The Most Fun We Ever Had (40 page)

“Is now a bad time, sweetheart?” her mom said, laughing uncertainly.

“No. No, it’s fine. Sorry, Mom. It’s good to hear your voice too.”

“Dad and I just spent much of our dinner discussing how much we miss you. Are you bogged down with school work? I saw it’s been raining there for almost a week.”

“I’m—pretty bogged, yeah. How did you know it’s raining here?”

“Dad and I added you to the weather trackers on our phones.”

It was the nicest thing she’d heard in some time, the fact that people existed on the earth who gave a shit whether or not she was enduring excessive precipitation. She combed her fingers through her hair, trying to decide if it felt softer, wondering if Ben would notice its shine, wondering what it would feel like to have
Ben
run his fingers through her hair, down her back. They’d go have a beer sometimes, after his shift, and last night he’d flicked a piece of lint from the sleeve of her shirt. She’d panicked, at the time, so unprepared for intimate contact, and Ben, laughing, had apologized for startling her, but now she felt the ghost of his touch on her arm while her mom yammered on about the hardware store and Jonah’s martial arts.

She swallowed. She’d become preoccupied with sex for the first time in her life, surreptitiously borrowing D. H. Lawrence and Catullus and
Lolita
from the library. She had once gone so far as to type out the single, shameful word—
porn
—before slamming her laptop closed in terror. She’d become obsessed, from afar, with the construction of Ben’s body, with the way his shoulders looked straining against the back of his T-shirt, with the dark hair she’d seen once on his lower belly as he reached to get a bag of coffee beans from a high shelf, with the smell of his sweat when he got close enough. She’d read that some boys could tell when they were having sex with virgins, which of course made her terribly nervous.

“Before I forget,” her mom said, jolting her back to attention. “I wanted to give you the new credit card number so you could get your flight home for Christmas.”

She’d forgotten the inconvenient fact of holidays. She’d managed to evade Thanksgiving by citing a crushing midterm exam schedule, but she felt somehow blindsided by the existence of Christmas. It wasn’t that she didn’t
want
to see them. In fact, she was wildly homesick, would’ve loved nothing more than to spend a week or two kicking around at the house on Fair Oaks, snuggling with the dog, sleeping until noon and eating her mom’s grilled cheese. She wanted to hear from Liza, no holds barred, what it felt like to be pregnant; she wanted to drink fancy wine on Wendy’s couch while her sister tipsily bought her expensive handbags online. She would’ve liked to go grocery shopping with her dad and to play Candy Land with her nephews and to finally meet Jonah, her sister’s mysterious progeny, who’d already seemed to have been absorbed wholeheartedly into the fibers of the family, who was spoken of so highly that it made her kind of jealous. One of the few perks of being the youngest kid was the fact that you didn’t have little siblings to be jealous of, but Jonah was a game changer, and it seemed ludicrous that she was the only one in the family who hadn’t met him, a fact that only made everyone feel farther away.

But as she pictured how these things would unfold—eating the grilled cheese would mean sitting with her mother at the table, having to lie to her face; everything she would say about herself to her newfound nephew would be at least slightly false; her sisters had an uncanny ability to extract the truth from her—the risk of it all started to feel enormous. She couldn’t keep this up forever, of course—things would inevitably implode, she knew, and probably soon; she couldn’t believe she hadn’t told them yet; she couldn’t believe that she didn’t have a plan for the coming year, a
real
plan involving some kind of forward motion, another go at the LSATs or a lower-bar round of law school applications or a ballsy move to San Francisco to live with her rich friend Caitlin and get an entry-level marketing job. But she hadn’t done any of those things, and every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.

“Mama,” she said without meaning to, her voice now truly pathetically small.

“What is it, Goose?” Her mom sounded concerned, but then interrupted herself: “I’m on the phone with Gracie, sweetheart; could you ask David?”

She had to be talking to Jonah. Her replacement, filling the place she’d once inhabited and of an appropriate age to actually
need
parenting.

“Love? You okay?”

