20

20

The way Emily is sitting in the grass, her head against her knees, I wonder if she’s going to be sick. Maisie is on one side of her, Nell on the other.

“Should I have told you this when you were fourteen?” I ask. “Should I have said, Duke isn’t your father but he came to the farm once and thought you were the most beautiful child in the world and swung you around and recited Chekhov to you? Would that have made it better or worse because I’m telling you, I don’t know. Maybe I did exactly the wrong thing.” It’s true that she met him once and was besotted with him, and it’s true that he, at least for those minutes, was besotted with her. Duke had looked straight into her eyes after all. Even if she was only four it left a mark.

Emily pulls up her T--shirt and wipes her face. “I wouldn’t have believed you,” she says finally. “I would have said he’d come to get me and you refused to let me go. I would have gone out of my mind.”

“Impossible,” Maisie says, rubbing circles on her back.

“I would have refused to let you go,” I say. “Even if you were his, which you weren’t.”

“Maybe you remember him,” Nell says to her.

Emily considers this, looking into her own memory for Duke. “It’s like watching a movie,” she says. “I can see the whole thing now that you’ve told us. So yes, I remember Duke, but I also remember you and Veronica sitting at that table registering people for auditions, and I remember Ripley standing by the swimming pool, and I remember your grandmother. I mean, it’s not the same thing.”

“Still,” Nell says encouragingly. “It’s something.”

“It’s not. It’s nothing.” Emily’s beautiful eyes fill up again. “I just wish he could go back to being a famous movie star who I wanted to be my father when I was a teenager. I wish he could have waited out the pandemic on a yacht in Capri.”

“Everybody wishes that,” I say.

Maisie takes Emily’s braid into her hands. “But then we’d have spent the rest of our lives thinking that Duke played George in Our Town and Mom dumped Duke for Dad. I never would have known that Mom used to spell her name with a ‘u,’ or that she wanted to be a vet for a week in high school, or that she ruptured her Achilles. I never would have known that Dad played the Stage Manager. I’m not saying Duke needed to drown so that we could get our facts straight, but I’m not sorry to know. The truth is I’ve never been one hundred percent positive who your father was and now I am. I mean, I knew it was probably Dad, but didn’t part of you think that paternity was going to be the big reveal?”

I look at Maisie, aghast. “Are you serious?”

She shrugs. “The only thing she ever said to me when I was a kid was that Duke was her father.”

“She told me the same thing and I never believed it,” Nell says. “Didn’t you ever watch her in the barn with Dad? It’s like they’re the same person.”

Joe started taking Emily with him to work after Nell was born, at least for a few hours in the morning, affording me the luxury of having only two children under the age of five instead of three. He showed her which green plants were weeds and taught her how to take those weeds out by the roots. He laminated a small picture of the dreaded plum curculio beetle for her to keep in her pocket so she could be on the lookout. Emily has always been Joe’s.

Emily stands, then reaches down to pull her sisters to their feet, one with each hand. “Is there anything else we need to know about the past?” Back to work, is what she’s telling us.

“I think that’s everything.”

“Then tell us what happened when Duke died,” Emily says.

Emily, Emily, stop. I shake my head. “You know that story already.” Talking about Duke as I knew him when he was alive has kept him alive this past week. I’d just as soon leave it at that.

For a good ten minutes we work without talking, which may be the new family record, but then Maisie breaks down just after emptying her bucket. “I was at the Minties’,” she says. “Lauren Mintie called me in the middle of the night because Ramona had gone into labor and she was barking and whining.”

“Doesn’t every living thing whine during labor?” Nell asks.

“Lauren said she was afraid something would go wrong and the kids would wake up in the morning and the dog would be dead and the puppies would be dead and then they’d be traumatized. Like dogs have never done this without human supervision before. But births are a good experience so I told her I’d come. Plus she said Ramona was in the bathtub downstairs and she’d leave the door open and the lights on but they’d all stay upstairs so I wouldn’t have to see anyone but the dog.”

“Contactless whelping,” Emily says.

“Ramona’s a nice dog,” Nell says.

Maisie nods. “She was very good. She had seven puppies so it took a long time. I got the window open and turned on the overhead fan. You can’t believe how awful puppies smell.”

“Everything you do smells,” Nell says.

Maisie ignores this. “The third one came out sideways so who knows, maybe it was a good thing I was there. That one died. I found a baggie for it in the kitchen and took it with me.”

