Confused, Dev pointed to the vase. “These flowers?”
“Yeah,” said Zach, kissing my cheek. “Ever since she told me they were her favorite, I made it my personal mission to keep Clare in stargazers.”
Dev’s eyes met mine for maybe two seconds, but I recognized who looked out at me through that startled gray-blue glance: the boy who had given me white tulip bouquets and prom corsages for years (which often took some finagling and sweet talk, since tulips were not necessarily florists’ go-to corsage flower), who had actually spent two fall afternoons planting white tulip bulbs in both his father’s and his mother’s yards so there would be a little trace of me there every spring, the boy who didn’t personally care about flowers enough to loathe stargazers but who had habitually fake-gagged at the mere mention of them just to keep me company. That boy and the man he’d become knew I had lied to Zach as surely as he knew my name, and even after his baffled gaze flicked away, the lie stayed.
As this lie ping-ponged invisibly between me and Dev and the oblivious Zach, I flashed back to another one. Last Christmas at my parents’ house in Virginia, the first time I’d brought Zach home. Dev, Cornelia, Teo, and their extended families had come for dinner, a crowd so big and bustling with storytelling and goofing off and children wound up on candy and pie that Dev and Zach scarcely talked until the evening was almost over.
Zach and I were washing dishes—a weirdness in itself, since washing dishes was a holiday job Dev and I had tackled together for so many years it was almost a religious ritual—and Dev came in, per Cornelia’s instructions, to pick the bones of the turkey clean and cook down the carcass for stock. Because, at Dev’s entrance, I could feel Zach starting to simmer right along with the water in the stockpot, I commenced to talk. And talk and talk, I guess hoping to somehow stave off his full-boil stressed state with an onslaught of words. I can’t even remember what I said, but at some point, I must have reminisced about a bygone holiday because Dev, who looked a little bewildered but was good-naturedly trying to squeeze in appropriate responses to my breathless, frantic, tumbling stories, said something like, “Oh, yeah, that was the same Christmas Toby’s dog Wilbur ate an entire pecan pie and threw up on the opened presents under the tree. Totally demolished that scarf you knitted for my dad.”
“I took it personally,” I said. “I mean, it was an unholy, holey, dropped-stitch wreck of a scarf, but I’d worked on that sucker for weeks.”
Dev smiled. “Hey, it was your first effort! I thought it was pretty good, actually. And you know he would’ve worn it no matter what.”
“True. He probably would’ve been wearing it when he got here today,” I said. “Nice of Wilbur to spare Teo seven years of mortifying neckwear.”
Until Zach burst out laughing—a throaty, cut-loose, tension-fraught string of hahahahas—I’d forgotten him and his simmering. My throat tightened at the sound.
“Wow, I guess this is what it’s like when people have known each other forever,” he said, all grins, his eyes glittering. “You two and your stockpile of stories.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I stared at Dev, asking for help.
With one glance at Zach’s face, Dev assessed the situation, laughed, and said, “Pretty exciting stuff, though, right? And the dog vomit/holey scarf story isn’t even the top of the stockpile. There’s also the time we were studying and I spilled coffee on my SAT prep book.”
It cracked my heart a little, Dev’s turning traitor to our past, his trying, for Zach’s sake and I guess mine, too, to make our relationship sound like boring kids’ stuff, like nothing, when, for us, for years, it was nothing short of sacred. And he needn’t have bothered. Zach’s bubbling, steaming stress didn’t cool; instead, as sometimes happened, it did a states-of-matter quick change: from boiling to solid ice. In an instant, his fidgety hands stilled; his voice flattened like a snake under a car tire.
“No, I think it’s adorable,” Zach said. “Clare told me she’s always thought of you as the brother she never had.”
