TJ: I’m sure she was. She must’ve wondered what had happened to you. Where you were.
FM: She told me she did. That she thought about me often. That she’d thought about finding me but . . . I wish we’d had more time together. It seems cruel, doesn’t it? That she died so soon after we finally found each other again?
TJ: It does. Have you tried to locate your biological father?
FM: No . . . Mr. Ring has been . . . I guess you could call him my stepfather, right?
TJ: Is that what you call him?
FM: Well, no . . . I mean, he’s been amazing and so welcoming, but I don’t look at him as a father figure.
TJ: Has he discouraged you from looking for your father?
FM: Not at all. He doesn’t know anything that can help me, though, and my mother’s parents died a long time ago, and she was an only child, so it’s kind of hard to find something to go on to track him down. I have some ideas, though, from talking to a few of her friends who knew her in high school.
TJ: She had you in high school?
FM: No, after. She took a year off between high school and college, like a gap year, you know, how they do in England? That’s when she got pregnant.
TJ: Did Mr. Ring know she’d had another child?
FM: No, can you believe it? [Pause] That hurt, you know? Like, I wasn’t even worth mentioning to the man she decided to spend her life with. And her girls, my half sisters, they didn’t know, either. I feel kind of bad about that . . . Like she abandoned all of us, in a way.
TJ: How do you mean?
FM: If I found out something like that about my mother, I mean the one who raised me, after she’d died, I’d feel like I didn’t know her at all. Like I had to revisit every moment I had with her. Was she missing this other kid the whole time she was with me? Was I only a replacement for the one she gave up? Shit like that. Oh, sorry, I shouldn’t swear.
TJ: It’s fine. We can edit it out if we need to.
FM: Right. That’s what you do. Splice and dice people’s stories together. Making them into good people and bad people. Turning people into villains. Like on The Bachelor.
TJ: That’s not my intention.
FM: We’ll see, I guess. But I’m not the villain, you know.
TJ: Who said you were?
FM: Lots of people. But it’s not my fault. I didn’t mean for everyone to find out like that. I didn’t.
9
EARTHQUAKE WEATHER
CECILY
I have this theory about cheating.
I don’t think it’s inbred, necessarily, that some people are programmed that way and some aren’t. I think, often, it’s born out of circumstance.
Take Tom. When I met Tom in college, he was an average guy. A “nice guy,” my friends called him, as opposed to the assholes I’d dated before, but not too nice. Not some geeky guy who was grateful I was going out with him, which would make him a boring guy and not enough protection against the bad guys I was trying to stay away from. Tom was his own man. He had plans. He’d had a serious girlfriend before me, and they’d drifted apart. They were still friendly without being friends, which seemed like the right balance. He even had a few women friends, which I liked, too. Women were people to him. He’d played the field a bit, but he was always someone who was happier with a home base. He wanted to get married, to be settled, to start his business and build something with me. He didn’t want a wife who stayed at home with the kids—he liked that I worked, that I had passions outside of us. He didn’t want to be the sun and the moon and the stars: just the stars would do.
That’s what he used to say to me: just the stars would do. It was kind of our thing, our motto, our secret exchange that would make us smile and my heart flutter. Back then, it felt like a nice sentiment. It’s what I wanted, also. I’d had that stomach-churning, crying-in-the-shower-when-a-guy-canceled-plans-for-the-third-day-in-a-row love. That sucked. I wanted a partner, a man, someone who understood I might need to disappear inside my work for a while and we’d see each other on the other side. We’d be each other’s touchstones, our lodestars.
And we were. Through the end of college, Tom starting his business, me my career, and buying our first house, we kept true to what we’d promised—we were together but apart when we needed to be. Secure. When we felt ready for kids, we started trying, and it happened right away. Tom was ecstatic, calling his friends and family and telling everyone he met even as I shushed him because it was too soon.
Having kids changes a lot of couples, and we weren’t an exception, but we weren’t changed in any fundamental way. We were still Lily and Tom, a team. He changed diapers. He did pediatrician runs when the kids needed shots or had a fever. He knew the bedtime routine as well as I did. We both cooked and cleaned. I don’t think it’s possible to be exactly fifty-fifty at anything, but we did our best. We came close.
I’ll admit—we were complacent. We looked down, sometimes, at our friends who didn’t have the same kind of balance. We were self-satisfied with our life, which had turned out mostly as we’d planned when snuggled up in my single college bed. We had this thing figured out, we thought, dialed in. We were doing it. It wasn’t perfect, it got messy sometimes, but we had each other. We’d make it through.
Here’s what I didn’t factor in: because we were just the stars, one of us might start to miss the moon or long for the sun. We’d packed those things away as unattainable, unnecessary in the grand scheme of things, but they weren’t. I’d forgotten to account for the fact that even the brightest of stars may dim as the years tick by because of compromise,
