Life After Yes (4 page)

I figure she must mean Sage.

I hand him the phone.

I can't make out what they say, just voices weaving in and out of each other and periodic rumbles of potentially authentic laughter.

“I know. Thanks, Mrs. O'Malley.” Mom and Dad urged Sage to lose the formality, but Sage insisted he was a Southern boy, and addressing them like that was nothing but pure instinct.

“Well, we haven't gotten that far. Bird Lake is definitely in the running, though,” he says.

“Bird Lake?” I whisper.

“This summer? That seems soon, but maybe. We'll see,” Sage says, fiddling with his coffee spoon.

“Well, here's your daughter again,” he says, playing it safe like always. He's careful not to refer to me as Quinn because he knows how it would upset her. And he's careful not to refer to me as Prudence because he knows how this will upset me.

For whatever reason, this is not how I envisioned things. Truth is, I haven't envisioned things. These things. But this college athlete and banker with a penchant for fishing and hunting and beer and wings and all things male shouldn't be the one making the prize-winning suggestion about locale and picking our wedding date. I am the girl.

Sage mutters a quick good-bye, yet another thank-you to probably yet another congratulations, and hangs up.

Sage won't look at me. He fiddles with the milk carton, staring at the grainy face of a missing little girl on the back. Where is this girl? Is she alive? Will she grow up and find a
man to pester and love? Will she too enjoy this coveted form of permanent and lovely torture?

“Last time I checked you were my fiancé and not some brown-nosing wedding planner.” (My words are swords, harsher than even I intend.)

“Simmer down. Your parents mentioned it to me last summer and I just thought it was a good idea, one you would love,” he says. It
is
a good idea. And one that I'm already starting to love.

“Well, I would've liked for you to run it by me first before getting the parents all hot and bothered.”

“I didn't think. I'm sorry,” he says. His words are soft and childlike, his apology the mea culpa of a little boy who has shattered his mother's favorite vase. “Anyway, the ideas were
theirs.
”

And, again, he's right. I have a way of doing this, twisting his words into my own self-serving pretzels. Blame it on the legal training.

Usually, our mornings are far simpler, far more charming than this. Usually, we sit side by side swallowing Starbucks, too tired for conversation. The silence is sweet; the calm before the inevitable swell of storms, delicious.

But this morning, I'm shaking. And I hope it's the coffee, but I know better. Sage is quiet. He slowly slurps the milk from his bowl of Cheerios. His steely confidence is missing, like that poor little girl on the back of the milk carton.

And suddenly I remember his face in the dream, his eyes distant and misty, brimming with salty sadness, that overwhelming sadness at being in the midst of many on the one day he's supposed to stand alone.

“No, I'm sorry. You're right. Bird Lake would be perfect. And you and your groomsmen could go a few days early and
fish the streams. It could be like a bonus bachelor party,” I say, and think of Phelps, our old rowboat, the sweet smell of his bug repellent, our long talks on the cabin porch swing.

“Now you're talking,” he says quietly, surprise in his tired eyes, and takes my hand. It is not like me to apologize so quickly. Usually, I stew for some time, let him suffer a little, before embracing that little thing called reason.

His smile returns, wide and bright. His eyes drop once again to his newspaper. Sunlight streams through our kitchen window, and he squints to fight the brightness, and glides his index finger down a slim column of stock quotes.

Yes, ring or no ring, the world goes on. The stock market will do its thing, creeping up and down. Dishes will pile up. For a fleeting moment, everything is okay, more than okay, and I wish that I could press pause.

But I can't.

A familiar buzz kills that good moment and ends the temporary silence. Then I do it. I reach for the dreaded object which sits cradled in quiet subversion. My BlackBerry. When I first got it, I thought it was so cool. It made me feel important and adult. It was Sage, with his three years of life and wisdom on me, who helped me understand just what it was: a curiously shaped leash. It took him more than a month to convince me that I didn't need to sleep with it inches away from my ear on the bedside table. A couple years into my litigation career, that little black devil still harbors the power to panic me.

“Do you think if Dad had one of these things, things would be different? Most cellular connections were down that day, but I think BlackBerrys worked.”

