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This was where the scared and skeptical part of my mind, the one that always wanted to scoff and tell me I was making a fool of myself, usually would have stepped in to slap me across the face—but it was strangely silent today. Flummoxed. I could almost picture her, my inner cool girl, shrugging and throwing her hands up and saying,I don’t know, man, I don’t know what’s going on anymore. Do whatever you want.
Instead, I heard another voice: Mimi’s. She’d told me this story countless times, of how she’d found herself at the edge of something, side by side with a man she hardly knew. A young woman standing on a ledge high above the water, with the sun on her face and nothing but open sky ahead of her. She hadn’t known then what would happen. There had been no promises, no assurances. There had only been a choice, to leap or not. He’d asked her what she wanted. And unlike me, she’d been unafraid to name it—and jump.
I stopped walking, draining the last lukewarm swallow from the mug in my hand. Ahead was the deadfall that would keep me from going farther, but that was fine: where I wanted to go was behind me. Back the way I came. Back to the house where there was a man waiting patiently for me to get brave. To make plans. To stop dithering over what-ifs and start thinking about what could be.
I smiled and whispered my answer aloud. Just like Mimi, I would leap—and allow myself to fall.
“Geronimo.”
I hurried back the way I’d come, feeling bolder and surer of myself with every step. I had resisted thinking about a future with Adam for so long that now my imagination leaped wildly ahead, as if making up for lost time. I imagined us holding hands as we told my mother we’d fallen for each other. I imagined us signing the lease on a cool loft in some young, unspoiled city and using my trust from Mimi to start some kind of business, a coworking space or a cat café, the kind of thing that gets you interviewed for a “30 Under 30” list about young entrepreneurs who are giving back to their communities—and I imagined my father seeing the resulting article and calling me up, unscheduled, just to say he was proud of me. As I left the pine path and climbed up through the garden, I looked around at the gray hedges and crumbling stones with fresh eyes and thought it would be the perfect spot for a wedding, and then laughed out loud at how completely my imagination had run off the rails even as I pictured soft lights, sweet music, the two of us swaying gently together beneath the evening sky.
The skeptical voice inside me had fallen entirely silent, no longer interested in telling menoorwait, and I closed my eyes to linger there, to luxuriate in the fantasy. It would be summer, the height of summer, after the awful blackflies had died off but before the nights turned too cool for dancing. The hedges would be green, the light golden, and the dress—the dress would be ivory, of course, with lace sleeves and a full skirt and a modest neckline, appropriate for church, because her family had insisted they be married in one. Not my family, but Mimi’s, and maybe this was why my vision seemed so real: not just because it could happen, but because it already had. My grandmother had danced in her white dress on this very spot with the manshe’d vowed to love, honor, comfort, and keep for as long as they both would live. Was it so crazy to think that I might do the same?
I opened my eyes. Above me, the house still loomed, the windows still dark and empty—save one. My breath caught in my throat. A man’s pale face was framed in one of the first-floor windows. He was holding very still, and he was staring at me. I stared back, raising one hand in a tentative wave, thinking that maybe it was Diana’s husband, realizing almost at the same moment that it couldn’t be. The shape of his face wasn’t like William’s at all, and his hair was black, not gray—and yet his face was oddly familiar, even as I became certain that I’d never seen him before. I dropped my hand. For a moment, the stranger in the window only stared at me. Then his mouth twisted. Sneering. I took an involuntary step back. The man disappeared.
Somewhere inside the house, my grandmother began to scream.
8.
Mimi’s screaming tapered off to a wail as I sprinted back through the gardens and toward the house, the cold burning in my lungs. The piazza was crowded with cars now, including a beat-up truck with rusted fenders that hadn’t been there when I left an hour ago. The front door was standing open and I ran through it, arriving just in time to see Richard stumbling up the stairs. He was still wearing last night’s clothes and his hair was sticking out in all directions. The room was full of noise, Mimi’s crying mixed with the urgent chatter of other voices. Richard shouted something at me that sounded like “Janet!”—which made no sense—and then pointed across the room. I turned my head to see Diana and William, who were huddled together and snapping rapid-fire questions at Adam, who was not answering them because he was whispering something to Mimi, who was standing with her back to him and her forehead pressed against the wall. She was still in her nightgown and still sobbing, shaking her head back and forth. I looked from Richard to Adam to Mimi and back to Richard twice more before I realized that the sneering man from the window was here, too, standing quietly beside the stairs with a canvas bag in hishand—only what I’d mistaken for a sneer was just how his face looked. Long and pinched, with heavy brows and a snarly upper lip that lifted at the center to expose his teeth but drew down sharply at the corners.
