The Smart One and the Pretty One (29 page)

“You might still get some time,” Lauren said. “If she rests up enough—maybe later there’ll be some time when she’s awake and can talk to you.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have a few minutes.” Then he said, “She’s my mom,” and his voice cracked on the last word.

“I know.” Lauren slid down off the sofa arm and into a crouching position next to him. She put her arms around him. “I know.”

He put his head on her shoulder and he cried—not the way Lauren cried when she felt sad, with tears choking in her throat and standing in her eyes, but big gulping, racking, wet sobs.

Like a little kid crying for his mother.

The rawness of it stunned Lauren. It made her realize that whatever she and Daniel had had—the flirting, the sex, the awkward dates—none of that had run very deep for either of them. They had gone through some motions, wondered if there were any feelings there, pretended for a few minutes maybe that there were, had some sex that was all the more exciting
because
they were really strangers.

But then you saw this—you saw a boy who was crying because the mother he loved was dying—and you realized the difference between love that mattered and a casual flirtation.

Seeing that made it easier for her to hold him. She didn’t even feel angry anymore, just sad, although she couldn’t have said whether she was sad for him, his mother, her mother, or herself, or for a world in which you had to watch your mother die because the only alternative sucked even more.

She patted his back and made soothing sounds.

Eventually he stopped and lifted his head. She released him and sat back on her heels.

“You got a tissue?” he asked, swiping at his eyes with his forearm.

“Yeah.” She went into Ava’s bedroom to grab some tissues from the box on her night table. When she came back, Daniel was standing near the window, his back to her. He held out his hand without turning around and she put the tissues in it.

He didn’t turn back around until he had blown his nose and wiped his eyes. Then he faced her. “I’m sorry,” he said, taking a deep, uneven breath. “I didn’t know I was going to do that.”

“You don’t need to apologize for
that
,” she said.

“Thanks for listening.” He dropped the used tissues into the wastebasket near Ava’s desk. “I needed to talk to someone. My brother’s not the emotional type. I’m glad he’s here, but he and Mom weren’t all that close. It’s not hitting him the same way.”

“It will, though,” Lauren said. “At some point. You can’t just lose a mother and not care.”

“He cares,” Daniel said. “It’s just different.”

They stood there for a moment in silence.

“You want a cup of coffee or something?” Lauren asked.

“That would be nice.” He glanced at his watch. “I should probably go home, though, in case she wakes up and has a few lucid minutes. It would kill me to miss that.”

“You’ll drive yourself crazy if you think like that,” Lauren said. “You can’t stay next to her bed twenty-four hours a day.”

“I know.”

“One cup?”

“Yeah. Okay.” He followed her into the kitchen.

“Will your brother stay in L.A.?” Lauren asked as she poured water into Ava’s coffeemaker. “Until—” She stopped. “Sorry. Is this bad to talk about?”

“No, it’s okay,” he said. “She’s going to die. I might as well get used to the idea. Saying it out loud doesn’t make it any more or less true.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Just don’t use any euphemisms. I hate when people talk about ‘passing’ or ask me how long it’s been since I ‘lost’ my father. I didn’t lose him: I know exactly where his ashes are.” He gave a short laugh. “In my mother’s linen closet—don’t ask me why. And he didn’t ‘pass on’ somewhere. He died. Avoiding the word doesn’t change the reality.”

“I know what you mean,” Lauren said. But she couldn’t bring herself to use the word even so. “How long do they think it’ll be?”

“Couple of weeks?” he said. “Give or take a few days. My brother told me that hospice nurses sometimes slip a little extra morphine into the drip when the time is near just to speed it along, make sure it’s painless.”

“I wouldn’t want that job.” Lauren pressed the button on the coffeemaker and it immediately started gurgling.

Daniel raised his hands and pressed them up against the top of the doorway like Samson bringing down the house. His sweatshirt rose up and showed a few inches of his flat stomach. Glancing over, Lauren thought it was amazing she had ever slid her hand across his muscles, that they had once been that intimate, even if only for a drunken moment or two. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess you just think of it as an act of mercy. Which it probably is.”

