Results May Vary (19 page)

“With a buffer,” I finished. “I believe it. But you guys will figure it out as you go along. And remember, you have the winning card in your hand, which is that the girls live with
you.
So Eva's folks will have to get along with you if they want the girls in their lives, and however much they may fuss along the way, I promise you they know that.”

“You're a smart woman,” he said, eyes warm.

“I have my moments,” I said, leaning over to stack his plate onto mine.

“The table looks pretty, by the way,” he said, following me to the kitchen and leaning one hip against the counter behind me. “I meant to tell you. Nice Thanksgivingery.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the dining table. “Oh, that's not me, that was all Ruby,” I said, fitting the plates and silver into the washer before tackling the Dutch oven I had cooked our beef stew in. It had been a wedding gift from Jonathan: Le Creuset, an absurd amount of money for a twenty-three-year-old to spend. Funny that the gift would outlast the marriage.

“Ah, that makes sense. I checked out her blog once; she's really talented. The way she photographs food was making me crave stuff I don't even like.”

Neil had been interested enough to look up Ruby's blog? And meanwhile I hadn't even told her about him?

Silence settled for a moment while I finished scrubbing the cast iron, then moved on to the wine goblets, carefully rinsing Cabernet residue from the gossamer-thin glass.

“Care, stop washing the dishes. It's late.”

“I'm almost done. I don't want to leave these sitting here all night.”

“Why not?” Neil said. “It's just a couple of glasses.” He stepped close behind me and gently pulled the glass and sponge out of my hands, but he didn't let me go. Instead he kneaded my soapy hands, his fingers firm on the balls of my thumbs, the pits at the center of my palms. “Such long fingers,” he said, rubbing his fingers between mine. “You would make a great pianist.”

My brain was suddenly full of bubbles. I struggled to compose a sentence. “Speaking of instruments, I still want a sax demo. It sounds amazing,” I said, referring to the slow swagger of vibrato brass that had filled the room. “Are you as good as this guy?”

“As Johnny Hodges on ‘Jeep's Blues'? The man's a legend, baby. But I'll break it out next time you come over, I promise. Which reminds me,” he continued, mouth behind my ear, “I have the sitter all night tonight. Thought it might be nice to skip my usual Cinderella routine. I have no agenda; but I did think you should be informed.”

I turned my head to the side; I couldn't see him, but he could see my profile. And with his chest against my back, he could feel the way my breath had picked up. “And what should I do with this information?”

“Whatever you wish,” he said, lips grazing the back of my neck. “Although I do have one or two suggestions.”

“I would be very interested to hear them.”

“Turn around.”

Slowly, I turned to face him. “Do the suggestions involve you kissing me?”

“Every single one of them does,” he murmured as he lowered his head.

It still took me by surprise, every time I touched him, how intensely attracted to him I was. Something about discovering that quiet, mild-mannered Neil was so goddamned sexy when you got him alone…it was like this delicious little secret that I got to keep from the rest of the world. And good god, was I ready to find out even more.

“You know, I have a few suggestions too,” I said against his lips. “The tricky part is, I think they would best be accomplished upstairs.”

He ran his hands deliberately down my back until he was cupping my butt, nestling me tight against him. “I think you and I must have had the exact same ideas.”

We stumble-kissed our way up the stairs, but when we got to my bedroom, Neil's eyes opened just long enough to snag on my Jackson Pollock wall. “What happened here?”

I shrugged. “Therapy.”

The chuckle that vibrated against my ear was rich with affection, and for a moment I pulled back. What were we doing? Was this too much, too fast? “Are you sure we should be—” I started, but he cut me off with a kiss.

“Yes,” he muttered. “We should.”

“I just want— I just have to put it out there that it's going to be weird. For both of us. I mean, good weird, but—”

“Does this feel weird?” he asked, sliding his tongue lightly along my collarbone.

“Mmm. No.”

“This?” Teeth scraping the base of my throat, making me gasp.

“No.”

“Then stop talking.”

