The Girl Next Door (18 page)

He’d driven past it, slowly, twice, which was as much as he dared, imagining Rachael growing up there, tossing hoops in front of the garage and sunning her long limbs by that cool clear water. Knowing that he was on the fringes of his own sanity at that moment, but not really caring.

More than anything else at this point in time, he wanted to go to that house for the 4th July party.

Kim hadn’t replied.

Trying to keep his voice casual, he dug his fingers into the sand beside his thighs. ‘We could go, maybe. Sounds like it might be fun.’

‘Traffic would be anything but fun. It could take hours.’

‘Couldn’t we go over via Shelter Island? Avery would love the ferry, wouldn’t she? We could make a whole day of it.’ Low blow, Jason – using Avery like that. Low blow.

It might just work, though. Kim shrugged, which was altogether more hopeful than Kim shaking her head.

‘So you’ll call her?’

No answer.

‘I could call, if you’d like…’

‘I’ll call.’

July

Eve

Fourth of July

Eve wondered whether it was too soon to start eating for two. This was the best ice cream she’d ever had, and perhaps another scoop – for the baby – might be permissible. She tried to conjure up the sobering image of all the size 2 yummy mummies in the doctor’s office, unafraid of Lycra, but all she could think about was the delicious combination of raspberry sorbet and chocolate brownie. And God, it was hot.

Ed had had business in Washington DC on the 3rd, and so she’d suggested that she came down with him on the train, and that they stay over for the 4th and 5th. Take a look at the nation’s capital on the nation’s birthday. Before the baby came. She’d started saying that a lot – ‘before the baby comes’ – even though Ed laughed and told her she was only a few weeks pregnant, no need to panic. She was working on persuading him to take a holiday in Hawaii… ‘before the baby comes’, but Washington would do for now. It was how their lives would be now, wasn’t it? Forever more, life would be ‘before baby’ and ‘after baby’. Nothing was going to be the same. She couldn’t wait. She said that often, too.

The other night, Ed had looked almost hurt. ‘You say that as though this bit has been okay at best – like our marriage has been the waiting room for the good bit…’

She’d climbed on to his lap and pulled his head into her chest, stroking his hair. ‘Are you going to be one of those jealous daddies? The ones who don’t want to share?’

‘That depends.’ He rubbed his head against her breasts. ‘Are you going to be one of those mummies who neglects the daddy?’

She showered baby kisses all over his face. ‘No. No. No. No.’

Eve loved trains – a love instilled during her post ‘A’ level InterRail trip around Europe. She loved the sound of the wheels on the track, their constant, lulling rhythm. The Amtrak was everything she’d expected an American train to be – huge and high, with three steep steps up to the carriages. The journey had taken three lovely hours, and she’d leant against Ed in the wide, comfortable seats, listening to him talk about things she didn’t understand and didn’t want to on his cellphone, and reading
Martha Stewart Living
magazine, wondering whether she might ever, ever be the sort of person who collected antique sugar shakers and wooden butter pats. She thought probably not. But really she was daydreaming. She’d managed not to tell anyone so far, about the baby, except the doctor, of course. Cath would be the first to know. But not yet. Just for now, it was the loveliest, most wonderful secret for just her and Ed.

She kept waiting to feel sick. One or two mornings she’d lain in bed and wondered if she did, but it was really only psychosomatic. Her boobs were as sore as hell, and she felt permanently like she’d just had a three‐course meal, but she wasn’t sick, and for that she was grateful, if strangely disappointed.

What she was was unpredictably hormonal. Given to wild surges of soaring joy in which she felt like a wide‐armed, world‐loving hippy. And to black moods where everything worried and frightened her. Some days the homeless guy who slept on the steps of the church on the corner reduced her to tears as she passed, and she wanted to bring home the whiskery old lady counting change for coffee at the diner by the subway station. She felt ungrateful then. She thought about an old song – ‘How can you tell me you’re lonely?’ She had everything, didn’t she? She’d been into the park, looking for the woman from the Boathouse, but she hadn’t found her, although she’d wandered around for an hour or so. She sat on the bench where the woman had been sitting the last time she’d seen her, thinking that she might come by, promising herself that, if she came, she’d talk to her, but she didn’t come.

