She gets in her car and begins to drive. She remembers being in high school and speeding down the PCH, some Beatles song blasting. She remembers, too, the rush of hormones from her firstdrives out here with Dave, when they’d pull over, somewhere hidden in the bowels of Topanga Canyon, and undress each other in her back seat.
He was a good lover back then, too. He had practice—more practice than she did, to be sure. She knew he went with a lot of girls before her, but she didn’t like to think about it. Not because she was jealous—she knew there were women more beautiful than her with bigger breasts and bigger appetites, but she also knew it didn’t matter. Dave loved her.
No, she wasn’t jealous, but instead curious. She saw these other women like portals into parts of Dave she didn’t yet know. If she could have, she would have gone to lunch with every single one of them.
The sun is slipping lower as she drives out to Malibu, and with the darkening sky, she feels the edges of this moment move in closer. The gripping reality of what they are facing, trying to swallow her.
In her hands she holds Sylvia’s ticket, discarded by Lauren into the folds of the hospital blankets.
Here it is now, pressed to the steering wheel, shiny and light as a feather—unbothered by the weight surrounding it.
If only, she thinks.
If only he had gone to his cardiology appointments more regularly, if only they had done more EKGs. They would have seen it sooner, wouldn’t they? They could have caught it? The doctors always said he had time—but until what they never revealed—and bad on her, she never asked. She was scared to. What if they had meant death? But now she thinks: What if they had meant intervention?
She pulls up to 31382 Broad Beach Road. She barely kills thelights before she darts inside. She knows she doesn’t have much time, but she also knows Sylvia will be waiting for her, and sure enough, she is.
Her mother—all ninety-one years of her—sits cross-legged on the couch. She isn’t reading or watching TV. She is simply sitting. Marcella can count on one hand the number of times she has come home to her mother waiting for her, and all of them have happened after she was grown—after she was a mother herself.
“Hi, honey,” Sylvia says to her. She says it softly, and Marcella feels the tenderness like cold water to the face—foreign and alarming. “Did you see Lauren?”
Marcella nods. She is having trouble speaking, trouble putting into words what she wants to say next.
“I’m sorry,” Sylvia says. “I’m sorry I never told you. You must think I’m selfish.”
Marcella does; she always has. Sylvia never cared how she appeared or affected anyone around her. But what Marcella feels, more than that, is sadness. That they have never had the kind of relationship that would render a confrontation like this unnecessary.
“I tried hard to have the ticket not shape my life, but it did, anyway. I was reckless and careless because everything felt ahead, everything felt like a dress rehearsal. None of it felt as real as it should have.”
It’s not an apology, not exactly, but Marcella listens. This is the closest her mother has ever gotten to one.
“I know you. I knew what that knowledge would do to you. I wanted you to live your life like it was the main event. I thought I could protect you.”
“But you didn’t,” Marcella says.
“No.” Sylvia shakes her head. She stands. “There is no way toprotect the people we love. Eventually, life finds us. And then all we have to meet it with is grit.”
“And your ticket,” Marcella says.
Sylvia nods. “There is that.”
“He won’t let her use it,” Marcella says. She comes farther into the living room. She can see her mother now, all the wrinkles that make up her face—her drooping, folded cheeks, the curtains of her eyelids. “He says he doesn’t want to take back all his memories.”
“And what do you think?”
Marcella doesn’t hesitate. “I think that he’s right.”
Is it relief she sees there, on her mother’s face? Or pride? She can’t be sure. But there is a flicker of something, some energy past the melancholy of the moment. Something she hasn’t seen in a very long time.
“She wouldn’t have Leo, but beyond that—” Marcella shakes her head. “We wouldn’t have the last ten years.” And they have, by all accords, been the happiest of her marriage. Even better than the early years, the honeymoon years.
In these ten years, since Dave has surfed and worked less, they have fallen back into each other with a kind of ferocity that surprised her. Their marriage never floundered, no, but it was taken up with the business of life—of family, of parenthood, of bills and social obligations. There was less of that—all of that—now. And in the absence they found a robust, active,romanticmarriage.
They made love on the weekends, Saturdays, lying in bed until eight, sometimes nine. They took long walks down the beach together and drove up the coast to Montecito, just for fun, just for lunch. But the best part was the puttering—all the tinkering and fixing and cooking and reading and scrolling that made up their together time. His presence was her balm.
She had loved it, every minute of it. She didn’t want to chuck it out for something else.
“You could have them again,” Sylvia says, but Marcella knows that her mother is testing her, is playing devil’s advocate, something she loves to do.