Once, not long after Adam and I got engaged, Jonathan confessed to me that he couldn't see himself ever getting married, because he didn't know how he could give up the thrill of being with a new person. I told him that once he met the right girl, his heart would start to be more compelling than his dick. Because, of course, I was the ultimate authority on monogamy and commitment.

But now, with Neil, I finally got it. Nothing we were doing was mechanically different from anything Adam and I had ever done, but because it was Neil and it was the first time, all of my nerve endings were buzzing. It just
felt
different: different pace, different pressure in his touch, different ways of coaxing the little sighs and moans out of me.

With palms and fingers and lips and tongue, I measured the countless ways
he
was different. Darker coloring, broader shoulders, deeper chest, longer and more muscular legs; I added them all to the tally of things that were new. That Adam was not, or had never seen, or would never know about my life. About me.

Like the cry that shivered out of my throat when I finally sank onto Neil's body, savoring the pressure as he filled me and we began to move. And the moans I couldn't control, every time we slid together, their pitch creeping up as he pulsed his hips up harder, pressed me closer. The fact that right now Neil was fucking me better than Adam had in
years
—that it was so good I could barely stand it, could barely drag air into my gasping lungs.

The pathetic irony of Adam's infidelity was that he had always been so deeply possessive of
me,
so as a supersonic boom of an orgasm roared through me, sending my fingers biting into Neil's shoulders, all I could think about was how viciously I wished my husband could see this. Me, panting with pleasure from another man's touch. It would fucking destroy him, and I wanted it to.

Neil came a minute after I did, and I watched, eating up his ragged gasp and the way his handsome face twisted as he moved inside me. As it subsided, his eyes flickered open. And for one long, suspended heartbeat, disorientation was splashed across his face, chased quickly by pain. I was not who he had expected to see.

It was such an impossible tangle, the four people there in that room that night.

Sometime later I woke, chilled. The spot next to me was empty and felt like it had been for a while.

I found Neil downstairs. He was sitting in a chair next to the dining room window, back curved like a bow, arms folded on the sill. A mug listed sideways in one hand. When he heard my feet on the stairs, he gave me a wisp of a smile, then turned back to the window again. My brain skittered for something to say, but I didn't have any references for this kind of situation. No sense asking how he was feeling; pain pulsed around him like an electrical storm. Any of the easy, empty platitudes that hovered on my tongue would have been a desecration.

I pulled a chair next to him and peered into his mug to see if he needed a refill.

“Cider? Really?”

This time, his smile had a little life. “It's friendlier than booze.”

I gave him a skeptical eyebrow, but plucked it away from him for a sip. The sweet flavor made me think of orchards in October, pulling fruit from the tree, the crisp snap as I took a bite. “You're right.”

He nodded. I wondered if he had a lot of nights like this, or if this apple cider was just about tonight.

I wrapped my arms around my knees and stared out into the yard. It was a curiously still night—not so much as a whisper of movement among the branches of the trees down by the river. Their edges were blurred with a thin smear of mist in the wan moonlight. No motion was visible beneath the ice that crusted the river's surface.

We sat that way, not speaking, for a long time. I didn't try to touch him, just sat there with him in the darkness, my shoulders next to his and the warmth of my breath making tiny blossoms of fog on the cold glass of the window. I hated that I had nothing to offer him besides the cider. But sometimes, I figured, just not being alone was exactly what was needed.

Maybe it was half an hour that I kept vigil with Neil; maybe more. The radiator clicked and hissed into the silence, then fell quiet. In the stillness that descended, I realized I was shivering, so I creaked to my feet and cupped my hand around the back of Neil's neck.

“Come back to bed when you're ready. I think it will feel a little better in the morning.”

Before I could move away, he uncoiled a little, reached toward me, and slowly wound his arms around my hips, gathering me closer so his cheek pressed against my belly. I curved my hands around his close-shaven head, massaging circles on his scalp. He pulled back to look at me, and teased apart the seam of my robe, opening a narrow stripe of naked skin to the chilly air. Then he leaned forward again and pressed a kiss to that little rounded hill right below my belly button.