While Ed had gone to his meetings, she’d felt weirdly like a kid playing hookey. She wasn’t used to hotels as smart as the one they were booked into – the Four Seasons in New York, a Ritz‐Carlton here, after thirty years of Holiday Inns and three‐star Trust House Fortes, and B&Bs – and she’d taken a long, deep bath (not too hot, the baby book said not too hot) and then curled up back in bed in a huge, heavy towelling robe to eat room service breakfast and watch reruns of
ER
. In the afternoon she’d walked the few blocks from the hotel to Georgetown, where the concierge said all the good shops were, and spent a couple of hours happily browsing in the eclectic stores that lined the main drag, picking out a tie for Ed, some pretty silver earrings for herself, and, almost guiltily, two tiny white onesies for the baby. Onesies, she’d discovered, were what Americans called Babygros, and she loved the name, it being almost as cute as the garments themselves. She’d been back at the hotel, dozing on the bed, when Ed came home, business over, and though he had woken her with a gentle kiss, neither of them had the energy, suddenly, to go out exploring, and they ate dinner in the room, both in their robes this time, watching
Die Hard
, which was still dying hard long after they’d fallen asleep in a too‐hot tangle of dressing gown and 400‐thread‐count cotton sheets.

She hadn’t known how hot it would be here. Much further south, Washington DC had about ten degrees on Manhattan, and no coastal breezes whatsoever. Ed had tried explaining the whole inland weather situation, but she was frankly too hot for meteorological lessons. Yesterday Ed had taken her out on a pedalo in the tidal basin by the big statue of Jefferson, and she’d urged him to go faster and faster, loving the hint of movement in the air his speed generated, so that he’d been sweaty and panting by the time their half‐hour was up, although she was a degree cooler. It was fun, though. It was a long, long time since she’d explored a new place like this, and she and Ed had never really done that together. She’d done her exploring, before they met, and he preferred to recharge his work‐flattened batteries. The holidays they took from England had always tended to be the sun‐seeking type, where the most intrepid you got was choosing a lounger on the other side of the pool from where you had hung out the previous day, and the most adventure you had was in bed after three cocktails.

For this weekend, she’d bought a guide book and a map, and had a list of what they should see, if only it wasn’t so damn hot and she wasn’t so sleepy all the time. They’d already eschewed the legendary Air and Space Museum, saving it for another time. (The baby might turn out to be fascinated by Amelia Earhart and Tiger Moth.) They had wandered, ever so slowly, from the Capitol Building up the Mall, to the incredibly tall Washington Monument and past, to the hauntingly powerful Vietnam War Memorial. She had stood and cried openly, moved beyond words by the notion of all the young men whose names were carved into the black granite, all of whom were someone’s baby, and had once been carried in someone’s womb, and been daydreamed about. Ed had led her away gently, muttering to himself as much as to her that they might give the Holocaust Museum and Arlington Cemetery a miss on this particular visit. She’d sunk gratefully on to the bottom steps at the Lincoln Memorial, insinuating herself into a small corner of shade, and leaving Ed to climb to the top and admire the giant Abe alone.

And now she was thinking of that second ice cream. And she was thinking that she was happier than she’d been for months. The loneliness that had plagued her in the early months hadn’t essentially been rectified at all. She had met and spent a little time with some of the women in the building, and Violet was someone she increasingly thought of as almost a friend, but really nothing was actually very different from how it had been. She could hardly claim (and still sound sane) that the foetus was her companion. But it was going to be, and she was determined to look forward. The pregnancy had brought with it lots of promises of things to come. There would be a baby, yes, and that baby could not have been more longed for, and more loved, already. But there was more, wasn’t there? The baby would bring antenatal classes, and other babies, and their mothers, and playgroups and mummy and me music classes, and membership to the club, the stroller club. Eventually, she’d be holding the hand of a toddler as she climbed the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in the park, and then of a small girl, up the front steps to school, in a blue and white striped pinafore and a hair bow like the little girls who went to Mary‐mount, the
Madeline
‐esque copper‐roofed school on 5th Avenue opposite the Met she passed each day on her way to walk around the reservoir. She would belong, and she would have purpose, and everything would be wonderful.

Ed was back. He was smiling at her. ‘You look happy. Hot but happy.’

‘I am happy, love. So happy. In the immortal words this guidebook tells me were spoken from almost this very step… “I have a dream”…’

They wandered up through the streets to the White House, which was surprisingly small, although it had, according to Eve’s book, 132 rooms. A stranger took their picture as they stood against the black railings at the front. From there, they strolled hand in hand back to the hotel.