She cleared her throat. “I’m fine. I— Actually, I feel so terrible about this, but I…”

“Of course you’re coming home,” her mother said, the statement part question.

“It’s just that I—got an offer I kind of can’t refuse.” She conjured up an image of some pedigreed friends, hearty souls who vacationed in wood-paneled chalets. “I’m going skiing. With a few friends from school.”

“Which friends?”

She tried to ignore the way her mom’s voice had wilted. “Um. Emily.” Emily she’d mentioned before, a made-up bisexual Wisconsinite from her fictitious study group. “And Sharon.” She froze. Where had
that
come from? Who, other than those born before 1960, was named
Sharon
? But she just had to go with it. This was one of the drawbacks of living a lie, the constant need to be ten steps ahead of where you thought you’d need to be. “Her parents have a house in the Alps,” she said.

“The
Alps
? In
Switz
erland?”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. “I meant Aspen,” she said. “Sorry, I’m super-tired.”

“Wow, sweetheart.” Her mom’s voice was undeniably wounded, despite the fact that she was obviously trying to be enthusiastic. “That sounds like a wonderful vacation. But of course we’ll— Gosh, I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever, honey. I miss you.”

The niggling sense again of
how easy
it would be to collapse right now, confess, take a red-eye home and let her parents take care of her. But then her phone buzzed with a text message, and she pulled it away from her ear to look at it:
You around? Up for a drink? Comeback, 8ish?
Every time her screen glowed with his name she felt a tiny door opening up inside of her, one through which she could enjoy little pockets of her life.

She returned to her call. “I miss you too,” she said. If she paused too long to consider anything, she felt a sickly vertigo. “And I’m really sorry to miss Christmas, but I—like, I feel like it’s important to be making friends, trying to find my footing here again since almost everyone from Reed left, and I…”

“Of course,” her mom said. “Of course that’s important. We’ll be a skeleton crew anyway; Violet and Matt will be in Seattle. You live your life, Goose. Dad and I will be here whenever.”

There was a downside, guilt-wise, of having the most wonderful parents known to man. She swallowed the lump in her throat.
I’m sorry I am such a garbage person-slash-daughter,
she did not say. “I’ve got to go, Mom. I’m meeting a friend for a drink.”

“Sure. Have fun, sweetheart. I love you.”

“Love you too,” she said, and she hung up the phone, texted Ben back
Be there in 20,
and flew out the door and into the chilly evening mist before she could fully digest what a monstrous asshole she’d become.

1996

It was rooted in chivalry, his offer to drop Gillian off at her car, because the windchill was twelve below, but David felt something else taking hold with her beside him in the passenger seat, something that quickened his pulse and left an acidic sickness at the back of his throat. They’d been stealing away to dinner after work for weeks, meandering meals with tacked-on rounds of drinks.

“Of all the places to live in the world,” Gillian said, blowing big dramatic puffs of air into her cupped hands, “we’ve chosen the Midwest.” The
we
struck him as odd, as though he and Gillian had, together, planted a flag in the soil of Illinois.

“Insanity,” he said absently, angling out of his parking space. Her presence contracted and expanded next to him, filling the car like monoxide, scent of cold air and kinetic energy, static and spearmint. He’d learned a great deal about her, their meals together allowing an impressive coverage of ground: she’d spent a year abroad in Italy when she was in college and had retained bits of the language and an affinity for the country’s dry red wines; she’d voted for Perot because she had a soft spot for crazy underdogs; she’d broken her right clavicle while cycling and the bone had been improperly set, resulting in a visible notch beneath her skin. He tried to allow himself to experience their conversations without any real-time introspection. On his way home after their dinners, he ticked off reasons why they weren’t doing anything wrong.

“I’m parked right up here,” she said.

He pushed the gearshift back into park beside her little gray Honda. She didn’t move.

“If you could live anywhere else,” she asked, “where would you choose?”

“Huh.” He fiddled with his heating vent.

“I have a list,” she said.

“I guess I’ve never thought about it.”

