Modern Lovers

THE Q AT CORTELYOU: DITMAS PARK’S NEIGHBORHOOD BLOG

Posted at 11:37 p.m.

Anyone else smell smoke? We’ve been out on the street for half an hour, trying to trace the origins of the fire. Seems to be coming from the south. Reply in comments with any info.

Forty-six

Jane’s phone rang, then Zoe’s. Their phones were both sitting in the car’s cup holders, in between the front seats, but Jane and Zoe were in the backseat. Zoe’s underwear was slung around one ankle, and Jane’s right hand had vanished up her dress. They had bellies full of dumplings and mouths full of each other. The cloth seats in the Subaru had seen worse.

“Who the hell keeps calling?” Jane said, into Zoe’s neck. It was probably Elizabeth, calling Zoe to ask her which side she should fall asleep on, which hand she should use to hold her toothbrush. She didn’t care, let the phone ring.

Food was always the way back in. Why hadn’t she thought of it? Jane liked fine dining as much as the next girl, but really she always wanted something salty and fried that could be eaten with chopsticks. Zoe’s skin was as delicious as a bowlful of MSG, and Jane was trying to lick her from top to bottom, every inch she could reach without pulling a muscle. It had been a solid decade — if not more — since they’d fooled around in the backseat of a car. There was one long late-night cab ride from Union Square to Ditmas Park that Jane could remember, with at least three orgasms apiece, but man, it had been a long time. Her body pulsed, and so did Zoe’s. They were breathing in unison, the air thick and shared.

“I just hope it’s not the police again,” said Zoe. She laughed a little but then paused. She scooted out of Jane’s reach. Jane rolled back against the seat while Zoe squeezed through the front seats to grab her phone. “It was Ruby,” she said. “And Leon. Oh, my God.” Zoe reached down and stuck her other leg into her underwear and climbed into the front seat, giving Jane a glorious view, a single moment of pure pleasure, like looking at a Renoir in person. “It’s Hyacinth.”

• • •

They double-parked in front, right behind the fire engine. The firehouse was only two blocks away, so they’d arrived fast — Ruby hadn’t even called, she’d just run over and banged on the door until someone opened up. Ruby, Leon, and Jorge were still out front, the three of them sitting on a little silver bench one storefront away, taking turns popping up and smoking on the corner. Ruby had a cigarette in her mouth when her mothers got there, and Jane plucked it out and threw it on the ground.

“What happened?”

Ruby started to blubber, and Leon put his arm around her.

Jane shook her head. “Goddamn it, will someone tell me what is going on?” She craned her neck to see past all the firemen into the restaurant.

One of the firefighters came over, slow in his enormous suit. “Ma’am, are you the owner?”

“Yes, we are,” Jane said, pulling Zoe close. “What happened?” There was smoke in the air.

“It seems there was a fire in the backyard behind the restaurant, and it spread into your building. Luckily, your daughter was here before the fire had reached all the way through — there is heavy damage, but the building is salvageable. Come and see.”

Jane and Zoe stepped gingerly through the open doorway — the glass had been shattered and covered the entrance, shards reaching nearly to the hostess stand. Inside, the smoke still felt thick, and the air smelled like a wet campfire. The floor, where it wasn’t covered with broken glass, was slick with water from the sprinklers and the firefighters. Jane pulled the neck of her T-shirt up over her nose and mouth and held it there. There was a large black shadow printed all the way along the wall of the dining room. The ceiling was in pieces, flaking off like a sunburn, and the glass doors out to the garden were broken, too. Jane clenched her fist, ready to hand someone, anyone else, the bill. But when she looked outside, she knew the answer: in any game of rock-paper-scissors, fire beat everything.

The wooden tables in the garden were all ruined and would have to be replaced. The chairs were gone, too. The back wall, a wooden fence, looked like it had been eaten by an angry shark.

“Shit,” Jane said.

“Shit,” Zoe said, coming up behind her. She rested a hand flat against Jane’s back.

The firefighter shrugged. “At least it didn’t get all the way inside. You’re really lucky that your daughter was here — another few minutes and the whole place would have been up, gone.”

“Thank you,” Jane said, and shook the firefighter’s hand. After he walked away, she turned to Zoe. “Seems like we’re really making the rounds lately, huh? What’s next, the coast guard?”

“Don’t even joke,” Zoe said. “How long before we can open again, you think?”

“A month? Two? God, I don’t know. Oh, man.” The power was off — everything in the walk-in would be ruined. There was gorgeous fish, beautiful marbled steaks. All those stupid tomatoes. Enough fresh mozzarella for three days of caprese salads. Everything would go to waste. She should take home what they could eat now, while anything was still good, if anything was still good. “Shit.” She hadn’t even checked the damage in the kitchen yet. That’s where the sprinklers would have gone off first, no matter what, but Jane made a mental list of all her beautiful equipment, all her jars, all her fucking salt — everything.

“It’s okay,” Zoe said. “It’s just money.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and started taking photos. “Go check on Ruby.”

Jane made her way back to the street, glass crunching under her sneakers. Ruby had lit up another cigarette and was pacing back and forth in front of the health-food store on the corner. She was wearing someone else’s sweatshirt, with the hood pulled tight around her face, her purple hair hanging out the sides like a psychedelic waterfall. Jane approached her slowly.

“Mom,” Ruby said. Her voice cracked. “I’m so sorry. It was my fault, I should have caught it sooner. I thought I saw something when I was locking the gate.” Ruby’s eyes were red. She took a long drag of her cigarette and bounced nervously on her toes. “I’m sorry that I’m smoking, too, but I can’t help it. Otherwise I’m going to start pulling all my hair out.”

Jane reached over and took the cigarette out of Ruby’s hand. Instead of dropping it on the sidewalk, she put it to her own lips and took a drag. “Don’t tell your mum.”

Ruby exhaled loudly and fell into her mother’s arms.

Forty-seven

Elizabeth was groggy. She’d slept terribly, rolling around all night. Andrew had fallen asleep upon impact, as usual, and watching him sleep while they were fighting was ten times worse than watching him sleep when they were getting along. The window was open, and at midnight some drunk person had been yelling on the sidewalk. At three, a car alarm went off, over and over. There were the usual sirens, backdrop to the city life, insistent and wailing. Elizabeth had finally fallen asleep around four, she thought, but it was equally possible that she’d been awake until just before six and finally conked out for an hour, until Andrew woke her up with a cough. When she opened her eyes, he was standing on his side of the bed, looking at her. Her cell phone was in his hands.

“What?” she said. “What is it?”

• • •

Harry was sitting on the couch hunched over a bowl of cereal. Elizabeth pulled her robe tight around her waist and sat down next to him. “Honey,” she said, “I just heard from Zoe. There was a fire at the restaurant last night. Everyone is fine, but I thought you should know.”

“I know,” Harry said. “Ruby texted me last night. Like, when the firemen were going in. She said they broke the door with axes, even though the fire wasn’t even near the door.” He slurped up a spoonful of milk.

“You knew? How could you not wake me up?” Elizabeth stretched her fingers toward Harry’s neck and pretended to strangle him. “God! Harry!”

“What were you going to do? Run down there with a bucket of water?” He raised the bowl in front of his face as a barrier when Elizabeth glared at him. “Sorry! I should have told you, fine!”

“I’m going to pop down there and see if they need anything. You stay here and out of trouble, okay?”

Harry waved good-bye with his spoon.

• • •

The front door was open, and Elizabeth poked her head in, knocking on the doorframe. Zoe was sitting at the dining table, her phone to her ear, a stack of paper in front of her. Ruby and Jane were both in the kitchen, with their backs to the door. The whole house smelled like pancakes and bacon.

“Hey,” Elizabeth said. “Can I come in? I just heard.”

Zoe glanced up and waved her in, but a look passed over her face that made Elizabeth stop just inside the door. “I can come back, if now isn’t good,” she said, half-whispering. Zoe waved her in again, more vigorously.

“I’m on hold, endless hold,” she said. “It’s shocking, I know — insurance companies are surprisingly hard to get on the telephone when a place burns down.”

Jane muttered something, and Ruby laughed. “Oh, hi, Elizabeth,” Ruby said, swiveling around in a clumsy pirouette. She winked.

Elizabeth scuttled over to Zoe and gave her a quick hug before gently lowering herself onto the next chair over. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Are you okay? Can I help?”

Zoe raised a finger. “Hang on, I think I have an actual person now. Hello?” she said into the phone. “Yes, hello, hold on, thank you so much.” She mouthed, Sorry, and then covered her left ear with her hand and walked up the stairs.

Jane set an enormous platter of pancakes — thick, fluffy, generously studded with blueberries — in front of Elizabeth. “Stay,” she said. “I always make too many.”

Ruby threw herself into the chair opposite Elizabeth and forked four huge pancakes onto her plate.

“Oh, I shouldn’t impose,” Elizabeth said. The pancakes smelled like Hyacinth on a Sunday morning. Her stomach growled.

“Really,” Jane said. “You know Zo never eats more than two. Better you than Bingo.” She smiled and handed Elizabeth a plate.

“Okay,” Elizabeth said. For someone whose restaurant had just been knocked out of commission for an unknown period of time, Jane seemed remarkably upbeat. Elizabeth edged off a small bite of pancake with the side of her fork. “Oh, my God,” she said. “These are insane.”

“I know,” Jane said, and smiled even more broadly, like the cat who had eaten not only the canary but the nest, too. “No hard feelings about the other night, right?”

“Sure,” Elizabeth said. “Of course not.”

“I forgot the syrup!” Jane said. “What are we even doing?” She hustled back over to the kitchen and came back brandishing an oversized bottle of syrup. Jane poured giant puddles onto everyone’s plate.

“You are extra goofy today, Mom. Is there Prozac in these?” Ruby said.

“Ha-ha,” said Jane. “Maybe.” She stuck a quarter of a pancake into her mouth. “Tastes good, doesn’t it? Nice and medicinal.”

Ruby rolled her eyes but was looking at her mother with affection. Elizabeth was tempted to back away slowly and open the door again, just in case she’d accidentally walked into an alternate universe.

Zoe thumped back down the stairs, as quick on her feet as Ruby. “Hey!” she said. “Sorry about that! I think we have a good guy over there, Jane. Shouldn’t be too bad. I mean, it’ll be terrible, and God knows how long it’ll take us to fix everything, but we’re covered, and they know it, so at least all we’re losing is time and money, you know?”

“Right,” said Jane. “Great. You hungry?”

“Always,” said Zoe. Instead of scooting behind Ruby, which would have been the most direct route to her chair, Zoe walked the long way around. Elizabeth pretended not to notice the way Zoe gave Jane’s earlobe a gentle tug as she scooted behind her, and then she pretended not to hear the low little noise Jane made in response.

“Did you make these with ricotta or yogurt or melted butter or all three?” Elizabeth said, instead of what she wanted to say. When Zoe finally sat down again, Elizabeth widened her eyes and gave her a look, but Zoe only smiled, beatific and sweet and full of it.

Forty-eight

The plans came together remarkably quickly — Dave was organized. Phillip, the architect they’d met with at the coffee shop, drew a few different scenarios and priced things out, and then they were interviewing contractors, the three of them. Dave introduced Andrew as “his right hand, his partner,” and every time he said it, Andrew felt better about the whole thing. Sure, it was a lot of money, but this was what money was for — investing in things you believed in. If it all went well and the other investors came in the way Dave thought they would, they’d be in construction by the fall and then spend the winter working on the inside, decorating and programming and finishing. Next summer, the Waves would be up and running. He could see all the photos now, he and Dave leaning casually against a rustic wooden check-in counter. Hotelier! His mother would no doubt find the career a bit gauche, but Andrew liked the thought of it. Purposeful, with a sprinkling of glamour. It was a good plan.