“He would never have carried one of those things,” he says. “And no, I don't think things would be different.”

I nod. And look down at the little screen, the tiny buttons. I scroll through my messages.

“Bug, don't do it,” Sage pleads. But I fumble with it anyway, escaping, my fingers dancing deftly across those miniature buttons.

“What, is
this
going to cause cancer too?” I ask, waving my BlackBerry.

“Probably,” he says.

“I just have to check and then I will have some coffee with you. I will deal with everything when I get to the office, but I just need to see what I missed,” I say, eyes fixed on the tiny screen, knowing it's never this simple.

Thirty-seven unread messages linger in my inbox.

“Fuck,” I say. “Fuck.”

“My favorite word. And notice how I didn't hear it all weekend. I thought you had forgotten all about that dandy four-letter gem.” Southern Sage hates profanity; I love this about him.

There's an e-mail from Fisher. Ask any associate—e-mails from partners are scary. The e-mail is short and cryptic and asks me (unapologetically of course—“This is a seven-day-a-week-job,” we were told on day one) to complete a research assignment by Monday, as in
this
, afternoon. Fisher sent it on Friday afternoon about the time Sage and I were giggling like overcaffeinated teens fondling each other in the Air France security line. Fuck.

“Fuck,” I say again, this time for effect. I hop up from the table, leaving a shallow pool of tepid coffee at the bottom of my cracked mug. Sage barely looks up from his newspaper.

For no good reason, I take another shower. And then bundle up in my old bathrobe. A college send-off gift from Mom, once pristine and fluffy, it's now dull and ragged.

In my bottom drawer, I reach for a pair of wool socks and pull out Phelps's flannel. Hula watches me disapprovingly as I hold it up to my face and inhale deeply, that old familiar fishy smell, and put it back where it was.

Antique heating pipes whimper and moan in valiant but failed efforts to keep us warm. Sage, a half-full kind of guy, admits he has come to crave those crackling sounds. Those, and the sirens and car alarms that break the nighttime silences. He assures me that this city symphony has replaced the soothing songs of crickets he fell asleep to as a boy. But I worry I am the reason he has abandoned the utopia of his childhood days for this wonderful and callous concrete jungle.

Sage is still there in the same chair at the small round mosaic table in our kitchen, putting off the inevitable start to another inevitable day. I return to my mug of Guatemalan or Costa Rican or Mexican coffee more cringe-worthy than Robitussin, so bitter that last Equal wasn't even worth it. Grains float on the ebony surface, mocking me. But I swallow anyway, and wait for that familiar buzz to pump through my flagging veins.

I sit across from Sage, sipping and cringing, getting new wrinkles, finally adding a third Equal to the sludgy mix.

“What am I going to do when I'm pregnant?” I ask.

“Breast implants and now a baby? What's going on with you this morning? Is there something you need to tell me?”

“It's just that I
depend
on this,” I do say, pointing to my mug. “I
need
it to function. What am I going to do when I'm pregnant and some lady in a white coat who spends her days looking at vaginas tells me I can't have it anymore?”

“Isn't this a little premature?” he asks. “We'll cross that road when we come to it.” Another cliché. Of course. It takes
time to wean someone off truisms. Thankfully, I have forever to do it.

“You think I am just going to get pregnant, give up the coffee, give up the alcohol, and sit still for nine months as your baby grows perfect, don't you? How am I going to do my job?”

Sage looks at me like I'm crazy—which, apparently, I am. We have been engaged for all of five minutes and I am talking babies and boobs, spouting feminist rhetoric more warped than Mom's.

“I didn't even
say
anything. What's wrong?”

“Nothing. I'm just stressed. I missed an e-mail from a partner about an assignment that is due
today.
”

Sage's face spells defeat. There will always be other men in my life. Living and gone. Men with more wisdom, more money, more power.

“Well, I guess that's my fault too. Sorry for taking you to Europe and asking you to be my wife. I should have timed it better,” he says, and stands up. His hair is spiky and adorable, a mini morning Mohawk. He pours himself the rest of the pot of coffee—which he would usually offer me—and escapes to our bedroom. Little Hula picks a side and trails behind Sage. Both are careful not to trip on my high heel that lies in the middle of the doorway.

