Starting from Square Two (19 page)

“I don't pay property taxes,” Hallie said, trying to look past him. “I'm a renter.”

“Oh, but renters do pay property taxes,” Paul said, moving his head so that he was still in line with her face. “I hear that all the time from people your age.”

“How old are
you?
”

“That's where you're wrong. Part of your rent does go to municipal taxes. That's why rents in New York are so high: Municipal taxes. Look me in the eye and tell me you hear what I'm saying.”

Hallie and Erika both stared at him.

“I hear you,” Hallie said flatly.

“You've got to use your right to vote,” Paul repeated. He laughed. “Sometimes people spend more energy thinking of excuses why they
haven't
registered than it would take to actually go register.”

He stared at them.

“Promise me that you'll at least register in time for the primaries,” he said.

“O-kay,” Hallie said.

“Great,” Paul said, shaking their hands. “So I've done one good thing today. Gert, is your number the same?”

“Yes. It's listed.”

“Good. Let's do lunch soon, when we're not so busy. I'm on my way to a meeting, Local Council of District Carpenters. Very important union. Good to see you all.”

“Good to see
you.
”

He took off.

A second later, Gert said, “Oh, my God, I'm sorry. I forgot to ask Paul if he's single.”

“Don't worry about it,” Hallie said.

“Don't,” Erika said.

They looked both ways up and down the block.

“Hubba hubba.”

 

“Where have you been all day?”

Cat slid in the door at eight o'clock as they were watching
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
which was somewhere in the ten-to-twenty range in the canon.

“My parents were in town,” Cat said.

“I know that,” Hallie said, barely masking her annoyance. “You were supposed to meet us after lunch.”

“They wanted to take me shopping.” Bags hung from her arms like ornaments from a Christmas tree.

“Well,” Erika said, looking over the first page of her notebook, “we're not sharing any of our men.”

“I'll come next time, I promise,” Cat said before she disappeared into her room.

“Nice to have Mommy and Daddy do everything for you,” Erika said.

“As if we'd turn down the help,” Gert said. She threw a popcorn kernel in the air and caught it in her mouth.

“I wouldn't,” Hallie said. “I'd take anyone's help.”

“What are we going to do with all the phone numbers?” Erika asked. “Are we really going to invite all the men to a ‘Stud Party'?”

“Yes,” Hallie said. She kicked off her shoes. “If only one hot guy starts dating us from it, it'll have been worth it.”

“Maybe they'll fight over us,” Erika said.

“We know they're good-looking, and we know they're single,” Hallie said. “This is the best thing ever.”

Gert looked up. “What would be the next step?” she asked. “Let's say you go on a date out of this. Would you be the one to pay?”

“I don't know,” Hallie said. “See? This is why women never attempt this. What if a guy I picked up today started dating me. Would I pay
every
time? Would I be expected to make the first move physically, too? I should write a letter about this to a women's magazine.”

Cat came out of the kitchen with a bag and mouthful of Chee•tos. “You sooood,” she said.

“I've never made the first move, physically,” Hallie said. “I don't think I could do it. In order for men to give us the level of attention that we deserve, they've got to be pursuing us and in love with us, because anything less won't hold their attention. Guys just naturally get distracted more easily. There's too many women for them to be distracted by. I'm sorry, but a relationship will never work if the woman is the one doing the chasing.”

“Then the gender roles can't fully switch,” Gert said, wiping butter off her fingers.

“Right,” Hallie said. “If I ever did ask one of these guys on
a date, I'd still leave it up to them to call afterwards. It has to snap back into its normal mode or it'll never work. Why do you think Erika ends up stalking from afar most of the time?”

“Shhhh!”
Erika said, pointing the remote control at the TV and turning up the volume. “I like this part!”

It was the “Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head” scene. Paul Newman and Katharine Ross were riding a bicycle.

“This movie is not what I thought it would be,” Hallie said.

“When they made it, they were debating whether to make it a comedy,” Gert said.

“Oh,” Hallie said.

“Movies you've heard about for years sometimes are completely different when you actually see them,” Gert said.

“Usually worse,” Erika said.

“When Marc had me watch
Midnight Cowboy,
I thought it was going to be an adventure movie,” Gert said. “But it's not.”

Hallie seemed annoyed at what was on the screen. “It's a bank robbery movie, and they're doing wheelies,” she said. “It doesn't work.”

Gert remembered when Marc had her watch it one rainy afternoon sophomore year, downstairs in the living room of the house he lived in. Various other guys drifted through the house and stopped to watch, and by the end, there were five guys standing behind the couch, transfixed. Gert had felt good about this, for some reason. Maybe it was that Marc was the trend-setter in the house. But he'd taken her out to dinner after the movie, showing that he wanted to be with her alone—not with his guy friends.