The first check wasn’t huge — a hundred grand. Dave said that they could squeak by with seventy-five, and that one-fifty would be ideal, and so Andrew thought an even hundred was a good place to start. He and Elizabeth had an accountant in the Slope and an investment person in the city, but he handled only their retirement accounts and Harry’s college fund. That’s where all their savings went. The big money — Andrew’s family money — was taken care of by a junior guy in the Marx family arsenal of suits. He and Elizabeth touched the money only in case of emergencies — when they had to replace something in the house or when they occasionally had to borrow from the fund to pay Harry’s tuition. It was just sitting there — not an endless Scrooge McDuck — size swimming pool, but a good-size puddle of money.

Andrew lay on his back at the far end of the EVOLVEment studio. It was relaxation meditation co-practice time, which meant that Dave offered a guided meditation while Salome walked around giving miniature head and shoulder adjustments and massaging everyone’s forehead. Andrew didn’t have to pay for classes anymore — Dave insisted. He was part of the team.

Kitty’s Mustache was the only other team Andrew had ever been on. A marriage was a partnership, and a family was a team of sorts, but those didn’t count, not really. The band had had meetings and practices and voted on things. There was no voting in a marriage — everything always had to be a double compromise. Parenting was an absurd job, mundane and sublime in equal measure, and once Harry had learned to talk, walk, and use the toilet, Andrew and Elizabeth had largely split up their days so that each of them could have some time “off.” When you were in a band and you wanted time off, it meant that you were quitting, and who cared, really? There was always another mediocre bass player.

“Imagine every breath you take is a white light,” Dave said, “and the light travels in through your nose and through your sinuses, across your cheeks and up into your head. Now imagine the light is a ball in the world’s softest pinball machine and it bounces around inside your head until your whole head is full, every inch of it, with that light. I’m moving the flippers on the machine, and the ball is pinging all over the place. Light! Light! Light!”

One of the best things about Elizabeth was the way that she willingly overlooked people’s bad qualities. It was as if she could see how terrible someone was and then redoubled her efforts to be kind to them, as if every asshole she encountered was an abused child she was trying to stop from setting animals on fire. It’s how she was with Lydia, who certainly never deserved it. Andrew had never been able to equal that goodness, that generosity. It was hard to reconcile that good-hearted kindness with what Elizabeth had done, but Andrew was trying. The white light was surrounding her face, making her blond hair glow even brighter. But Dave’s cool white light couldn’t seem to knock out Lydia, no matter how many deep breaths Andrew took.

• • •

Kitty’s Mustache was the most popular band at Oberlin — they played shows at the Grog Shop in Cleveland, opening up for bands on tour from New York and Chicago, and when they played at parties around campus, the houses would turn into glorious fire hazards, the packed rooms overflowing into front yards until a neighbor called the police. Zoe and Andrew were the same year, one class ahead of Elizabeth and Lydia, and they had endless conversations about what to do when half the band graduated. Andrew was in no hurry to get back to New York. He wanted to stay to be with Elizabeth, just live off campus and work at the bike shop — it cost almost nothing to live there, and Elizabeth could steal enough food from the dining halls and the co-op kitchens to feed them fine, if the parental well ran dry. But the well wasn’t going to run dry, and so Andrew wasn’t worried. It all would have been easy, except that Zoe wanted to get the hell out of Ohio, and how the hell were they supposed to practice without her? They had a seven-inch already, Kitty’s Mustache and the Male Gaze, which an indie label had pressed three hundred copies of, and Andrew and Elizabeth were anxious to finish a whole record.

That was when Elizabeth wrote the song. It was a fucking hit — there were no two ways about it. Even if Elizabeth had never shown it to anyone, had only played it for herself in her bedroom, it still would have been a hit. Songs were like that — freestanding monuments. When she came back to their practice space from the library, she played it on the guitar and sang, with Andrew, Lydia, and Zoe all sitting on the floor in front of her. Lydia drummed her sticks on the floor, keeping time. By the time Elizabeth got to the second chorus, Zoe was on her feet, singing along, and Andrew knew that she wasn’t going anywhere. They stayed late, doing it over and over again, until their cheeks were flushed and their fingers were red.

When they were done, it was midnight, and the bar in the shitty hotel across the street from Zoe’s apartment would be open for another two hours. They walked over together, giddy. Elizabeth and Zoe got a table in the corner, Andrew went to the bar to get a pitcher of beer, and Lydia went to the bathroom, which was in the lobby. The entire first floor of the hotel stank of cigarettes (the rooms probably did, too, but Andrew had never actually been in one) and stale popcorn, which was free at a machine in the corner. Zoe knew all the bartenders, enormous guys with motorcycles and terrible teeth, and every other pitcher was usually free. Andrew was buzzing — he always liked the band, and they had other good songs, including ones that he’d written, but this was different. He got the pitcher and sloshed it over to the table. “I have to take a piss,” he said.

“I was dying to know that, thank you,” said Elizabeth, who was always more sarcastic when Zoe was around. Both the girls laughed.

Andrew gave them each a middle finger and headed into the lobby. The bathrooms were behind a half wall, as if the hotel were nice enough to pretend that people passing by didn’t walk in and use them all the time. Andrew pushed through the swinging door and relieved himself loudly at the urinal, sighing. He walked out again, whistling “Mistress of Myself” but only made it one step back into the hall before Lydia got to him.

“I was waiting for you,” she said, her eyes mostly hidden under her bangs. “Come with me.” Lydia pulled him by the hand out the front door of the hotel, well out of view of the bar. It was April, and not yet warm, though the flower buds had started to push through in the park across the street.

“Fucking good song tonight, huh?” Andrew said. He felt drunk, even though he hadn’t had a sip yet, and rubbed his belly. They stood on the dark street corner, and Lydia wrapped her arms around his body. She was small, just over five feet, and her head fit under his armpit in a way that he liked. Elizabeth was taller than he was, and he liked that, too, but Lydia made him feel like he was 30 percent handsomer, like the star quarterback on a high-school football team.

“What’s up?” Andrew said, petting her head affectionately.

“I don’t want to go back to the bar,” she said. “I just want to be with you.”

“But we’re celebrating!” Andrew pulled back and put his hands on Lydia’s shoulders. “Come on, it’ll be fun!”

“That’s not the kind of fun I want to have,” Lydia said, and she grabbed his face and kissed him.

It wasn’t unexpected. Was it ever? Elizabeth had teased him about Lydia’s flirting, and Andrew had always said it was nothing, because it was easier than telling Elizabeth the truth. They’d slept together a handful of times — only when they were both really wasted, and when Elizabeth was elsewhere for the night. Lydia seemed to know exactly when she would be gone, and she’d present herself on Andrew’s doorstep with a bottle of not-terrible wine and no underwear. They never talked about it after the fact, which made it feel less like a secret and more like a shared fugue state. It had nothing to do with Elizabeth; Andrew loved Elizabeth. She was a glass of whole milk, fresh from the cow — undiluted goodness. Lydia was something separate. Something spiked. It was like Betty and Veronica. Archie loved them both, and they loved each other, too, even though they tugged him back and forth. When Andrew imagined Elizabeth finding out, that was a part of his defense. It wasn’t much, but it was something. He hoped he’d never have to use it, that Lydia would just disappear one day and make his life easier. It wasn’t like he and Elizabeth were married. They weren’t even living together. It was worse than jaywalking but not as bad as a root canal. Worse than throwing up in a taxicab but not as bad as going to the DMV.

“Come on,” Andrew said. “Let’s go back.”

“Fine,” Lydia said, sticking out her lower lip and squinting at him. “Or I could just blow you right here.” They crossed the street into the park, and Andrew unzipped while Lydia crawled half under a bush and then pulled him to his knees.

Would that scene be in the movie? The white light didn’t exist. Andrew’s head was filled with Lydia. They slept together a few more times, and then the semester was done, and Andrew moved in with Elizabeth, and it was over. Lydia swore to him that he wasn’t the reason she was leaving school, that she actually fucking hated it there and he wasn’t even remotely that important to her, but he never knew for sure. That summer he helped her load a U-Haul truck, and when she hopped up into the driver’s seat, she shook her head, giving him that same look she gave him a thousand years later at the restaurant, after Harry was born. She looked at him like he was a fool, like he’d made the wrong choice and she knew it. It was never so clear to Andrew — nothing was. All he wanted in life was for something to be as clear as everything had always been for Lydia. She had wanted him, and when she didn’t get him, she was out. Whenever Lydia sang that song, that fucking, perfect, beautiful song, it was all Andrew heard. She was calm, and she was gone, and he was left with her voice and Elizabeth’s words, and Andrew was sure that he heard exactly what Lydia wanted him to. It was the thing in his life that he felt the guiltiest about, and when Lydia died, Andrew’s first emotion had been relief. No one else knew, and now he’d never have to tell Elizabeth. That relief was the second thing he felt guiltiest about. It was a guilt sandwich, with Lydia in the middle.

Andrew felt Salome ruffle his hair and heard her crouch down behind him. She pressed her thumbs against his shoulders, grounding him into the floor, and then she rubbed little circles on his forehead. Her hands smelled like lavender. Andrew breathed it in and breathed out as much Lydia as he could. There was always more. She was sticky inside him, a thin coating of lust and regret stuck to his insides like tar. There was never enough white light, but he kept breathing, hoping that it would change.

Forty-nine

Now that her job was on indefinite hiatus, Ruby had more time for being a creeper for Elizabeth. It was fun, like pretending she was Harriet the Spy, and more than anything, it gave her something to do. The first step was going to a yoga class, which Ruby thought sounded relatively low-impact, in terms of spy missions. The EVOLVEment website was garbage — just a bunch of photos of pretty girls with their eyes closed, smiling like someone’s tongue was on their clit — but there were class schedules on pink pieces of paper in a clear plastic box on the porch. Ruby put her hair in a ponytail and stole Zoe’s mat from the hall closet. “Just see what it’s like in there,” Elizabeth had said. “Just see if there’s anything weird going on. You know, talk to people.” Ruby was on it.

The classes were fifteen dollars for drop-ins. Ruby paid cash and signed a waiver under the name “Jennifer Lopez,” which seemed both funny and within the realm of possibility. “Call me Jen,” she planned to say to whoever was teaching the class, before launching into a long soliloquy about her youth as a gymnast and her tight hamstrings.

The preplanned speeches were unnecessary — unlike most studios, which were pretty empty during the day, EVOLVEment was packed, and the woman teaching the class didn’t even introduce herself. She was a lissome blonde, and she stepped on the tiny slices of hardwood floor in between the mats, touching everyone as she made her way around the room. Ruby unrolled her mat in the front row — she had to be an eager student if she was going to get any intel — and Om’d loudly when called upon to do so.

“Welcome to EVOLVEment,” the woman said. “My spirit sees you.”

“My spirit sees you,” everyone in the class said back.

“Let’s do this!” the blonde said. She turned around, whipped out an iPhone, and pressed a button, immediately filling the room with Afrobeat music. “I want to see your beautiful bodies moooove!” If Andrew was in trouble, it certainly wasn’t with this idiot. Ruby did as many upward-facing dogs as she could before collapsing onto her mat and waiting there for the class to be over.

• • •

When they were all rolling up their mats, Ruby sauntered casually up to the teacher, who was drinking a tall glass of something frothy and green.

