Results May Vary (14 page)

I started giggling. “When did you get to be such a Deadhead, Rube?”

“In college. I don't know how you could have missed it.”

“I was already living with Adam by then,” I said.

“Oh, right. Well, it was Vincent who got me into it. Which turned out to be his only worthwhile contribution to my life.”

“Ohhh, yeah, I remember Vincent. Mom
hated
Vincent.”

“Mom hates all my boyfriends,” she said, and took another drag on the vape.

“Not true,” I said. “She's liked most of the last few. She definitely liked”—I started laughing before I even formed the first syllable of the word—“Burqhart.”

“Shut up,” said Ruby, but she was grinning.

“Say what, now?” said Jonathan.

“Ruby got dumped by a guy named Burqhart,” I said.

“I did not get dumped,” she yelped. “It was a mutual decision.”

“That's not what you—”

“I want to go play in the river,” my sister announced, surging to her feet so fast that my own legs went flying. I heard the pounding of her feet down the stairs from the deck to the ground, and when I sat upright there she was, standing in the middle of the back lawn, flapping her hands at us to join her. “Come on, you two! It'll be an adventure!”

Jonathan and I looked at each other and shrugged.

I rolled my jeans up to my knees and headed down the lawn. The night was slippery with moonlight, trembling with cicada song; and the grass slid cool and silky against my feet as I walked. When I reached the edge of the river, I paused, uncertain how to proceed. I knew it wasn't more than a foot or so deep here…didn't I? How would I know where to step? What if there were sharp rocks I couldn't see?

A few feet away, Ruby extended one leg like a ballerina and swiped the tips of her toes into the water. “Oooh! Shit, that's colder than I thought!”

Jonathan picked his way down the riverbank until the bottoms of his strong calves disappeared underwater. He waded over to where I stood and extended his hand to me. “Come on in, it's nice.”

“Of course you think it's nice, Mountain Boy,” yelled Ruby. “ ‘Look at me, I spent my childhood frolicking in the Smokies, I lost my fear of frigid water when a bear kidnapped me when I was three years old.'…”

“No, I find it nice because it's actually not cold,” he said, not looking at her. He curled his fingers to beckon me closer. “Come on. Are you as big a wuss as your sister?”

“Screw you!” Ruby launched herself off the bank and landed with a shriek, immediately toppling over onto her hands and knees in the water. Her laughter bounced off the rippling sheet of the river and the arching tree branches above us. Shaking his head, Jonathan waded over to help her up.

Cautiously I stepped down into the river. Cold water swallowed me up to my ankles, but there was nothing sharp where I stood. I closed my eyes and curled my feet around the smooth, slippery rocks I stood on. Gradually, I grew used to the chilly water, and as I relaxed, I decided I liked its gentle tug around my legs. Ruby and Jonathan's voices mingled with the silvery gurgle of the river, and I never wanted to go back inside. Adam and I had lived here for three years; why had we never once played in the river?

After a few moments, I turned and splashed toward Ruby and Jonathan, who were standing together, heads bent in concentration. Then they both looked up as he flicked his hand, releasing a small stone that bounced four times on the surface of the still section of the water near them.

“Lookit,” said Ruby, after Jonathan's stone had disappeared beneath the surface. “Tennessee here is showing me how to skip stones.”

I turned my palm up, and Jonathan dropped a stone into it, smooth and wet and cool. “Try to throw it so it's almost parallel to the water. The motion with your hand is like you're throwing a Frisbee.”

This was another thing I had never done before. One of the casualties of growing up in a city, I guessed. But here I was, frolicking in a moonlit river and throwing stones. I clasped the stone in my fingers, curled my arm inward, and then flung it outward. My stone arced through the air, spinning, and I held my breath as I waited for it to bounce gloriously across the water like Jonathan's had.

But then it hit the surface and sank.

“Shit,” I said.

“That was a good try,” said Ruby. “Here, try it again. Give her another rock.”

Jonathan held his last rock out to me, suspended between his fingers, but I shook my head.

“It's okay. You do it. Show us how it's done.”

He let the stone fly, and Ruby and I watched as it skidded across the water before dropping underneath it. When it vanished, we both cheered.

Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with the need to hug them. Grabbing one of them in each arm, I forced them into a triangular hug, and we huddled together like teammates.

“Thank you guys so much for coming up to be with me. I love you both a ton.”

“We love you too, Care,” said Ruby.

“Yeah,” said Jonathan, nudging my head closer so he could kiss my temple, “we love you too.”

You will do all sorts of things yet, and I will help you. The only thing is not to
melt
in the meanwhile.

—Henry James to Grace Norton, July 28, 1883

The box on my doorstep should have been the first sign that I was in trouble.

