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Annie glanced around, a little uncertain as to what to say. This was the fork in the road of their lives; after all these years, he would go one way and she another. She had no idea when she would see him again. Probably at the lawyer’s office, where they’d become a cliché—a cordial, once-married couple coming in as separate individuals to sign papers. . . .
Blake stared down at her. There was a faraway sadness in his eyes that made her move closer to him. In a soft voice, he asked, “What will you tell Katie about me?”
Annie heard the pain in his voice, and it moved her to touch his cheek. “I don’t know. The old me would have fabricated an elaborate fiction to avoid hurting her feelings. ” She laughed. “Maybe I’d have told her you were a spy for the government and contacting us would endanger your life. But now . . . I don’t know. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. But I won’t lie to her. ”
He turned his head and looked away. She wondered what he was thinking, whether it was about lying, and how much it had cost him over the years. Or if it was about the daughter he had lived with for eighteen years and didn’t know, or the daughter he’d hardly lived with at all, and now would never know. Or if it was the future, all the days that lay ahead for a man alone, the quiet of a life that included no child’s laughter. She wondered if he’d realized yet that when he was an old, old man, when his hair had turned white and his eyes had grown coated with cataracts, that he would have no grandchildren to bounce on his knee, no daughter to kneel in the grass beside his wheelchair and reminisce about the time-worn antics of the past. Unless he reached out now, in the days that mattered, he would learn that some roads could not be refound and that true love took time and effort . . . that a life lived in the glare of summer sunlight never produced a rainbow.
“Will you miss me?” he asked, finally looking at her again.
Annie gave him a sad smile. “I’ll miss who we used to be—I already do. And I’ll miss who we could have been. ”
His eyes filled slowly with tears. “I love you, Annie. ”
“I’ll always love the boy I fell in love with, Blake. Always . . . ”
She moved toward him, pressing up on her toes to
kiss him. It was the kind of kiss they hadn’t shared in years; slow, and tender, and heartfelt. There was no undercurrent of sexuality in it. It was everything a kiss was supposed to be, an expression of pure emotion—and they had let it go so easily in their life together. She couldn’t remember when kisses had become something perfunctory and meaningless. Maybe if they had kissed this way every day, they wouldn’t be here now, standing together in the middle of the Stanford campus, saying good-bye to a commitment that had been designed to last forever.
When Blake drew back, he looked sad and tired. “I guess I screwed up pretty badly. ”
“You’ll get another chance, Blake. Men like you always do. You’re handsome and rich; women will stand in line to give you another chance. What you do with that chance is up to you. ”
He ran a hand through his hair and looked away. “Hell, Annie. We both know I’ll screw that up, too. ”
She laughed. “Probably. ”
They stared at each other for a long minute, and in that time, Annie saw the arc of their love; the bright and shining beginning of it, all those years ago, and the way it had eroded, one lonely night at a time for years.
Finally, Blake checked his watch. “I have to go. My plane leaves at six o’clock. ” He bent down to the stroller and gave Katie a last, fleeting kiss. When he drew back up, he gave Annie a weak smile. “This is hard. . . . ”
She hugged him, one last time, then slowly she drew back. “Have a safe flight. ”
He nodded and turned away from her. He got into his rented car and drove away.
She stood there watching him until the car disappeared. She had expected to feel weighed down by sadness at this moment, but instead she felt almost buoyant. Last week she had done what she’d never thought she could do: she’d traveled alone. Just for fun. She’d given Katie to Terri for the day—complete with two sheets of instructions and a shelf full of expressed milk—and then Annie had just started to drive. Before she’d even realized where she was going, she’d arrived at the Mexican border. A flash of fear had almost stopped her as the rickety red bus pulled up to the curb, but she hadn’t let it own her. She’d boarded the bus with all the other tourists and ridden into Mexico. All by herself.
The day had been wonderful, magical. She’d walked down the dingy, overcrowded streets, eating churros from the stands along the way. At lunchtime, she’d found a seat at a restaurant and eaten unrecognizable food and loved every bite, and as night had begun to fall and the neon sputtered to life, she’d understood why she’d always been afraid of traveling alone. It changed a person somehow— wasn’t that the point, after all? To go to a wildly different place and learn that you could negotiate for a silly trinket in a foreign language, and then to hold that item a little closer to your heart because it represented something of your self. Each peso she’d saved had somehow become an expression of how far she’d come. And when she finally had returned home that night, dragging her tired body up the stairs, snuggling up with her cranky daughter in her big king-size bed, she’d known that finally, at forty years of age, she had begun.
“Come on, Katie Sarah. Let’s go. ” She picked up her almost-sleeping daughter and strapped her into the car seat in the back of the Cadillac. Then, throwing her clunky diaper bag onto the passenger seat, she climbed into the car and started the engine. Before she even pulled out, she flicked on the radio and found a station she liked. Humming along with Mick Jagger, she maneuvered onto the highway and nudged the engine to seventy miles per hour.
What will you do now?
She still had months of responsibilities in Southern California. Closing and selling the house, packing everything up, deciding where she wanted to live and what she wanted to do. She didn’t have to work, of course, but she didn’t want to fall into that life-of-leisure trap again. She needed to work.
She thought again about the bookstore in Mystic. She certainly had the capital to give it a try—and that Victorian house on Main Street had plenty of room for living upstairs. She and Katie could be very comfortable up there, just the two of them.
Mystic.
Nick. Izzy.
The love she felt for them was as sharp as broken glass. Sometimes, when she woke in the middle of the night, she reached out for Nick—only he wasn’t there, and in those quiet moments the missing of him was an actual pain in her chest.
She knew she would go to him again when her life was in order; she had planned it endlessly in the past few weeks.
She would buy herself a convertible and drive up Highway 101 along the wild beaches, with her hair whipping about her face. She would play show tunes and sing at the top of her lungs, free at last to do as she pleased. She would drive when the sun was high in the sky and keep going as the stars began to shimmer overhead. She would show up without warning and hope it was not too late.
It would be springtime when she went to him, in that magical week when change was in the air, when everything smelled fresh and new.
