Skipping a Beat (17 page)

I thought about it for a minute. I still didn’t totally get it, but then I forgot all about Noah’s trick question. Because at that moment, as I looked back and forth between him and Michael, it hit me: the person Noah was a dead ringer for was a young Michael.

Twenty-three

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I flung the sheet away from my sweaty body and sat up, my breath coming in quick gasps. “It was just a dream,” I said aloud. I looked over, but the other side of the bed was empty.

“Michael?” I called out, my voice cracking. He didn’t answer.

I’d been restless all night long. After lying awake for hours, I’d finally drifted off, but I’d never dipped fully into sleep. Instead I felt suspended inside the thin membrane separating sleep and wakefulness. My dreams had been dark and turbulent—I’d been swimming with Noah in the river, and he was arcing high into the air, like a porpoise, the sunlight turning the drops of water on his pale skin into diamonds. Then he slipped under the surface, so cleanly and suddenly he didn’t leave even a ripple behind. I dove deeply, blindly reaching for him, but my arms kept closing around nothing, and then I saw him through a burst of bubbles. I kicked as hard as I could, diving deeper into the water, but Noah’s face turned into Michael’s and he spiraled away from me, to the bottom of the river. He was smiling; how could he be smiling when he was drowning?

“Please don’t go,” I’d been crying in my sleep.

I didn’t know why I’d had a nightmare about losing Michael. It could have been because of what he’d said about not knowing how much time he had left. Or maybe I was beginning to realize that, at the end of these three weeks, I wouldn’t stay with him.

I climbed out of bed and put on my robe, trying to shake away the shadowy images clinging to the corners of my mind.

Michael wasn’t in his bathroom, or the sitting room. I hurried downstairs, the thick carpets absorbing the sound of my footsteps.

I saw a silhouette by the French doors and stifled a scream. “You scared me!” I said when I realized it was Michael.

“Sorry,” he said, turning toward me. He gestured toward the glass doors. “I was just watching the deer.”

I’d never seen deer in our yard before, probably because our gardeners had an arsenal of tricks to keep them from snacking on our manicured flowers and shrubs. I’d once heard them discussing wolves’ urine and foul-tasting chemicals. But the gardeners were gone, and rain must’ve washed away their toxic sprays.

I walked over to Michael and saw there were at least a dozen animals moving through our yard with the graceful steps of dancers.

“Look at the little ones,” he whispered. Four fawns, their soft brown coats dotted with snowy spots, rooted their noses into the grass. One chased another to a far corner of the yard, then they raced back, hurdling a row of butterfly bushes with ease. A doe sensed our presence and lifted her head, but after she appraised us, she seemed to decide we weren’t a threat, and she bent her head to eat again.

“It’s incredible,” I breathed. “There’s this whole other world all around us, and we never noticed it.”

Michael looked at me but didn’t say anything.

“Don’t even think for a second that’s an analogy for anything else,” I said, and he laughed. He lifted his arm, as though to put it around me, then he slowly let it drop back to his side.

I wondered what I would’ve done if he’d tried to hug me. Michael always used to bury his face in my hair when we embraced; it was a habit of his I’d loved. “You switched shampoos,” he said to me once, shortly after we’d started dating. “Now you smell like green apples.” Still reeling from my parents’ abrupt withdrawal, I’d hungered for the way he cherished the tiniest details about me: the mole on my left shoulder, the tiny but stubborn cowlick in the back of my hair, the way my eyes took on the hues of certain shirts I wore.

I might’ve stopped him if he’d tried to touch me … or maybe I would’ve let myself feel his arms around me again, for a moment. I looked up at his profile and swallowed a sigh.

This was how it had been with Michael for too long, I thought, suddenly feeling as tired as if I’d been battling insomnia for months. My yearning juxtaposed with anger at him for not giving me more—and at myself for wanting it. Being with him was a constant push and pull. Nothing about our relationship was simple now.

“I think the deer are leaving,” Michael was saying. “Want to go outside and watch the sun rise?”

I considered it for a moment. I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, and I didn’t feel like being alone. “Sure,” I finally said.

