“Me, too,” said Matt. “But she’s going to be okay. Regan’s going to be okay. I promise.”
“Baby Ray Ray,” said Lee, shaking her head. She wished she could protect her sister, keep the pain of Matt’s affair from her somehow.
“I thought I’d saved her,” said Matt. “I thought I could take care of her. But she…it’s like she’s a ghost inside. She acts all loving…like we always have perfect dinners or whatever, but it’s a mirage…everything always looks fine but you try to…touch her, reach her…and it’s just air.”
Lee thought of her sister, the lovely mother she had become. She was confused by the distance between Matt’s version of Regan and what Lee had seen. To Lee, Regan seemed deep and vibrant. Sure, Regan was conflicted—even worried (and with good reason)—but she was so realized, so grown-up, alive. “You’re wrong,” Lee said.
“I was so lonely,” said Matt, not seeming to hear Lee. “I thought I was going crazy. But then I met Janet,” he said. “I fell in love. It happens. What am I supposed to do?”
“What you have with Regan…it’s a lot of people’s dream come true,” said Lee.
“I’m not a failure,” said Matt. “I just fell in love. Real love. And I can’t give that up, Lee. I just can’t.”
Lee remembered telling Matt she was moving to Los Angeles. He had been furious, desperate. “You need someone who wants what you want,” Lee had told him, her mind bright with visions of her California future. He’d wrapped her in his arms, clutched at her.
Now, Lee remembered that Regan had been there, too. At the edge of her bedroom door, a flash of auburn hair. The sound of footsteps down the stairs, but when Lee went to the hallway, she found a platter of cheese and crackers.
My God. Had Lee somehow known that Regan would put Matt back together after she left? Had she subconsciously set it up, so she could run? “Matt, look!” she’d said. “Cheese and crackers.”
“Regan’s so wonderful,” Matt had said, picking up a Ritz.
THE RUINED CITY OFPompeii was hot and horrifying. Charlotte walked along uneven streets that had once been a community. Regan’s admission that her marriage was falling apart was weighing heavily on Charlotte. How sad that Regan would have to live as Charlotte herself had: alone, frightened, unloved. She could imagine how upset Louisa would have been to witness her granddaughter’s broken family. Charlotte had called her mother in hysteria after finding Winston’s body and cried, “Mom! It’s Winston! He’s…he hung himself!”
Louisa had responded, “Don’t move. Don’t tell anybody anything.” She arrived at the house as the paramedics carried Winston out. “A heart attack,” she said. “Tell everyone it was a heart attack.” Charlotte had rushed to her mother for a hug, but Louisa had stepped back, searching Charlotte’s face, asking, “What did you do?”
Oh, so many things! She had spent the years since Winston’s departure cataloging them: she let herself go, she tried to make him sober, she let the kids “run the show,” she didn’t keep them quiet enough, or servile enough, or maybe she should have been less obvious about how much she hated sex with her bloated, boozy husband. She’d let herself be deflowered early by an old manand she’d sort of liked it. She was no prize. She’d always been plain.
Here she was, nearly seventy-two, and still she heard Louisa’s and Winston’s criticisms. And to add insult to injury, Charlotte would have to watch her own daughter’s sad story unfold. Her mind spun, imagining Regan crying on her lemon-colored couch; Regan waitressing at Denny’s; Flora and Isabella humiliated on a public school playground, wearing that awful purple mascara that had heralded Regan’s own demise into troubled teendom.
Their guide, a tall man named Massimiliano, held a pole with a placard that readSPLENDIDO27. Among hundreds of people and dozens of guides with poles, Charlotte struggled to keep number 27 in sight. There were pillars and brick walls. There was an amphitheater where, my heavens, the sun was strong.
“I am so hot,” said Lee.
“For the love of God, just keep moving,” said Cord.
“I could use a cold drink,” said Lee. “Or a bag of ice to dump on my head.”
Massimiliano seemed able to walk backward, not pass out from heatstroke, and keep up a lecture simultaneously: Mount Vesuvius had erupted inA.D.79, burying this Roman city under volcanic ash. The ash, said Massimiliano, “poured across the land like a flood.”
Ugh. Charlotte held on to Lee’s hand and struggled to keep up.
“The city was captured in a darkness like the black of closed and unlighted rooms. That is a quotation. Can you imagine this? Try to imagine this.”
Charlotte didn’t want to try to imagine this.
“Two thousand people died and the city—this city—was abandoned.”
Massimiliano, mercifully, led them inside a building. It was still stifling, but at least there was a respite from direct sunlight. Charlotte leaned against a wall and closed her eyes. “In 1748,” said Massimiliano, “explorers rediscovered this place. Pompeii was intact! Skeletons and buildings and paintings and tools can teach us about what it was like in this place before the eruption that ended human life here.”
Minnie would have loved Pompeii. She’d been a history buff, always watching late-night documentaries and telling Charlotte about them whether Charlotte was interested or not. Oh, how Charlotte missed Minnie now, her dull stories and grating laughter. It was still a shock that Minnie was just gone, that Charlotte would never, ever, see her again. And then the selfish part: was Charlotte next?
Massimiliano led them through the rooms of the house and back outside. They stopped at a street corner and Massimiliano explained there was a big line waiting to see a stone penis that had been carved in the road to show the way to an ancient brothel. “We will have to wait here approximately forty-five minutes to see the penis,” he explained. “Some people, they take a selfie with the penis.”
“Oh, my,” said Charlotte.
“No, thanks,” said Cord.
Regan looked conflicted, but Lee said, “No! No penis selfies.”