“Bloody hell!” Richard shouted, his voice booming above the cacophony. Everyone looked except Mimi, who kept crying, and the stranger, who looked at his feet. “Doesn’t anyone have a sedative? Some Xanax?!”
Xanax,I thought, as the whole room stared.Xanax, not Janet.
“Oh, shut up, Richard,” Diana snapped finally, at the same time as my mother appeared from the dining room door and said, “For god’s sake, Richard, if anyone hasthat, it’s you.” Richard threw his hands in the air and stomped the rest of the way up the stairs, disappearing in the direction of his bedroom.
“What’s going on?” I asked, but Mom only hissed, “Where were you?” and brushed past me without waiting for an answer. She said something hurriedly to the scowling stranger, then ushered him back through the open front door. He stared at me as he passed in a way that made me take an involuntary step back, his gaze pointed and angry. My mother followed him, pulling the door closed behind her. I glanced through one of the panes of glass in the casing and saw that they were paused halfway across the piazza, having an intense conversation that I couldn’t hear over the sound of Mimi’s weeping. Her sobs were starting to take shape, becoming words.
“I won’t,” she was saying over and over. “I won’t, I won’t!” She lifted her head to look at me, and I shuddered. There was no sign of the composed, confident woman who’d arrived here yesterday morning, or even of the slightly confused but amiable one I’d walked with in the afternoon. Mimi’s skin was splotchy, her jaw quivering uncontrollably, her eyes bloodshot, her lips flecked with spittle. I gazed into her eyes, which gazed back at me without a shred of recognition or understanding—and that voice, the skeptical one that was always chiming in to tell me cruel and unbearable truths, chose this moment to break its silence.
She’s going to die soon,it said,but not soon enough. There will be months of this, horrible moments just like this one, while the lights inside her go out one by one, until all that’s left is a walking, shitting, drooling husk that used to be a person. You’ll wish she was dead a hundred times over before she ever takes her last breath.
It was a horrible thought, one I never wanted and tried to banish as soon as it had come—but as I looked at Mimi’s face, her empty eyes, I felt the truth of it and shuddered. Adam, who was holding my grandmother carefully by both shoulders, shot me a look over the top of her head that could have been confusion or maybe disappointment, and I looked back with a miserable shrug. The excitement and intimacy of last night seemed like a distant memory.
“I was just out for a walk,” I said, even though the only person who’d asked where I’d been wasn’t in the room anymore. Diana left her husband’s side and took me by the arm, pulling me away from the others and down one of the shadowed hallways. Mimi’s moans echoed eerily behind me.
“This is just awful,” she said. She was wearing long, tasseled earrings that swung below the blunt line of her blond bob as she shook her head and kept swinging for several beats after she stopped. “Dora told me she had some bad days, but I never imagined—”
“This isn’t normal,” I interrupted. “Something must have happened. That guy, the one with the bag—”
“Oh, he’s just a repairman or something,” Diana said.
“He was watching me from the window.”
She stiffened. “Watching you? You mean, like... a predator?” she said, her eyes narrowing, and I suddenly remembered that Diana was one of those people who was always sharing fake news stories on Facebook about women getting kidnapped in Walmart parking lots and getting sold into sex slavery.
“No,” I said hurriedly. I would have said it no matter what, just to stop her from getting worked up, but it was true: there had been nothing predatory in the man’s gaze.
I heard the front door open and close and my mother’s voice saying, “Adam, can you take my mother back to her room and help her find some clothes, please.”
“Of course,” Adam said; I came back into the foyer just in time to see him disappear into the hallway opposite me, holding Mimi’s arm with one hand and gently pressing her forward with the other. I wondered if he regretted coming here, and then thought dismally that if he didn’t already, he would. Every person in the house seemed determined to show him, in their own ridiculous way, that he’d made a terrible mistake in getting so close to my grandmother. To my family. To me.
Diana had followed me back and started clucking, shaking her head again, her earrings swinging lightly. “A male nurse, Dora?” she said. “Is that really appropriate?”
“He’s not a nurse, he’s a personal caregiver,” my mother and I said automatically, in unison. Mom looked startled and let out a littleha!sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. She sat down heavily on the staircase and pressed two fingers into her temples, hard.
“I don’t see what’s so funny.” Diana sniffed, and Mom rolled her eyes.
