A pack of five girls pushed past him, then a couple who were in the throes of making out and walking at the same time. Behind him, someone tooted a noisemaker, and someone else cheered, and for some reason, Ezra thought of his mother. It hit him occasionally that she wouldn’t be here for the milestones: welcoming a new century, walking him down the aisle, meeting her first grandchild. He knew she wouldn’t want him to live a life shadowed by her memory, and most of the time, Ezra didn’t. But every once in a while, it felt safe, it feltgoodto sink into his grief, because only when he emerged from it did he feel a little more healed.
He was headed back to Steinway now, to the cacophonyand merriment of the wedding. He didn’t have anywhere else to go, and besides, he owed Gregory an apology. He shook his head and nearly laughed:earrings at Neiman’s.He never would have thought that would have been the cause of his reckoning.
Someone was running up the path toward him. Her elbows were askew, and her stride was terrible, but then Frankie had never been an athlete. It took him a long beat to figure out that she was calling his name, that she was coming for him. He slowed and then stopped. He’d wait for her here. Now it was her turn.
FORTY-THREE
Frankie
A few minutes before the turn of the century, Frankie saw Ezra in the shadowed lamplight on Middie Walk, and her heart nearly stopped. She knew what she had to do, and yet, old habits were so deeply ingrained that she had to forcibly not turn around and flee. But Gregory had been right: Ezra was always the one chasing her; Frankie was always the one retreating.
So she pushed herself forward. She owed him that. And she owed him the truth.
Steinway had been locked last night. But the light was on behind the door to the auditorium, and Ezra was determined. He pounded on the front door—something new, Frankie took note of, as the old Ezra would have just let it be—until finally, a custodian unlatched the bolt and said, “Yeah?”
Ezra said: “It’s urgent. We have an emergency.”
“What kind of emergency?” The custodian looked more annoyed than alarmed.
“A ten-year-old grudge emergency?” Ezra tried, lookingserious. He was drunk. Anything could have seemed serious to him.
“It’s fine,” Frankie said. “We don’t have to.”
Ezra narrowed and locked his eyes with hers. “Yes, we do. You promised.”
So Frankie nodded, and because she was used to cajoling people into doing things in the name of music, she said, “Can we just have five minutes? He’ll give you fifty bucks.” And Ezra shrugged and said, “Absolutely,” then smiled at Frankie like she was brilliant. She wasn’t. She just knew how to manipulate the weak spots. Still though, his smile, that smile: it was like it was made just for her, like she was the only person who saw him, like he was the only person who saw her too.
Ezra pulled the cash from his wallet, then stumbled for no reason at all, and the custodian said, “Just don’t make a mess. We’re setting up for an event.” And they each assured him that they would not. Music wasn’t messy after all, though the heart of it, the guts of it—Frankie’s, at least—were something else entirely. Nothing but mess, really.
The grand piano wasn’t center stage, which meant that if they were really going to do this, if Ezra was going to force her to keep her end of the bet, they were going to have to find an upright in one of the rooms backstage.
Frankie stopped at the bottom of the steps, while Ezra patted his pockets in search of his phone, which he hadn’t yet realized had been crushed by the Zamboni. “Shit, I really need to call Mimi,” he said. Then, as if the thought were there then gone, he turned to Frankie. “Come on. Let’s do this.”
“I really don’t want to,” she whispered.
“I know,” Ezra said. “And that is why we’re doing it.” Hewas amazingly coherent for someone who was also well over the legal limit of intoxicated.
Frankie thought she might cry, but she had promised, and she wasn’t going to give Ezra any reason to accuse her of being the same person she’d been a decade ago. She’d grown! She was an adult! She managed the number one girl band in the world! She told herself all these things while she ascended the steps with heavy legs and then wound her way backstage. Of course, neither of them had been back here since the day in early May a decade ago when she’d watched the pregnancy test turn blue. They walked side by side in silence.
The two weeks between the test and graduation were agony. Frankie knew now that they were agony for the both of them, but she, at the time, could think only of herself. She doubled down on the lie about the job offer in LA: it didn’t matter if it were true or not; what mattered was that Ezra believed it, and actually, Frankie came to believe it too. She called up her father’s travel agent and booked a one-way ticket the night of graduation, and if she could have left sooner, she would have. Ezra refused to acknowledge that they couldn’t find a way to make it work. She knew that he couldn’t give up NYU and his scholarship money, which she found reassuring: she hadn’t wanted him to recalibrate his whole life for her, and she’d never have expected it. And perhaps that was part of the reason she was so irritated that he wanted as much from her. With each passing day, it became clearer and clearer to Frankie that their two mostly happy years had been pure luck, and they were so diametrically different—all Frankie wanted for her future was freedom, and all Ezra wanted was security.
But they had never argued; they didn’t even know how toreally. And eventually, luck ran dry: you couldn’t exist together with such opposing desires and forge peace, find common ground. The pregnancy wasn’t the wedge that would drive them apart, though on that they were also divided; rather, it was the light bulb that illuminated brighter and brighter for Frankie that what she needed was out. Ezra’s notions of the future terrified her, but more than that, they enraged her. He knew she had spent her years at Middleton attempting to break the shackles of her childhood, even if he didn’t know the full-dimensional why of it, and here he was, pretending that a baby, that cohabitation, that New York were all on a new road map for the course she had charted, a course she should just rewrite.
It had been a balmy, bright day in May. Ezra’s mom was in town for graduation, as were Frankie’s parents, though her mom and dad were barely speaking. Frankie’s mother had booked a table for the five of them for dinner at the nicest restaurant in town to celebrate. Frankie pulled on her cap and gown, and spun around in front of the mirror a few times, then turned to the side and cupped her belly, which was still flat—she was only seven weeks pregnant—and gave herself one moment to consider shelving LA and her flight out that night and giving in to everything Ezra wanted because she did love him. But she met her eyes in the reflection and knew she had done that for the first seventeen years of her life—played dress-up for someone else’s aspirations—and she also knew, even as much as she did love him, even as wide as her love was, that this was simply too much to ask.
Her phone rang on her desk, and she answered it. Ezra was at Burton, calling from a pay phone.Come meet me,he said,then we’ll go to the holding area together. It was too early to line up forthe graduation ceremony, but Frankie didn’t have anything else to do: her room was packed, she was dressed, and besides, as fraught as these few weeks had been, she wanted to leave for Los Angeles on a good note, with only fond memories. She’d call him from there and say that she couldn’t have the baby, that she’d had it taken care of. He’d be angry, she knew, but ultimately, he had his whole life in front of him too. One day, he’d be grateful.
She descended the steps to the dorm and pushed open the metal door into the bright blinding sunshine and wandered through the campus, trying to pinpoint what she was feeling, how she could explain. And then there he was, exactly where he said he’d be in the archway to Burton Library. Her Ezra. He didn’t break his promises.
“Hey,” he said, smiling at her cap and gown. “You look beautiful.”
And before she could even reply, he was down on one knee, his grandmother’s ring in a black velvet box.
Frankie didn’t remember what he said. White-hot anger was buzzing in her brain, and she was too clouded to focus. Eventually, he stopped talking, and she realized he was waiting for a reply. So she said no.
Then Ezra rose to his feet, clearly stunned, which Frankie didn’t understand because she’d never indicated that she had any interest in marriage, much less at twenty-two, which meant she would be exactly like her own mother and father, who were the world’s worst example of how to be married.
“No?” Ezra had parroted back.