“Good class,” Ruby said. “I ran six miles yesterday, and my body just needed a little break. But really good class.”

The woman lifted her thumbs to her forehead and offered a micro bow. “Thank you so much,” she said. “My spirit could tell that your spirit needed a rest. That’s so important, really — it’s, like, the number-one thing that you learn in teacher training, that the hardest thing to do is to just listen to your own body and not care about what else is going on in the room.” She put her hand on Ruby’s arm. “You are my greatest teacher today.”

“I feel exactly the same way,” Ruby said, and put her own thumbs to her forehead. “Namaste.” She looked around the room, which had finally thinned out. There were still a few bendy-looking people loitering, giving each other back rubs, complete with appreciative moans. They reminded her of Dust and the church-step kids, only with better skin and clean livers. “This place is so great,” she said. “Do you teach here a lot?”

“Oh, we’re all teachers here,” the woman said. She leaned in. “You know, I think that you could really be an interesting part of this place. I’m Lena. Can I show you around? Want some kombucha? We make it here, it’s so good. Have you had it before? It’s kind of like iced tea, only funky.”

“I’d loooove that,” Ruby said, trying not to ignore how sore her thigh muscles were when they started climbing the stairs.

Fifty

The tops of Dr. Amelia’s feet were tan except for the crisscrossing flesh that had been hidden underneath the straps of her sandals, which made her look like she was sitting in the shadow of venetian blinds. Zoe thought someone ought to tell her that her whole body needed SPF 30, not just her face and arms, but it seemed awkward to give a doctor medical advice, and so she kept her mouth shut.

There was a lot that Zoe wanted to keep her mouth shut about — she knew that Ruby and Harry had been fooling around whenever they thought she and Jane were asleep, and she didn’t care. She and Jane had been fooling around whenever Ruby was out, which was like when she was a baby, and they’d have sex during her naps because they were too tired and/or busy after she went to sleep for the night. She didn’t want to tell Elizabeth about Jane, which was ridiculous, because Jane was her wife and Elizabeth was her friend — but Zoe was worried that Elizabeth would be disappointed if she and Jane stayed together, like she was chickening out.

Dr. Amelia liked to sit cross-legged in her Aeron chair. “How’s it going, guys?” she asked. “Seems like it’s been a good summer?”

“We just had a fire at the restaurant,” Jane said. “The restaurant itself, actually.”

“And Ruby still hasn’t gotten into college,” Zoe said, and then corrected herself. “Isn’t going to college, I guess.”

“And she got hauled into the police station for having sex in Prospect Park,” Jane added.

“Oh,” said Dr. Amelia. She wrote something down on her notepad. “And are you two getting along? That seems like a lot of additional stress.”

“We are,” said Zoe. She looked at Jane, who was sitting to her left. Jane hated therapy — her mother was a therapist and had seen patients in her home office in Massapequa, and it had soured her on the whole thing, all those afternoons when she and her siblings weren’t allowed to watch television because the den was connected to her mother’s office with French doors. But now Jane looked completely happy to be there, even smiling for no particular reason.

“And have you talked about the problems you were having? It’s great to get in a good spot, of course, but I want to make sure that it’s not just a passing mood — have you two spoken about the issues that caused the space in the first place?”

Jane closed her mouth.

“Well, we haven’t really had time,” Zoe said. And they hadn’t — after the fire there was a lot of busywork to be done, and meals to be cooked, and they were two seasons behind on Damages, which they were watching on Netflix. Every day, Zoe thought about having a Talk, but every day she thought better of it.

“We’ve been really busy,” Jane said. “And plus, I don’t know, it feels like it would be a jinx or something. Rock the boat. You know what I mean.”

“I do know what you mean,” Dr. Amelia said. “You’re afraid to frighten the natives. To muddy the water. To poke the bear.” She tapped her pen cap against her chin.

“Right.” Jane clasped her hands in her lap. “Something like that.”

“Well,” Dr. Amelia said, “why don’t we start now? This is a safe space, remember, and all feelings are valid. Zoe, do you want to start?”

“Okaaaaay,” Zoe said. She crossed her legs one way, then switched. Her hair was in her eyes, and she tucked it back behind her ears. “I guess I feel like things have been going really well, but maybe my fear is that it’s because Jane is maybe afraid of being lonely? And so she’s more interested in me right now than normal? And in a little while it’ll just die down again? And then we’ll be right back where we were?” She covered her eyes. “Don’t kill me,” she said to Jane.

“I’m not going to kill you,” Jane said. “You’re right. I don’t want to be lonely. But the reason I don’t want to be lonely is because I love you. It’s not just that I want to have someone around, I want to have you around.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re really making us do this here?” Jane cleared her throat. “I think we should talk about Elizabeth.”

Zoe was genuinely surprised. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not saying it’s sexual, Zo. But I do think there’s some weird stuff there. Is that a thing, Dr. Amelia, even if it’s not about, like, doing it?”

“Of course,” Dr. Amelia said. “There are all kinds of betrayals — physical, emotional, spiritual. What exactly do you think is going on, Jane?”

“We used to fight about this, years ago. I just think that Zoe has someone else to go to, for whenever she’s upset, or happy, or whatever. I know it’s not as big a deal as it used to be, but still, I think that it’s messing with us. There’s a reason people don’t live close to their parents, you know, or next door to their best friends. It’s weird. People need space. Or at least I need space.”

Zoe scrunched up her mouth. Space was her line.

“What?” Jane said. “Do you really think I’m so off base?”

Dr. Amelia waited expectantly, her toes wiggling with excitement.

“I think that’s completely ridiculous,” Zoe said, and then she tried to slow down and think about whether or not she actually did. She felt herself heat up for an argument, the way matadors probably felt before striding into the bullring. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that Jane was a lot like a bull — angry and immovable, sharp and prone to snorting. Zoe knew that it wasn’t only Jane’s fault, though, whatever had happened to them. And maybe she was right. Zoe thought about all the times she’d gone to Elizabeth instead of her wife, for any number of reasons. It hadn’t happened that often recently, except to talk about the house, really, but years ago it had happened all the time. When she and Jane were first together, she and Elizabeth had been inseparable, and Zoe had often started sentences, “Well, I was just telling Elizabeth,” or “Elizabeth just told me…” which was obviously tedious and annoying. She thought about how she would feel if Jane had someone like that, a confidante she really loved, and if that person lived next door. They weren’t in college anymore — they weren’t Jerry Seinfeld and his bachelor(ette) friends, always popping in and out with no notice or reason. They were adults, with families and taxes and mortgages. Zoe had the horrifying realization that her wife might be right. The specifics were all wrong, but Jane was right that Elizabeth had always been there, hovering at the edges, eager to answer the phone.

“I think we should set up a few more appointments,” Zoe said. Dr. Amelia nodded and made a note.

Fifty-one

Dave could surf — he was from Southern California, as Andrew had suspected — and Andrew agreed to give it a try. Dave had a friend who rented boards and wet suits a few blocks from the hotel property, and they had everything they needed in fifteen minutes. He recommended a nine-foot foam soft top, and Andrew nodded like he knew what that meant. “We’re gonna get you right up, man,” Dave said.

He’d taken a lesson once before, when he and Elizabeth went to Hawaii for their honeymoon, which was otherwise nothing but reading paperbacks in the sand, stopping every now and then to kiss each other and twirl their rings. More than anything, Andrew had spent his days feeling lucky—lucky that Elizabeth, so light and good, had chosen him, this lump of coal. He was sure from the start that he didn’t deserve her, but he was going to try, and that was how they’d spent their honeymoon — having sex and getting sunburns and walking nowhere, holding hands. Maybe they should go back — maybe Harry could stay at home. He was old enough. Andrew was still upset about the movie, but maybe if he looked deeper into it, he could see what she was trying to do.

They — EVOLVEment, Andrew, Dave, the Waves, whatever they were going to be called — had made an offer on the hotel. There was some due-diligence zoning work to be done, so the process would take a few months. Dave and Phillip were taking care of everything. The first check had gone to the realtor’s escrow account, along with some other money from investors, where it would sit until they signed the contract. In the meantime, Andrew had written a second check, this time straight to Dave, for another fifty thousand. EVOLVEment was growing so fast — they needed money to pay for the teachers and for the equipment, cases of bottles for the kombucha and reams of plastic cups for the juices, and to continue to make improvements to the house — and all of Dave’s capital was earmarked for improvements to the hotel. He’d asked so sheepishly, as if Andrew would object, when EVOLVEment was the clearest and easiest of all his responsibilities.

Together they paddled out into the water. Andrew quickly remembered the feeling from so many years ago, all those dormant muscles in his chest and shoulders suddenly squeaking awake. It was hard to keep the board flat underneath him — he felt like a Weeble Wobble, only with no weight keeping him down. They made it past the break, and Dave gave him a few pointers — not to try to leap up to stand but to sort of drag his feet into place, which sounded easier but wasn’t, not really. Leaping was for people like Dave, whose stomachs were circuit boards of muscles, each tiny piece clicking together with purpose.

“It’s not about instruction,” Dave said. “It’s just about feeling it, you know? The wave, the vibe. That’s what surfing is all about. The ocean tells you when it’s your time, and then you go.”

“Right,” Andrew said.

Nearby, a surfing school was teaching lessons, and three girls in matching wet-suit tops and bikini bottoms giggled as they watched one another slide off their boards and into the shallow water. A large wave began to roll in, and Dave nodded at it, squinting. “That’s mine,” he said, and began to paddle. He was on his feet in another minute, his back flexing as he shifted his weight.

Andrew was on his stomach, bobbing up and down with the waves. August had come so quickly this year — the city was empty, but the beaches were full, dotted with people young and old. Andrew wished he’d taken Harry to the beach more as a kid — they went every so often, maybe once or twice a summer, but that was it. It struck him as a grand injustice, a wrong he had done. The kids playing on the sand were digging holes, they were building castles with plastic buckets. Harry was just like Elizabeth, prone to indoor activities, and Andrew thought it was all his fault for not intervening. They’d never gone camping without a car. They’d never driven a Winnebago. They’d never gone down a zip line or made a bonfire. Andrew wanted to cry, thinking of all the things he’d deprived his son of, just because he hadn’t thought to do them. Up ahead, Dave had easily coasted all the way to the sand. The water was shallow, and by the time Dave reached the beach, he was just skimming the ground like he was on a giant skateboard, which he sort of was, more or less. It looked so easy. Dave was probably thirty-five, and Andrew wondered if he’d ever been married or if he had any kids. He surely would have mentioned a kid, unless it had been in some seriously bad situation and they weren’t in touch, and Andrew couldn’t imagine that being the case. Dave seemed like a bachelor, in a good way. Unencumbered.

A slightly bigger wave rolled out from underneath him, and Andrew pushed himself up so that he was straddling the board again, his legs dangling in the water on either side. Dave waved from the beach and shouted something that Andrew couldn’t hear. He turned around to see what was coming — surfing was sort of like fishing in a lake, lots of waiting and watching, only with an increased likelihood of drowning. There was a wave coming, and Andrew decided to paddle. He flopped back onto his stomach too quickly, and it stung, but he didn’t have time to think about it — he started to paddle and paddle with his head and chest up, just like in yoga class, until the wave was underneath him and the board was doing what it was supposed to — keeping him and the wave apart. For a second, Andrew was doing it — he dragged his feet to a low crouch and then pushed himself up to stand, almost. His knees were bent and his arms were out. He felt like Philippe Petit walking between the Twin Towers. Andrew wanted to look for Dave and give a thumbs-up or a wave, but he knew that if he did, he would fall. But then he started to fall anyway, and as he was falling off to the left side of the board, Andrew looked toward the beach and thought he saw Harry and Ruby standing just behind Dave, her big curly hair wound up like a ball of yarn on top of her head. But then he hit the water, and he went for a short ride in the Atlantic Ocean washing machine, and when his head popped back up, they were gone. Andrew grabbed the board and used it to kick the rest of the way to the sand.