“Caroline,” he said softly. It was a question and an invocation and an apology. And I answered the only way I could have, pulling the robe open wider so he could slide his hands inside and warm them.

I feel foolish and happy as soon as I let myself think of you.

—Honoré de Balzac to Countess Ewelina Haska, January 19, 1834

The next time I woke, it was from a clinging kiss on the back of my shoulder blade. Followed by another, then another. I groaned, dragged my hair out of the way, and rolled over. Neil was sitting on the edge of the bed next to me, smiling, already fully dressed.

“I've got to get home to my keepers,” he said.

I smiled, struggling not to resent that he had to go so early, when all I wanted was to spend the day in bed with him. After the rocky start last night, he'd seemed determined to demonstrate that the real live woman in his hands was of very great interest indeed, and I'd fallen asleep quivering and exhausted. But I was already ravenous for him again.

He was, it turned out, put together beautifully under his sweaters. He had the look of a former athlete—he'd rowed in college and grad school—who had taken care of himself well: He wasn't ripped, but he had shape where it was nice to have shape, and a flat belly with an appealing dusting of hair. Farren, no doubt, would call him something like a tall drink of water, or—even worse—some appalling metaphor involving chocolate that would make me want to die from inappropriateness.

Neil leaned in to kiss me and, close up, the bright sunlight revealed that his eyes were a more complex color than I'd ever realized—dark olive green, banded with a ring of gray at the edge of the iris, and sparks of topaz-gold around the pupil. It made me think of butterfly wings.

“I guess I'll see you tomorrow,” I said. “Where we will be super professional all day and definitely not think about sex at all.”

He gave a sexy little chuckle and sank his hand into my hair for a deep, breath-stealing kiss. I was so dazed it took me almost a full minute to process the words he tenderly murmured when he lifted his head.

“Did you just ask me if I ever heard from Diana Ramirez?” I yelled, and he rocked backward on my bed, laughing.

“Just keeping things professional,” he said, getting to his feet. “Hey. Will you be up for sleeping over at my place on Saturday? Since, you know, we're sleeping together now and all.”

I pulled the covers up to my chin and glared at him. “Only if you promise not to mention Diana Ramirez in bed again ever in your misbegotten life.”

“Deal,” he said, offering his hand to shake on it. But at the last second he tugged my hand closer and kissed the backs of my fingers. “See you later, baby,” he said, knocked his knuckles against my door casing, and left.

When he had gone, I yanked my covers all the way up over my face and burrowed under their soft, flannelly weight. For some reason, the word that came to mind was the one that had popped into my head when I first discovered Neil's vulnerability to blushing: bewitching. The damn man was bewitching. Because I was most certainly bewitched.

We did, as it turned out, finally hear from Diana Ramirez that week. She responded to one of my follow-ups, which had variously taken the form of one unanswered phone call, one email with a link to Farren's website, and comp tickets to an upcoming musical performance at the museum. This time, she was responding to the tickets: “Thanks!” Exclamation point smiley face.

“How do you put up with this shit all the time?” I fumed, from the guest chair in Neil's office.

He shrugged and tossed his pen in the air like a juggler. “Patience, girlhopper. Give her till January before you give up on her. Nobody can pay attention to anything around the holidays.”

I squinted at him in sudden suspicion. “Do you say ‘Patience, girlhopper' to your daughters?”

The pen spun into the air again. “Maybe.”

“You realize they have no idea what you're talking about, right?”

“They definitely don't,” he agreed. “But by the way,” he said, launching the pen into flight once more.

“Yes?”

“I also call them ‘baby.' ”

The next Saturday was the first big snowstorm of the winter, and after calling my neighbor to reconfirm for the third time that he did, in fact, remember the substantial amount of money I had paid him in October to plow my driveway for the season, I tossed my canvas duffel in my backseat and headed to Neil's. It always amazes me how, much like people say happens to women with childbirth, those of us with northern winters have forgotten the pain of them by June, and greet the return of snow in December with dewy-eyed amnesiac joy.

