The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay (34 page)

I give a weary childish sigh. I know what they think, that I am too weak-willed and complacent to break up with Mitchell or tell Renee to lay off. That I will rush back to my old life at the first possible opportunity, regardless of what awaits me there.

But I've changed, in the last hour. I'm coming to figure out who I can trust.

And, apparently, I cannot trust anyone.

“I think,” I say coldly, “that it's time for me to put my days of being manipulated behind me. If such a thing is possible.”

“Where will you go?” Jenny asks.

I shake my head and then take one last look at the pretty snow-clung brick facade of the Minnow Bay Inn. “I only know where I won't be,” I tell her. Then I roll up the window to stop the icy wind coming in, and put the car into drive, and prepare to leave Minnow Bay forever.

There's just one more stop I need to make.

*   *   *

When I pull into Ben's house on Lemon Lake, it seems like no one is home. Actually, it seems like no one is home on the entire lake. The houses are totally dark, the streetlights are sodium dim, the moon isn't out, and the only clue to the whereabouts of Ben's driveway is a tiny silver bike reflector on the mailbox in front of it. I rumble up the gravel driveway and shine my headlights on the house, which is completely dark, and then, just as I am about to give up and leave, I spot a little glowing illumination coming from, of all places, Ben's roof.

I cut the lights, pull my coat around me, and head to the house.

“Up here,” he calls, and I see a big aluminum ladder propped against the garage.

For a second I think about ignoring him. I could pretend I didn't hear him, knock, go back to the car, and leave forever.

Or, perhaps more fun, I could “accidentally” knock the ladder out of position, trapping him up there. The woman who came here and tore up the divorce papers weeks ago might do that.

I am not really that woman.

Instead I walk to the ladder, tip my head up to where that tiny little light is coming from, and say, “Is it icy?”

“I raked it yesterday. Safe as long as you watch your step.”

The gable of the roof is perpendicular to the lake, and the ladder is set halfway between edge and peak on the lake-facing side. I make my way slowly up the ladder, glad for my serious boots and questioning the merit of my felt mittens yet again. When I come to the top of the roof and get myself to standing, mountain-goat style, I find Ben sitting on what is clearly a homemade addition—a small teak bench set into the roof, with a PVC pipe handrail leading straight to it.

“You can't winterproof your house, but you can build a winterized bench on the roof of your garage?” I ask.

“You must remember how I feel about stars,” he says. “It gets so nice and dark up here.”

It is so incredibly dark. When I am seated on the bench, padded with one of those impossibly thick army-surplus blankets, and my heartbeat settles a little from the climb, Ben turns out his lantern and we both look up. It is like nothing I've ever seen before. The sky is brighter than any cityscape I've ever seen. There is an arch of creamy glow in the sky that I know from planetarium visits to be the Milky Way. It stretches across the entire sky, above, behind, in front, and through it, stars on top of stars, on top of stars.

Without knowing exactly how I can feel inspired amid all that has happened today, I let a deep sigh escape.

“You might see the northern lights. If you stay up here long enough.”

“I'm leaving,” I tell him quietly.

“I know. I found your note when I came back from plowing the ice.”

“And I'm not coming back,”

“I know that too. Colleen texted me already.”

“The Good Old Minnow Bay Bulletin Service,” I say, not turning away from the stars.

“You know, they didn't mean to hurt you. They thought you were sort of in on it, the whole time. You didn't put up much of a fight.”

“I'm not much of a fighter,” I say. “I trust people so easily.”

“That doesn't mean they never deserve your trust. Colleen and Jenny are not bad people. They're actually wonderful people.”

“I know,” I say. “But it doesn't help.”

He says nothing for a time.

“When were you going to tell me you were moving?” I ask.

Again I get silence.

“Were you waiting for me to fall in love with you?”

The longest silence yet. Then, finally, quietly, he says, “Yes.”

“I think I was,” I tell him.