“You totally had it,” Dave said, offering Andrew a hand. “Next time will be even better.”

“I thought I just saw my kid,” Andrew said, looking around the beach. There were tons of young people on the sand, lying around with supermarket gossip magazines and cheap beach umbrellas, but he didn’t see Harry. “I swear, he was just standing right behind you.”

“Like a vision,” Dave said, nodding. “Far out.”

“No, I mean, he was standing there, right there!” Andrew pointed, as if the sand would offer a map.

“I get it,” Dave said, his mouth flat, his eyes blank. So there it was — he didn’t have kids, Andrew could tell. He was looking back at the water, his board sticking straight up toward the cloudless sky overhead. “Want to try again?”

“Sure,” Andrew said. He took one last sweep of the beach, looking for Ruby’s hair, but still didn’t see them. She was trouble, just like her mother, and Andrew was tired of pretending not to care. “Let’s do it,” he said, and threw his board back into the water, forgetting that it was still attached to his leg, which made him stumble and fall in the low, foamy surf.

“It’s cool,” Dave said. “You’re getting the hang of it already.”

Andrew was embarrassed but didn’t let it show. “Let’s go again.”

Fifty-two

Elizabeth sat on the porch, sweating. She had an appointment that afternoon with a couple from Carroll Gardens who wanted a house in the neighborhood — they had a three-year-old daughter and were pregnant with another. Zoe’s house was exactly what they were looking for — big enough for all the people in their family but shabby enough that they could afford it. Deirdre had a listing for a house on Ditmas Avenue, but Elizabeth knew they wanted to be closer to the park than that. A few blocks made all the difference, sometimes — it wasn’t unusual to have clients who gave you exact borders that they were looking within — sometimes it had to do with school zones, but sometimes it was just personal preference. If Elizabeth ever moved, she would want an apartment on Commerce or Grove or Bedford in the West Village, a tiny little tangle of streets. Not that she wanted to move — it was just a professional hazard, seeing how other people lived their lives and measuring against your own. She also didn’t really want to sell Zoe’s house — it would mean that Zoe was actually leaving the neighborhood, and if they weren’t neighbors, what would that mean? Would she regularly text her for a last-minute dinner date? Not that Zoe had responded positively lately — though of course they were sorting through a lot, what with the fire and everything. Sometimes excuses weren’t excuses. If Zoe moved, would they sit on each other’s porches and drink wine? How often would Zoe get on the subway for her? She didn’t want to have to find out.

Elizabeth was sitting on the porch because Zoe was avoiding her — she wasn’t responding to e-mails and texts, as if Elizabeth didn’t know that she’d seen them. Sometimes she longed for the olden days, when you had no idea whether anyone had listened to your message, or that you’d called them six times in one day. Elizabeth wasn’t trying to be a stalker; she actually needed to talk to her. She promised her clients that she’d ask about the likelihood of the house coming on the market, but even more than that, she wanted to know about Jane. Of course, it was all the same conversation, and one that Zoe was clearly trying to avoid. But being neighbors in addition to friends meant that Elizabeth knew when Zoe and Bingo were going to take their late-morning walk, and it wasn’t breaking any kind of protocol to be sitting on her own porch at that same time, was it?

She saw Bingo first — his happy mouth open, with his leash dragging behind him on the sidewalk. Dogs were gloriously uncomplicated creatures — food and play and sleep and love, that was all they needed. People were so much worse. Zoe was a few yards behind Bingo, looking at her phone.

“Hey,” Elizabeth said, coming down her steps.

“Oh, hi, I was just about to call you back,” Zoe said, and tucked her phone into her back pocket. “Hold up, Bing.” She bent over and picked up the end of the leash.

“Is everything okay?” Elizabeth squinted, and shaded her eyes with her hands. “With us, I mean? Did I do something?”

“What? No! What would you have even done?” Zoe looked at the ground.

“I’m not sure,” Elizabeth said. “That’s why I’m asking.”

“No,” Zoe said. “Really. We’re fine! Things have just been hectic, with the fire, you know.”

“Of course,” Elizabeth said, dropping her hands to her sides. “It just seemed like things were weird, and we hadn’t talked about the house in a little while, and then the other day, with the pancakes, you and Jane seemed…”

“What? She is my wife, you remember.” Zoe sounded defensive.

“Of course! No, of course! I just thought, you know, that you guys were having some things, and we’d talked about the house, and I thought maybe there’d been some backsliding there….”

“Backsliding? You’re saying that me and my wife are backsliding into our marriage, out of your greedy little hands? God, Lizzy!” Zoe shook her head. “Maybe she was right! Is that crazy? I don’t know! You honestly seem to be thinking more about your commission than our friendship, if I’m being honest.”

“No!” Elizabeth said. “That’s crazy! That’s not what I meant. I promise!” Everything was coming out wrong. Elizabeth wanted to tell Zoe that she was afraid of her moving away, afraid that she would want to move, too, to the apartment next door, just to make sure that they stayed friends for the next twenty years and the twenty after that, that she was sad about the idea of Zoe and Jane getting divorced and sad about her own marriage, too, that Ruby and Harry were getting too old to be called children, and what did they call them next? But her mouth wouldn’t work right, and none of it came out. “Just, no, really,” Elizabeth said. “I promise.”

“Can we talk about this later?” Zoe gestured to Bingo, who was relieving himself on the sidewalk.

“Sure,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t mean anything by it, and of course, of course I just want you to be happy. And I’m not trying to sell your house out from under you. I just want to make sure I know what’s happening. If you’re telling me to pump the brakes, I will pump them, okay?”

“Okay,” Zoe said, a wistful look crossing her face. “It’s just like, everything is all fucked up right now, both good and bad, and I don’t really know which end is up. I’m sorry.” She leaned over and gave Elizabeth a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll call you.”

“Great,” Elizabeth said. “Please do.” Her clients could go live in Deirdre’s listing — she didn’t care about that. And she did hope that Jane and Zoe would work it out, sort of. They weren’t like some of the couples she knew, who she actively thought should get divorced because they fought in public so much. They were somewhere on the middle of the scale, which is how she thought of herself and Andrew. They weren’t lovebirds, like Zoe’s parents, or even Deirdre and Sean, couples who rubbed each other’s backs for fun, without being asked or complaining that they really needed a massage, too. Most couples she knew were in the middle, slogging it out. Don’t get divorced! That was their shared motto. It was the only way to have a long marriage, the only way to have a truly solid family. Who needed happiness when you had stability? Wasn’t that the idea behind Ferberizing babies, that a few nights of misery led to more sleep for everyone? Elizabeth looked down at her hand and realized that she was clenching her fist so tightly that her fingernails had left deep impressions in her palm.

Some people were the leavers and some were the left. Zoe was the former. Kitty’s Mustache began to die when Lydia dropped out, though it didn’t seem like it. Lydia had always been their weakest link, and Zoe’s girlfriend at the time had a friend in the conservatory who played drums, and so that was an easy replacement. The only problem was that the new guy was a much better musician than the rest of them, which made their songs sound rinky-dink, amateurish. Nevertheless they played parties and shows all that year, even after graduation, when Zoe and Andrew were both otherwise unemployed and unoccupied. It was January when Zoe again decided that she’d had enough. She was tired of playing for freshmen clutching their first red plastic cups of beer. There was no one interesting there anymore, she said. She said that she felt old and pathetic, which was hilarious, because the whole town followed her around like she was the Pied Piper.

Maybe that was a problem — being the coolest person for miles meant that there was no one to look up to. She knew that music wasn’t for her — she wasn’t one of those kids who wanted her parents’ life. Zoe started spending more and more time with her art professors, drinking wine at their kitchen tables and talking about New York. When winter break rolled around, she announced that she’d had enough and that they would see what happened with the band in the spring, when Elizabeth and Andrew were out of school. It was a hiatus — that’s what they said to all their friends. But there was no such thing as a hiatus for a college band. Elizabeth was saddest of all, because she knew that she’d probably never be in a band again, not a real one. College was a make-believe place, where you could decide to do something and just do it, where no one was going to tell you that you weren’t good enough or talented enough. Elizabeth had plenty of self-confidence, but she knew her limitations.

What was a year? When they were in school, it seemed like something. Zoe was older and wiser, which is how Elizabeth always felt — like The Sound of Music and she was Liesl and Zoe was Rolf, and they were dancing around that gazebo together, minus the Nazi part. It was so funny, being a parent and realizing what a year actually meant. A year was nothing! And a school year was truly nothing — you could be born a day apart and be in two different grades, depending on the date. It was all so arbitrary. Elizabeth wished she’d known that earlier on in life. Zoe wasn’t any wiser than she was. A year wasn’t a long time. She was just bored in Ohio, and that was the end of Kitty’s Mustache.

There was a girl in New York, of course — Zoe was never without one for long. This one was an artist and had been known (and much admired) for walking around the Oberlin campus wearing only a pair of overalls. The girl wanted to start a new band, a duo, and Zoe was gone. It hadn’t lasted very long — only as long as the romance, maybe six months — but it meant that when Elizabeth and Andrew arrived, Kitty’s Mustache was a memory, not even Zoe’s most recent project. It didn’t matter that they’d been popular, that they’d had a record. There were so many indie labels that everyone they knew had had a record out — everyone had show posters and music videos and a box full of memorabilia. They weren’t that special. It was Lydia who later made them special in hindsight, who made them a footnote in music history. And so they all moved on, and after a few years it seemed quaint, a sweet memory to tell their children about. We were cool. Sometimes, if Elizabeth didn’t think too much about the specifics, it even seemed true.

Fifty-three

There was one more SAT class and then the test. Harry wished it would last forever — he’d move into the karate studio if he had to and take all his meals with Eliza and Thayer staring at him, chewing with their mouths open like two stoned cows. Ruby was humoring him by letting him quiz her on vocabulary flash cards. During the day, they mostly had Ruby’s house to themselves, and if one of her mothers did come home, it was easy enough to wait her out. The secret truth of parenting (in houses other than Harry’s own) was that parents almost always had other shit to think about, boring stuff like taxes and dermatology appointments, plus their actual jobs and whether they needed to buy milk. Ruby told him that she’d been smoking for three years — in her bedroom! — before either of her mothers noticed. Harry couldn’t imagine ever not noticing anything having to do with Ruby. The day before, she’d trimmed the front half of her hair two inches, and it was the first thing he saw. She looked like an Egyptian queen, and he’d told her so. “You make me want to shave my head,” Ruby said. “Just to see what compliment you’d come up with.”

She was wearing one of his old T-shirts — God, she could make an ancient, stained Rugrats T-shirt look good — and a stretchy little black skirt. The air conditioner in her bedroom window was so loud that they had to turn the music way up, which made it hard to hear Ruby’s answers to his flash cards, but Harry was reading her lips. They were listening to Otis Redding, and every now and then Ruby would jump off the bed and dance.

“‘Showing great joy’—come on, that’s an easy one. Jubilant!” Ruby rolled her eyes. “Give me something harder.”

“You can’t just do the hard ones. You need to make sure you know the easy ones, too. You can’t give the easy ones away! That’s how you rack up the points!”

“Harry, this is the SATs, not a video game.” Ruby clapped her hands. “Let’s go, next.”