Dev’s shoulders lifted in an almost imperceptible flinch and he turned his face, but not before I saw the hurt on it. I stared at Zach, stunned at his lie, the ease with which he told it, and, more than anything, the fact that he fully expected me to keep quiet about it. And the sad truth is that I almost did keep quiet. Or maybe not almost, but, for at least five whole seconds, I was definitely tempted. Zach had been at my parents’ house for three days, during which he’d met every single member of my family, and all had gone smoothly. But three days of smiling watchfulness, of walking the tightrope of Zach’s moods had wrung me out. For the first time in ages, I was glad to see a holiday at home end, and it almost had. We’d come so close. If I had kept quiet about Zach’s lie, and then apologized privately, later, to Dev, we could have been home free.
But then, Dev looked up with what I recognized as his peacekeeper smile, and I just knew he was about to play along, to back up Zach’s lie—or, more horribly, what he must have thought was my lie because no way could he have thought I’d actually meant it—to say something not just totally false but also cosmically wrong, and since only a truly yellow-bellied and empty-hearted monster could have allowed such a thing to happen, I jumped in with the first sentence that popped into my head, “That’s just wrong.”
“What?” said Zach, blinking with surprise, evidently completely thrown off by my failure to be complicit in his lie.
“I never said that.”
I watched Zach regroup, tossing off shock like a hat and replacing it with a regretful, embarrassed face so authentic looking that it probably would have fooled most people, but it didn’t fool me. He scratched his head, sheepishly. “Uh, right. My bad. Sorry to bring it up.”
Disgusted with him, I turned to Dev. “It? There’s no it. Because I never said that,” I told him. It suddenly seemed crucial to be as clear as possible. “Not because I wouldn’t say it, but because I wouldn’t think it. Ever. How could I? Zach is mistaken.”
Without looking up from the stockpot, Dev nodded. “Okay.”
Zach mumbled, “Hey, sorry,” and backed out of the kitchen, scalding me with a glare and leaving me dreading the conversation I knew we’d have later. But when later came, instead of getting mad, in a not uncharacteristic sharp swerve toward sweetness, near tears, Zach apologized for the lie, for letting his insecurity get the best of him.
Standing in the shadow of those poor, innocent lilies with the memory of that old lie and with this new one snared between the three of us, I hoped against hope that Dev would do what he ended up doing: be complicit in my lie, keep quiet, and walk away. But, as I watched him go, even before I could exhale with relief, I saw myself for who I was: a woman who would yank someone else’s lie into the light and feel noble about it, but who wanted to keep her own—and wanted help keeping her own—safely tucked away in darkness. I turned to Zach.
“I need to tell you something.”
He smiled and touched his nose to mine. “Go for it.”
“I lied.”
Zach pulled back. “About what?”
I’d been gearing up for full disclosure, for telling him how I’d felt sometimes that he wanted not just my present and future, but all of it, to stamp his name—like a kid going to summer camp—on every important belonging I’d ever had, on my past, my private thoughts, my likes and dislikes, on the books I’d read, until they were his instead of mine. I had thought I’d tell him how lying about the flowers had been an act of self-preservation. But looking into his worried amber eyes, I didn’t have the heart.
“Stargazers aren’t my favorite flower.”
Zach burst out with the laugh of a person who had been holding his breath. “Is that all?”
I refused to be let off that hook so easily. “No, it was awful of me to lie. We just happened so fast. And I had all these years of being myself before I knew you, and that life, well, it was just so full of details that had been mine for so long, and, I guess there were just momen
ts when I didn’t want to share all of them with you, which I suppose is fair enough, but I should have just said that to you when you asked the flower thing, but I couldn’t figure out how, and so I said, ‘Stargazers.’ And I’m sorry.”
Zach nodded. “I get it.”
“You do? Really?”
“You wanted to start fresh with me.”
I sighed. “Oh, Zach.”
“Roses or whatever were part of your old life. Stargazers are part of our life. I feel exactly the same.”
“That’s not actually it.”
He lifted my hand and kissed it. “Not to be a jerk, but I think I might see this more clearly than you do.”
“Why would you?”
“Because I’m not blinded— No, blinded is the wrong word.” He thought for a few seconds. “Distracted. I’m not distracted by loyalty to my past, to my family.”
I shook my head in confusion. “What?”
“I like knowing that from here on out, we’ll be each other’s family, something completely new and better than what we had before. But you’re more attached to your past and way closer to your family than I am to mine, so leaving them behind probably feels a little like betrayal to you.”