‘I’ve made reservations in the restaurant for tonight.’ Eric Ripert, famed chef at Le Bernardin in New York, had recently opened a place in the hotel. Eve had read the Zagat restaurant guide from cover to cover back in Manhattan, and put Le Bernardin in her Top 10 of restaurants to try. ‘Before the baby comes.’

‘Have you? That’s sweet!’

‘Thought I’d treat my wife to dinner.’

She squeezed his hand.

‘I know I’ve been a bit rubbish lately.’

She didn’t deny it.

‘And I just want to say that I’m going to try harder. We don’t need to talk about it. I mean – we can if you want to, but I’m saying we don’t need to. I get it. And I’m going to make more of an effort.’

She tried not to mind all the exertion words – he would ‘try’ and make more ‘effort’. This time together had been really good for them – she was so glad they’d come.

‘Thank you.’

He stopped, and pulled her around, into his arms. ‘I love you, Mrs Gallagher.’ Then he bent down, and kissed her tummy, his hands on her hips, oblivious to the amused stares of the hotel bellboys. ‘And I love you, baby Gallagher.’

Eve’s eyes filled with tears. Ed hardly ever made gestures like that, and it moved her excessively.

Rachael

July 4th was Rachael’s favourite holiday, bar none. She loved the weather, and the inclusivity and the food and the fireworks, and the silly, tearful sense of pride that welled up in her when she heard ‘The Star‐Spangled Banner’. Her family had never been particularly religious and so, growing up, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and Passover were not so important to her as these American holidays – 4th July and Thanksgiving. They had never kept Shabbat, or fasted, so far as she knew, since her great‐grandparents had come from Russia in the last century. She understood, and she admired those who did, and she sometimes, as a young woman, found the notion of becoming more practising of her faith appealing. In California as a student, she had wondered about falling in love with someone outside the faith, unsure, despite their lapsed state, how her parents would react. But that hadn’t happened. David hadn’t been inside a synagogue since his Bar Mitzvah, but he’d at least had one. He didn’t practise at all – he didn’t believe any of it, he said, although he was grateful that you could be a Jew and still an atheist. They had married under the chuppah, and he had crunched the glass beneath his shoe, and it had been beautiful. And then they had settled easily enough into a fairly secular life (with brief and traumatic diversions into Judaism for a Bris for both Jacob and Noah), and, when the time came, on a hybrid Christmas–Hanukkah celebration for the children, which arguably would only ever work well in New York. They had a tree and a Menorah and a goose and nine days of presents, went nowhere near Church or Temple, but sometimes to the movies on Christmas Day, and if the kids were confused they never said so (worried, perhaps, that their quota of gifts might be in some way affected).

So the American holidays were her thing – the days that celebrated pioneer spirit and the will to survive and triumph over tyranny. And since she was more a summer girl than a winter one, 4th July was her favourite.

When she’d been a kid that one day had lasted, it seemed, twice as long as any other day of the endless hot summer. Everything was dressed up in bunting and flags, and everyone was always in a fantastic mood. Adults forgot about children and vegetables and bedtimes, busy with their beers and their daiquiris. Even as a small child she remembered marauding around in a huge gang of her cousins and the kids of her parents’ friends, high on sugary root beer and s’mores roasted on the huge bonfire that was built on the beach in front of the house every year, anxious to evade the glance of anyone who might potentially send them to bed. She’d had her first kiss on the 4th July when she was fourteen, late at night in the dunes – all marshmallow and braces, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’ blaring out from the deck back at the house.

Now she stood and watched her own children rampaging, nursing her own daiquiri, along with a profound, and almost smug, sense of well‐being. Everything was as it had always been, and as it always should be. The party had changed in only the subtlest of ways. Now she was the grown‐up; among the adults at the party were her friends as well as those of her parents, older now, and more sedentary, watching proceedings from deep Adirondack chairs they would later complain about heaving themselves out of. Her kids were hiding and laughing and waiting for the fireworks to start, as she had once done. She watched David, flipping tops off beers down at the other end of the long terrace, and blew him a small kiss when his eye caught hers. It had been a fabulous day. David had moved some things around at work, come a day early, to help get things ready, although her parents always hired caterers and bar staff.