The Other Life (5 page)

“Let’s see . . . who do you know that’s smart, sweet, a little nerdy, and took care of their mother from a very young age?”

Quinn peered into the coffee cup, examining her own reflection in the liquid. “You make it sound like we’re carbon copies,” she said, “like I’m some kind of narcissist for liking him.”

“Not a narcissist. It’s natural to be attracted to people we have a lot in common with.”

“You were always so sure I was attracted to needy men.”

“People can like both chocolate
and
vanilla. But when given a choice, there’s always a natural preference.”

“Meaning what? You think I’m destined to wind up with a neurotic guy?”

“If a man isn’t desperately needy, my little caretaker, you have no use for him.”

 

QUINN DECONSTRUCTED, NO. 1

“ARE YOU DRAWING CHICKENS AGAIN?” QUINN ASKED.

She had kept Isaac home from school even though his throat felt better. He sat at the kitchen table with her, coloring on the sketch paper she had given him. It was from an unused pad she had found in her mother’s studio after she died.

“I’m drawing ducks,” Isaac said. “And a house.” The whole drawing was rendered in blues and greens, using the crayons he had pulled from his box of Crayola 64.

“Do the ducks live in the house?” she asked.

“They’re visiting.”

He sounded so earnest it made Quinn smile. Isaac took the red-orange crayon from the box and used it to draw the ducks’ bills and the roof of the house. He put the crayon back in its place, moved the page aside and started on another drawing.

Quinn remembered her mother telling her about how Rembrandt had used red to draw the eye into the center of a painting. Had Isaac just done that instinctively?

She kept the question to herself because she didn’t want to make him self-conscious about his process. But she often wondered if he had a vision before he began or if the process was entirely organic.

A short while later, Quinn’s next-door neighbor, Georgette, stopped by for a visit. She was a plump, middle-aged woman who dyed her hair burgundy red, wore green eyeliner under her lower lashes, wrote erotic romance novels, and was on her fourth husband. She had a habit of telling Quinn intimate details of her sex life the same way some people talk about their vacations or their pets or what they’d had for dinner—that is, with more detail than anyone else would possibly want to know. For instance, Quinn knew that Georgette’s first husband, Ivan, had insisted every lovemaking session start with a blow job, and that he never reciprocated. She knew that her second husband, Clifford, liked her to insert a dildo in his backside before they had sex. (The graphic details of that one left Quinn more than a little nauseated.) Juan, Georgette’s third husband, had a stash of porn that he spent every Sunday afternoon with. And Roger, her current spouse, thought she didn’t know he took Viagra. Of course, Georgette had her own secret, which was that she was carrying on a cyber affair with a thirty-one-year-old landscape architect in Miami.

The flip side of this openness was that she expected Quinn to share with equal abandon. Quinn, of course, wasn’t as comfortable as her neighbor in exposing such intimacies. But Georgette had a way of drawing even the most guarded information from her. It was a kind of magic charm she had. Quinn didn’t know whether it was her neighbor’s nonjudgmental aura, or simply the way people responded to Georgette’s obsessive curiosity. She only knew that nearly everyone who came in contact with Georgette was susceptible to her psychological truth serum.

Today Georgette came bearing a freshly baked banana bread. “I noticed the little guy didn’t get on the bus this morning,” she said. “Just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

Quinn folded her arms. “Georgette,” she began, trying to think of a way to remind her friend that she needed to mind her own business.

“I know, I know,” she said, pushing her way past Quinn into the house. “I’m your Gladys Kravitz. Where’s my little honeybun?”

“Kitchen,” Quinn said, following her. “Who’s Gladys Kravitz?”

“Didn’t you ever watch
Bewitched
? The nosy neighbor always wanted to know Sam and Darrin’s business.” She knelt down by Isaac. “How do you feel, honeybun? Auntie Georgette made you banana bread. Would you like some?”

“You’re supposed to ask the mother first,” Quinn said.

“Oh! I’m sorry. Is he allergic?”

Quinn sighed. “Good thing you’re so adorable, Georgette. Give him a slice if he wants it. I’ll put up coffee.”

“Of course he wants it. Don’t you, Isaac?” She held it under his nose. “Smells good, doesn’t it?”

“Like banana shampoo,” he said.

“Tastier, I hope. Who are you drawing? Is that you?”

“Harry, my friend from school.”

“Cute. Is he married?”

Isaac laughed and Georgette mussed his hair. “So is he sick or what?” she said to Quinn. “He looks okay to me.”

Quinn explained that Isaac had complained of a sore throat during the night, but seemed better this morning.

Georgette rummaged through Quinn’s utensil drawer, pulled out a bread knife, and cut into the loaf. “How are
you
feeling?” she asked.

Quinn stopped dropping scoops of coffee grounds into her French press and realized she had lost count. “Damn it!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Quinn said, hoping Georgette wouldn’t push it.

Georgette put her hand on her friend’s back. “Are you okay?”