He flipped through the cards. Temperate. Gloaming. Cloister. Ruby knew them all. She got up and turned the fan so it was pointing right at her face. She had a few tiny pimples on her right cheek, and one of her earrings had gotten infected — she’d pierced that ear herself, in the bathroom at school — and the hole was still a little bit red. Harry wished that he could videotape every second he spent with Ruby so that he could look at it in twenty years. So he could show it to her in twenty years. So they could look at it together and show their children. A boy and a girl. Twins, maybe. Was it weird that Harry was picturing twins? They’d be light-skinned, like Ruby, with chubby arms and legs, like him.

Harry had been thinking a lot about the future.

He’d be done with Whitman in less than a year — graduation was in June. That was only ten months away. He’d already told Ruby that he loved her, and he couldn’t imagine that changing anytime soon. He couldn’t imagine it changing, period. What were the rules for when the best person you knew was someone you’d known all your life? Were you supposed to pretend to look elsewhere, just for due diligence? Harry didn’t give a fuck about who else might be out there — it seemed literally impossible that there was anyone else on the planet who he would like more. It wasn’t anything as cheesy as having a soul mate — that was Lifetime-movie shit, soft focus and hokey. It was just math. Anyone else + Harry = stupid. He hoped that was one of the questions.

If he did well enough on the test, he could easily get into any of the city schools he wanted to go to, which wouldn’t even be expensive. If Ruby kept working at her parents’ restaurant, she’d make money. All they needed was a place to live. In eight months he’d be eighteen, and then his parents couldn’t tell him not to see her. It was really just his dad, anyway, and Harry thought that there was a fairly high likelihood that he’d get over it soon.

Harry hadn’t seen his friends in weeks, and he didn’t care. Maybe that’s what it felt like to be in love. Ruby hadn’t been hanging out with her friends either — there were girls who Harry had seen her with every day for the last four years, Chloe and Paloma and Anika and Sarah Dinnerstein, but other than Sarah, he hadn’t seen them all summer. That seemed weirder. He didn’t really want to bring it up, because it might pop a hole in that magical, mysterious dream that they were clearly living inside, a world in which Ruby loved him back. But he wanted to know.

“Hey, what are your friends doing this summer? Chloe and them?” He chewed on his nails.

“Chloe’s in Paris, Paloma’s already at Dartmouth. They’re on the quarter system — plus, there was some freshman camping trip beforehand. Ugh, I would rather die a slow, painful death than go on a freshman camping trip.” Ruby sighed. “Everyone is gone but me.”

“I’m not gone. I’m here.” Harry flipped through the flash cards, quizzing himself.

“I know,” Ruby said. “But you don’t count.”

Harry looked up.

“Oh, come on, I don’t mean it like that,” Ruby said. “I just mean that of course you’re here. You’re not done with school yet, and plus, you’re just, like, always here.”

“Uh-huh,” Harry said. “I guess that’s true. Would you rather I was somewhere else?”

“You’re my love slave,” Ruby said. “This is the only place I want you to be.” She jumped back onto the bed, stuck her legs in the air, and tugged off her skirt.

“Is that your way of apologizing?” Harry asked. He pulled his knees into his chest.

Ruby flipped over and crawled the rest of the way toward him. “Yes.”

“I guess I could let it go with a warning. Just this once.” Harry closed his eyes and let Ruby take the flash cards out of his hand. They made a splashing sound when they hit the wood floor, and when Ruby started kissing him, Harry imagined all the words floating up in the air and making sentences about them, a miniature tornado of love poems. Maybe it didn’t matter if Ruby loved him. Maybe his love was enough for both of them.

Fifty-four

Andrew was home so infrequently, it was almost like he had a nine-to-five job. Elizabeth took to staring out the window like a sailor’s bride. A sailor’s widow? Is that what they were called? A couple of the houses in the neighborhood had widow’s walks, which didn’t even make any sense — there was no view to speak of, except the roofs of other houses, and it seemed like offering burglars a runway, but there was no accounting for sense in Brooklyn real estate. Even when Andrew was at home, he treated her with a polite chilliness that usually lasted only a few hours. Now it had been several weeks, and Elizabeth was worried he might never warm back up. She missed the cat. She missed Andrew, the way he used to be, or the way she used to think he was. Sometimes at night when Elizabeth was trying to go to sleep, she would close her eyes and see Iggy, his tiny little pussycat face peeking out from under a car or behind a trash can, and then he would start to look like Andrew, and she would open her eyes and stare at the ceiling, her heart beating so fast. Iggy was lost, Andrew was lost, and so was she. Everyone except for Harry. Poor Harry! To be saddled with such parents and a missing cat, all at once. Maybe she should make an appointment for him to see someone.

Her phone rang — the house phone, the landline. No one ever used it except the office at Whitman, or sometimes some clients who were especially anxious about something that couldn’t wait until morning. Elizabeth picked it up and said hello. There was a telltale pause.

“Hi there, oops, you caught me! It’s Naomi!”

Elizabeth looked at the telephone. “I didn’t even realize that you had this number. Then again, you seem to have all the numbers, so I’m not really surprised. I’m much easier to reach on my cell phone, though.”

Naomi laughed. “I’m calling for Andrew. He left me a message, and I got a little excited, you know, like, he’s Mr. Mistress!”

“Andrew called you?” Elizabeth pulled back the curtain again and peered out onto the street. “To say what?”

Naomi tsked. “You are so naughty! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” Her voice hardened. This was Hollywood — the swift, humorless shift toward the mercenary. “He said that he never agreed, and that as a co-writer of the song, his consent was required to use it, and that his lawyers would be delighted to talk to our lawyers about it. He also said, and I quote, ‘There is no amount of money that will make me change my mind.’ So that’s interesting, don’t you think?” The bubbles came back to her voice. “Tell me he was high, Elizabeth. Tell me that it was a prank phone call.”

Elizabeth swallowed. Andrew was the one who was acting crazy — why was she the only one who noticed? Why was everything her fault?

“He is not thrilled,” Elizabeth said.

“Not thrilled with what, exactly?” Naomi said. “Spell it out for me.”

“My husband may not have actually signed the form. Did I not mention that he was wavering?” Elizabeth knew she was being bad, couching her decision this way.

“That presents something of a problem, Elizabeth. There isn’t really a huge gray area there. If he didn’t sign it, he needs to. Which means we need to get him on board. You know what? I’m going to come on out. Darcey and the rest of the cast are going to be in New York next week anyway to film some things, and rather than hold up everything I’m going to make time in the schedule for a little visit. It worked for you, and I think it’ll work for him.” Naomi said something to someone else in the background. “No, it’s fine,” she said, coming back to the phone. “This will be fine. And, Elizabeth?”

“Yes?” It was like being scolded in elementary school. She wanted to curl into a ball and roll under the bed and stay there forever.

“If for some reason this doesn’t work, and Andrew really does call his lawyers, I hope you’ve got one, too.” Naomi hung up the phone, and Elizabeth burst into tears. She heard the door unlock and footsteps on the stairs. “Harry?” she called. “Is that you?”

“It’s me,” Andrew said, swinging open the bedroom door. “Jesus, what happened to you?” The bridge of his nose was pink, a tiny sunburn. He hated wearing sunscreen — she practically had to hold his arms down to put it on, worse than when Harry was a toddler.

“Nothing,” Elizabeth said. She swiped at her cheeks and smiled as brightly as possible. “I was just on my way out.” She stood up and gave herself a little shake, like a wet dog. “Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Andrew said. He raised his eyebrows.

“I don’t know! How would I know?” Elizabeth pushed by him and into the hall. When she got there, she realized she’d left her keys and her shoes in the bedroom, but she hated the idea of walking back in, so she went into Harry’s room and started folding dirty clothes.

• • •

It was two years after they graduated from Oberlin that Lydia called about the song. She had never called Elizabeth directly in the days of Kitty’s Mustache, and so when the phone rang and Lydia’s voice was on the other end, Elizabeth was on high alert. The last she’d heard, Lydia had signed a record deal. There were often pictures of her in magazines and items in the gossip column in the newspaper. Everyone loved Lydia already, somehow — Elizabeth found the whole thing slightly inscrutable, but then again that was Lydia — her white-blond hair hanging in front of her eyes, her round cheeks gone narrow. She looked so different that Elizabeth bet that most people at Oberlin wouldn’t even recognize her face — her first face, that is. Maybe she’d even had something done, professionally. One never knew.

“Lydia, hi,” Elizabeth had said. Andrew was out — she was in the house alone. It was when she was working as an assistant for the gallerist, and it was her day off. They were still living in Zoe’s house then, in what would someday be Ruby’s room. Did Ruby know that, that Elizabeth had slept in that room hundreds of times, that Elizabeth had had sex in that room eons before she was born? She felt like she was constantly swimming through time and space, her old self and her current self simultaneously, with her flat stomach and her stretch marks and the lines around her eyes. When she thought about that phone call with Lydia, which would change both their lives forever, Elizabeth wasn’t sure who was talking. It was impossible that only young Elizabeth — unmarried, rootless, beer-drinker Elizabeth who was thinking about going back to school for social work or maybe early-childhood education or maybe for a fiction M.F.A. — was on the telephone, that she had somehow been the one to speak the words to Lydia.

She was calling because she needed the song. Of course! As soon as Lydia said it, Elizabeth laughed. “I’m sorry,” she’d said. “Go on.”

“We have lots of great songs, obviously,” Lydia had said. “There are some fucking amazing songs. But the record company doesn’t feel like they have it yet, you know, the single. And.”

“You want ‘Mistress of Myself.’”

“Yeah.” Elizabeth could hear how hard it was for Lydia to say it, though it must have been her idea, because no one else knew the song. She must have sung it for them, or played them a tape. Elizabeth could picture an office full of suits, with Lydia at the center, holding up a tiny boom box, Elizabeth’s voice coming out of the speakers and Lydia singing over it, drowning everything else out. People in the halls would have turned to look.

“Okay,” Elizabeth had said. “As long as we get the publishing all squared away. I mean.”

She heard Lydia breathing.

“There is no way that I’m going to let you pretend that you wrote that song.” Even all these lifetimes later, Elizabeth was proud of herself for having said it. She could imagine Lydia’s sulky mouth getting all twisted up, and she didn’t care. “You know that, right?”

“Of course,” Lydia had said. “I’ll get you the paperwork for ASCAP.”

Elizabeth had never heard of it but agreed. “Fine.”

“Great.” Lydia had wanted to get off the phone so badly, Elizabeth could tell. Even before she knew, she knew. Lydia was a snake, slithering through the grass, and Elizabeth wanted to catch her by the tail and fling her against a tree.

“Well, good luck with the record. What’s it going to be called yet, do you know?” Elizabeth knew the answer before the words were out of her mouth. Her words, Lydia’s mouth. Her words, written across a photo of Lydia’s face.

“We’re still deciding,” Lydia said, unwilling to admit it.

“Okay, then,” Elizabeth said. “Talk to you soon. Be good.”

And then she was gone.

Fifty-five

Dust texted HI at midnight. Ruby was on the couch watching the Kardashians, even though it was an episode that she’d seen before. She loved them and hated them in equal measure, and if she ever applied to college again, her plan was to write an essay about them, and how she’d always had imaginary sisters as a child, even in her house full of women. Ruby thought she probably still wouldn’t get in, but at least she’d be putting her real self on paper. The first time, she knew she wasn’t going to get in anywhere, and so it didn’t matter. If she actually tried to get in and it didn’t work, then she’d be upset. A minute later, Dust texted R U HOME? HAVE A PRESENT FOR YOU. OUTSIDE.