Gert reached for more popcorn. Her mind drifted to Marc's family. They hadn't returned the two messages she'd left about meeting up with them Tuesday. Maybe they'd just been busy. She'd try once more.

It also had been a few days since she'd seen Todd, but she'd talked to him on the phone. They had a dinner date set for Wednesday, the day after she would get back from visiting Marc. If things got uncomfortable with his parents, at least she
could tell Todd about it. He'd sounded a bit strange on the phone, maybe still getting used to the idea of dating a widow. But no matter what happened, at least she'd see him Wednesday.

She didn't consider the possibility that this might change.

 

“Before we finish our happy celebration of the Manhunt,” Erika said. “We must take a new visit…to Challa's Corner!”

Gert's stomach dropped. She'd hoped the pursuit of Dr. Eden had helped her forget. She didn't know why Erika had to bring up something that continually upset her, when they all had been relaxing. Maybe Erika had to keep confronting herself with the reality of it, just like Gert had to keep thinking about Marc being gone.

“I thought you were taking a break from it,” Hallie said, making Gert glad she wasn't the only one concerned.

“I haven't checked in three days,” Erika said. “I swear I'm cutting down. I just can't quit cold turkey. Next time I'll wait four days.”

They trooped into Hallie's bedroom. Gert was reluctant to leave the couch, but was happy to flop onto the big bed. Hallie turned on the computer and Erika sat in the chair. Challa's blue screen came on, but no one was expecting what would pop up next.

Amid the usual graphics, there was a giant message that said:

Erika looked as if she was in a daze.

Gert couldn't help staring at the screen. She was thinking: They're my age. The two of them met five years after Marc and I did. And they're already on their second kid.

Erika clicked for the message board, her hands shaking a bit.

“Congratulations, guys!!! Love, Annie.”

“Best of luck.”

Erika looked appalled but kept her eyes on the screen.

Finally she threw her hands up and moved backward.

“It's a train wreck,” she said. “I keep waiting for them to break up, and I see more and more steps in his life. First he's married. Then he's got a kid. Soon he'll have
two
kids. How long do I have to wait until the divorce? Aren't fifty percent of marriages supposed to end that way? Am I supposed to wait until he's forty-nine for him to finally realize we should be together?”

“Erika…” Hallie said.

Erika's face was turning red. She shook her head. “If he saw me again, I know he'd want me. A woman who had two kids can't measure up. She's probably stretched and fatlike right now.”

“Er.”

“Just let me do this one thing.” Erika began typing.

“You said you weren't going to write any more messages,” Hallie said.

“Just one more.”

She typed: YOUR CHILD HAS COME FROM THE INCUBUS. WATCH FOR CLOVEN HOOVES.

She blasted it into cyberspace.

Hallie reached over to shut down the computer.

“Mark my words,” Erika said, looking at them both. “She's ruining his life. His desire for everything is completely lost. He was talented. He was going to go to grad school for architecture. What happened to that? He should be designing buildings instead of working at a job that has nothing to do with art. He needs someone who'll complement him and awaken his passions, not someone who lets him be so…settled. This Web log is evidence of a great big nothing. It's time to remind him what creativity and passion are. The kind that
we
had.”

Gert didn't think Erika was getting any better, three-day blog hiatus notwithstanding.

T
he wind was blowing Tuesday morning, the day Gert was going to see Marc's grave. The weather was perfect for Boston: cloudy. A mess. It would probably take longer than usual to get there. There were rumors of snow. It hadn't materialized, but dirt and leaf bits whirled through the air.

Marc's family had not returned her third call. Were they avoiding her, or just consumed by Michael's upcoming wedding? She had her cell phone with her in case they called back. She imagined Mrs. Healy getting the messages, but Mrs. Healy wouldn't be the one to return them. If anyone would, Mr. Healy would.

She wondered again if she should take Todd to Michael's wedding. She would feel better having him there. But it might also be an affront. It might be like telling Marc's family goodbye. She wasn't ready to do that.

Still, if they were going to make her feel uncomfortable, shouldn't she move on as well? Or at least take steps in that direction?

 

Gert had taken along the
Economist
to read on the bus. It was one of Marc's two-year subscriptions she hadn't canceled. But she ended up putting her head against the window to sleep. The sky was overcast, and the back of the bus was dark. She slept through most of the five-hour trip.

