The Instant When Everything is Perfect (16 page)

What would Kenzie do?
Mia wonders, wishing she could talk to her best friend about this. She could, really. Of course she could. Kenzie knows more about men than anyone Mia has ever known, telling Mia hundreds of date stories over the years. Sex stories. Penis stories. Sad lonely night stories. But for some reason, Mia’s holding this secret tight. But why? It’s over with Robert, isn’t it? Hasn’t she decided to stop? Didn’t she promise everything to Ford’s quiet, sleeping body?

Mia stands up and walks to the window. The goldfinches fly away, the thistle bag swinging from their tiny legs pushing off into flight. A squirrel starts, looks around, and then bends back to the seed.

There’s so much Mia needs to do. It’s enormous. Overwhelming. She has to figure out her marriage. She needs to lose weight, work out more, and take up yoga. And then there’s her mother. Where to start with that? How to begin with Sally? But for today, Mia needs to make a batch of chili, clean the bathrooms, and pay some bills. First—first she’s going to check her email. She has to. She knows now where Lucien inherited his addictive personality. She can’t even go more than a week and a half.

She’s going to write to Robert.

When she reads his last words, “I have killed someone,” Mia wants to weep. He admitted this, wrote this, said this, typed this, thought this, and she didn’t answer him for ten days. Now he must think she read the sentence and decided that he was bad, evil, wrong. He’s been walking around for a week feeling judged. He probably wishes he’d never met Mia at all.

And like her, he probably has stopped looking at his email, knowing that it would do no good. Her decision was in. He’d waited long enough. It was over.

Mia swallows, rests her head in her hand for a moment, and then starts to write.

Dear Robert,

I could lie to you and say that I’ve been so busy with my mom that I haven’t had time to write, but even though I have been busy, I’d still be lying. And because you’ve been so truthful, I have to be. I was scared. I came home from the hospital that night, and I promised myself that I wouldn’t write to you or see you again. And then when my mother decided that she wasn’t going to have reconstruction, I knew that it was a sign. We weren’t supposed to see each other.

But I think about you. This morning, I thought about you. Last night. The day before. The day before that.

Can we meet? Can we talk about what you wrote in your email? I want to know. I don’t want to write any more about this. I want to see you in person.

But I’ll understand if you don’t want to see me. I must seem indecisive. A flake. It’s your decision.

Mia



As she browns the hamburger for the chili, she thinks about Robert, imagining him at his desk, reading the emails she sent him. She chops the garlic, onions, and bell pepper and talks to Harper about his geometry homework, thinking of Robert pushing his hair back from his face, thinking how to answer her. She thinks of him writing the story of how he killed someone. Killed someone? All afternoon, Mia is in two places or there are two Mias. One Mia is in the kitchen, one Mia is floating in Robert’s office, imagining him.

How can she be this split person, neither one place nor the other? She should be here, at home, with her family.

“Mom?” Harper asks, holding out a piece of paper.

“What?

“Permission slip? The thing we were just talking about?” Harper stares at her, his eyes dark like Ford’s, like Sally’s.

Mia puts the lid on the chili pot and takes the slip, reading it. “Where are you going?”

Her son shakes his head and goes back to sit at the table. He sighs, rubs his forehead, just like Ford does. “Monterey. The aquarium. What is going on with you and Dad? Is it Grandma still?”

Mia grabs a pen from the wire mesh basket on the counter and signs her name on the slip and then hands it back to Harper. “What do you mean?”

Harper shoves the slip in his backpack. “You’re both on some other planet. Pluto, even if it really isn’t technically a planet anymore. Just some giant rock floating around the sun.”

Mia puts her hand on her hip, staring at her youngest boy. What is he seeing? Is it just her fatigue from taking care of Sally? Or has her betrayal of his father seeped through her skin like whiskey? But Ford? He’s who he’s become in their long marriage. Helpful, thoughtful, kind, slightly detached. Mia doesn’t know what Harper is talking about. Ford seems fine, happy to help out with Sally, content with being alone all those nights Mia stayed at the condo. Unwilling to go to therapy, but okay with the same day-in and day-out of their lives.

Mia puts the hot pads back in the drawer, opens the chili pot to look in, and then closes it. “It’s been a hard time. Grandma’s better now, though, and she’ll be able to drive tomorrow. I won’t have to keep going over there.”

Harper zips his backpack, tightening its straps. “You know that book you wrote?”

“Which one?”

“The second. The train one.”

Mia nods. Of all the people in her family, only Lucien has read her novels, talking with her about each one, every character, the covers, the titles. Ford and Harper and Sally and Dahlia are proud—Dahlia as well as Sally buying them in batches—but Mia knows that her family doesn’t really read them or they don’t read them past the first chapters. When people ask her if she’s ever had to worry about using her own life sometimes as material, she honestly answers, “No,” clear that only one son would find the real intermixed with fiction.

“And?” she asks Harper. “What about it?”

“You know Rafael?”

“You read the book?” Mia pulls out a chair and sits down at the table, staring at Harper. Even though she knows he has something important to say, she can only think of the boy in second grade who had trouble with
Green Eggs and Ham
. For most of his reports now, he skims books and reads up on what he missed on sparknotes.com. If he were younger or not trying to be serious, she’d stand up and hug him tight, proud that he got through her whole story.

But then she sighs, knowing that he could only have done so because he was worried.

“Most of it. Anyway, you know Rafael? The guy?”