He swallows. At some point in the last few moments I've turned to him, and now I see his windburned face set in a deep frown, his eyebrows furrowed. “I was hoping you'd come with me,” he says. “We'd go back, and I'd start another company, and we could buy a beautiful apartment in the suburbs, and you could paint whenever you wanted.”

My heart contracts. That sounds exactly perfect for a version of myself that no longer exists. “But that's not what I want.”

He sighs. “I know that now.”

My eyes start to sting. The cold. “I wanted something that wasn't real,” I say, thinking of Minnow Bay's incredible main street. It's friendly, cold-proof people.

“It was real. It just isn't lasting.”

“What I want would last.”

We sit quietly for a little longer.

“I have to go now.”

“Just stay tonight,” he says, turning to me, suddenly with hands on my shoulders, his face a foot from mine and yet so incredibly close. “Please.”

I want to. I want that so much. “I can't,” I tell him. “Despite…” I grope around for the words to describe the manipulation, the confusion, the disappointment I feel, and then give up, “…
everything.
There's a part of me that wishes I could stay. But, for better or for worse, I told Renee I'd be there for her in the morning. I think she needs me to watch the girls while she consults her lawyer.”

“Oh, come on,” Ben says, suddenly angry. “What about a nanny? What about the husband? The one you almost married? What about anyone else in the world but
you
?”

“It has to be me.”

“It doesn't have to be you. Don't you see? Can't you see through any of this manipulation?”

I bite my lip, hurt. “Apparently not, Ben. If I could, I wouldn't still be here.”

“No, you'd be back in Chicago with your so-called boyfriend and the best friend who treats you like shit and the brother who won't take your phone calls unless he needs money.”

I press my eyes into my hands. It all hurts so much. I feel so incredibly lost.

“I know you think you can't trust us, Lily. But the people here, we care about you. Colleen, Jenny, Simone, Drew—”

“Drew?”

“My older brother. You met him at my mom's party.”

“Your brother? What the hell does he have to do with this?”

“He's the one who bought your paintings, Lily. Don't you see? People who barely know you believe in you, and I believe in—”

“Stop,” I say, and wave my hands in front of my face like his words are ravens aiming directly for my eyes. My mouth goes dry. I want to cry and barf at the same time.

“A Hutchinson bought my paintings?”

“Yes,” he says. “I don't know why Jenny didn't tell…” His voice drifts off as he starts to understand exactly why Jenny didn't explain that no, my paintings didn't sell because I'm talented or I'm worth what she said I'm worth or because some collector saw investment potential or just fell in love with the works and they'll soon be hanging in a carefully decorated lake home and admired for exactly what they were intended to be. No, Jenny forced them on yet another obedient Hutchinson who obliged as one more attempt to preserve the smoke and mirrors that my last month has been comprised of.

So that's good. Because now I can do what I need to do with absolutely no lingering regrets.

“Give this to Colleen for me, will you?” I say, and stand up, carefully, because no matter what Ben tells me, everything, everywhere I look, seems so tenuously icy.

Ben takes the envelope I hastily stuffed together in the car. “What is it?”

“Just give it to her,” I repeat. “And help me down this ladder. I'm leaving now.”

“I want you to stay,” he says. “Please. Lily. Stay.”

I shake my head, make my way to the ladder, accepting his help, wishing I didn't so badly want to say yes, and knowing that I have let everything go way too far. At the edge of the roof, once my legs are kicked over and solid on the ladder, I wrench free of his hands.

“It's better I'm leaving,” I tell him. “After I'm gone, you can watch for those northern lights for as long as you like. For the rest of your life, if you want.”

 

Twenty-one

 

I am angry, truly angry, at the citizens of Minnow Bay for only about an hour. Somewhere around the time I have to stop to pee and buy more syrupy fast-food coffee, I stop being mad at them and turn the blame directly where it belongs, onto myself. I came to Minnow Bay looking desperately to get unstuck from any number of things, but no matter what I might have told myself, the very last thing on that list was my marriage to Ben. I came because I didn't know how to keep an apartment, break up with a jerk, stand up to a friend, or be a sister to my brother. I still don't know how to do any of those things, but I know now the answer isn't running away, or throwing a tantrum, or buying a really soft pair of mittens.