Ruby swiveled around and looked out the window. Sure enough, Dust was sitting on the porch. He wasn’t even facing her, just sitting on the steps as if he hadn’t written and invited her to join him. Ruby stuck out her tongue, paused the TV, and went out in her bare feet. Dust didn’t turn around when Ruby sat down next to him, and when she looked at him, she realized why.

There was a cat cradled in Dust’s arms. Not just any cat. “Iggy Pop!” Ruby said, too loud. She covered her mouth and said it again. “Iggy Pop!” She reached over and took the cat out of Dust’s grip. Iggy was a good boy, almost boneless, with a never-ending lust for attention, and so he didn’t object when Ruby began to pet him and scratch under his chin. “Where was he? Oh, my God, Dust, they are going to be so fucking happy, you have no idea. Where did you find him?”

He shrugged. “Around.”

“Well, I’m so glad you brought him back. Harry’s mom is going to be happy. She, like, needs this.” Ruby snuggled Iggy against her shoulder. “Whatta good boy.”

“He likes roast chicken,” Dust said. “And cottage cheese.”

“How do you know? How long have you had him?” Ruby asked, even though she really wanted to ask if Dust had parents who had provided these items, or if he’d roasted a chicken himself.

“It was from the grocery store,” Dust said. “My mom can’t cook for shit.”

“Oh,” Ruby said, and immediately tried to clear her mind of all other thoughts he might be reading. How long had he had the cat? Had he found it and just taken it home, to rescue it from the streets of Brooklyn? Had he stolen it from Harry’s front porch? Had he blown weed smoke in its poor little pussycat face? Ruby didn’t want to know. “Anyway, thank you.”

“It sucks about the fire,” Dust said. His hair had grown out a little over the summer — it was maybe an inch long, sticking straight out. In a few more weeks, it might start to look like normal boy hair and not a shaved head. Ruby tried to picture Dust with hair he could tuck behind his ears, like Harry.

“Um, yeah, that’s an understatement. Now I think my parents are happy I didn’t get into college — no tuition to pay for. When the restaurant is closed, no one is buying a thirteen-dollar hamburger, you know?” Ruby was afraid to put the cat down, even though he’d probably just run straight home. She wanted the points for bringing him back.

“Sarah was tripping balls,” Dust said. “She thought the sparklers were fairies sending her messages. She kept trying to kneel down and get close to them. I don’t think she meant to put them so close.”

“Excuse me?” Ruby scooted a few inches away. “Did that bitch set my parents’ restaurant on fire? Are you joking?”

“No,” Dust said. “She didn’t set it on fire. Not, like, on purpose. She was just putting these sparklers all around the back of Nico’s house, and… you know, the fence behind Hyacinth is right there, and she put them all in a little line with some candles and stuff, and then I guess she came inside and forgot about them. She didn’t ‘set it on fire.’ She’s not psycho. She’s just kind of dumb.”

Ruby had never heard Dust call anyone dumb before. That was her line — it was what she always said about him. His stupidity was the reason they weren’t ever going to be serious, it was why she never gave their relationship that much thought. She’d always seen him as a cardboard cutout of a person, a type. But now she wasn’t sure.

“So you think Sarah Dinnerstein accidentally set my parents’ restaurant on fire?” Ruby wondered where Sarah was now, if she was at home in her family’s apartment in Park Slope, in her bedroom that overlooked Prospect Park. She was probably staring into space and thinking about how she could make sure she got a private room in her dorm, just in case Dust came to visit. And who knew! Maybe Dust would go and visit her — maybe he’d take the subway to Penn Station and then a Greyhound bus, and when he got off in the bumblefuck Vermont town where her school was, Sarah would be standing there with tears in her eyes, so happy to see him, and then maybe Dust would decide to move in with her, and he’d let his hair grow, and they’d get married and have babies, and he’d teach them all how to skateboard. “I could call the police, you realize that, right?”

“You’re not going to call the police. They probably already came. I already heard, the whole thing is covered by insurance. It’s not even a big deal. It could have been way worse.” Dust pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his front pocket. “Most people’s houses burn down because of cigarettes, did you know that? Cigarettes and ovens.”

“Thanks, that’s great,” Ruby said. He was right — she wasn’t going to call the police. What would it accomplish, except getting her in more trouble? “Give me one of those, mine are upstairs.”

Dust plucked out another cigarette and lit it on the end of his own, the two papery embers flashing in the darkness. Ruby took it from him and plugged it into her mouth. She exhaled a string of perfect smoke rings.

“I bet your little boyfriend can’t do that,” Dust said.

“Why would he need to do that?” Ruby picked a fleck of tobacco off her tongue — Dust smoked unfiltered. Sometimes he even rolled his own from a little baggie, which Ruby had always found very sexy, his fingers working so quickly.

“He’s, like, a kid,” Dust said. “Like a good little kid who always does extra credit on his homework.”

“I do my homework. Or I did.” Ruby spit. “Your cigarettes are fucking gross. What are you, like, a cowboy?”

“Yeah,” Dust said. “But so are you. You’re more like me than you are like him, Ruby. You gonna tell his parents I gave you that cat? Or are you gonna tell them that you found it in the bushes?” Dust dropped his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk, then pushed himself up and ground it down with his shoe.

“Did you walk here?” Ruby asked. She’d never seen him without his skateboard in hand. He raised a finger and then leaned down and reached under her mum’s forsythia. He pulled out his board and slid it under his feet.

“It’s hard to ride with a cat,” Dust said. “But not impossible. I’ll see you, Rube.”

She watched him skate away, his willowy body shifting back and forth as he went down the middle of the street. It was dark, and there were cars, but Dust didn’t care — he was immortal, just like she was, immune to common sense and traffic laws. Ruby finished the cigarette even though she wasn’t enjoying it, and then took the cat down to Harry’s house and knocked on the door. By the time Elizabeth came to the door, Ruby’s sheepish, hopeful smile was firmly in place.

Fifty-six

Dr. Amelia had both Zoe and Jane keep journals about their feelings. It was worse than the food journal Jane had kept in culinary school, a brag book that was intended to shame anyone else who happened to open it (Lunch — seared foie gras with poached egg and frisée salad). Jane didn’t know what to write down, so she wrote down everything — when Zoe kissed her on the cheek in the morning (about half the time), when Zoe farted (often, but so did she), when Zoe said something dismissive (sometimes), when Bingo paid more attention to Zoe (always). Jane felt like it was probably stupid, but she was doing it anyway. If Zoe wanted her to do homework, she was going to do homework.

There wasn’t very much to do about Hyacinth — the patio was under construction. The replacement tables and chairs were on order, as was the glass that had been broken. A special cleanup crew was working on the ceiling and the wall. Jane was on the phone with her suppliers every few days — squash blossoms, tomatoes, a new cheese, beautiful pork chops — she wanted to order it all, but they were at least a month away. During the day she took the Q to the Grand Army Plaza farmers’ market, buying things for the house. She always saw other chefs there, and she’d kiss them hello. Everyone knew about the fire, everyone was sympathetic, and they all furrowed their brows before turning their attention back to the hen-of-the-woods mushrooms or the fairy tale eggplants. Jane wandered, putting her hands on everything. She was going to grill some steaks, or maybe make some scallops, and throw some asparagus on, too, let them roll around on the fire until they were striped with beautiful grill marks, both firm and tender. Maybe a chimichurri — Zoe loved her chimichurri. Jane picked up three big handfuls of parsley. There were enormous peaches, practically already dripping, and Jane’s mouth began to water. She’d make dessert, too.

When Jane got home, her shoulders weighed down by tote bags, Ruby was on the floor. She was leaning against the couch, watching television. “Help me,” Jane said, and Ruby peeled herself up like Gumby. Together they unpacked the bags, lining everything up along the counter.

“What are we making?” Ruby asked. “I just got so hungry.”

There was nothing Jane liked to hear more. “Well,” she said, and immediately snapped to action. She pointed at cabinets, and Ruby took down whatever she needed — the mandoline, the immersion blender, cutting boards. It was Ruby’s job to peel garlic, to be the sous. They worked silently — Jane was the captain of the ship, and she knew just what had to be done. That was what she liked most about being in kitchens — people thought cooking was about making things taste good, and it was, but it was more like being a conductor, or a choreographer — there were a thousand moving parts, and you had to be aware of them all. An allergy, a birthday, how long it took mussels to open in their buttery little bath. All the information was inside her, organized and constantly recalibrating.

“Avocado,” Jane said, and Ruby cut one open the way she’d been taught, letting the knife rest on the seed and rolling the fruit around in her hand. She handed it to her mother, and Jane made a quick mash. She tore off a hunk of bread, slathered the avocado on top just as an egg began to crack and sizzle in a pan. “Bon appétit,” she said, sliding the egg out of the pan and onto the bread, drops of olive oil polka-dotting the plate.

“Thank God,” Ruby said. “I thought I was actually going to die.” She didn’t leave the kitchen, the way she usually did, squirreling her food upstairs like someone was going to steal it from her — instead she ate standing up, hunched over the counter. Jane put the rest of the groceries away and then leaned on the counter next to Ruby and ate the other half of the avocado with a spoon. When she was a baby, Ruby would eat a whole avocado every day — she’d try to eat the peel if they let her. For a few months, it seemed like her skin might actually be permanently stained green, along with most of her clothes. Zoe had loved it — she would throw her head back and laugh, so entranced by their daughter’s gusto. Jane leaned over and kissed Ruby on the cheek. “Love you, honey,” she said.

“Jeez, Mom,” Ruby said. “I already said thank you.” Some crumbs fell onto her shirt. Jane pinched Ruby on the nose and went upstairs to write more notes for Dr. Amelia.

Fifty-seven

Harry was happy that Ruby had brought Iggy Pop home — Iggy was a good cat, and his mother was waltzing him around the house like they were in a Disney cartoon — but her story was weird. She said that she was just sitting on the stoop, and then Iggy crawled out of the bushes and onto her lap. Iggy was a lover, and he would have crawled onto her lap, sure, but if he’d gotten as far as the Kahn-Bennetts’, then why wouldn’t he have just come home? Cats weren’t idiots. And neither was Harry. He knew that Ruby hadn’t been hiding the cat — he’d been in her room a hundred times, and even with all the piles of clothing everywhere, he still would have noticed his own pet. There was only one likely candidate — otherwise Ruby’s story about finding the cat would have made sense.

During the school year, it was easy to find Dust and Nico and the rest of their friends — they were always across the street from Whitman, skidding along the edge of the lowest church step on their skateboards or wrestling each other to the ground in a way that looked both playful and dangerous. That was what the girls liked about them: at Whitman, parents were everywhere — in the halls, in the audience at plays, standing along the edges of the gym during basketball games, visibly willing shots to go in — which meant that all the kids were bubble boys and girls, with no broken limbs or bruised egos. But the church-step kids had no parents. They were like kids from the 1970s, self-sufficient, with bruises and scars. Sometimes Harry was envious of them, the way their lives seemed full of empty days instead of extracurricular activities designed to boost their chances of getting into college. But most of the time, he understood that he had it better than they did, even if they probably had more fun.

Nico’s house was the first logical stop — mostly because Harry knew where it was. He waited until afternoon and then walked over, going around the block so that he didn’t have to walk by Ruby’s house, just on the off chance that she was looking out the window and might see which direction he was going and follow him. It was paranoid, but Harry was feeling paranoid, and so what? He got to Nico’s house and rang the bell. No one answered, and he rang again. Five minutes later, he was about to leave, when he finally heard some rustling around on the inside. The door slipped open a crack.