Shrouded in the heavy silence I have created, I watch him go. I don't know what to say. My body twitches. I feel my heartbeat in my fingers. I can't move. I don't go after him.

I don't know. I don't know.

What I do know is that this isn't how it's supposed to be. I should be deliriously happy. I should be calling all my friends, even though it's still early. I do love him. But right now, that ring is the only thing that sparkles.

I
met Sage on Halloween. In 1999. It was a random encounter in a smoky bar downtown. He was dressed as a fisherman, and I wore all black and American flag–print wings.

He was surrounded by banker buddies, a herd of tall and cocky creatures sporting the same belts and button-downs and hearty laughs.

But even from a distance, I could tell he was different. Wounded. Exuding confidence shaded by struggle, by real life. Lugging a secret or two.

He stood at the bar funneling Hershey's Kisses into the pockets of his neoprene waders when I approached.

“Kiss?” he asked, smiling, offering me a candy.

“I'm not that easy,” I said. “Stocking up for Y2K?”

“My mother didn't let me eat the candy on Halloween,” he said, smiling, grabbing another fistful, unwrapping one and popping it into his mouth.

“Ah,” I said. “Making up for lost time?”

He smiled again. Ordered me a drink.

“Well, I was allowed to eat the candy,” I said. “But I never got much of it. Mom would follow me around and I'd grab as many candies as I could and she'd make me put them all back. And she'd say, ‘Take just one. All you need is one.' Only then would I take the one I really wanted. Usually it was a Tootsie Pop. In case you were interested.”

“I am.”

Buoyed by alcohol and the confidence it divines, we bantered beautifully, washing down Kisses and conversation with wine and whiskey.

We talked about Halloween, how we both still loved the holiday. How we could be kids for one day and pretend to be someone else, something else. We talked about our all-time favorite costumes (his: Batman, homemade; mine: Strawberry Shortcake, store-bought). I told him about Halloween in the city; how kids from the neighborhood would convene on our block on the Upper West Side and go brownstone-to-brownstone en masse, collecting candy from perfect strangers. I told him how much I hated it when some wiseass would hand out toothbrushes.

We debated the virtues of open bar and came to the consensus that it was both a beautiful and a dangerous thing.

“Where is your girlfriend?” I asked, pulling a small fishing fly from the fleece drying pouch on his vest and studying it under the red lantern that hung above the bar.

“Don't have one,” he said. “Where is your boyfriend?”

“Uptown,” I said. “Is it wrong that I'm still fishing even though I've already snagged one?”

“Not at all,” he said.

“A Parachute Adams,” I said, reattaching the fly to his vest.
“An oldie but a goodie. Perhaps the most important and versatile dry fly. One of Dad's favorites.”

“Not bad,” he said. “Tied it myself.”

Before I knew it, there we were trading vital statistics, like clichéd young drunken souls in bars do, like we were reading from the backs of baseball cards. Names. Colleges. Hometowns. Occupations.

Sage McIntyre. Played baseball at Duke. Savannah-bred. An investment banker.

Quinn O'Malley. Dartmouth. Columbia. City girl. Law student.

That night I went back to his apartment, a glorified dorm room with a fake wall.

Though the apartment smelled vaguely of beer and pizza and bad aftershave, his room was clean. On the windowsill, silver picture frames glimmered, but in the dim light, I couldn't make out the faces. His bed was made, and while he was in the bathroom I lifted his comforter and saw something at once amazing and alarming: meticulous hospital corners.

“So let's talk about this fishing business,” he said, reappearing.

“What do you want to know? I'm an odd species. A fly-fishing New Yorker. Never done much spin fishing; Dad thinks it's for the lazy man. He's the real deal. Compared to him, I just pretend.”

He smiled. “There's plenty of time to talk shop, Quinn. I want to know why you're still fishing when you've already caught one.”

I looked at him.

“Your words, not mine.”

“I really don't know,” I said.

“You don't know?”

And I didn't. Why was I there in this apartment with this strange boy making small talk when I had a keeper at home?