Quinn shrugged, unable to speak. She didn’t want to tell Georgette about the baby—not yet, anyway—and she certainly didn’t want to break down.
You don’t have to tell her
, Quinn coached herself.
It’s none of her business.

“Oh, God. Is it the baby? Is something wrong?”

That was it. The river rose with a rumble deep in Quinn’s throat and the dam burst. She covered her face.

Georgette ushered Isaac into the den, where she turned on the television for him before coming back into the kitchen. “What is it?” she said, taking a seat at the table. “Did something happen at your appointment yesterday?”

Quinn nodded.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

A salty drop found its way to Quinn’s lips. She caught it with her tongue. “They think something’s wrong with my baby,” she whispered, and closed her eyes. Hearing herself say it out loud made it more real than she could bear. And then, in a flood, she let it all out, spilling everything about what she’d learned from the doctors. Georgette handed her a tissue; Quinn blotted her eyes and wiped her nose.

“What does Lewis say?”

“Nothing. That’s what makes it so hard. He doesn’t say anything.”

“That’s the way men are. They can put their emotions on hold and go about like nothing’s wrong. He’ll open up eventually.”

“There’s so much we need to talk about and he just . . . he won’t let me.”

Georgette patted her hand. “I know.”

“I miss her,” Quinn said, and her friend nodded. They’d had enough conversations about Quinn’s mother for Georgette to understand the shorthand.

“Do you want to go today? I can stay with Isaac.”

When Quinn needed to talk to her mother, she drove to her parents’ house and spoke to Nan’s paintings. She thought, perhaps, she could glean some wisdom, as if her dead mother could help solve her problems. Sometimes, though, she went hoping to understand more about her mother’s death. Intellectually, Quinn understood bipolar disorder, and knew that when her mother fell into a depression it was a chemical imbalance and not a personal affront. But suicide? That was the part Quinn didn’t get. Why couldn’t she get help? Didn’t she love them enough to move past it? No matter what anyone said, and no matter what Quinn understood from all the books and articles she’d read, her mother had left her.

What these visits really did for Quinn was unleash her grief. There, alone in the studio with no one but the paintings to hear her, Quinn could miss her mother with all the messy emotional drama she couldn’t otherwise face. It was excruciating, but afterward, she felt lighter.

Quinn glanced toward the den where Isaac sat quietly, and wondered if he felt well enough for her to leave him with Georgette for an hour or so. She knew he loved being with their colorful neighbor, but she didn’t want to abandon him if he was under the weather.

“He’s fine,” Georgette said, reading her thoughts.

“You sure you don’t mind?”

“How else would I get a chance to snoop through your personal things?”

 

 

IT WAS BARELY OCTOBER, and Quinn’s father, a retired attorney, had already packed up and moved to Florida for the fall-winter season. Since he had met Jillian there three years ago, he was leaving New York earlier and earlier in the season. She was a divorced jewelry designer who lived in West Palm Beach year round. At first, Quinn couldn’t believe her father had chosen someone so opposite from her mother. Nan had dark, wild hair; a full figure; and dressed in bohemian clothes so long before it became chic that she used to draw hard stares in the supermarket. Jillian, on the other hand, was a reed-thin fashionista, with spiky white-blond hair and perfect manicures. Eventually, Quinn came to understand that her father was attracted to Jillian because she was an artist of sorts, and had a strong personality—the very things that had drawn him to Nan.

It was just as well that Quinn was taking the opportunity to stop by today, since she liked to visit the empty house at least once a week to make sure everything was in order.

The house was on the North Shore of Long Island, several winding miles west of where Quinn and Lewis lived. Her parents had bought it before the community became fashionable. When she was growing up there with her parents and brother, Hayden, it was just a big, old Tudor that needed constant repairs, and not a coveted piece of Gold Coast real estate. Quinn loved the place, and understood that it was a part of her, and what made her know she could only ever live in an old house. New homes always felt so sterile, so lifeless.

Quinn threw her handbag on the hall table and did a lap around the first floor to make sure everything looked okay. She had heard there were a few burglaries in the area over the past several weeks, and though she doubted anyone could break in without tripping the alarm, she needed to see for herself. If there was anything that could push Quinn’s buttons, it was the idea of being robbed. She just couldn’t find any way to excuse the selfishness that went into taking something that didn’t belong to you.

Once a professional thief in Manhattan had clipped an expensive gold bracelet off her wrist, though she didn’t realize it until later. It was during dinner at an Italian restaurant with Eugene that she discovered the jewelry missing and understood what had happened. She had given directions to a young man at the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue. At the time, she didn’t think much of the fact that he didn’t move a step even after she pointed him in the direction of the subway station he had asked about. But replaying the scene in her mind, she realized he’d been holding a magazine in such a way that it covered his right hand. He must have been concealing a clipper. By the time she walked away, no doubt her bracelet was already on the sidewalk, and all he had to do was pick it up and be on his way.

Eugene had told her it was insanity, but she insisted on going back to the corner to look for the thief.