She reached the outer perimeter of campus and turned toward the athletic complex, a looming concrete eyesore that had once been modern when it was built in the 1970s but now, she could see from a distance, looked as out of place amid the traditional architecture as she probably had when she first arrived on campus. For reasons that were obvious, Frankie hadn’t spent much time there over her four years. Occasionally, she would accompany Laila and April to the fitness center and half-heartedly give it a go on the treadmill with the Go-Go’s or Duran Duran or Madonna or, when particularly moody, the Cure or the Smiths, blasting out of her cassette Walkman, her spongy headphones soaking up sweat. Once she met Ezra and discovered that he was as disinterested in the fitness center as she was, she abandoned that ruse too.
Still though, she slowed her pace today and lingered. She pulled the Polaroid of the two of them by the pool out of her purse.
“Document each clue,” April had announced, clapping her hands as if this were a murder mystery party and she was the lead detective.
Frankie remembered now that she’d groaned, and Ezra, to her left and unable to meet her eyes, finally turned to her andsaid: “Look, grit your teeth and keep your mouth shut. We’re adults. We can do this. We’re not going to ruin April and Connor’s rehearsal dinner.”
Frankie had a slew of witty yet acerbic retorts on her tongue, but he’d already returned his focus to April, who was running down the list of rules.Rules!At a rehearsal dinner. This was not what Frankie had signed up for! This was not at all part of the agreement when she’d booked her ticket back east to her old university at risk of seeing her ex-boyfriend with whom she’d had a calamitous breakup. Frankie was just trying to be nice. Showing up. She was just trying to prove that she wasn’t the sort of person who walked away from her past after dumping a pool of kerosene on top of it and lighting a match.
Once the rules had been dispatched—there was a clue at each location that would lead them to the next, and photographic evidence was required to move on (Just so we know there’s no cheating!April had said, ever the professor)—Ezra had been the one to handle the camera. Frankie remembered that now too. She could see that he was a little tipsy, if not significantly wobbly, already in the early evening. Gregory lumbered over, equally foggy, and brought another round of shots.
“This should be interesting,” he said, more to Ezra than to Frankie, and when Frankie waved off the alcohol, Gregory drank hers too. Then, he added: “I swear, if you two don’t kill each other by the end of the night, maybe you’ll find true love.”
Frankie exhaled outside the athletic complex. She knew, at the very least, where she’d been at one point last night: she had the Polaroid beside the pool. In college, shortly after their firstChristmas break together junior year, Ezra’s mom called and said that her scans were looking uncertain, that the doctors needed to run more tests. Frankie had just nailed a spin at Abel Rink during those skating lessons he’d made her take, and she, high on euphoria, had swung by his room with hoagies and Diet Cokes, when she found him sitting on the floor, the phone in his lap, his face in his hands. That he’d been crying was obvious, and Frankie was surprised to find that she didn’t mind. She’d never been a particularly good caretaker, mostly because she’d had no one to tend to, but also because she was so often in self-preservation mode herself. But she found Ezra’s vulnerability, at least in that moment, endearing. She found that she loved him more for it, and this revelation startled her. Frankie had always assumed that a hardened exterior was the only way to get through the day-to-day; she’d frankly assumed that it was the only way for anyone to love her. But here was Ezra, his figurative guts on the floor of his dorm room, and she wanted nothing more than to open up his whole heart and to open up hers too.
“Come on,” she said finally, as she sung him a bit of “Summer of ’69” (it was stuck in her head from the rink, and she was humming it under her breath before she realized what she was doing), and they then sat in silence long enough for the hoagies to warm and the cheese to congeal. She breathed in and out with him; she implored him to exhale. “Let’s go do something nuts.”