“Don’t tell us that,” Emily says.

I wonder if there’s a puppy in the freezer somewhere.

Maisie keeps going. “I was just rubbing puppies, trying to get them stimulated to nurse, trying to get them to latch on. By the time Ramona was finished and I’d wiped the mess out of the bathtub and put the dirty towels in the laundry it was really late. Lauren left out extra towels and I made a new bed in the tub and brought Ramona some food and water. It must have been two o’clock before I got out of there. I drove home with the windows down because I was covered in puppy stink. I came up over the hill in the pitch--black dark and saw Duchess in my headlights, standing in the middle of the road. I swear to god, if I’d turned my head for a second I would have killed her.”

Emily turns around. “What?”

“Duchess was in the middle of the road.”

“You didn’t tell me any of this,” I say to her.

“I didn’t even think about it then but what are the chances?”

“If you were leaving the Minties’ then she was a long way from home,” Emily says.

“Right? And if she’s just standing in the road in the dark, somebody was going to hit her. So I pulled over and got her in the car and she was practically in my lap, licking my sweatshirt, going out of her mind over the puppy slime. That’s not a small dog. I drove her back to the Whitings’ and put her in the yard. I was all keyed up. By the time I took a shower and looked at my phone it was three o’clock. That’s when I saw the news about Duke.” Maisie looks at me. “I don’t know why I woke you up. You’d been working all day. I should have let you sleep.”

“Of course you woke me up.”

She shakes her head. “He was still going to be dead in the morning.”

That night when I opened my eyes, Maisie was sitting on my side of the bed in the dark, scrolling on her phone. It was the light of the phone that woke me up.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

She ran her hand over my leg, over the summer quilt that covered my leg, and I knew it was bad. Joe was asleep beside me. I asked her where the girls were.

She shook her head. “Everyone’s fine.” Then she told me Duke was dead, and I thought for a second she was talking about a dog because Maisie was always going out in the middle of the night for one animal or another. And then I understood.

“How?” I whispered.

“He drowned. He was on a boat in Capri and he drowned.”

She meant both the famous actor and a young man I’d known a hundred years ago, the one who hadn’t crossed my mind in such long time. The two of them died together. I remembered how he would shake me gently awake at four in the morning, his hand running up my arm in the tangle of our sheets. Wake up, wake up, he’d say. It’s time to smoke.

“Mom and I went down to the kitchen and looked at our phones. There wasn’t any update in the news but the internet was flooded with pictures of him. There must have been a thousand pictures, and I said, one of these days, you’re going to have to tell us what happened.”

“I was worried about you finding out,” I say to Emily. “We talked about going over to the little house but we didn’t want to wake you.”

“We decided to go over there first thing in the morning but by then you’d already looked at your phone.” Maisie is apologetic. This has been weighing on her.

“You were worried about me?” Emily asks. “I met the man for what, twenty minutes when I was four years old, and I somehow managed to make the entire story into something that happened to me.” Emily lifts the bucket of cherries from her neck and upends it into the empty lug on the grass. After all these years of begging her to put him down, I can hardly believe the time has come. Emily knows everything now, and she is done.

And I am done, except for this: I saw Duke one other time, and of that time I will say nothing to my girls. His brief reappearance came in the period after my grandmother died but before Joe returned. It was years and years before that day in Michigan when he showed up on our porch. This was when I was living alone in New York and sewing for a costumer. He called me at seven in the morning. Not a Duke hour.

“Cricket,” he said. “It’s your past.”

This was in the Rampart days and Duke was already famous. Not the kind of famous he’d become, but anyone who saw him kept their eyes on the screen. I didn’t have a television, but a sports bar on my block had twenty of them and the bartender was not averse to letting me watch the small one he kept next to the ice machine. I’d show up on Thursday nights a little before nine o’clock even as I promised myself I wouldn’t. Not that it mattered. The bar was full of people who promised themselves they weren’t coming again.

“That guy,” the bartender would say, shaking his head. “Somebody explain it to me.” But I didn’t have to explain anything because half the time he was leaning over my beer, watching.

Duke told me he was in a hospital outside of Boston.

Had he said he was at a diner down the street and could I meet him for breakfast, I might have hung up the phone. But say the word hospital and everything changes. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“What happened,” he began, and then was quiet. “That’s a long one. That’s maybe a whole lifetime.”

So it wasn’t the kind of hospital I was picturing.