Mia used to know Rafael. For years, he lived in her fingers and arms and brain and heart. But now, like the rest of the story, she’s let him go, off into the death of characters with no sequels to revive them. What he loved and hated and cared about has become exactly what Rafael and
Sacramento by Train
is: an old story.

“Of course. What is it, Harper?”

“You know what he did. With his secretary.”

Something pings in her chest, her breath stops. How can Harper know about her and Robert already? How can she be guilty when she hasn’t even had the opportunity to sin? To enjoy the sin. How can she pay for it now without having the joy of the crime?

“Yes. He had an affair,” she says, her eyes steady.

“Well,” Harper says. “It happens, right? In real life. And then people go on. Like Rafael and Susan.”

Mia leans forward, feeling her thighs press against the wooden chair. “What are you saying, Harper?”

Maybe it was the question or her forward movement or the fact that he had only five minutes to get to his math tutor, but whatever the reason, Harper stands up and swings his backpack onto his shoulder. “I’m just talking about it, that’s all.”

He walks around the table, hesitates, and then kisses her on the forehead. “It was a good book.”

She holds his shoulder, feels the hard muscle there, and then puts a hand to his head. He allows her touch and then slowly pulls away.

“Harper.” Mia pivots in the chair to watch him walk toward the front door.

“What?” He turns, his eyes narrowed. Then he looks at his watch. “I’ve got to go.”

And then he’s gone, the door closing behind him.

Mia turns forward, leans against the table, liking the hard press against her stomach. She was right in the first place. She should have never opened her email, never answered Robert. Her boy already knows the entire story and it hasn’t even happened yet.

On the deck out front, a blue jay hops onto the bird bath, dipping his black soot bill into the water and then raising his head, his throat vibrating as he swallows. On the stove, the chili bubbles, tomato and garlic steam filling the kitchen.

Mia stands up and lowers the heat on the range, staring at the stove dials.

Her boy knows. He can see that she wants something else, needs it. He’s read into her words, her complacent smiles, her acceptance that this is her life. Maybe he’s read an email. Maybe he somehow saw her with Robert in the hospital. But how?

She picks up the spoon, hits it against the counter gently. She making things up, she knows that. But even Harper’s seeing inside her doesn’t make her stop craving Robert. Even now, she’s thinking about him.

The chili rumbles into a simmer. Mia breathes in and then turns away, walks down the hall into her office, and sits at her desk.



Instead of looking at her email, though, she calls Kenzie, who is on BART headed to her acupuncture appointment in San Francisco.

“I can barely hear you,” Kenzie says. “Wait.”

Some loud noise in the background slowly disappears, and then Kenzie is back on the line.

“Kids and music. Christ. What’s up? How’s your mom?”

“I have to tell you something,” Mia says. “It’s—it’s not good. It’s not about my mom, or anything. But it’s—“

Kenzie laughs, interrupting Mia. “You sound like you’ve betrayed me. Did you use some of my life in your latest story? Did you promise some other boring professor a date with your best friend?”

“No. I’ll never set you up again. I promise. It’s not that.”

“Are you calling me to tell me I need to lose weight? My ass is finally an embarrassment?”

“Right. If your ass is an embarrassment, then mine is a scandal.”

“Well, then, just get over it. What is it?”

Mia rubs her nose and sits back in her desk chair. “I think . . .” she begins and then stops, listening for the sounds of Harper running up the stairs, desperate to find his math book. But the house is silent except for the occasional slight ting of the chili pot. “I think I’m going—I think I’m getting involved with another man.”

Kenzie doesn’t say anything for a second, the muted roar of the BART train constant in the background. “Rockridge. Rockridge station,” the train operator says over the loudspeaker.

“Who?” Kenzie asks finally.

“The plastic surgeon. The one my mom went to see.” With the truth in the air, Mia expects to feel worse, her transgressions validated by sound. But she actually feels—she feels better. She finds a breath deep in her lungs and sucks in air.

“Has anything happened yet?”

“Not really. We’ve talked. Emailed. I didn’t write to him for a week or so, thinking I would forget about it. As if my attraction for him was really all about being scared about my mom’s surgery or something. As if I could make it go away. But I can’t. It’s just that Harper said something weird. I wonder if he—”

“Are you—Have you?” Kenzie stops talking. The train operator mumbles something, doors open and close, the BART train roars. “Look, we’re about to go underground. I’ll call you after my appointment. Don’t—don’t do anything yet, okay? I mean, anything real. Just wait—”

The conversation cuts off, Kenzie somewhere underneath Oakland. Mia hangs up her phone and turns to her computer.

Dear Mia
Robert has written.

Mia forces her eyes to stay on his words. Dear. Mia. She doesn’t want to read any further, know anything more. All she knows is that he’s written back. He’s forgiven her enough to do that. He’s calling her dear.

Mia looks at her clock. It’s four. It’s a Tuesday. A month ago, she didn’t know Robert Groszmann. A month ago she wasn’t really able to look at her marriage. A month from now. A month from now. She breathes in and reads on.

I’m glad you wrote back. Yes, we can meet. Let’s meet. When? I can get away for lunches on the days I’m not in surgery. Nights are good for me, but I imagine they aren’t for you. Give me a date. Let’s figure it out.

Robert

She reads his email over and then stands up and grabs her calendar off the wall. Mia brings it back to her desk and looks at the March and then April dates. Toward the middle of April, her days are full of black ink, a reading, a conference, a trip to LA, a trip to New York. A book signing. A lecture.

Flipping back to March, she sees all the empty space. Some, she knows will be taken up with Sally.