“It’s fucking early,” Nico said. He had a sheet wrapped around his shoulder like a marathon runner at the finish line.

“Not really,” Harry said. “It’s almost one.” They’d barely met when Harry came over for Nico’s party, and he couldn’t tell if Nico recognized him. Harry got the feeling that Nico would let anyone into his house, though, as long as the person was under thirty and looked like they might buy weed from him someday.

Nico squinted. “Okay,” he said. “You coming in?”

“Well, actually, I was just looking for Dust. Do you know where I could find him?” Harry peeked over Nico’s shoulder and into the living room. There were other sheet-covered lumps moving around on the floor.

Nico turned around and pointed to the couch. “Yup. I’m going back to bed now.” He propped the door open with an elbow and gestured for Harry to come in. Harry took a few sideways steps into the foyer, his eyes adjusting to the relative dark of the room.

Dust was prone on the couch, his face turned to the side like a sleeping baby’s. He was wearing only a pair of jeans, which looked neither comfortable nor cool — the room was hot, and Dust’s cheek was pink. There was a small tattoo just below his shoulder blade, a muddy-looking drawing of a lightning bolt. “Can I help you, bodyguard?”

Harry startled. “Oh, sorry, I thought you were sleeping.”

Dust rolled over and pushed himself up. There was hair on his chest, not a lot, but more than the four that Harry had. He rubbed his face with his hands. “Not anymore.” He opened his eyes wide and then felt around on the floor by his feet until he found a T-shirt. “What can I do for you? You need some tips on how to make Ruby come?” He smirked.

“Actually,” Harry said, trying to maintain his composure, “I was wondering about how exactly Ruby came to acquire my cat.”

“She told you? Man, I thought she was going to take all that glory for herself for sure. That girl loves to be the center of attention. She ever tell you how we met? She was outside school, and I was on my board, and she lay down on the sidewalk and told me that she’d only go out with me if I could jump over her. So I did.”

“No, I didn’t know that,” Harry said, sorry to have learned it. “But what about the cat? Did you have it?”

“Relax, man, I didn’t steal your stupid cat. I found it on the street, I don’t know. But I saw the posters. I can read. I was just trying to do the right thing.” Dust patted his jeans until he found his cigarettes. He held out the pack, and Harry shook his head. “Oh, right,” he said.

“Ruby’s with me now, you know,” Harry said. He didn’t mean to sound possessive. He knew that Ruby belonged to no one but herself. And he didn’t even know for sure if he was with her, really, or if he was just in the right place at the right time, filling a bored spell. He hadn’t even meant to bring up Ruby. He’d come about Iggy. Truth be told, he hadn’t thought any further than knocking on Nico’s door, and the rest was a bit of a surprise.

“Is she? I hadn’t heard.” Dust took a long drag and blew it out, smiling. “I’m just fucking with you, man. You gotta relax. Ruby Tuesday needs some head space.”

“Whatever,” Harry said. “Ruby knows what she needs. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t steal any more pets.”

“I’ll think about it,” Dust said. “Now I think I need to go back to sleep. Tell Ruby I say hello. And tell the cat I say meow.”

“His name is Iggy Pop.”

“Who is?”

“The cat.”

“I thought it was a girl.” Dust shrugged. “I was calling her Whiskers.”

“I thought you didn’t have her. Him.”

“Does anyone really have anything?” Dust closed his eyes, his cigarette still in his mouth. “See you later, bodyguard.” Two of the other lumps on the floor began to stir. One of them grabbed Harry’s ankle, and he let out a very small yelp before hustling out the front door.

Fifty-eight

The yoga classes required a certain flexibility that Ruby didn’t possess in spades, and so she’d been spending most of her snooping time in the upstairs bedrooms. At first she assumed that the whole thing was just a cover for a whorehouse — a hippie escort-service kind of thing — but by her third visit, she reluctantly admitted that it didn’t seem to be the case. Everyone at the house was earnest and open, like they’d had their senses of humor taken out and run through a car wash, which wasn’t the least bit sexy. If anything illegal was happening, it certainly wasn’t that. It occurred to Ruby that Andrew might just be getting into shape, the way people did when they realized they were going to die someday. It really didn’t seem like a major problem. Lena was nice, though, and Ruby found that she actually liked spending time with her. It was the complete opposite of how she spent time with her friends at school, where she was never sure if they were being sarcastic or not. Lena retained eye contact for a scary long time and made Ruby tea with special little sticks and twigs that were supposed to balance her qi.

They were sitting on some pillows in the upstairs lounge, which had formerly been the attic. The ceilings weren’t quite tall enough to stand under at full height, but you could sit up comfortably against the wall or just flop over onto the floor. It was kind of like being in the ball pit at a Chuck E. Cheese, only no one wore deodorant. Lena had been living at EVOLVEment for a month. She was from Rhode Island and thinking about doing her reiki training, but she wasn’t sure.

“Want to practice on me?” Ruby wasn’t sure how it worked, but most of the special treatments at EVOLVEment looked like napping with another person watching, more or less, which didn’t seem hard.

“Sure,” Lena said.

Ruby scooted down so that her head was near Lena’s lap and crossed her arms over her chest and shut her eyes tight.

“You look like a vampire,” Lena said.

“Maybe I am,” said Ruby. She opened one eye. “You’ve been warned.”

“No, seriously,” Lena said. “Lie down, arms at your sides, and try to relax. I’m just going to concentrate on your energy.”

Ruby closed her eyes again. “Okay,” she said. “Are you doing it yet? How do I know when it’s working?”

“Be quiet,” Lena said. “And it’ll work.”

Ruby tried to settle down. “How does this place make money? Is that a rude question?” She opened an eye again. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Lena said. She didn’t seem annoyed. “I’ll practice my acupressure instead.” She gently placed her thumbs on Ruby’s wrists and pressed down. “Dave is just that kind of guy, you know? Charismatic. People give donations. Some people give their time, like me, and some people give money. It’s a really good ecosystem, actually.”

“Like, rent money?” Ruby felt a twinge in her shoulder and jerked involuntarily.

“Ooh, I hit something, let’s spend some more time there,” Lena said. She moved both of her hands to Ruby’s arms and poked around until she found what she wanted and dug in. “Some people pay rent, but then there are some big investors. You know, like big money. Like to buy a house.” She moved one finger to the left, and Ruby jerked again.

“I wonder what you have to do to convince people to give you money,” Ruby said. “I want that skill.”

Lena laughed. “He used to be an actor. Dave. When he was a kid, like. Or a teenager, I guess. You’d recognize him if you saw him without his beard. He had a stage name — I don’t remember what it was. But I think that’s why. He just gets right in there with people and knows what they need to hear. It’s really an amazing talent. It’s like, if you love animals, Dave will tell you about how he wants to organize a retreat to the rain forest to look at frogs or whatever. And then you’ll give him the money to do it, and it’ll happen. Or it won’t, exactly, but maybe he brings some frogs here, you know?”

“Huh,” Ruby said. She jerked again. Whatever Lena was doing was definitely going to leave a bruise. She needed way more practice than Ruby was going to give her. Ruby wondered what kind of training was actually happening at EVOLVEment, if any of them truly knew what they were doing or if they were all taking turns being the emperor with no clothes.

“It’s really his most special talent. It’s almost like being a therapist, you know? Or like a spiritual guide. He helps people.”

“Like, helps people part with their money.”

“No, it’s not like that, it’s really different,” Lena said. “He helps people realize their potential. And if it serves EVOLVEment, even better.”

“I get it,” Ruby said. It was weird to think about other people’s parents — about your boyfriend’s parents — as dupes. It was like seeing them clip their toenails or have diarrhea. Some things you just weren’t supposed to see. Ruby had always thought of Andrew as the good kind of dad, the kind of dad she would have wanted, if she’d been forced to choose. He was sort of reserved, which Zoe said was because he grew up with too much money. He was masculine without being macho, and he looked good in a T-shirt, which wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Andrew wasn’t as bad as it came — one of her classmates’ fathers had gotten caught texting dick pics to the babysitter — but Ruby felt slightly nauseous thinking about Andrew as an actual human being. A human being who was going to be really embarrassed really soon, probably.

“And you guys all know? I mean, like, who’s giving lots of money for Dave’s projects?”

“Well, no, not everyone,” Lena said. “But I’m sleeping with him.”

“I see,” Ruby said.

“He’s a very open guy,” Lena said. “You should meet him.”

“I think I’m okay,” Ruby said. She rolled over to one side, squinting with pain. “I should probably go.”

Lena held her hands in a prayer position. “Namaste. Call me if you change your mind.”

“I will,” Ruby said, and crawled over to the stairs on her hands and knees.

Fifty-nine

Andrew was in the kitchen, and Elizabeth was in the living room. It was the middle of the day, and he was expecting to hear from Dave about some details on the Waves. The architect had sent his drawings to the city, and they were waiting on approval, but in the meantime Andrew was having his lawyers draw up some documents. Dave had been hesitant — he said he was a handshake guy — but Andrew wanted everything to be aboveboard. Dave had said he’d call or text as soon as he heard anything, and Andrew was lolling around in front of the open fridge like a teenager, neither hungry nor thirsty, just looking for something to do.

When the doorbell rang, both he and Elizabeth stayed put and stared at each other. “You’re closer,” Andrew said.

“I have a cat on me,” Elizabeth said back, her face hidden behind a magazine. Iggy was curled up on her stomach. This was their trump card, always, and he respected it.

“Fine,” Andrew said. He wandered over to the door and pulled it open, expecting to see one of the neighbors, maybe, not Zoe or Jane or Ruby, but one of the well-meaning half strangers, the ones who always wanted to tell you which day was alternate-side-of-the-street parking, even though their car was parked in the driveway. It could also be the UPS guy, or FedEx, but it was too early in the day — they were late on the route. There was always an outside chance it would be a fleet of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons of New York City.

Instead of any of these, when Andrew opened the door, he saw Lydia.

It was her face exactly — the face he remembered most precisely. Not the bleached-out punker she became, not the fashion model she tried to be, not the junkie. It was Lydia Greenbaum in all her frizzed-out glory, angry at what she’d been given and hungry for everything else. Andrew’s eyelids fluttered, and his knees softened. On the way down, he thought he saw her smile, her teeth as white as a shark’s.

• • •

When he opened his eyes again, Andrew was on the couch, lying in the spot where Elizabeth and Iggy had been so smugly undisturbable. Elizabeth’s face was inches from his own, her mouth hot and open.

“Oh, my God, Andrew, are you okay?” she was whispering, and looking around, as if for ghosts. Andrew wished he could ask which ghosts were present. Had he hallucinated? It hadn’t felt like a vision. He should ask Dave what one of those felt like, if it was different from a regular dream.

“Wow,” Andrew said. “I fainted? I don’t know. Um, I’m not really sure what happened.”

Elizabeth smiled. “I am.” She leaned over and helped him sit up. “Andrew, this is Darcey. Dead ringer, huh?”

His head was sloshy and heavy, a bucket filled with wet leaves. He blinked a few times before turning in the direction Elizabeth was looking. When he did, he was sorry he had. He should have sewn his eyelids shut and stayed down, like an animal playing dead.

She didn’t just resemble Lydia, this girl. Andrew got the whole thing immediately; it wasn’t complicated. Someone in Los Angeles had found a girl who looked so much like Lydia that the money just flew into their hands — this was how careers were made, luck and bone structure. But what those people didn’t know, what they couldn’t know, because they hadn’t known Lydia, was that this not-Lydia girl possessed the quality that was the closest to Lydia’s heart — black, black, black ambition, the darkest little lump of coal right where her actual heart should have been. That was what Andrew saw when he opened the door — Pandora, just before she opened the box. Not-Lydia knew what she was going to do to him, and she was excited about it. Andrew felt sick — the movie was going to give Lydia her due after all.