“What I was wondering is if you could visit me here. We get two visiting hours every afternoon before dinner. We’re supposed to write down a list of people we want to see. It’s an assignment, they’re very big on assignments here, and I’m having a hard time coming up with an answer. Then I thought of you, and how you’d always been a such regular sort of girl, very sensible. I have a memory of you sewing.”

“You need me to sew something?”

“Phone calls are limited and brief in this neck of the woods, so let’s not waste our minutes hashing out the past and feeling bad. It’s pretty much a binary situation, yes or no. I just thought it would be nice to see someone who knew me from before. The Mythical Kingdom of Before. You knew me, didn’t you?”

“How did you find me?”

“Your uncle,” Duke said.

My uncle. Of course. I hadn’t been in touch with Ripley since I left New Hampshire but he could find the proverbial needle in a haystack, or he could pay someone to find the needle for him.

“Could you please tell me yes or no because I’m a little desperate to end this conversation before I change my mind. They’ve told me it’s important I have a visitor, therapeutically speaking.”

“I live in New York.”

“I know that.”

And so I told him yes, because yes was the only word I had for Duke. Yes was the only word I knew.

Buses were cheaper than trains, and so I took a bus from Port Authority to Boston, then in Boston I found the bus to Belmont and in Belmont I took a cab. This was exactly the sort of thing that would have floored my grandmother: I’d done all of it by myself. The hospital wasn’t a hospital at all, at least not in my experience of hospitals. It was more like a charming college campus in New England, one that had been rented out to shoot a movie about college. The signage was maddeningly discreet but I managed to find the administrative building and told the woman at the front desk, which was not a hospital front desk but a college front desk, that I was there to see Peter Duke. It was the sort of place where poets and academics came to dry out and/or work through their suicidal tendencies. They must admit just enough gentle actors to fill a quota because the woman at the desk was clearly no stranger to famous. The name Peter Duke didn’t quicken her pulse at all, she just opened a file and asked for my name.

“Lara Kenison.”

But even as she was tracing her finger down the list I knew I wouldn’t be there. He would have forgotten or changed his mind. He’d already told me he was close to changing his mind. She got to the end, and then went back to double--check herself. “I’m sorry,” she said.

It was cold outside and the light was already coming in through the leaded windows at a slant. The bus ride had been long and irritating, and now I was going to take the same trip back in the opposite direction and it would be too dark to read. “I don’t suppose you could call and ask him if he wants to see me?”

She shook her head. “There are a lot of rules about visitors.”

My bag was heavy on my shoulder, the copy of Middlemarch sitting in the bottom like a brick. I wondered if I could walk back to the bus stop and save the cab fare. I had been paying attention. I had not been paying attention. Duke hadn’t taken me to the hospital or visited me or brought me home. His brother did all that because Duke was very busy with his important work and he was drunk and the hospital was fifteen minutes away.

“Emily Webb,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?” The woman at the desk found me sympathetic. I knew that. Being small is helpful sometimes.

“Emily Webb. That’s the name I’m under. We were in Our Town together.”

And because it was a mental hospital and treatment center for the noble and literate outside of Boston and not that far from New Hampshire, she did not tell me that in this life a person gets only one chance. She checked the list again and made a tick with her pencil. “Miss Webb,” she said. “I’ll need to look inside your bag.” Then she gave me a map and told me she would call ahead to let them know to expect me.

Duke was housed in a looming brick manse with wide stairs and oak doors. Even with the seriousness of the situation, I couldn’t help but notice the maple trees that lined the walkway were in full flame. Leave it to Duke to break down on the most beautiful day of autumn in Massachusetts. He called me two years after I had stopped waiting for his call, but times were tough and he was down and I was there.

I rang the bell on the locked front door and when the voice on the intercom asked my name I said Emily Webb and the door clicked and buzzed and I went inside. Except it wasn’t exactly inside, I went into a human--sized fish tank, a glassed--in holding pen big enough for one. I watched as scruffy, sad--eyed folk wandered by in sock feet, smoking cigarettes. I tried the glass door in front of me but it was locked, and now the door behind me had locked as well. A couple of the residents lifted a hand to wave. The sight I presented was not new to them. A woman with a clipboard walked briskly past and when I tapped she held up a finger. “One minute,” she said, or appeared to say. I couldn’t quite hear. I waited because waiting was the only option. A man with a dark beard leaned down to put his face close to mine then opened his mouth. I turned my back on the sight of his tongue writhing against the glass.