“Zach, wait. My family won’t stop being my family. I need them.”
He smiled an eager, childlike smile. “Of course they won’t stop! But everything will change! In a really, really good way.”
“Zach—” He cut me off with a kiss.
“Just trust me when I say that we will be okay. Way, way better than okay. I love you so much. You know that, right?”
No simmering. No fluttering fingers or twitch in his cheek. He was so happy and glowing and trusting and true, this man who had taken the whole of himself—past and future, body and soul—and placed it in my hands.
“Sweet Zach,” I said. “Yes. I know you love me. I know. I know. I know.”
Chapter Five
Edith
They gave each other gifts.
From him to her: a newly moribund sand dollar clothed in blue velvet spines; a skate egg case, glossy and horned as a beetle; a glass and red plastic hummingbird feeder; an edition of Audubon’s Birds of America. This last he wrapped with a ribbon and told her to untie it only when she was ready.
One late autumn morning, she sat on the back steps with the book resting on her knees and opened it. The pages offered up heartache, certainly—some of the birds now extinct, their vivid portraits turned to elegy—but the plates of the marsh birds her father had loved didn’t bruise her as Joseph had worried they might. Instead, the precision of the drawings, the service to accuracy over romance—all the weird and sharp-eyed grace of the animals intact, so many of the birds in motion, necks snaking, beaks open or with a fish clapped between them—the sensibility alive inside those pages brought the essence of her father, all that had been lost in those last weeks of his slow dying, back to her.
From her to him: a cookbook called The Home Book of French Cookery (after he mentioned that during his postwar years in France, he’d developed a love of French food) and the promise to make him a new dish every week; two solo canoes, made in Maine and so fluidly ribbed and curved that they seemed less constructed than grown.
Edith and Joseph would spend hours paddling the inland bay, threading the narrow salt marsh channels that opened out to ponds, Edith carefully collecting flora and fauna, scooping crabs or moon jellies into buckets, hungry for the names of everything, Joseph content just to look and talk about what he saw. They sat in their separate canoes, but Edith felt she had never been so close to anyone, the salt pond waters laid down like a cloth of gold between them.
From him to her: a camera, a compact black-and-silver 35-millimeter. He taught her how to use it, how to develop her photos in the tiny, magical, chemical-smelling darkroom off their kitchen. Edith avowed that the elemental differences between them appeared in their photographs, their souls made manifest in silver gelatin, delineated in black and white and gray: Joseph’s all wide views, everything airy, included, and soaked in light, never without a slice of sky; hers close-in, all detail, edges, obliquity. Her photos surprised her. She meant only to capture the small specifics that intrigued her, but the resulting prints riddled and tricked: horseshoe crab tail transformed to a pointed skyscraper, salt marsh hay to a child’s tousled hair. She saw her work as shy, elusive but Joseph looked at her photos of him—the landscape of veins on the back of his hand, the nape of his neck after a haircut—and caught his breath at the intimacy. She looked at his of her—silhouetted in her canoe backed by waves of cordgrass, head thrown back, face to the sun or standing at the ocean’s edge before a storm, shoes dangling from her fingertips, hair whipped by wind—and felt that she was seeing herself, for the very first time, as she really was.
Chapter Six
Clare
I was only looking for a place to catch my breath.
But the instant I practically fell into the tiny outdoor alcove—surrounded on three sides by high, manicured boxwood, a secret compartment of green containing one white bench—and saw the old woman I’d come to think of as my old woman, I felt as if we’d planned it. She wasn’t reading or drinking coffee or looking at her phone (if she had one) or doing any of the things people do when they’re sitting on a bench alone. Her hands lay one upon the other on her pale yellow cotton skirt, and when I stumbled around the corner and saw her, she turned her face to me serenely and patted the spot on the bench next to her.
“Don’t talk,” she instructed. “Take a moment,” and I obeyed, sitting, shutting my eyes, and pulling the clean morning air into my chest.