Or, then again, maybe that was just me.

But it was so unearthly
pretty.
Inconvenient and even dangerous as they were, it was impossible to hate the fluffy crystals that tumbled out of the flat gray sky, covering fields and roads and rooftops with a pure and lovely coat of white, and decking every bare tree branch in sight with frosting. Heavy snowstorms were one of the only times I missed New York, because there, they turned the city silent; but up here, it was always quiet. My car was a warm, solitary pod of sound that whirred over white velvet roads to North Adams, where I found the Crenshaws in the midst of a snowball fight on the sidewalk in front of their building.

Neil waved one shearling-gloved hand when he saw me straggling toward them. “Guys,” he called. “Caroline is here; that means it's time to go inside and start dinner.”

Predictably, this was greeted with howls of protest, but after some stern negotiations, Neil was able to wrangle his snow-maddened children inside and into their apartment, where they shed hats and gloves and boots and small puffy coats in an astonishingly rapid near-biological process that reminded me strongly of Ruby.

Basic principles of fairness told me that I shouldn't pick a favorite between Neil's daughters, but it was impossible for it not to be Annie. Aside from her having a sunnier and more affectionate personality than her sister, she was cartoon cute, with immense dark eyes, round cheeks, and hair that projected in two downy puffballs on either side of her head. She liked to sit next to me when I shared meals with them, and would swing her foot against the table leg incessantly until Neil told her to stop it—whereupon she would simply start again two minutes later. One time, in an attempt to head off the reprimand I could see gathering in Neil's face like a storm cloud, I had simply reached down and wrapped my hand around Annie's ankle. Which she thought was the most hilarious thing in the world. The “Make Caroline Catch Me” game had taken on a life of its own by this point, and showed no signs of becoming less amusing to either of us.

This evening, though, I had been trying to draw Clara out by asking her about her Thanksgiving visit from her grandparents, but while she answered my questions politely, she just clearly…didn't want to talk.

“Did you have fun at Thanksgiving, Clara?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“Nana and Poppy visited us.”

“Where do Nana and Poppy live?”

“Mississippi.”

And so forth. Stubbornly, I pressed on; there had to be something I could ask this child that would spark her interest.

“So how about Christmas? That's only a few weeks away now. Are you excited about that?”

“I hate Christmas,” she said, pushing a rejected chunk of potato around the perimeter of her plate. “And I hate Thanksgiving. Everyone is so sad since Mommy died.”

“Hey,” said Neil softly, leaning over to wrap his arm around her. “We're not always sad, baby. Sometimes we are, and that's okay. But sometimes we don't feel as sad, and that's okay too. Mommy wouldn't want us to be sad all the time. She wouldn't want you and Annie to be sad at all. Nana and Poppy and I, sometimes we can't help being sad, but we have a lot to be happy about, too. Like you two.”

My eyes stung, and, lacking anything better to do with myself, I glanced at Annie, who was staring at her father with a furrowed brow. Moving stealthily while she was distracted, I pounced my hand onto her foot, making her shriek with laughter, so much so that a half-chewed mouthful of green beans spilled onto her shirt.

“Sorry,” I mouthed to Neil, suddenly anxious that it hadn't been the right thing to do. Who was I to break into this family's conversation about their loss? But he just shook his head, smiling. And then he handed me a napkin for Annie's green beans.

Later, after the house was still and dark and Neil had amply reconfirmed his qualifications in the bed department, he snuggled me against him as our skin cooled; but after a minute, the rib cage under my arm was rising and falling steadily in time with the breath that stirred the hair by my ear. I had thought it was an Adam thing, crashing hard into sleep immediately following an orgasm, but maybe it was just a guy thing. I peered at the dark smudges of his lashes resting against his cheeks, and smiled.

Outside, the snow was falling even more heavily now, and the dense white cloud cover reflected the orange glow of the street lamps into the room. A plow rattled down the street outside the building, and Neil started awake.

