Matt stayed with her, though, or at least near her. As she perused the next room, he sat on a bench and scrolled through his phone. Mary Ellen tried to focus on the art, but her enthusiasm had drained away and she found herself standing too long in front of an abstract black-and-white photo, staring blankly at the grainy pattern.
Was this what it was going to be like when the girls went away to school? Would she and Matt drift about, doing their respective “things,” intersecting only over occasional meals? Mary Ellen turned and looked at her husband, who was flicking at his phone with his thumb, his lower jaw thrust forward, exploring the inside of his upper lip with his tongue the way he always did. He was dressed in his usual outfit of sweatshirt and shorts (even though it was the first day of December, with snow in the forecast), nothing to distinguish him from the unemployed college graduate she’d fallen in love with twenty years ago, other than a gentle softening around his waist and jaw and two strokes of worry between the brows. Mary Ellen sighed and turned back to the photo.
They still had another year with the girls, but the Breckenridge trip was right around the corner. The twins would be spending half of January in Colorado with the Penn Charter ski team, giving Matt and Mary Ellen a two-week-long preview of life in the empty nest. Mary Ellen already had misgivings about the trip; the ski coach was known to turn a blind eye to after-hours partying. But more than that, she realized she was dreading coming home every day in the dark of January to find Matt, stripped of his entire raison d’être, still in his pajamas, watching ESPN, his head burnishing the sofa arm to an ever-brighter sheen. As if January weren’t depressing enough already.
“Come on, Mary. Let’s go to lunch. You need to be home in time for your conference call.”
“Matt, you’ll be home the whole time the girls are in Breckenridge, right?”
“Where else would I be?”
Mary Ellen sat next to him on the bench. “I think I’m going to take Justine up on her offer. I’m going to spend a week in her mountain house right after Christmas, while the girls are gone.” As she said this, Mary Ellen felt a nervous quiver in her stomach that may or may not have been hangover related.
“What? Why then?”
“Justine wanted me to go during the winter, and—”
“No, I mean, why go when the girls are gone? What am I supposed to do, all alone in the house?”
“It’s only a week, Matt. Maybe it’ll be good for you. The change.”
“I still don’t understand why—”
“They’re leaving in a year. I don’t want to miss any time with them. But since they’ll be away anyway…” As she was saying it, this reason struck Mary Ellen as perfectly valid.
“What about work?”
Mary Ellen leaned her head against his shoulder. There was something German shepherd–like about the way Matt worked to keep everyone together in their proper places, nobody straying from the herd. Which was understandable. He’d been so comfortable. “I’m quitting my job.”
Matt jerked back, causing Mary Ellen’s head to bounce, setting off sparks of pain behind her eyes.
“I’m kidding, Matt. Geez.”
“Don’t do that to me.”
“Relax.” Mary Ellen squinted at him. “But what if I did? You’d be all right, wouldn’t you? You could go back to freelancing.”
“I could never make what you make, Mary. You know that. Anyway, I thought you loved your job.”
“Of course,” she said, pressing her thumb and forefinger against the bridge of her nose. “Don’t worry. I’m only going away for a week. Nothing’s going to change.”
“Promise?”
Mary Ellen gazed around the room at the mysterious jumble of objects reverently pinned to the dove-gray wall. She knew what her father would have said about them, what a laugh he and Matt would’ve had together. But would she even have come here if her father were still alive? Would she have accepted Justine’s invitation, or would she have politely turned it down, explaining that her brand’s positioning platform was far too important to leave to her underlings?
“Nothing will change,” she said again, even though she was starting to realize, deep down, that something already had.
7
The pain in Ivy’s head bloomed like a cabbage rose, a hot fist of petals unfolding against the walls of her skull. The pain jerked and pulsed and pressed, bloodred, against her eyes, and spread its tendrils into her ears and down her throat. Coughing pushed the pain into farther, darker corners, but she couldn’t stop; she coughed and coughed like her lungs were trying to claw their way out of her chest; she coughed so hard she retched everything in her stomach onto the bed.
Such a waste, she thought, bundling up the bedding, trying to remember if there was any bread left in the kitchen, too tired to go up the stairs to check. How long had it been since she’d gotten the bag of groceries from the man with the cloudy eye? Time had been stretching and shrinking in unpredictable ways since she got sick, but she had a feeling it had been more than one week, less than three, but who could really say. Long enough to eat most of a loaf of bread and a pound of egg salad.
Ivy got a little confused looking for the laundry room. She was sure it was at the end of the hall, but now it was a bedroom, and she looked in all the cabinets but couldn’t find the washer so she just stuffed the sheets into a drawer and hoped for the best. At least this bed was made up with fresh sheets. She climbed in and rode the waves of pain all the way out to the open sea.
She dreamed and dreamed, her dreams whizzing in manic circles like a roulette wheel, never wanting to settle into one story line, always circling back. She