This was never going to happen to me. I don’t suppose that’s something a person can ever really say but I said it anyway. This will never be me. I took comfort in that.

A good ten minutes went by before a member of the staff arrived with a security guard to let me out. My bag was searched for a second time and then he checked my pockets and shoes. I signed the visitor log and was escorted to a large den full of ratty couches and little tables. It was like one of those beautiful old mansions that had been destroyed by generations of fraternity abuse. Duke was sitting on the floor in a circle of men, a two--liter bottle of diet raspberry ginger ale in the center of the group with little paper cups all around. The last time I’d seen him he was up onstage, making his exit in Fool for Love. He was wearing spurs. He said, “I’m only gonna be a second. I’ll just take a look at it and I’ll come right back. Okay?” Not to spoil anything but he doesn’t come back.

“Cricket’s here!” He gave me a wave, then he patted an open space on the carpet beside him. “Alex was just telling us about a halfway house in Illinois where he found a friend in Jesus.”

Alex didn’t look up but he nodded. I remained standing. “We listen to one another’s stories,” Duke said.

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t know how long he’d been in there but he looked better than his compatriots, which probably had more to do with the fact that he looked better going in. He was a famous undercover cop on television and I was a seamstress and very likely the biggest fool God ever made. I wondered if it would be easier to exit through the fish tank than it had been to arrive.

“We need to finish,” he said, as if it were surgery they were performing with their little paper cups.

“I’ve got a book.” I went off to a free spot on a couch on the other side of the room.

“She’s always got a book,” he said to his friends, and when I turned to shoot him a look I saw that the men in the circle were watching my retreat sadly, pulling on their cigarettes while Alex resumed his tale of love.

The room was smoky and crowded with people hunched into corners, trying to exchange sentences without being overheard. It was the saddest bar in the world, the one in which no alcohol was served and everyone was waiting for the check so they could settle up and go home. Two women with clipboards were making the rounds, asking questions, marking people off. Magazines were piled on every surface and I picked one up because no one could find communion with George Eliot in those circumstances. The caption beneath the picture of the famous model on the cover said she was looking for honesty. Beneath the room’s only floor lamp I thumbed through the pages that had already been thumbed to thinning velvet: an article about a former child star fallen on hard times; an article about a beagle who nursed an orphaned chipmunk in with her own litter of puppies; a picture of Peter Duke on the Santa Monica Pier, eating an ice cream cone and holding hands with someone named Chelsea who was identified as his wife. The only gossip I knew about Duke I knew from standing at the checkout in the grocery store. I didn’t buy the magazines because they were not good for me, but a certain amount of information entered my consciousness by proximity. Somehow, miraculously, Chelsea had not come in. I closed the magazine, closed my eyes.

“You could have been friendlier.” Duke dropped down beside me, taking my hand.

“I could have been—-” I started and then closed my mouth, suddenly overwhelmed by the knowledge that I would cry.

He leaned over and kissed me, missing my mouth by several inches. Let it be known that the last person to kiss me with romantic intent was this same man. Despite the daily offers I received while walking to fittings in Times Square, I had remained alone. “I’m glad you came,” he whispered.

I could not say I was glad. He seemed to understand this.

“Do you want to smoke?”

I shook my head. I asked him how the marriage was working out.

His fingers gently picked at the knee of my tights. “The marriage is no more. The lawyers have seen to that, or they are seeing to that.” He tilted down his head. “Where’s my girl?” he said quietly. “Where’s my birthday girl?”

Truly, I did not think I would survive.

He pulled me up from the couch. “Come on, I’ll show you around. The full ten--cent tour.” He kept his arm around my shoulder, pressing me into his chest as if to keep me safe. We went back to the reception area. A man who looked like someone’s sad father was in the fish tank now, and when I caught his eye he looked away. Duke stopped in front of an empty room with a circle of yellow folding chairs and an enormous chalkboard. “This is where we have the meetings. Lots and lots and lots of meetings. And that’s the snack pantry.” He pointed to a wide closet. “They’re very generous with snacks but we aren’t allowed to take them ourselves. We have to ask for them so that everything can be properly inventoried and recorded. I would like a bag of Cheez--Its, please.” He steered me back across the lobby to stand outside the open door of a large, dark room where seven single beds were arranged in a haphazard manner. “This is where the dwarves sleep. I’m Happy, but only compared to the other six. We’re not allowed to go into the bedroom until bedtime. We may not put our foot in there. Sleeping in the daytime is bad for depression. Did you know that? No closing the door either because there is no door.”