It was lightly drizzling when they got in around noon. Gert groggily headed through South Station, but stopped at one of the kiosks to buy a donut—strawberry frosted with yellow sprinkles.

When she stepped outside, the wind hit her in the face right away.

She brushed the hair out of her eyes and headed across the street. Red tape streamed off striped orange barricades. There was always construction going on across the street from South Station. She made her way around the plazas and office buildings toward the subway.

A few drops of drizzle stung her. Saplings in a plaza swayed ominously. The weather was mocking her. It was Marc's weather. It had always felt this way when they'd gone up to Boston to visit his relatives—frozen, stinging. Marc had always walked her through it, pulling her into a warm restaurant, a cozy tavern, his parents' living room. But today, there was no one to guide her through the bitter cold—only the cold itself.

 

Gert had to take the red subway to the green subway to an MBTA commuter train to a taxi to the gravesite.

The cemetery was two hundred years old—at least, the part right behind the church was. Two hundred years ago, someone had erected a little white church on a few acres of property, and a small circle of graves followed. For 170 years, no one new was buried there. In the 1970s, new owners bought the property and began expanding the cemetery far back.

Gert opened the front gate slowly. The graves went back in rows like teeth. On one side, knotted trees gnarled around a metal fence. Abutting it was a backyard with a swingset, and Gert wondered if those kids got ribbed at school for living next to the cemetery, or whether the house was the site each year of the coolest Halloween party around.

Gert walked past the thirty-five original graves. They were brown instead of gray, and the most legible one said a woman had “Dy'd—1823.”

She heard the swingset creaking. Gert headed back to the newer rows. Before she came to Marc's grave, she stopped at one that she'd noticed last year. It belonged to a kid who had died on Sept. 11, 2001. He wasn't really a kid—he was in his early twenties—but Gert was starting to think of anyone who was more than a few years younger than she as a kid.

She stood in front of the kid's grave.

“Hi, Colin,” she thought. “Remember me? I said hello last year.” She had kept meaning to look on the Internet to find a victim profile on Colin from the
New York Times.
Gert really couldn't be sure that Colin had died as a result of the attacks, but she assumed.

Colin's grave always reminded her that she'd been lucky to have gotten to spend eight years with Marc. Gert thought about what it would have been like to lose him when they were both twenty-two. They had known so little about relationships when they'd met. They had had to learn so many steps together. But they were also supposed to grow old together. They were supposed to be there through every step of life.

 

In the row behind Colin's grave was Marc's. He'd been buried next to an uncle who'd died young, in 1985. The uncle was only twenty-nine at the time, and had had leukemia. He would be in his forties today. He'd died young, and he'd still be young today.

As Gert knelt down, she saw someone coming through the cemetery gates at the far end. It looked like a woman with curly
hair, and Gert first thought it might be Marc's mother, but it was just a stranger.

Gert sat Indian-style on the ground.

Marc's grave said:

Gert wondered what the protocol was; whether, if they'd had a kid together, “husband” and “father” would come before son. Were there rules on that, or was it decided by the family? She didn't know. She'd been in such a bad state after the accident that she'd paid little attention when Marc's father had taken care of everything.

She smelled the damp, rich soil. A thatch of grass rustled in front of the grave.

“Hi,” Gert said.

That was all she needed to say. Sometimes, when they said hi to each other, it meant everything. Sometimes he'd look at her and say it while they were watching TV, just to remind her how happy he was that she was there.

“I don't know what to say, because I really don't know if you're watching me,” she said. “Maybe you're with me all the time.”

She pictured him leaning against the grave, looking at her and smiling.

“I need to talk to you,” she said. “You know I love you. I
always
love you.”

She told him about work and Craig, and about the little blond-haired girl across the street being old enough to walk. Then she sat there for a while, listening and thinking. She heard birds chirping behind her. She thought about the first time she'd gone to a cemetery, when her mother had brought her to
her
mother's grave. Her mother had said to the grave, “Mom, this
is my daughter, Gert. We named her after you.” Gert had been surprised to hear her mother call someone “Mom.” Her mother
was
Mom. How could she call someone else Mom?

A car that needed a new muffler motored past.

“So young,” a voice said behind her.

Gert jumped a little. The old woman behind her had a round, motherly face. She was wearing a raincoat and a hood, with just her face showing, and somehow that made Gert think of a nun. She was carrying purple flowers.

Gert wiped herself off, but didn't get up. “It was a car crash,” Gert said.

“You were married to him?” The woman had a Boston accent. “Yes.”

“My son,” the woman said, waving her hand at a few rows over.

“Did it happen recently?”