“Mmm. Dozed off,” he said, and inched forward to kiss me. “It's so nice to have you here. And I'm glad for you to spend more time with the girls.”

“I'm glad too,” I said.

“I saw your face before. At Clara, saying that Eva had died. I told them that. I told them exactly that…that Mommy got sick with a terrible disease, and it made her body stop working, and that's why she's gone. I told them that we will always love her, and remember her, and remember how much she loved us, but I didn't tell them she's watching over us from heaven. I told them that she's gone. My in-laws were not happy with me, but what was I going to say?”

I nodded, but my uncertainty must have shown in my face.

“Okay, I can see you don't like that, either. I'm curious: What do you think I should have said?” His tone was conversational, not defensive, but I still knew I was way out of my depth.

“Neil, I couldn't even begin to have the right to an opinion about that.”

He shrugged. “I'm asking. That gives you the right.”

“I don't—”

“Let's look at it another way. Do you believe in God? I don't care if you were raised to believe. I mean do you now, personally, believe in the existence of God?”

I only had to think about it for a minute before I answered. “Not really. I guess I believe it's possible, but no, I don't actively think there is one. At least, not according to what any of the religions say.”

He nodded. “Okay. And do you believe in an afterlife?”

“I don't know. Again, I'm not sold on the whole thing with the choirs of angels and Jesus on the big golden armchair, but it seems impossible to me that when we die, we're just gone. I mean, there are so many examples, millions of them, of ordinary everyday people, many of whom aren't even religious, and they talk about sensing the presence of loved ones who are gone. I guess…I guess maybe that's what I would have said. Not that she was in heaven, but that…they'd always carry her spirit inside them. So that they could still feel close to her.”

He brushed my cheek with his knuckles. “That's a beautiful thought. And I wish I could believe in it, I really do. But I know better.”

“How?”

“I told you I didn't have siblings because it's easier to explain that way, sometimes, without getting into everything…but I had an older brother, Jason. He died when I was eleven and he was fourteen. Leukemia. If I could tell you the times I tried to feel his presence around me…tried to talk to him and feel like he was listening…we even had an honorary seat and a moment of silence for him at our wedding. And that's all it was: silence and an empty chair.”

I stroked his throat, aching. The cruelty of living could steal your breath sometimes, it really could. “Neil, I'm so sorry.”

“So the thing is, I know. I
know
there's nothing left of Eva for them to feel, other than what we do ourselves to keep her memory alive. I don't see the benefit of telling them otherwise. I won't lie to my kids. I won't. Not about death, not about heaven, not about Eva.”

The air in the room was too taut, too silent. I wanted to pull him back into the present. “What about Santa Claus?”

He laughed. “There's been some confusion about that,” he admitted. “Last year I got a letter from one of the moms, accusing me of ruining Christmas for the rest of her daughter's life because Clara told her Santa was actually just her mommy and daddy.”

“Oh boy.”

“I believe the word used to describe me was ‘joyless.' ”

“Nice thing to say to a man who just lost his wife.”

“Yeah, well.” He rolled onto his back and rested one wrist on his forehead. “I've been wondering if I should reconsider my approach on that one. I don't know what the answer is. I don't know what any of the answers are.”

“Nobody does.”

“No, I mean, I seriously don't. It scares the shit out of me. I'm raising girls. Two girls! What the hell do I know about raising girls?”

“You're doing a phenomenal job.”

“But none of the hard stuff has hit. They're small enough that the boys haven't started acting like dickheads yet; but they will. And I've got these two tiny women that I have to teach to be strong, and to stand up for themselves, and respect themselves, and to not text people photos of their boobs or sleep with boys to get approval.” He ran a hand over his scalp. “I have to talk to them about their vaginas, Caroline! And their periods! How the hell am I supposed to talk to a young girl about her period?” he demanded, hands flung wide with entreaty.

I couldn't help it; I started giggling. The panic in his voice. I pulled his face toward me and kissed him. “You are going to do great. Seriously. You're already teaching them most of it, and as for the sex stuff…did Eva have any sisters?”