“Think I could convince them to come over and give my father a quick shot?” Lauren said. “He’s not sick or anything, but it might put me out of
my
misery.”

Another ghost of a smile. “Sure,” Daniel said and dropped his hands down to his sides. “Go ahead, Lauren. Make jokes about parents dying. Nothing funnier than that.” At least he sounded a little more like himself.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a bad habit of mine. I get tactless when I’m nervous.”

“It’s fine. You should hear some of the jokes my brother and I have been making—some truly awful shit.”

“Will you both stay in L.A.?” she said. “Until the end?”

“Yeah.”

“And Elizabeth? Will she come?” No snarkiness this time: she really wanted to know.

“As soon as they can find a decent substitute.” They were both silent for a moment. Then he said, “Thanks for letting me come over. After everything . . .”

“Guess I’m still your cancer buddy,” she said with a lightness she didn’t feel.

“I thought maybe I’d ruined that forever.”

“You kind of did,” she said. “But then you played the dying mother card.”

“Clever of me.”

“You only get to use it once, though.”

“The thing is”—and his face was crashing again, crushed by misery and self-loathing and self-pity and despair—“the thing is that she would have been so mad at me for what I did to both you and Elizabeth. She would have said it showed a lack of integrity. That was the worst thing to her. It meant I had disappointed her in every way possible. If she knew—”

“She won’t know,” Lauren said. “She’ll never know.”

“That’s not a consolation.”

“I can’t do better than that,” Lauren said. “I’m not really in a place where I can tell you that what you did was okay.”

“I know. I don’t expect you to.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and when he opened them again he was once more in control of his features. “So where’s my coffee?”

“Just about ready,” she said and busied herself getting the cups out.

As they sat at the table, drinking coffee and not saying much, Lauren looked at him and thought,
In a different time and place, this could have worked.

But then again, maybe in a different time and place he would have been just another rich, self-centered banker, no different from most of the Financial District guys she met when they ran into her boutique to buy gifts for their thin, self-centered girlfriends. Maybe that was who Daniel was when his mother wasn’t dying.

She didn’t really know him. He was a stranger. He had this whole life going on back in New York that she knew nothing about but was more real to him than anything here in L.A.

For years, maybe even decades, he’d look back at this time in his life and think,
Wow, those few weeks when my mother was dying were surreal
. He might remember that there was a girl during that time, maybe even that he had slept with her, but once a year or two had gone by, Lauren seriously doubted he’d remember her name.

She needed to talk to someone about what happened, so when Ava came home that night after a late client dinner, Lauren told her that Daniel had stopped by the apartment.

“Really?” Ava said. “So did you sleep with him again?”

They had both been curled up on the sofa, but that made Lauren sit up straight. “How did you know I slept with him?”

“I heard you. I was in the next room, remember?”

“We thought you were asleep.”

“Do you have any idea how noisy you were? Crashing around, moaning, talking about condoms . . . Good for you, by the way—making sure he wore one. Made me proud of my little sister.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you heard us?”

“Well, you were
trying
to be discreet. It’s not your fault the walls are thin. I figured you were entitled to your privacy.”

“I don’t think it counts as privacy if you just
pretend
not to hear.” She slid back down so their heads were near each other. “Anyway, no, I didn’t sleep with him again.” She told Ava how Daniel was already living with someone back in New York but had waited to tell her that until after they’d had sex.

“Jesus,” Ava said. “What a jerk.”

“Yeah,” Lauren said. “I hated him when he first told me. But today I actually felt kind of sorry for him. His mother’s dying, Ava. She has probably less than a month to live.”

“That doesn’t excuse what he did.”

“I know,” Lauren said. “But to be fair, it wasn’t like he ever claimed to be serious about me. The only thing we had in common was that our moms were sick. And, in the end, we didn’t really have that in common because his was so much sicker.”

“Thank God for that,” Ava said. “Better his than ours.”

“That’s an awful thing to say.”

“I know. I don’t care. I want Mom to be okay.”

Lauren remembered the look on Daniel’s face when he first walked in, the blindness there, and the pain behind the blindness. She said, “Me too.”