Except for my hyperventilation and desperate, crablike scuttling away from my bridal brunch, my wedding morning could not have been lovelier: cool and crisp, greens and golds running wildly over the surrounding hills, the forget-me-not sky interrupted only by translucent, wedding-veil clouds. Zach had gone golfing with all his male family members, his severe discomfort with them eclipsed only by his insistence on doing our wedding entirely “by the book,” including the mandate that the groom not set eyes on his bride until she walked toward him down the aisle.
With just my people there, the informal brunch should have been easy, but a sleepless night had left me wired and restless. Everything—my relatives’ smiles, the bowls of berries, the glass pitchers of juice, the diamond on my finger, my new white-and-green Stan Smith sneakers—looked overbright, garish even, and despite the lofty ceilings, sheer curtains, and delicate chandeliers, the room felt airless and like the walls were closing in. And because, in these ways, the room resembled my own chest cavity, after a few sips of obnoxiously orange apricot nectar, I turned to my mother and, gasping a little, said, “I’m sorry but I just need—” and, before I could finish, she said, “Do it. Whatever it is, go ahead,” so I bolted for a side door and stumbled out into the air.
I don’t know how long I sat on that bench with my eyes shut, but eventually, my breathing slowed and my rib cage expanded and the rushing river sound inside my ears went away along with the dark red static on the insides of my eyelids, and only then did I open my eyes and say, “I’m sorry.”
“Unless ‘Sorry’ is your name, there is no reason whatsoever to say it.”
“I’m Clare,” I said, putting out my hand.
She took it. Her hand was as long and thin as mine but much softer and cooler, her loose skin as silky as talcum powder. “Pleased to meet you, dear Clare. I’m Edith.”
“It’s my wedding day.”
“I thought maybe it was.”
I sighed, a deep, stretched-out sigh that seemed to begin at the soles of my feet. “I feel like this is the first chance I’ve had to catch my breath in months.”
“I’ve always found that phrase funny. ‘Catch,’ as if it’s gotten away and you have to chase it down with a butterfly net.”
I smiled. “Butterflies, again. You’re right. That’s how it feels.”
“So tell me. You and your fiancé
had a whirlwind romance? A short engagement?”
“Yes. I mean, Zach and I have been together for a year, but since we got engaged in early February, it’s been like falling, like one long, breathless fall.”
“Like in Alice in Wonderland?”
“But faster. I keep looking around and thinking, ‘How in the world did I get here?’”
“How did you? Would you like to tell me?”
I looked into Edith’s dark brown eyes. In her old face, tan and pink-cheeked but crosshatched with wrinkles, her eyes were like her voice, young and crystal clear. Also sharp. Also kind.
“You know what? I would. I haven’t told the complete and unedited story to anyone, not even my mother or Cornelia, but I would really like to tell you.”
“Good. No editing allowed. Full speed ahead.”
“Okay, then. It began with Zach’s father’s dying. I don’t mean it began when his father died, but as he was dying, at his deathbed, I guess it was, although we didn’t actually spend much time in his father’s room. They had a hospice worker do the true watching over. Zach didn’t want to and said his father—who was very much out of it by the time we arrived—would have considered it an intrusion, for us to sit next to his bed and physically watch him die. Since Zach had previously told me that his father also considered hugs and text messages an intrusion, I believed it. So maybe this wasn’t technically a deathbed vigil, but it was a vigil. God, was it ever. The entire family was there. Zach. His brother, Ian. Awful Uncle Lloyd and the horrible cousins Zach loathes. I was the only woman, and everyone seemed to expect me to make food, so I did, and I was so grateful to have something to do with myself that I couldn’t even resent it properly. We waited. We kept watch, day and night. Mr. Barfield had chosen to die at their family’s lake house in Northern Michigan, and even though Zach said it was beautiful there most of the year, in February, it was just plain bleak. Freezing. And not just the weather outside the house, but inside, too. Inside was worse. I expected sadness, maybe regret, because surely the Barfield men are the type to leave the important things unsaid, but instead, everyone seemed angry. Stone-faced and sarcastic and perpetually on the edge of exploding.”