I remember, now, how much I used to want. How impossible it felt to be apart from him, even for a day. How I’d lose whole nights to not even his body but the idea of it. How I’d fall asleep imagining his mouth on mine. For years after—past thirty, even, if I’m honest—whenever I couldn’t sleep I’d think of us in bed together. I’d imagine his arms around me, and I’d drift off.
Stone elbows me lightly, interrupting the memory. “So how are you?” he says. “Really?”
I think about the question. How am I? Really? The IVF bills, the hovering of infertility, the job that has long since plateaued. But it feels cruel, somehow, to say it out loud. Although to him or to me or to Leo, I’m not sure.
“Fine,” I say. “You know.”
“I don’t,” he says. “That’s why I’m asking.”
“Life,” I say. I shrug. “It gets more complicated, doesn’t it?”
Stone appears to really consider this. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe we make it more complicated.”
I think about Bonnie. “But look at what’s happening in your family.”
“What’s happening is very real. But real and complicated are not the same thing.” He sits up and brushes his palms against each other. “Actually, I’d argue that impending death makes everything really simple.”
It’s the first time we’ve said it:death. The reality of why he’s here. An inevitability.
“It’s the biggest thing there is,” I say.
I remember that night like a trauma. How after my mother and grandmother told me about what had happened to my father I’d gone to Stone’s. We had just gotten together, but we were fifteen. We didn’t need help figuring out how to blur the lines between friend and more. Our bodies knew for us.
“What happened?” he’d asked me. He was wearing a striped shirt and board shorts. He was always in board shorts back then. Always slightly wet from the water.
I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t known how. But I had folded to him in the way you can only do when you’re very young—when you believe other people have the power to save you, to make the world whole again. He had wrapped his arms around me in response to the question I hadn’t answered. And it was enough. Somehow, then, it was enough.
Stone doesn’t say anything right away, now. He just keeps looking at me.
“I don’t know,” he says, either to save himself or me. “But there are times when I think about it, and I wonder if I fucked it all up.”
I feel my heartbeat begin to drum.Thump thump thump. “What?”
“I moved, why did I move? I missed a decade with Bonnie, with the ocean.” He looks up at me, and I silently ask him not to say it. He doesn’t. Instead, he just shakes his head. “There are so many things I’d do differently.”
I think about how easy it would be, to turn back the clock. To go back to twenty-five. To tell him not to go. To demand it. Would it make a difference?
It wasn’t what I wanted then, was it?
“You’re happy,” he says. “I’m not.”
“I can’t have a baby.”
The words tumble out. Whether they’re to make him feel better or because they are the truth, I don’t know. I’ve avoided putting our “situation” into such concise verbiage. There is a multibillion-dollar industry around fertility that tells you to Speak It Into Existence that tells you your Words Have Power and Nothing Is Impossible. It says Pay Us and you’ll get knocked up, and then when you don’t, it says You’re Just Too Stressed—here, relax, have some lavender. Have you tried these herbs? That’ll be twenty thousand, please. And don’t forget:It’s all up to you.Which really means:It’s all your fault.
On the rotted wood deck of the Greek, Stone takes my hand. We sit that way, side by side, listening to the waves of the ocean as if the water has the answers.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dave has open-heart surgery the summer before Lauren starts the second grade. He needs three bypasses and an aortic valve replacement. Marcella is stupefied. They are so young! Not even forty! What has happened?
He has coronary artery disease. They discover this after an episode walking up the beach steps. Dave feels the sudden constriction, falls to his knees.
They are lucky they caught it when they did, the doctors say. Another few days and he’d be dead. Surgery will help for a long time—decades, perhaps—but it, like all human things, is not a permanent solve.
Marcella is woefully unprepared for this twist, this knot in the thread of her life. She has a curious young daughter who spends most of her time in the water, and a mother who has just built herself a back house and has no plans on leaving. They are trying to navigate three generations in the same household, and Dave, in many ways, is the lubricant that makes it all turn.
In the hospital Marcella is measured and stoic. Dave’s parents fly in from New York—big, lively, Upper West Siders who bringbagels into the waiting room and hug Marcella as if it’s her wedding, not this.