They sat quietly for a few minutes and then Lauren stirred and said, “By the way, I talked to her today. Mom, I mean. She wanted to know what’s going on with you and Russell.”

She could feel Ava stiffen into a more upright position next to her. “I hope you told her nothing’s going on with us. Nothing at all.”

“I told her he really likes you.”

“He doesn’t really like me,” Ava said. “If he really liked me, he wouldn’t always be working so hard to try to change me.”

“He bought you a pair of shoes,” Lauren said. “Any way you look at it, that’s just
nice
.”

But Ava’s face remained stony. “I’m sick of him—and you, for that matter—telling me there’s something wrong with me because I don’t want to spend hours every day fussing over my outfit and worrying about whether my hair is ultra-thick and shiny or just
hair
. I’m happy with the way I look, and I think I’m the one making the right choices about this stuff, not you or the ten thousand women Russell’s gone out with before me and the ten thousand women he’ll go out with
after
me.” Then she added hastily, “Not that there’s a ‘me’ in his life in the first place. Just . . . Well, you know what I mean.”

“Not really,” Lauren said. “What’s your point?”

“My point,” Ava said, her voice going up higher than normal, “is that I don’t want some stupid Prada shoes forced on me when I’m perfectly happy with the shoes I already have.”

Lauren rolled her eyes. “You’re not seriously mad at him about that, are you? You
can’t
be.”

“You don’t get it,” Ava said. She stood up. “You’re incapable of getting it. You’re just as bad as he is. Just leave me alone about Russell, okay? Every time I see him, I end up feeling worse about myself. It doesn’t work.”

“You’re blaming him for something that’s your fault. If you’d just—”

“What about ‘leave me alone’ don’t you understand?” Ava turned on her heel. “I’m going to sleep. Don’t make a lot of noise when you use the bathroom.” She stomped off.

Lauren sighed and watched her go. For all of Ava’s intelligence and professional success, she could be awfully stupid about some things. The girl needed help.

Chapter 16

L
auren was usually still asleep when Ava left for work, but on Thursday morning she came into the bedroom as soon as Ava’s alarm went off.

“I planned an outfit for you,” she said. “It’s all laid out in the bathroom.”

“Huh?” said Ava, who was sleepily fingering the snooze button. “You did what?”

“I want you to put on the clothes I picked out for you,” Lauren said. “It’s easier than not doing it, right? It’ll take you two seconds to throw them on.”

Ava was apparently too weary to argue because she just nodded, threw back the covers, and stumbled toward the bathroom.

Fifteen minutes later, she emerged with damp hair, wearing the black pants Russell had given her and a dark green top of Lauren’s that had three-quarter-length sleeves and a scoop neck that dipped lower than anything Ava usually wore but which, even so, didn’t reveal anything but the elegant hollow of her neck and a few inches of pale, smooth skin below and around that. “Perfect,” Lauren said, with real delight. “Now give me your hand.”

“Why?” Ava said, but Lauren had already taken her by the wrist and shoved four different silver bracelets up and over her fingers. “I never wear bracelets,” Ava said, shaking them into place and studying them dubiously.

“I know. They look great. Come here.”

“Why are we doing this?” Ava asked as Lauren pulled her into the bathroom.

“I’m proving a point.” She put the toilet cover down. “Sit.”

“I don’t have a lot of time.”

“This won’t take long.”

Ava sat and Lauren quickly and expertly brushed on some blush, eye shadow, and mascara—all belonging to her, of course—occasionally and indifferently swatting away her sister’s protesting upraised hand. “I’d do more, but I know this is all you’ll sit for,” she said as she dabbed on some light lip stain. She put her head back and studied her sister’s face. She nodded. “It works. Now put your head down.”

“Huh?” Ava said again, and Lauren wished she had thought to brew her sister a cup of coffee before starting all this.

“Like this.” She pulled Ava’s head forward and thrust it down so she was staring at the floor between her knees, then grabbed the blow dryer and started working on her hair, using her fingers to flip it forward and down. A minute later, she said, “Okay, now sit up and twist toward the sink so I can get at your back.”