Still in my pajamas, robe, and slippers, I followed him into our backyard. “Oh, my God,” I said upon catching sight of the rock-lined pond. How could I have forgotten? I ran toward it, grabbed a small plastic container resting between two of the rocks, and reached inside for some pellets. I felt relief as greedy, gaping mouths came to the surface and gobbled up the food. I threw in more pellets and watched them disappear as flashes of orange and white and red and black zipped through the water.

Michael was staring into the pond, an inscrutable expression on his face. “I didn’t even know we had fish.”

“Seriously?” I couldn’t believe it. “Michael, we stocked them two years ago.”

I reached back in my memory, seeing the gardeners approach me about it one morning as I lingered over coffee and the Style section of the
Washington Post
. Michael wasn’t home, but surely he’d walked by the koi pond sometime in the past two years. It was only fifty or so yards away from our house. He had to have occasionally looked down instead of always staring at the spot in the distance where he wanted to go next, hadn’t he?

“Move it, Pugsley,” I ordered, tossing in another handful. “You’ve had enough.”

Michael grinned. “You named them?”

I looked over my shoulder at him. It was a small secret, but I felt reluctant revealing it. He was suddenly so eager to know everything about me, and perversely, his eagerness made me want to hold back. It was my way of punishing him for not being interested before, I realized. I wanted to show him the distance between us wasn’t that easy to bridge;
I
wasn’t that easy. Finally I shrugged and kept my voice light: “The littlest one is Nemo, and that pretty one with the long fins is Cinderella. Pugsley is the breakfast hog.”

“Speaking of breakfast, want to eat out here? I could bring us a tray.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said, “but I could use something to drink.”

“Coffee?” Michael asked.

I shook my head. “I’m more in a juice mood.”

“Be right back.” Michael lightly jogged toward the house as I looked after him. For years my husband hadn’t touched a stove, laundered a sock, or filled a tank of gas. Now he was my personal cabana boy.

I heard a little splash and tossed another pellet into the water. “Just one more, Pugsley,” I warned. I never could resist his puffed-out cheeks. He looked like a toddler who was threatening to hold his breath until he got his way. “But after this, you need to clean your room, understand?”

Pugsley eyed me, then swam off with a shake of his tail that I interpreted as fish-speak for “Make me!” I grabbed the net by the side of the pond and skimmed the leaves and sticks from the surface. See, this was why Pugsley never listened; he knew I’d cave and do his chores for him.

After a few minutes, I spotted Michael coming toward me, clutching two bottles of DrinkUp and carrying a plate covered in aluminum foil.

“Provisions!” he announced as he got closer to me. “I brought some croissants and jam in case you changed your mind. Sorry I took so long. Dale called when I was inside.”

“What did he want?” I reflexively wrinkled my nose, as if a bad smell had just wafted by on a breeze.

“It isn’t important,” Michael said. “Even if Dale thinks it is.”

“Is something up with the company?” I asked casually. I picked up the net again and began clearing some imaginary leaves.

“A former employee is complaining about something. It’s nothing. Dale said he’s just trying to get some money. Let’s not let it interfere with the day. Some lemonade?” He held up a bottle.

Interesting, I thought as I slowly nodded. It was strange that Dale had called about something so inconsequential. Dale was the company’s top attorney, and he had a vested interest in seeing that Michael stuck around, since Dale might be out of a job after Michael left. Could Dale be casting around for excuses to lure Michael back to work?

Maybe, I mused as I sipped the lemonade I’d helped taste-test to perfection in our tiny kitchen so many years ago, Dale could turn into an unexpected ally.

“What are you thinking about?” Michael asked. “You’re a million miles away.”

“Hmmm …?” As I looked up at him, our herb garden caught my eye. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s find some fresh mint to put in the lemonade.”

“Good idea.” Michael followed me to the little patch lined with straight green rows. “Is that it?” He pointed to a cluster of stalks that shot up straight into the air.

I shook my head. “That’s lavender.”

Michael dropped to his knees and leaned close to the plant and took in a deep breath. “Julia, have you smelled this stuff? It’s incredible!” I thought about telling him the gardeners used to cut fresh stalks and put them in a vase in our bedroom all the time, but I refrained.