A yelping came from the room we’d just been in and I was glad I wasn’t there to see who it was.

“That’s the bathroom.” He pointed to a white door. “No lock there either but people are respectful about knocking. Make a mental note of that.” He walked me in a slow circle around the reception again.

“Do you have to stay here?” I asked, when what I meant was, Do I have to stay?

Duke nodded vigorously. “Oh, I do, I do. If I don’t stay I lose my job. I lose my contract. I become uninsurable, which means the movie can’t start, which means I can’t be in the movie. I’m going to be an astronaut. Did I tell you that? I’m going to be in a big white suit with a glass bubble on my head, floating in the darkness. Every single day feels like research for that one. People start taking you seriously once you’ve been an astronaut.

Have you noticed that? It’s a rite of passage. It means you’ve really got something going on.”

“I never thought about it.”

“Well, you need to. You need to get back in the game. They’re plenty of good parts for women in space these days but you’re going to need to put yourself out there.”

“I’m done,” I said, though I imagine the scope of those two words were lost on him.

He shook his head. “I saw Singularity.”

“You did?” I couldn’t imagine it.

“You’re very beautiful, cricket, and by that I don’t just mean you’re pretty, which you are. You have a real beauty that shows up on the screen. Pow. I found you mesmerizing. I find you mesmerizing.” He was pressing me closer now, holding on to me like a raft. I was holding him up.

“We’re going to go back and sit on the couch,” he said in that same low voice used by every inhabitant of the room who wasn’t screaming. “In two minutes you’ll get up and go to the bathroom and I’ll stay where I am. We get checked off every fifteen minutes. It’s almost time. Once I get checked off I’ll come and meet you there.”

I looked at him in horror but he ignored it. Clearly it was an emotion whose expression had lost its impact in this place.

He squeezed my arm gently. “Do this for me.” There was so much need in his voice. Then he went back into the den. I suppose I could have gone back to the glass door and banged on it with my fists until someone came to let me out, but instead I went to the bathroom and took off my tights. I thought about that first day when he said he was going to show me the lake, and then I walked into the lake and I swam, farther and farther away, until I couldn’t hear anyone anymore.

I stood with my back to the sink, to the mirror. There was no condom dispenser in the bathroom. I’d bet there never are in these places. For this event I relied on the birth control favored by all women in such circumstances: luck. It works maybe half the time.

Duke came into the bathroom a minute later and lifted me up on the sink. He was facing the mirror. I couldn’t stop thinking about that. He was looking at himself. “Not exactly ladies’ night,” he said once he had finished. He kissed the top of my head and then hustled back to make his next fifteen--minute check off. I straightened myself up as best I could, then found a woman with a clipboard to let me out of the building.

The light had shifted while I was inside and I was trying to get my bearings, trying to make a space in my mind for bus schedules while my mind kept wandering back to Duke trying to make a list of who he could call who might come to New England on a cold autumn night and fuck him in the unlocked bathroom of a locked ward. Pallace? What a preposterous thought. Chelsea? I didn’t know her, but why would she come if there were already lawyers involved? So many actresses and makeup artists and wardrobe mistresses to choose from, so many fans, and still, I was the only person he could absolutely count on.

My hands were shaking and I thought it was from the cold so I dug through my bag to find my mittens. A spectacular orange light reflected off the windows of the building in front of me that made the glass look like beaten sheets of copper. A man in coveralls was raking leaves while another man bagged them up and put them on the back of a John Deere Gator nearby. I wanted to go and open up every bag and dump them out because didn’t they know the leaves were the nice part? I stood there, taking in the sharp air and waiting until the feeling passed so I could walk by them without speaking. Another man sat on a park bench on the other side of the open lawn and watched me watch them. Maybe he had special privileges. Then he stood and I remember thinking how tall he was.

“Lara?” he said.

There were two ways to go: I could have run or I could have cut a straight path towards him, straight into his arms. I was crying when I walked into his arms.

Sebastian was on the visitors’ list but I got there first and a patient could have only one visitor at a time. The night was cold and clear but he had a warm coat. The traffic had been bad driving from Boston where he was staying for the month, and so he decided just to sit and wait, see who came out. Sebastian visited his brother every day.