“He's a great guy,” I said, “but…”

And in a rare moment, this lawyer-to-be had nothing to say. I wasn't being coy, or trying to appear mysterious. This wasn't about sparing him details about another man, or theories I had on the trajectory of relationships. The truth was I didn't know why I was doing this. Whatever it was I was doing.

“You don't have to justify it to me,” he said. “I get it. I dated the same girl through high school and college, Sally. A good girl. She and my mother were just waiting for me to get down on my knee and I couldn't do it. I knew there was something bigger to wait for. She just wasn't The One,” he says. “And maybe your guy isn't either?”

“The One?” I said, and cringed. I didn't believe in The One or soul mates or any of these hokey, new agey, bullshit concepts. “Can we go back to talking fishing flies and pretend you didn't say that?”

He smiled. “Sorry, that's my mother talking. She checks in daily to see if I've encountered The One. She's itching for grandkids.”

“Ah,” I say. “A good old-fashioned mama's boy, I presume?”

“Guilty as charged, daddy's girl,” he said.

I shrugged.

“Speaking of guilt and innocence, law school?”

“What about it?” I said.

“Any chance you're still fishing for a career even though you've already snagged one?”

I smiled.

“Scared to be in the company of a budding young attorney?”

“I haven't done anything illegal,” he said. “Not yet at least.”

“Banking?” I said. “Two can play at this game.”

“I've always loved numbers. Math major in college. Do you know how many times I've been invited to Vegas because I'm good with numbers? Banking's just like gambling, really.”

“So, it's not about the money, then? The cuff links and summer homes?”

“The money can't hurt,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt, peeling it off, folding it, and placing it on the floor.

“Only if you let it,” I said.

He looked at me, perplexed.

“Let me guess: only child?” I said.

He was silent for a moment. Looked down. Traced a broad stripe on his faded comforter—no doubt a relic from college days—with his fingertip.

“I am now,” he said.

In that dark and silent room, where moonlight mingled with the green glow of his clock radio, I waited for him to elaborate. But he didn't.

“You are now?” I asked, and suddenly chubby little boy faces—two of them—were cruelly crisp in those sparkling silver frames.

“I had a brother named Henry,” he said, his voice crackly and soft, his Southern accent suddenly more detectable. “He was six years younger.”

“Was,” I say, and nod.

And though I wanted to know what happened, why he used that brutally simple past tense when talking of his brother, I didn't ask. But he told me anyway.

“It was Christmas Eve. I was sixteen and he was ten. We
were hanging lights on the fence around our property. Henry started at one end and I started at the other. Our plan, like every year, was to meet in the middle. I was faster than him, close to that middle spot when I saw it happen. The black car, the loud music, the faint and familiar scream.”

“Shit,” I said.

Sage fought tears. “The ambulance came, but it was too late. My father tried everything, CPR. But he stood up, covered in Henry's blood, Christmas red, and stared at my mother and me. He never said so, but I know he blamed us. Still does. My mother for not watching us. Me for not protecting my kid brother. Me for not catching the numbers on the license plate as the car sped away. I'm obsessed with numbers. Have a photographic memory. I could remember the exact number of fence posts we snaked lights through, the song that drunk bastard was playing, but I didn't even think to look at the license plate.”

“You were just a kid,” I said. “You can't blame yourself.”

A few tears escaped those beautiful eyes, innocent and blue, and his cheeks glistened.

“It happened over ten years ago,” he said. “You'd think it would get better.”

“It will?” I said lamely, as if I had a clue about this kind of thing.

“I go home on his birthday every year,” he said. “In August. My mother makes his favorite blackberry pie.”

I nodded and rubbed his back.

“She hasn't been the same since. She started drinking when it happened. To escape, I think. And my father basically disappeared when Henry did. He's barely home. He works, he travels, makes money. She bakes and gardens and
goes to church on Sunday. I worry about her. It's as if she has nothing to live for.”

And though I'd never met this woman and barely knew this guy, in that fragile moment I said something, something that seemed to comfort him. And something that couldn't have been more true. “She has you.”

Sage nodded. And curled up on his bed. Pulled me down next to him, draping a strong arm around me, holding me tight. And I lay there, happily trapped by a boy's tears and a man's muscles.