Back in Chicago, in my real life, such as it is, I can decide to learn how to do those things. Or I can move in with Mitchell, take care of Renee, and try to cram myself back into as close a facsimile of a time long past as possible.

And what makes me so angry is that I'm having trouble deciding on which thing to do.

I don't love Mitchell, not even a little bit. I was telling the truth when I said I was falling in love with Ben, so that is how I know for sure about Mitchell. Maybe before I went to Minnow Bay I could have convinced myself that what we had was something love-like. Now I can be absolutely positive it is not.

And I know too now that my creative “block” in painting was a similar invention of mine, as useful to me as the idea that I might one day feel love for Mitchell, and just as improbable. I was not waiting on perfect light or ideal material or some kind of painterly lightning bolt of inspiration to strike me from the sky. If I could work in a sixty-degree garage in an alleyway in the middle of darkest Wisconsin winter, painting from a sketch made by a stranger five years earlier, I can work anywhere. The real reason I wasn't painting was because I didn't believe in myself anymore. When, for ever so short a time, I did, I painted again.

And the most infuriating thing of all? The thing that hurt me most in Chicago, that hurts most now, that fundamental understanding I seem to be incapable of having? That my best friend is a shitty one, and my attempt at replacing her was utterly unsuccessful, and that the reason for all of this is that my magical-unicorn-ride idea of friendships has been, all this time, unrealistic, childish, and just plain stupid.

Apparently, my friendships aren't the “always there for each other, push you forward when it hurts, hold you back when you're about to step into traffic, move next door to each other and talk on the phone every day and cry and laugh and get old and play cribbage together” bullshit I was promised since I read my first Baby-Sitters Club book at age seven.

Apparently, my friendships are conditional. And deceptive. And fleeting.

I look straight ahead, into that wintry dark that creeps into the edges of my headlights, that threatens to overtake me from behind, that seems utterly inescapable and, for the first time, I truly understand: you cannot, it turns out, build your entire life around your friends' lives. You must have a life of your own. And believing otherwise will only land you with a nasty surprise ten years down the road.

When the bachelorette party is long over and everyone else's life has moved on and yours is only standing perfectly, totally still.

*   *   *

In Chicago I go straight to Renee's house. It is six in the morning when I arrive—I had to stop and sleep for a couple of hours near Rockford—and I don't want to ring the doorbell in case she cried herself to sleep in the late hours the night before. I'm mad at her, but I'm not a total asshole. Instead I park in front of her house—my God, it seems even bigger than usual, and yet more outrageous that she couldn't squeeze me in there for a couple of days—and wait until I see some signs of life.

Some number of minutes later I am asleep with my face on the steering wheel and Renee is knocking on my window at the same time as she is yanking on my door.

I nearly tumble out, catch myself, blink my eyes hard, and wrap her in a hug. It's like a reflex, like opening your mouth when you put on mascara. I see her, I hug her, I try not to cry. She hugs back, a real one, the first I've gotten from her in a long time, and says, “You really did it. You drove through the night.”

I nod. I'm feeling sleep addled. I'm supposed to be mad, I remind myself. I'm not.

Renee shakes her head at me. Disappointment? Relief? “I don't know what to say.”

“Are you okay?” I ask her.

“I am. I'm really okay,” she says. “I'm good, actually.”

I look at her blankly. My car door is standing open, and I must have left the keys in the ignition because the car is dinging at me. “Ding, ding, ding,” it says, like a wakeup call gone unanswered.

Renee takes my arm and pulls me out of the car, pushes the door closed behind me. She grabs my hand, presses it tight in her fingers. “You know Nic and I are never going to split up,” she says matter-of-factly. “We have two amazing daughters together, and an obscene mortgage, and fifty thousand dollars in credit card debt holding us together even if just being married wasn't enough.”