apartments. The city where the
Just in time-just as Riley remembers her mother’s phone call this morning-Philippe turns her over, holds her hands spread open on the bed, pushes her legs apart with his knees, and enters her from behind.
We are speaking the same language, she thinks.
And this time the sex is even harder-he bites her shoulder at one point, he pushes so hard inside her that she feels herself opening, breaking up, crumbling, splitting.
When he comes, he falls beside her on the bed.
She puts her hand between her legs and makes herself come. She’s almost there, and he’s not going to do anything about it. He watches, his face full of something like wonder.
When she’s done, she’s crying again. This time the tears are for Vic, the old Vic, the old marriage, the love vanished in thin Parisian air. Riley slides away from Philippe and hobbles to the shower. Sure enough, it’s a pit, a hole, and she doesn’t mind one bit. She washes and cries and washes some more. She hums.
Philippe is sleeping when she comes out. She finds her clothes and gets dressed. A button has torn off her shirt-it gapes open, exposing her baby belly. Who cares? She’s a sexpot.
She leaves, pulling the door closed behind her. She doesn’t want to talk to him. Besides, she doesn’t speak the language.
On the way home Riley sees a couple walking down the street, their pigtailed little girl between them, all of them holding hands. To let Riley pass, the dad drops the girl’s hand, like the child’s game London Bridge Is Falling Down. Riley walks past and then looks behind her-sure enough, the little girl skips ahead, untethered, and the parents walk with a gap between them.
Riley imagines that anything that once held Vic and her together-love, passion, Cole’s hands-has fallen down. She knows that cheating on Vic didn’t kill love. Love was already gasping its last dying breath. Even if Vic has been cheating on her, it’s what he did to fill the space between them.
She race-walks down the street, her heels clattering on the pavement.
Twenty minutes later, she is home. Gabi is taking her nap-with a clean diaper-and Cole is playing checkers with the babysitter’s mom. Riley pays the woman twice what she’d normally pay and bows too many times, backing the woman out the door. Cole wraps his arms around Riley’s leg as if she’s been gone for years.
“Let’s call Nana,” Riley says.
“Nana!” Cole repeats, rapturously. He loves his grandma.
It is early morning in Florida-her mother will be reading the paper in the sunroom overlooking the golf course. It is early afternoon in Paris-Riley and Cole sit in the breakfast nook overlooking the courtyard below. A little girl, the concierge’s granddaughter, stands in the middle of the courtyard, her mouth open in a wide O.
“Open the window,” Riley says. “I think she’s singing.”
Cole climbs over the chair and slides the window open. It squeaks and the girl looks up at them, caught mid- note. She pauses and the sound of
“Mom,” Riley says when her mother answers the phone.
“Don’t start calling me every two minutes, Miss Worry-wart,” her mom says.
“I just want to talk to you,” Riley says quietly.
“Is my favorite little man there?”
“Cole,” Riley says, handing him the phone. “She wants you.”
“Nana?” Cole says.
He listens, but he never once takes his eyes off the girl in the courtyard below. He has his grandmother’s voice in one ear and a child’s song in the other ear. His smile spreads across his face.
“I love you, too,” he says, probably to both of them.
He hands Riley the phone.
“I’m fine,” her mother says right away. “I’ll have the surgery, they’ll take it out.”
“Chemo,” Riley says. That’s all she can say.
“So I’ll do chemo. I won’t be the first person in the world.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“He says we should all be so tough at sixty-four years old. He says what I already know. I’m a fighter.”
“How come you didn’t give any of that fight to me?”
“You got plenty of fight. Who else goes to live on the other side of the world with two babies?”
Riley looks around the kitchen-it’s all white, as if aliens or nuns live here.
“You’re the only one I ever talk to.”
“You don’t talk to your husband?”
“No, Ma. Not much.”
“He’s never there. Who takes his bride to the other side of the world and leaves her all alone?”
“Vic.”
“Oh, baby.”
Luckily Cole is staring out the window so he doesn’t see the tears pouring down Riley’s face.
“I’m coming home,” Riley says.
“No. Stay where you are and fix your problems. You have two babies. You can’t just go gallivanting across the world every time you have a little fight with your husband.”
“It’s not a little fight. And it’s not across the world. It’s an ocean. It’s a six-hour flight.” Riley’s mother never left the United States, never jumped on a plane at a moment’s notice, never served a cheese course after dinner.
“Tell Mr. International Businessman to pay a little attention to his wife. Tell him his mother-in-law said so.”
“It’s not so easy, Ma.”
“Nothing’s easy, Riley. No one ever said life is easy. You kids-”
“Don’t start that.” Riley hates the “you kids” lecture. No one ever served her her life on a silver platter anyway.
Her mother is quiet again, and it begins to worry Riley. Her mother has never waited for words to come to her. They just spill from her mouth.
“Your father came home to eat dinner with his family every night of the week,” her mother finally says.
Riley has heard this chant for years, and though she knows it’s not true-he worked late and she usually ate dinner hours before he came home-she loves the memory of her father’s entrance each evening. At the front door, he’d take off his suit jacket and place it over Riley’s shoulders. He’d perch his hat on her head. She’d smell his aftershave, his sweat, the stuffy air of his accounting office, and she’d feel the weight of him as the jacket pulled on her small shoulders.
“I miss Dad,” Riley says. It’s not something she ever says to her mother. She remembers the years of her mother’s grief after her father died ten years ago, years when she worried that her mother would suddenly grow old. But then her mother moved to Florida and forged a new life for herself-grief was no match for her. Riley’s own sense of loss became quiet, hidden, as if now, as an adult, she doesn’t have a right to miss her daddy the way she does.
“I miss him, too,” her mother says. “It’s quiet in an apartment all by yourself. I leave the TV on all day just for the noise.”
“Who’s taking you for your surgery?” Riley asks.
She has no idea if her mom has boyfriends, though she seems to have a lot of men in her life. There’s Art, the trainer at the gym who might be gay, but if he isn’t, go get him, Mom! And Stitch, the construction worker who has dinner over a few times a week, even though there isn’t any more work to do at the condo. Last Riley heard, a guy named Al was swimming laps with Mom every morning.
“Wally,” Mom finally says.
“Who’s Wally?”