Nuts was a relative term, she realized today, as she swung the door open to the fitness complex. Frankie was still getting her bearings back then, still calibrating how far she could pushherself into rebellion. A couple of years ago, she found herself in a Paris hotel with a rooftop pool. Night Vixen was still out doing God knows what with God knows who, but Frankie had called it an early night. She suspected she was getting an ulcer, from either the stress of touring or the stress of managing the world’s top female act who also had the maturity of twelve-year-old girls or the stress of eating shit food on the road for nine months. Or maybe all of them. So she slipped out of her jeans and hoody (standard tour uniform) and into the hotel robe, and then out the door of her room, and pressed the elevator up button. It was well past midnight, and she was the only one there, on the roof with a full view of Paris. In the distance, she could see the Eiffel Tower. It was magnificent. She dropped the robe and dived into the pool headfirst, naked. And when she finally surfaced, the first thing—the first person—she thought of was Ezra.
Today, the athletic center was deserted, as expected. In the distance, Frankie could hear the clanking of the weight room—a few athletes who stuck around for break getting in their training. Though the pool was back through the locker room and several long hallways and even a staircase down half a level, the air still smelled of chlorine. Even now, Frankie couldn’t disassociate the scent of pool water from Ezra. That night, the night his mother called with the ominous news of her scan, the first time he ever heard her sing for real because belting in his Jeep didn’t really count, Frankie had pulled him to his feet from the floor by his twin-sized bed and off the rug he’d probably bought at Bed Bath & Beyond, and they walked out of his dorm room without so much as a word. He hadwoven his fingers through hers and trusted that wherever she was taking him, whatever she had in mind, it had to feel better than how he felt right now. Frankie didn’t remember now—today—why she’d headed toward the pool back then. Maybe she’d been reading some solemn poetry for one of her English seminars about how water was like a baptism, that it could make you feel reborn. Or maybe she was in the middle of her Bruce Springsteen phase and obsessed with “The River” and, in lieu of an actual river on campus, thought the pool water would suffice, even if the song was depressing and had nothing to do with hope, which is exactly what she wanted to offer. Or maybe the idea of skinny-dipping just seemed titillating. The why of it didn’t matter then.
They’d discarded their clothes by the diving board, and Frankie jumped in first. When she emerged, Ezra was standing there naked staring down at her, smiling despite the previous few hours, despite the phone call and the scans and the cancer.
“What?” Frankie said. She felt blood rush to her cheeks and felt a little off-kilter that she could be self-conscious in front of an audience.
“Nothing,” he said, just before he jumped in. “I just love the shit out of you, Frankie Harriman.” Then he cannonballed right next to her, and Frankie had to sink under the water with him so she wasn’t blinded by the spray.
Ten years later, Frankie made her way to the back of the athletic center, the scent of chlorine getting stronger and headier as she drew closer. She didn’t know what she was looking for. She didn’t think that she’d find the answers to the question of their matrimony here, and she doubted their phoneswere at the bottom of the pool. But she and Ezra had been here last night, just like she and Ezra had been here a decade ago. Maybe that had to mean something.
She knelt down and untied her Doc Martens, which were stained with the salt from the Middleton sidewalks, and she left them outside the pool entrance. The tile flooring felt cool against the pads of her feet. In front of her, the pool was vast and peaceful, the filters churning quietly, near-invisible ripples cresting across the surface.
Frankie rolled up the hems of her jeans, then eased down to the concrete lip of the deep end and plopped her feet in. The water was surprisingly warm, though she didn’t know what she expected. That was half of Frankie Harriman’s mantra: expect the unexpected! Always be prepared for anything! Which actually, when she thought about it, was basically the Boy Scout’s motto, which led her right back to Ezra.
She kicked her feet lazily in the water and considered for the first time how things could have gone differently for them. If she’d been honest with Ezra about who she was, about what she was running from. She’d always blamed him for their split; maybe it had been easier that way, but he was so willfully naive that she couldn’t help but use that as an excuse for their messy ending. Well, not the finality of the ending. That was on her. But the messiness of it, yes. Frankie had always assumed that if Ezra had reallyknownher, if he’d leaned into the whole of her, they never would have exploded. But, she considered now, maybe she had been focused on the wrong thing for all of these years. That she had blamed Ezra for missing the most fundamental parts of her—the independence she craved, the freedom she required as much as she needed oxygen—but maybebecause she hadn’t cracked herself open wide enough, he’d never been able to peer in and get the proper view.