“I can’t believe how good this smells,” Michael said, his eyes shut. He stayed there for a long moment, inhaling and smiling like the poster boy for the Get High on Life campaign. He was wearing old jeans and a faded Georgetown University longsleeved shirt, and his hair was growing out into wild curls; somehow it made him look like a college student again. Like the Michael I used to adore. I’d felt numb toward my husband for so long; now he was conjuring such sharp emotions in me that it felt like the ground beneath my feet was constantly shifting.

Finally Michael stood up and pulled a smaller, shinier leaf from a plant in the next row over and rubbed it between his fingers. “What’s this one?”

I leaned in for a sniff. “Basil. And here’s the mint.” I tore off a few sprigs and handed one to him. He dropped it into his bottle, then led me to a nearby hammock that was strung between two strong poplar trees.

“Want to sit for a bit?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Sure.”

He held the side steady for me as I climbed in. We nearly tipped over when Michael got on, and I clung to the side of the hammock until we stabilized. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something,” he said, stretching out his legs. “Do you like your job—I mean
really
like it?”

“Of course,” I said without even having to think about it.

His brow had been furrowed, but it smoothed out with my answer. “Good,” he breathed. “What was the best party you ever threw? I don’t mean the fanciest one, or the most expensive. Just the one you liked the best.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, hanging one of my legs over the hammock’s side and using my toes to push off against the ground and swing us back and forth.

“Come on, I really want to hear it,” he said.

There wasn’t any reason not to tell him, other than to punish him by denying him the conversations he’d once withheld from me. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty appealing reason, even if it did make me feel about as mature as Pugsley.

“There were so many of them,” I finally said, casually crossing my arms behind my head, as if I’d only been sorting through my memories during the long pause. “I guess I can rule out weddings. There’s always some battle leading up to the day, between the mother and the bride, or maybe if the parents are divorced and remarried, there’s drama about the photos and who gets to sit where. And sometimes relatives get upset if they’re not allowed to bring kids…. I don’t know, it seems like there’s always something. The day itself can be magical—”

I smiled as I thought of something.

“Tell me,” Michael said.

“Whenever the bride starts to walk down the aisle, everyone turns to look at her. But I never do,” I said. “I look at the people surrounding her. There’s so much hope and love in the room. Sometimes there’s an older couple reaching for one another’s hands at the exact same moment, or the father of the bride trying to choke back tears—”

Michael was staring at me.

I cleared my throat, feeling inexplicably annoyed at him. And at myself, for letting him in even this much. “Anyway, weddings are great, but I can’t ever forget all the stress leading up to them.”

“Anniversary parties?” Michael asked. “Are they any better?”

“Usually,” I said. “By then everyone has mellowed out. But nothing’s jumping out at me as a favorite. Let me think …”

I reached back for the memory. “There was this family reunion,” I began, then I looked up at the sky and frowned. The clouds were thin and gray, and the air held a hint of winter, which was less than a month away; it felt like a storm was coming.

Michael was watching me intently, as if my favorite celebration was significant in some way only he knew.

“The family reunion,” he prodded.

“It was for three brothers, who all lived really far apart,” I began again, getting caught up in the images of that day despite myself. “They’d grown up in Virginia, and one still lived there, but another had moved to England and one was all the way in Australia. Anyhow, they’d all gotten married and had kids, and somehow time just slipped away from them. They wrote holiday cards and called, but they hadn’t seen each other in years. They wanted to reconnect, with each other and with their families. So they invited everyone—their parents and aunts and uncles and cousins and new in-laws—and it ended up being forty people.

“They were my easiest clients ever, but that’s not the only reason why they were the best. They didn’t care about the food or the decorations, they just wanted to be together and have fun. So before I planned anything, I called them up one by one and asked about their memories of growing up. They had this great childhood. They were outside all the time, playing stickball and kick the can and football. There was a creek behind their house where they went fishing every weekend, even though they never once caught anything. I’m not even sure there were fish in that creek. But it wasn’t about the fish; it was about the three of them, digging for worms and casting their lines into the water and catching fireflies in jelly jars when it turned dark. Once they even tried to make a raft, like Huckleberry Finn. It sank before they’d gotten ten feet away from shore.”