“Sage?” I said, before nodding off next to him.

“Yes?”

“How many fence posts?”

“Eleven,” he said. “Eleven posts.”

“What song was playing in the car?” I asked, hungry for this detail. I'm not sure why I needed to know these things. Maybe I wanted to know everything about this guy. Or maybe I knew that this was my chance. That this was the last time he would talk to me (in a very long time) about Henry.

“‘Silent Night,'” he said. “It was ‘Silent Night.'”

“Oh,” I said. “I love that one.”

“I did too,” he whispered as his eyes, still damp, drifted shut. “I did too.”

 

I woke up the next morning, my cheek itchy. I looked down at the pillow and there it was. One of those little white rectangular labels that said “Sage McIntyre” in bold black type. I smiled and folded it back inside the pillowcase. I felt like I was back in camp.

“She still irons labels into my things,” Sage said, sitting up, rubbing his eyes. “She can't sit still. She clips coupons every
Sunday and never uses them. Doesn't need to. You should see our garden.”

I smiled. Thought of my own mother, how she sent me off to camp with a Sharpie in case I felt the urge to mark my things. How she killed every plant that we ever brought into our home.

I stood and gathered my things. My high heels, my angel wings.

Outside, the autumn sun climbed through the buildings. A new day.

“Do you have any bacon?” I asked. “A Bloody Mary?”

Met with a befuddled grin, I tried again. “How about coffee?”

“That, I think I can do.”

Only when he left the room did I study the pictures in the polished silver frames. Of two blond boys, one tall and one small. Matching smiles and matching haircuts. In one, they were very young and peered over the edge of a bathtub. In another, they wore baseball uniforms. And in another, they wore fishing gear. And in yet another, they flanked a beautiful woman, petite and blond, same oversized smile. His mother.

In the tiny kitchen, Sage fumbled nervously with a box of coffee filters and grabbed a bag of grounds from the freezer. From his bedroom door, I watched him putter around, wiping down the counters, chucking his roommate's box of late night pizza.

I ducked into the bathroom. Noted the clichéd trappings of the twenty-something banker breed along the slim countertop—the medley of colognes and razors, the pile of dirty towels, the empty toilet paper roll crushed in the corner.

Only when I looked at myself in the mirror, at the broad smile I hadn't worn in a while, did I think of Phelps. I pictured him at my apartment. Beginning a new day just like it was any other.

And then I waited. For the guilt to wash over me. But curiously it didn't come.

I hadn't slept with another man. Hadn't even kissed him.

But even so, I knew there was no going back.

I walked into the kitchen. Sage smiled. Handed me a mug that said, “Georgia: We Put the ‘Fun' in Fundamentalist Extremism!” “I hope it's okay,” he said. “It's my roommate's coffee. I'm more of a tea man myself.”

“A tea man, huh?” I joked. “Is there such a thing?”

“Indeed, there is,” he said, smiling.

The coffee was bitter, but I drank it.

When his phone rang, Sage skipped off to his room to get it. “Don't go anywhere,” he said.

And maybe that's exactly what I should've done: gotten out of there. For there were plenty of those proverbial red flags. Lined up, clear as day, waving furiously in that figurative and foreboding wind. The way he said “
my
mother,” for one, like she was his possession that I might steal. That he talked about his ex-girlfriend and dead brother in the first twelve hours. That he was an investment banker and a neat freak and a tea drinker and
Southern.

“I'm not going anywhere,” I said.

He returned a few moments later, wearing his fishing shirt from the night before, buttoned wrong over khakis.

“Who calls you at this hour?” I asked.

“My mother,” he says. “She's an early bird.”

“Mama's boy,” I said.

He nodded, running fingers through dirty blond hair that
flopped over his eyes and made him appear all of seventeen.

“Daddy's girl,” he said.

I drained my coffee.

He smiled, his cheeks pinked. He took the coffee mug from my hand and placed it on the counter.

I unbuttoned his shirt and rebuttoned it the right way. Then I opened the front door and took a single step into the hallway, long and beige. And Sage stood there, barefoot on the other side of the threshold. He reached out, took my hand. Pulled me closer.