loved
The Prophet
. She started to panic. She would have to fast-forward through this sequence.

After an appropriate period of time, John Paul could move into the penthouse with her (if he was still the doorman, no one need ever know, which would circumvent the prenup) and they would raise the girls together. If it happened soon enough, maybe she could have another baby, naturally this time, a black-haired son with his blue eyes and her tanned skin. She saw herself giving birth, at home maybe, moving between the bath and her bedroom, screaming with pain maybe, no, breathing deeply, radiating empowerment, discovering that her peasant stock stood her in good stead. She could have had ten children in a field, should life have thrown that at her. John Paul handed her their son, blue and red, wide mouth gaping, crying, and she felt herself start to cry, too.

“The girls want to go on the rides.
”
He was standing in front of her, his hand outstretched. She took it and stood up, still shocked by her inability to control her own thoughts. There were tears on her cheeks. He looked at her tenderly and didn't say a word. Was it possible he knew what she was thinking?

The girls, who had been skiing in Aspen, had gone on a VIP trip to Euro Disney, and had their birthday parties in a private room at the Plaza Hotel, were shrieking with unadulterated joy at playing the slot machines and eating the dirty-water hot dogs, and they took turns recording snatches of video on Christy's phone. Christy and John Paul took them on the bumper cars, where they put a girl each in the seat beside them and vented their sexual frustration by crashing into each other as Sorcha shouted
“Harder! Harder!”
And then, as the afternoon light faded and they knew the day would soon be over, the girls insisted on going on the Ghost Train and jumped into the first carriage together. Without a word, Christy and John Paul got into the next one, and the moment they crashed through the bloodred doors he put his hand on her thigh and kissed her, neither moving until they burst through the cobwebs back into the dusk light.

The girls demanded to go round again, and John Paul quickly paid for five goes each for the four of them. On the third time it occurred to Christy that although she had never been a good swimmer, it was amazing for how long you could actually breathe through your nose if you tried.

Her stepdaughter Lianne was in the lobby with Loretta the Housekeeper when they returned. John Paul was carrying sleeping Sinead, Sorcha was saying over and over again that it was
“the best day EVER”
as she invited him up to have dinner with them, and John Paul had just whispered in Christy's ear that he would sell his very soul to the devil to spend one evening with her. Christy was laughing loudly. Any other time, Lianne might have raised a perfectly threaded eyebrow at such an extraordinary spectacle, but today, very pale, her lower lip trembling, her fingers clutching Loretta the Housekeeper's, she was oblivious. There could be no doubt she was about to deliver a momentous piece of dialogue. Loretta the Housekeeper was not so absorbed in the plot. She seized Sorcha's hand and bustled a very anxious John Paul and Sinead into the elevator, just as Lianne was quivering. “I'm so sorry, Christy.”

So this was it. Christy
had
had a premonition that day at the Met, but it was not her own death she had foreseen. And at that moment she knew that her ridiculous fantasies meant nothing, and the appalling reality of this was worse than she could ever have imagined. Bizarrely, her first thought was how awful Julia would feel about the “croaking” joke. Then she was all alone with the blackness and the shock and the truth. Her knees buckled beneath her. She collapsed onto the floor. Lianne looked at her in horror.

“Dad's not dead, Christy. He's had a heart attack.”

Lianne made a mental note to herself. She had overdone the preamble. She would have to do better next time, when it counted.

•   •   •

T
HE FIRST THING
Vaughn said when she arrived at the hospital was
“I love you.”
Christy burst into tears. Lying in the bed, various plastic leads looping around his arms and chest, it was no longer only in his sleep that Vaughn looked like an old man. He would have to stay there for three weeks, charming the nurses and halfheartedly torturing the doctors by insisting on second and third opinions on Skype from cardiac experts around the globe. His white roots appeared; his muscles weakened. He didn't want the girls to see him, but he insisted on Christy's presence and had a bed made up for her in his room, laughing and calling it their “heart attack honeymoon,” but they both knew that really was a joke. When a decision had to be made, even what he should eat, he looked at Christy and said,
“You're the boss.”

And then she had a call from his lawyer, Myron Schulberg. Myron wanted her to know that Vaughn had changed his will. He had voided the prenup; she would get what she would get, and the absurd clause about her losing her home if she remarried was gone.

“We were only winging that one, anyway,” Myron intoned. “Vaughn wants you to know that whatever happens to him, and that includes being put in sheltered accommodation in the event of another more debilitating attack, diabetes, or Alzheimer's, he wants
your life to go on
.”

She put the phone down quickly, as she half expected him to burst into song, and she smiled. How like Vaughn to deliver such a piece of news like that. She was no longer trapped in the Temple.
She could have a different life if she wanted.

Christy had rung her mother to tell her what had happened, as it seemed like that was what she should do, and her mother had caught her off guard by announcing that she and Ron, Christy's father, would fly to the city immediately to take care of their granddaughters, leaving Christy free to minister to her recuperating husband. And so Felicia and Ronald Mahon traveled economy on American Airlines to take up residence in the guest room of their daughter's multimillion-dollar penthouse. It was unusually warm for April, so they poured their ample frames into matching shorts and print shirts and huffed and puffed the girls to school and back, after which Ron sat and watched sports in the den, and Felicia chatted to Loretta the Housekeeper.

Fortunately, Christy was so consumed with the new helpless Vaughn that she had no time to worry about dealing with her parents. After the first few testy exchanges with her mother (Christy knew Felicia would not be able to resist a couple of comments about Vaughn's age, she
hadn't wanted to say anything, of course,
and how
all the money in the world can't buy you your health
),
Christy decided that she would get through all this by repeating the mantra of that meditation class.
Life gives you exactly what you need.
And certainly the girls adored their grandparents, and they did not seem to care about their irritating corpulence, their devotion to the tabloids, and their refusal to ever validate Christy for her choices, her struggles, and her achievements.

And then one evening, Christy dropped back home unexpectedly. To her relief, the lobby was unattended (too much had happened for her to even know what she would say to John Paul when she saw him again), but Mrs. Sorenson was complaining loudly and, just as if she was an observer to the situation, Christy hoped for his own sake that John Paul's lovesickness wasn't affecting his duties as doorman. Because, although she was as sure as she could be that they did love each other, it would feel too weird appealing to Vaughn to save his job, should he lose it through negligence.

The apartment was quiet, and the peace made her feel quiet, too. She found herself creeping along the corridor, where she bumped into Loretta the Housekeeper, who pointed her toward the den. She walked slowly up to the door and was greeted by the extraordinary sight of herself, aged about ten, on the enormous flat screen. It was an old video recording made by her father at a ballet competition, which he had had transferred onto DVD. Little Christy, skinny and blond, pointed and frappéed and pirouetted for the judges as her girls clapped admiringly and her parents bickered about what prize she had won but agreed that she had been robbed and that no one had shown promise like Christy.

“If she hadn't grown so tall, she could have been a professional,” they said.

There it was, proof that her memories of her childhood were unreliable and the story of little Christy, the changeling, who had been swapped at birth and was never truly loved, was not her parents' truth, but the narrative she had constructed to allow her to leave them. She had been a happy, confident, beautiful girl, a girl who could also have been a high school teacher, or the manager of the local bank in Thousand Oaks. She felt her parents' pride and her daughters' admiration, and that moment changed her view of herself forever.

No longer would she be a person to whom life happened. It could happen
because of her
. She made a mental note, as she so often did, that she must tell Julia about this.