Isn’t it always the mundane we want to return to when something catastrophic happens?
So she thinks about that memory, as Sylvia instructed her, she gets inside of it. And then, miraculously, she is back there.
There Dave is, dripping wet on the living room floor. There he is, asking for breakfast.
“Is there coffee? The waves were off the hook this morning, wowwweee.”
Marcella screams. She keeps screaming. And hugging him. And kissing him.
Dave looks confused but only briefly. He screams back, still high off the ocean. He thinks it is just what they are doing: howling at the sun.
“With a welcome back like this, how am I supposed to not go out in the morning?”
And then Lauren comes down the steps. “What is going on?” she aasks. “Are you guys… OK?” She has on a white-striped T-shirt and yellow pajama pants. Her hair has come unspun from a ponytail—scattered straw.
Marcella throws her arms around her, stays that way. Lauren is still half asleep, maybe, and that’s why she lets her. Marcella cannot remember the last time she held her daughter in her arms, and this closeness, this beating of her child’s heart right here, right between her rib cage, makes Marcella weep.
“I love you,” she says.
“God, Mom, enough. What is wrong with you?”
“I love my girls!” Dave bellows.
There is relief—puddles and pools of it. Relief that she hasavoided tragedy. Relief that the past twelve hours are now just particles of memory, a memory that belongs only to her.
But the relief is not an ocean, cannot renew itself. It is like a saturated rainstorm, and eventually, when it dries up, in its place springs terror.
Marcella now knows that the unthinkable could happen, that it already has. And she also knows that next time she’d have no ability to stop it. No power, now, to save her husband.
Lauren still remembers that day, the one with the hug on the stairs. Although she does not know why it lingers so strongly in her memory.
CHAPTER NINE
I move into 31382 Broad Beach eleven days later, Pea in tow. It takes almost no time to find subletters—an actress who is out here shooting the pilot of a show on the Warner Bros. lot signed the day after we put it up on Airbnb. We’re getting enough to cover our monthly payments and grab an extra fifty-five hundred dollars. Leo was right, it’s a no-brainer.
The week after Leo leaves, a Wednesday, before I can even go to the clinic for blood work, I get my period. It’s not a surprise, not exactly, but I feel this lost hope more than I do the others. Because I know I am running out of time. With my biological clock, yes, but also with Leo. We haven’t talked about anything since that night at Broad Beach, and the weight of that—of this silence between us—feels like an elephant on my chest. I have no idea how we’ll move forward.
I peel myself off the bathroom floor, and by Friday I’m hauling four suitcases and Pea’s crate up the driveway and into Broad Beach.
Marcella greets me on the other side. “Honey,” she says. “Are you sure about this?”
I feel a familiar jolt of irritation rocket through me. I point tothe duffel in my hand. “It’s a little late for that,” I say. “Place is rented.”
Sylvia appears in the doorway. She elbows Marcella. “Oh, what do you know, you’ve been cramping my style for sixty-nine years. Out of her way!”
I see Marcella take a step back, a flash of something cross her face. I hug Sylvia, as Marcella takes the crate out of my hand.
“Oh,” Sylvia says. “You brought her.”
“What was she supposed to do?” Marcella says. “Leave her?”
Sylvia has never much cared for animals, specifically cats. But there are no allergies to speak of in our family, and for the most part, Pea keeps to herself. My mother loves her—I think because Sylvia never let her have a pet of her own when she was younger.
“Upstairs,” Sylvia says. “And watch the walls! I just had them repainted.”
I take the steps up to my childhood bedroom. The walls are covered in family portraits. Black-and-whites of the older generations and full color as the years turn on. Sylvia and Mom on the beach; me holding a fish on a dock at the Jersey Shore, that summer we decided to trade one sand for another. Dad and I on our boards, our fingers in shakas. They are all in mismatched, wood-peeling frames. It’s impossible to keep anything new with this much sunlight—eventually even the glass starts to bleach.
I pop the door at the top of the stairs open with my elbow. Inside it’s like a time capsule. My things aren’t there anymore—Sylvia loves clutter but not junk (her words), but everything else is exactly as it always was. There’s my brass bed, Laura Ashley yellow floral sheets and curtains that once matched but are now so sun-soaked you can barely see the outline of a print. It smells musty and salty—exactly the scent of home.