I balanced it on my hip to read the label as I got the front door open. It was surprisingly heavy.

“Ruby?” I called, when I opened the door. “What on earth is this Sephora box about?”

I heard a distant shout, followed by her bare feet pelting along the upstairs hallway and down the stairs. “It came!” she panted, snatching the box from my hands and waltzing it across the room to the kitchen counter.

“What came?”

“My fun kit!” she said, beaming. “You and I, sister mine, are ready to date again. And so we are going to get ourselves looking spectacular.”

I watched with alarm as she stripped the packing tape from the box and dove into it. “First of all, I am categorically not ready to date. I can't even turn on my vibrator without getting angry. Second of all, you've spent the last five weeks reverting to a feral state, and now suddenly you want to look pretty again?”

“That's how it works!” she said. “You sink to the bottom, and then when you get tired of dark and murky, you push off and head for the sunlight again.”

“Okay, well, you can head for the sunlight, but I'm going to stick with dark and murky for a while, thanks.”

“Fine. But at least help me try some of this stuff out.”

We poured ourselves some wine as Ruby unpacked her fun kit into an array of small but exuberantly colored packages all over the kitchen counter. Lotions, creams, spritzers, toners—the sheer variety of formats was baffling, let alone the types of application.

“How do you even know where to start?” I said, and she grinned.

“I don't. Here, try this,” she said, shoving a flat pink pouch toward me.

“Wrinkle-minimizing rejuvenation mask? Oh, thanks, Ruby. Or is this where you say ‘It's not an insult, it's an observation' again?”

“Fine, give me the wrinkle minimizer. You take”—she rooted among the packages for a moment—“restful relaxation.”

I squinted at the tiny lettering on the package. “ ‘Apply mask to freshly washed face. Leave on for fifteen minutes, then discard mask and massage excess product into skin.' And then what happens? All my worries float away?”

“Yes, along with all my wrinkles. Come on.”

I followed her upstairs to the master bathroom, where we scrubbed our faces with a scrumptiously scented exfoliant cream before opening up the mask pouches. I got mine open first and tipped my head back to drape it onto my face, smoothing it into place as I watched Ruby fight with the package on hers. Then she raised her head and looked at me and shouted with laughter.

“Oh my god! What the hell is that thing? You look like Jason freaking Voorhees!”

I spun to face my reflection in the mirror and shrieked. She was absolutely right. The opaque, papery tissue of the mask clung in a damp white oval to my face, with sinister-looking holes for my eyes and mouth. I looked utterly deranged.

“Braaaaaaaauuuughhh,” I growled, in my best attempt at whatever threatening noises Jason Voorhees might make from behind his favorite hockey mask, and Ruby squealed and stamped her feet.

“It's so insane,” she wheezed. “Your mouth hole is all sideways like your face is melting off, and the flap over your nose is…oh my god.”

“Put yours on,” I giggled. “Don't leave me all alone here.”

Shoulders shaking with laughter, Ruby unpeeled her mask from its wrapper and stuck it into place, and when she lowered her hands we laughed all over again because somehow, it was just as funny the second time. And then we looked at each other in the mirror and squealed and laughed again.

“Wait, wait, wait,” said Ruby, skidding toward the door. “We have to get a picture of this.”

She returned a minute later with her phone, and as she held it at arm's length above us while we experimented with stupid faces, I breathed in her lemony scent and wrapped my arm around her waist and squeezed, because I was just so glad she'd come to visit. And then she had to ruin it by clicking over to her Facebook app, which caused me to lunge toward her phone, shouting “RUBY ELAINE FAIRLEY, DON'T YOU DARE, don't you DARE, I will tell Mom ALL about the weed;
give me that,
you obnoxious little shit!”

I chased her down the stairs and into the kitchen, where she wheeled to face me, holding the phone in my face and wiggling her hand from side to side. I snatched it from her and read.

No such thing as natural beauty. Caroline and I heard Jason's skin stays fresh under that mask.

She'd tagged me in it, of course, but instead of running to my own phone to remove the tag, I suddenly didn't care. We looked dorky and happy and like we were having a hell of a lot of fun, and there wasn't a damn thing wrong with that.

“Nice mask,” Neil said to me as he passed me in the hallway on Monday morning. “Any chance you know where I can get my hands on a really sharp machete?”

“Shut up,” I mumbled. While I was busy making my little stand for social media authenticity, I'd sort of forgotten I had a few co-workers as friends on my (usually staid) Facebook page.

There was a dramatic whooshing noise behind me, as if someone was slicing a blade through the air.

“Shut
up
!” I yelled. I was absolutely not going to laugh.

“Hey, you know who I heard likes
Friday the 13th
movies? Diana—”

I slammed my office door behind me with a satisfying bang. And it was irritation, more than anything, that made me pick up the phone—so much so that I started with surprise when she actually answered.