Frankie pulled out the Polaroid picture from her back pocket and stared at it until it made no sense, and then dropped it into the water where it floated to the middle of the pool, out of reach. Then she held up the engagement ring, which was stuffed on her sausaged finger, and found herself moved—moved—that it had made its way back into her life. She didn’t want it; she never had. But still, she had to admit, a second chance at an old love was the stuff that artists wrote about, the kind of thing that could spark a pretty good song.
TWENTY-TWO
Ezra
Zoe, who Ezra still found quite terrifying, led him back to the private room within the bowels of Burton Library once he explained what he was looking for. She’d half-heartedly apologized for macing him, but she said, as she delayered her various winter accessories—the earmuffs, then a scarf, then the mittens, then her parka to reveal yet another wool sweater below—she didn’t think he could blame her. Now she could see that he was harmless, but give her a break, how was she supposed to know?
“That said,” she continued, as she wound her way through the reading room and past the hallway with the vending machines stocked with junk food, “I’m a little confused here: your girlfriend isnotthe Night Vixen woman?” She held up a yellow Discman as if this were code forher.
“No,” he said. “She’s my ex.”
Zoe stopped and took a long look at him. He knew how that sounded; he deserved it.
“You don’t understand,” he stammered. “This is the sort ofthing Frankie does. This is the sort of mess she finds herself in.All the time.”
“So you have no blame for the mess?” Zoe asked, though it wasn’t really a question. She doubled back to the vending machines, then kicked one right in the lower left corner, and three seconds later, the machine spit out a bag of Fritos. She grabbed it and said, “Breakfast,” offering Ezra none.
Ezra considered this: blame. About his blame with Frankie. He thought, even a decade later, that he’d been a pretty wonderful boyfriend. He’d cheered her when she was sorrowful; he’d given her space when she needed to breathe. He’d brought her Paris, and he hadn’t asked too many questions about her life before Middleton because he’d promised her he wouldn’t, and he showed up day in, day out, when she was moody, when she was happy, when she was exhausted, when she wasn’t. He’d asked so little of her. This, to the best of his understanding, was what a dedicated boyfriend did. He simply stood beside her and wished for her happiness. Still, that hadn’t been enough.
He thought of Mimi now too. How even though he’d evolved since twenty-one—he liked to think he’d evolved—the way that he showed up for her as a present partner had not. Something about this bothered him, though he wasn’t in any sort of shape—battered and hungover—to articulate exactly what. Relationships were meant to be easy. His dad had left his mom (and him and Henry), and the explanation his mother always gave, with a sigh, was: “It just got too hard for him. He wasn’t the type of man to stay when it got hard.”
His dad would call on Christmas, and of course on their birthdays, but they would go months without seeing him, sometimes longer. He worked as a longshoreman on boats inAlaska and who knew where else. He’d literally fled to a northwestern territory rather than grit it out through the hard stuff. Ezra—and he knew this was a cliché, ok?—was going to inoculate himself from the hard stuff, and this way, he’d never have to test if he were the man his father was and then leave. So he’d tried to make Frankie’s life seamless in the way that he now tried to make Mimi’s life seamless, and thus, that meant that he had zero accountability in their destruction. This was one of the aspects about poker and even blackjack that he found so soothing, at least how he played it: it wasn’t that it was predictable, but there were rules and there were strategies, and if you kept your emotions out of it, you rarely got destroyed. Sure, maybe you’d fold, and maybe you’d lose an extra hundred, but if you were careful and held steady, nothing ever happened that you couldn’t foresee. If things really went sideways, you got up from the table and walked away unscarred but for whatever you lost in a hand. But with Frankie, so much was unforeseeable. Even ten years out of the explosive breakup in front of this very building, Ezra simply could not dream of the ways that he could have seen any of it coming. He’d kept his head down; he’d loved her. What else was there to know?