“Do you want to go in?” We were sitting in his rental car in the parking lot. “I can wait.” That wasn’t true, I couldn’t wait, but I could leave while he was inside and that might be the best thing anyway. I had stopped crying and I was trying very hard to keep it together.

Sebastian shook his head. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

I was starving. He drove quite a way, out of the small town the hospital was in and into the small town beyond it, like we were scraping the whole thing off our shoes. When we walked into the restaurant an old man with a white short--sleeved shirt and black tie smiled to see us. He took two menus from the rack and led us into the dim room. “I’ve got a nice booth in the back,” he said. “All the young lovers want a booth in the back.”

Sebastian’s hand was on my shoulder and he took it away. We laughed like a couple of lunatics but we were glad for the booth, glad for the privacy, glad most of all to be together in some Italian restaurant in a town I didn’t know the name of.

“Here’s to drinking.” He raised his glass of wine to me. The old man had been quick with the wine. He brought it without our asking.

“To drinking,” I said, and touched my glass to his. I was desperate for a drink.

“There’s something about the place. I seem to sponge up everyone’s desire for alcohol and carry it with me out the door.”

I drank down half of what I had and let the warmth spread through me. I had never been so cold, not even in New Hampshire. Sebastian refilled my glass.

“The list of things I feel like I can’t ask you,” I said, shaking my head. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

“Let’s see how far I can get without you asking then. I never went back to Tom Lake. I didn’t see Pallace again, never heard from her. Duke and Pallace, I don’t know how long that lasted. I know that when Duke went to Hollywood on a ticket your friend Ripley paid for she didn’t go along. Once Rampart caught on, Duke started getting in over his head. He was going on ride--alongs with real cops at night and he kept making friends with the guys in the back of the car, the criminals. Duke wanted me to come see him but I was teaching and I was still?.?.?.” He stopped. “It’s very hard to put a word to it. Duke’s my brother and I love him. You think the thing that hurt you is going to hurt you forever but it doesn’t.” He looked at the menu because he couldn’t look at me anymore. I believed that he was my true friend.

“Eggplant parmesan,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s good.”

“How do you know it’s good?”

“This is my place. Whenever we go to a new town I find a place.”

Wood paneling halfway up the wall, black and white photographs of Frank Sinatra and Robert De Niro and Jimmy Durante. His place. “Do you miss teaching?”

He didn’t answer the question. The little candle in a bumpy red glass globe burned between us. “You know what I think about all the time?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter.” He picked up a book of matches and tapped it on the table. “I was an hour on the road going home before I even thought about you sitting there, waiting for me to take you back up the stairs.”

“I worked it out.”

He nodded. “You were the smart one.”

Oh, Sebastian, if you only knew, though he’d been around from the start. Maybe he did know. I opened my hands. “Look where it got me,” I said.

We had been given an opportunity to make things so much worse, Sebastian and I, and no one would have blamed us except for Duke, and Duke never would have known. The flame of that little candle sat between us for the rest of the night but through some holy kindness we felt for one another, we let it burn out. He drove me all the way back to New York, four hours in the car that went a long way towards setting my life to right. I told him about my grandmother dying and my time in New Hampshire, how I stayed around too long and became embarrassingly proficient on the monogram machine. I told him about not being an actress anymore. He told me about not playing tennis, or not playing tennis as a job. He still liked to play. And he liked California. He said Ripley had been good to him. He was getting him work on projects that had nothing to do with Duke. “He’s trying to make sure I stick around.”

“I bet he is.”

“Man, was he ever in love with you.”

“Duke?”

Sebastian glanced over, taking his eyes off I-95 for just a second. “Sorry, no, Ripley.”

I laughed.

“I mean it. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. He told me once he was waiting for you to grow up, you know, so it wouldn’t seem so weird.”

But everything was weird, everything but me and Sebastian in the car, the lights of Connecticut shooting past us. We had chosen not to make a hard thing harder, which made it slightly easier when I counted up the days six weeks later and realized that my luck had run out. I still had enough money in my savings account left over from when I made actual money. I didn’t have to call anyone. I didn’t have to ask anyone for permission or help. A nurse stood beside me and held my hand and I’m here to tell you, I felt nothing but grateful. There was always going to be a part of the story I didn’t tell Joe or the girls. What I did was mine alone to do. I tore the page from the calendar and threw it away.