The woman shook her head. “Twelve years ago today,” she said. She didn't say anything else.

“Marc died a year and a half ago,” Gert said.

“You're not from Boston,” the woman said.

“No,” she said. “New York. And L.A.”

The woman said, “I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry for
your
loss, too.”

The woman looked at the ground. “My husband doesn't come here anymore. His health isn't what it was. I don't even remind him his son is gone.”

Gert nodded.

“You can't forget,” the woman said. She gave Gert a brave smile. “I live around here, so I'll put flowers on your husband's grave when I come up.”

“Please do,” Gert said.

The woman nodded her head, then turned around and walked away.

Gert watched her trudge toward the far end of the cemetery, toward her son's grave again.

Gert thought that if this had been a movie, the woman would have offered her some worldly advice that suddenly snapped everything into perspective. But instead, all she'd done was remind Gert that the pain doesn't go away.

 

Lachlan answered the door. Lach was one of Marc's nephews. He was thirteen. Gert was amazed at how tall Lach was now, but more, how mature he looked. She'd last seen him a year ago, on Marc's last birthday, but he hadn't had partially shaved hair and an earring then. He could be any teenager hanging out with his friends at the mall, or in a music video.

“Hi, Aunt Gert!” Lach said. His voice was changing, too.

The first time she'd met him, he'd been four, dressed up for church.

“Hey! Are your grandparents here?” Gert asked. “I tried calling.”

“They've been out all day,” Lach said. “At the cemetery.”

“Oh. I didn't see them.”

“They were going to go to lunch first and to do wedding stuff. Do you want to wait in here?”

“Nah.” She realized how sad she must look, and she gave Lachlan a smile. “I'm going to see you at the wedding.”

“Oh, good!” he said. “You're coming? I'll see you.”

“You tell them I said hi, all right?”

“Yeah. I will.”

Before she could step down, Lach opened the screen door and gave her a quick kiss. “Bye, Aunt Gert.”

 

She walked back down to the corner and called the taxi service on her cell phone.

She checked again for messages. There weren't any.

She called her voicemail at home. Nothing.

Why wouldn't the Healys call her back? Wasn't that cruel?

She could call them when she got home. She would call and call until she got them, rather than leaving a message. She wasn't
going to let this go. She didn't want to end their relationship with them chickening out.

It would really make Michael's wedding uncomfortable if they weren't talking. She'd rather talk to them now, know what she was facing. Even if they weren't going to have a relationship, she didn't like ending it on bad terms. And ignoring her on Marc's birthday was bad terms.

 

Waiting for the Greyhound, she made one last quick check of her messages. Still nothing. She thought about how Marc had left a message on her cell phone the day before he'd died. She'd been at lunch and hadn't answered. He left her the address where they were going to meet his business associates after work. She'd listened to it and saved it. After he died, she had been listening to messages again and was startled to hear his voice, so lively, as if nothing was wrong. She'd left that message and resaved it. She realized it was the only recording she had of his voice, except for maybe a few seconds on the wedding video. She was amazed that you could be with someone for eight years and never think to tape their voice. She had photos, but few recordings. How could she not have tapes of him?

Eventually she'd borrowed someone's speakerphone, dialed into her cell phone voicemail and played his message over the speakerphone so she could tape it on Marc's stereo. She didn't know what she'd do with the tape, but it was his last message and she felt a need to keep it.

 

By the time she got home that night, there was a message on Gert's home voicemail from Mr. Healy. He said that he was sorry, that they hadn't gotten her messages until late. She had trouble believing it, but maybe they were just old people who didn't bother with things like answering machines. She didn't want to believe they would just snub her.

“We'll see you at Michael's wedding,” Mr. Healy said. “You know you can call us if you ever need to talk.”

His voice wasn't very emotional, Gert thought. He sounded perfunctory. He sounded like he really didn't care whether she called. And even if they hadn't gotten messages from her, they should still have reached out to her on Marc's birthday anyway. Was it so much to ask to be treated like a family member by in-laws? Did you have to be a blood relative to be considered worthy of loving someone?

 

There was a second message on her voicemail—from Todd.

There had been a time not long ago when she'd never had a two-hour period during which she didn't think of Marc, and today, she'd had one in which she hadn't been thinking about Todd. Hearing his voice was reassuring.

He said that he'd hoped the trip had gone well and that he'd see her the next day. She felt better.

She thought of calling him back, but it was late. He'd sounded tired in his message. He was at a hotel in Buffalo after a late-night run. He had told her his schedule was starting to get crazy again.

She didn't realize that this was about to cause a problem.