“You’ve never thought about living somewhere else?” The note of surprise in her voice shamed him. Was it so unheard of, that he’d never envisioned an alternative? His family was here. The rest was white noise, as far as he’d always been concerned.

But now, in the car, he considered it. He’d always liked the winter—the ground had been white on the days both Wendy and Violet were born; one evening in Iowa City, before the children, the furnace had broken, and he’d come home to find Marilyn waiting for him, naked in a nest of blankets on the living room floor. The best thing about the cold was the comfort that came from escaping it. The warmth pulsed from the vents while the air outside the car crackled with the bone-numbing negatives of early February. He wondered if it ever got this cold in Italy.

“Siberia might be nice,” he said, but Gillian didn’t laugh. “Have I given you my hearty endorsement of snow tires yet? We’ve got at least a couple more months of precipitation.”

“David.”

“They really make a difference.” Nothing had happened between them. He reminded himself of this at intervals each time they went to dinner. But he knew how to order a glass of wine for her, and he knew she’d always felt estranged from her parents, and he knew she’d gone on a series of unsuccessful dates in the fall with a high school math teacher who was an amateur parasailor. He’d grown accustomed to her conversational rhythms, to the weight of her silences, to her wit, which was often so dry as to be overlooked.

Gillian shifted incrementally closer. “I’m not—imagining this, am I?”

“Imagining what?”

“Come on, Mr. Observant Feminist. Help me out here.” She leaned in—his heart stopped; she smelled—he could finally experience it himself, from a point of remove, the scent his wife loved—like the grainy silt of latex gloves. She put her hand over his.

He exhaled, and it wasn’t until he did that he realized he’d been holding his breath. “I can’t,” he said. It almost felt more intimate than kissing, the breath of his words so close to her face, the chapped skin as her fingers laced between his own. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not looking to interfere with anything,” she said. “I just thought…”

“I didn’t mean to—mislead.” He still hadn’t moved his hand.

An inch of charged particles between their faces. Warm boozy breath, and he couldn’t tell if it was his or hers. The dull shock of her hand moving up to his forearm.

“You’re not imagining it,” he said after a minute.

The smile that bloomed on her face was sudden and girlish.

“But I’m not—that man.”

“What man?” She put her hand on his thigh, and he was so used to the gesture, one his wife made often when they drove together—her little proprietary hand just patting his leg hello, an idle expression of affection—that it took him a few beats to realize what was happening.

“Gillian…”

“I just— I need to— I like you so much. I’m never happier than when I’m with you, lately,” she said. And though he realized the same was true for him, he knew he could never admit it, that to do so would be damning, forever, even if Marilyn never found out. “It’s just
easy
with you, you know?”

“I’m married, Gillian.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so anxious. “I can’t— This isn’t—” He reached down and took her hand, lifted it away from his leg. “You’re my friend. I’m flattered. But—”

“I’m not crazy.”

He swallowed. “You’re not crazy.”

She smiled at him sadly. “You’re too nice for your own good.”

“I should get going.”

She hadn’t yet moved. “Back to the Arctic.” Eye contact that lasted a second too long. She leaned in closer. “Thanks for your company, David.”

She kissed him—dry, quick, like a goodnight—and was gone.

—

W
hen he got home he was surprised to find Marilyn awake, reading on the couch in what didn’t seem like enough light.

“Hey,” he said. The house was quiet. She didn’t look at him. He was unused to seeing her stationary like this; lately when he came home she was either going full speed—packing lunches, keeping an eye on Wendy, trying to assure the other girls that their parents were still wholly extant beings, still available should they, too, God forbid, find themselves in crisis—or dead asleep. “Hi, sweetie,” he repeated, and finally her eyes traveled upward, slowly, like they could just barely be bothered to register him.

“I called you,” she said finally, flatly, and his heart immediately started racing.

“Oh.”

“Six weeks,” she said. She set down her book. “Adrian said you switched to volunteering at the clinic in the
mornings
six weeks ago.”

“Why were you calling?” he asked, still trying to hang on to some modicum of normalcy, though he knew, then, that he had irrevocably ruined something, he hoped not everything.