“Hello?”

“Diana, hi. It's Caroline Fairley.”

“Oh, hey, Caroline. Sorry I haven't called you back, I've been so busy—”

“I'm sure. Honestly I can hardly even imagine. But that's actually what I've been thinking about. I hate the thought of you looking at this as some sort of obligation. Why don't you come up here on a Sunday sometime? We normally open up at eleven, but I can unlock as early as nine, and then you can have the whole place to yourself. I can walk you through the exhibits, or we can just sit in the kids' galleries and play with paint.”

She gave a surprised bubble of laughter. “For real?”

“For real. And if you're tired of all the wining and dining, which I'm guessing you probably are, then come over to my house for brunch. My best friend is a chef, and my one accomplishment in the kitchen was learning how to make scrambled eggs he will happily eat.”

“Still buddies with Jonathan, huh? That's good to hear.”

Despite the friendly words, there was a tightness in her voice that hadn't been there before. Had Jonathan neglected to tell me about mowing down Diana with his very special artillery fire? Damn that boy. I was going to kill him.

“Yeah, uh, yeah. But we can do whatever you want. Tell me what would make you feel like a guest instead of a target.”

“Wow,” she said after a moment. “You have no idea how appealing that is.”

I did a silent, slow-motion fist pump and spun in place, tangling myself in my phone cord. “I'm glad. Tell me what date would work for you, and we'll make it happen.”

“What's the name for those songs they play in baseball?” I said, leaning into the open doorway of Neil's office a few minutes later. “When the batters step up to the plate and they blast their favorite pump-up song?”

“Walk-up songs?” he said, grinning.

“Yes. Imagine that mine is playing right now.” I swaggered into the office and swung an imaginary bat, sending an equally imaginary baseball flying over the park fence.

“I don't think Jason Voorhees really has a walk-up song. You're thinking of
Jaws.
”

“Okay okay, forget the walk-up song and just ask me what I did.”

“All right. What did you do?”

“Oh, I just got Diana Ramirez to agree to come up for a private tour at the end of next month, and then join me for brunch at my house afterward,” I said, picking a stray thread off my cardigan with exaggerated nonchalance. “You should join, also.”

Neil stretched back in his desk chair, arms behind his head. “Oho! Will you look at that? And from the woman who said she wasn't a schmoozer. Nice job, Caroline, that's great. That's fantastic, actually. It's a perfect opportunity. Personal and undemanding—you caught what would make her comfortable. Very well done.”

“Thank you.”

“And very gracious of you to invite her to your home. Will your husband be around, or is he the stay-in-hiding-till-they're-gone type?”

And, all of a sudden, here it was. My first confession to the public at large. “Oh. Ah, actually, Adam won't be joining. He and I…well, we've split up.”

“Oh, man,” said Neil softly. “Damn, I am awfully sorry to hear that.”

And I could tell that he was, without the slightest hint of salacious curiosity—he was just sorry. Neil, I remembered just then, had lost his wife to a sudden illness about a year and a half ago; his loss was more catastrophic than mine, and untainted by betrayal. But still, he knew what it was to lose the person you'd planned to spend your life with, the future you'd thought you'd have. He wasn't going to pity me and he wasn't going to gossip; and, unexpectedly, I didn't mind him knowing at all.

“Yeah. It's been a pretty weird couple of months.”

“When did— Sorry,” he said, holding his hands palms up. “Not my business.”

“It's okay. End of July is when it started. It's weird, it's like half of me expects him to come home any day now, and the other half of me can barely believe that I was really married for ten years, because if I was, why on earth would we not be together now?”

Neil blew air softly through his teeth, shaking his head. “Man, do I ever know what that feels like. It does get better, eventually. That sense of alienation.”

“Thank you. For telling me that, I mean.” My fingers drifted to my rings, and spun them. “You're the only person I've told outside of my immediate family and my best friend. I am absolutely dreading it. To the point that it's going to be awkwardly late by the time I tell people.”

He shrugged. “Do what you've got to do. Just, you know…try to make sure you get enough air. Don't isolate yourself too much. That's not a good place to be.”

“
Divorce
is not a good place to be,” I said. “But I'm okay. My sister has been visiting the last few weeks, so I'm not home alone drowning in a bowl of ramen.”

“Well, if you ever do hit the ramen stage, make sure you reach out to your friends. Most people won't know what to say or do—they can get a little paralyzed—so ask them. If you want company, say so.”

“Thanks, Neil. That's a good thing to hear. By the way, though…dare I ask what comes after the ramen stage?”

His lips moved in a faint approximation of a smile. “Not sure, actually. Still trying to figure that one out myself.”