“Hey,” said not-Lydia. “Nice to meet you.”

Another woman appeared behind her, holding a glass of water. “Oh,” she said. “You’re awake. I was going to splash this on your face. I’ve always wanted to do that, haven’t you?”

Andrew looked to Elizabeth.

“That’s Naomi, the producer,” she said.

“Well, glad I woke up, then,” Andrew said. “Should I get my lawyer on the phone?”

Naomi walked around to the couch and sat down next to Andrew. “I was really hoping that wouldn’t be necessary.” She snapped her fingers at not-Lydia, who nodded and reached down into a large bag sitting by her feet.

“There better not be a stack of cash in there,” Andrew said.

“Right, because no one wants that,” Naomi said, rolling her eyes. Not-Lydia passed her a sheaf of papers. Elizabeth leaned forward to try to see what it was, but Andrew took the stack of pages and hunched over, as if he were a tightwad fifth-grader protecting his spelling test.

It was Lydia’s handwriting. Pages and pages of it — small and neat and slanted to the right, her blocky letters. Andrew saw his name over and over again. And when Andrew kissed me, I knew his mind was somewhere else, in the library even, or with stupid, boring Elizabeth…. Andrew came over again tonight, told me he thought girl drummers were sexy, and I slapped him, and he laughed, and then we fucked on the kitchen floor….

“Who has seen these?” Andrew felt his face turn pink.

“What are they? Let me see!” Elizabeth reached for the pages, and Andrew tucked them under his legs. He looked at Naomi.

“What are you trying to do here, exactly?” he asked.

“Listen, Andrew,” Naomi said, clasping her hands together. “I know you’ve been reluctant to get on board, and I just wanted to come down and try to answer some of your questions in person. Can we speak freely?” She pointed to Elizabeth.

“Let’s go outside,” Andrew said, standing up slowly.

“Are you kidding me?” Elizabeth said. “You watched me push a baby out of my vagina, and I can’t listen to your conversation with Naomi?”

“I wasn’t privy to your previous conversations, so this seems fair,” Andrew said. “Let’s go.”

Naomi shrugged. “Hang tight, Darcey.” Darcey shrugged back — Andrew found looking at her so unnerving that he quickly turned back to Naomi, who mouthed, Sorry, to Elizabeth and then flashed a megawatt grin. Andrew opened the door and held it while Naomi walked through, then let it slam behind him.

“Ditmas Park is so cozy,” she said. “It’s like the suburbs, but without leaving behind any of the grime!” She ran a finger along the porch railing and then lifted it in the air. “So authentic.”

“So, what is this?” Andrew waved the pages by his head. He was trying to breathe deeply, from his belly button, through his scapula, to his third-eye point.

“That is a very small sampling of pages from Lydia’s diary.” Naomi opened her eyes wide. “She was very detailed.”

“Yes, I can see that. My question is what you’re doing here, in my house, with these pages.” He clenched his jaw.

“And I’d like to hear your reservations about seeing her story on film. We’re not going to make her into Saint Lydia, if that’s it. Did you see Ray? Walk the Line? Those were films about complicated people. That’s what we’re doing. It’s going to be Ray meets Sid and Nancy minus the Sid, meets Coal Miner’s Daughter, only the coal miner is an orthopedic surgeon from Scarsdale.”

Andrew chuckled, despite himself.

“Listen, she loved you, and you didn’t love her, I get it. And then she becomes this superstar. And then she dies. That’s a weird situation. And now someone is going to put it all on-screen, and you feel like an asshole.”

“That’s really not the problem.” Andrew crossed his arms. There were too many problems to name just one of them. Visions of Harry watching a movie where his father slept with a dead celebrity danced in his head. Ads for Mistress of Myself would be on the radio and the television, with movie posters plastered all over the sides of buses. He didn’t want to see Lydia’s face, even if it was not-Lydia Lydia. Who would call and ask what he’s done in the last twenty years? Entertainment Tonight? He didn’t want to feel old. He didn’t want to feel like a sideman in someone else’s life story. He didn’t want his wife to hate him. He didn’t want his wife to leave him. He didn’t want his wife to think that she’d fallen into a marriage by accident, by trickery. He didn’t want to feel like a failure. He didn’t want to feel like a rich kid who’d never had to work for anything. He didn’t want to feel like he was selling out. He didn’t want to feel like Elizabeth was selling out on Lydia’s behalf. He didn’t want to feel like he’d chosen the wrong life, chosen the wrong partner. He didn’t want to sit in a dark room and watch himself make mistakes. He didn’t want any of it. “Or maybe it is, I don’t know.”

“Andrew, you’ve got a few choices here. You can dig in your heels, and make us prove that your wife signed your name, and make a lot of things difficult for a lot of people. Or you can just sign the form, and give your consent. I know the term ‘life rights’ sounds like agreeing to euthanasia, and trust me, we have our people working on that, too, the phrasing of it, but let me be clear: You are not giving us your whole life. You are giving permission for there to be a character in a movie who has some things in common with you. That’s it. He won’t have your face. He might not even have your name.”

Andrew had the brief worry that all his work at EVOLVEment was making his insides visible on the outside of his body, a giant flashing neon sign.

“So those are my options? Fight or roll over?” It was a hot day, and his upper lip was slick with sweat.

“We have very, very good lawyers. I know you have tons of money, and so you probably have a good lawyer, too, but ours are pretty much rock stars.”

Andrew twitched.

“Bad choice of words. They’re the best, is what I’m saying. I’m sure that we can all come to an agreement. You just need to accept that it’s going to happen. It’s a movie. It’ll come out, and then it’ll go away. That’s how it goes.”

“So you came here to tell me that I have no choice.”

Naomi rolled her neck around, producing spectacular cracking noises. “Well, kind of. I mean, you have choices, but it’s sort of like when you go to the dentist. You can choose to bite them, and to grit your teeth, but that’s just going to make it take longer. I’m just here to tell you to open up and say ahhhh. You might even enjoy it.”

“The dentist?”

“The movie. In my experience, people often enjoy seeing versions of their lives on-screen. It doesn’t happen to everyone, you know.”

All of a sudden, Andrew heard “Mistress of Myself” begin to play, a tinny, canned version.

“Oh, that’s my phone,” Naomi said, and reached into her back pocket.

“You’re kidding,” Andrew said.

“Hang on,” Naomi said, answering and then skipping down the porch steps to the sidewalk. In Andrew’s head the song kept playing, a shitty karaoke version of his life. He closed his eyes and imagined an ocean wave crashing over him and pulling him out to sea.

Sixty

Darcey was smiling politely, but Elizabeth could tell that she was doing something else — research, maybe. She was wearing a black tank top and cutoff shorts. She was thinner than Lydia had been at Oberlin, but that was the magic of the movies, the removal of cellulite and blemishes. Elizabeth leaned back and looked out the window. She missed actual Lydia’s sturdiness, the prickly hair on her legs.

“What was that?” Naomi was facing the street, and Elizabeth couldn’t see her face. Andrew looked pissed off, but then he laughed. She wasn’t sure.

“Oh,” Darcey said. She reached back into the bag at her feet. “Copies of this.” She pulled out a marbled notebook and handed it to Elizabeth. “You should really meet my friend Georgia, the one who plays you. You really look like you could be her mom — it’s, like, perfect. She’s so uptight, and I’m always the one who’s, like, let’s go run around naked! It’s hilarious.” Darcey wiggled back and forth. “Hilarious.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth said. She opened the notebook gently. Lydia’s handwriting was distinctive — the product of a carefully crafted personality. That was probably under “traits of narcissists” in the DSM. “I feel guilty, but I probably shouldn’t, right?”

Darcey nodded. “That’s just what Georgia would say. As you, I mean. Classic victim stuff.”

“Excuse me?” Elizabeth said, but then she began to read, and she understood.

She’d never been a jealous girlfriend. That was for other people, insecure people. Elizabeth had always felt as solid as a tree trunk. When she was heavily pregnant with Harry, at her last ob-gyn visit, her doctor had pronounced the baby enormous, but then when Elizabeth had slid ungracefully off the paper-lined table, he had looked at her hips and said, Oh, you’ll be fine. She hadn’t been wounded. Zoe would have cried. Lydia would have burned the place to the ground. But Elizabeth had thought, Yes, I will. She wasn’t a saint, of course — Elizabeth had always been jealous of Zoe, and other girls too, high-school friends, or other young mothers she’d had tea dates with when Harry was small. But she’d never been a jealous girlfriend. It was a psychological math problem: Twenty years later, was she angry? She thought about the restaurant, about Lydia’s snuggling against Andrew’s chest, the way Lydia had always looked at her with crocodile eyes. Yes, she was angry.

“Excuse me,” Elizabeth said. She stood up and straightened out her skirt. Darcey pulled out her phone and started texting, probably writing to Georgia to describe whatever she felt had just occurred. Elizabeth herself wasn’t sure. She walked slowly to the door and opened it. Andrew was sitting on the porch with his eyes closed. Naomi was halfway down the block, laughing loudly into her cell phone.

“Andrew?” Elizabeth said.

He opened his eyes and looked at the notebook in her hand. “Fuck,” he said.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “That seems to be the problem.”

“What did you read?” Andrew shoved his fingers into his mouth and began to chew.

“Does it really matter? She’s not making it up, right? You were sleeping together?” Elizabeth heard her own voice getting louder at a somewhat alarming rate, like a fire-engine siren. The neighbors would hear. She couldn’t help it. In her whole childhood, she had never heard her parents speak loudly to each other, and during Harry’s entire childhood, she had only yelled when he was about to jump off something he shouldn’t, or lick an electrical outlet. She didn’t shout. And yet her voice was getting so loud that her ears began to ring.

“It only happened a few times. Half a dozen, maybe. Lizzy, it was a lifetime ago.” Andrew started to walk toward her, but Elizabeth put her palms up, a traffic light. A few aggressive bees circled Andrew’s head, and he swatted them away. Elizabeth wished they would all sting him simultaneously.

“You were never going to tell me, obviously.” Elizabeth kept her hands out.

Andrew shook his head. “I didn’t think it mattered. I mean, at the time. We weren’t even married yet. Doesn’t that make a difference?”

“Oh, yes, I think it does. I think it does make a difference that I married you without knowing that you’d been cheating on me. Don’t you think that might have affected my decision to do so? I’m not saying I expected you to be a virgin, but come on, Andrew.” Elizabeth heard something inside and turned toward the window — Darcey was leaning against the window, her ear to the glass. She waved. “Jesus!” Elizabeth said. “She’s everywhere!”

“I was going to tell you.” Andrew crossed his arms over his chest.

“You just said that you weren’t!” Elizabeth’s voice went up several octaves — if she’d known that her voice could do that, Kitty’s Mustache would have been a better band. Across the street one of their nosiest neighbors, a tall woman with a German shepherd, turned to look and gave a half wave. Good luck ever selling her house, Elizabeth thought.

“Back then I wasn’t. But with the movie and all this.” He gestured toward Darcey, still a little goblin in the window. “I was pretty sure I would have to. Can’t say I was looking forward to it, but I will say I did not imagine it going quite this badly.”

Elizabeth felt like she had a hair ball stuck in her throat, and hacked up a cough. “I’m so sorry for your experience.”

“Come on, Lizzy,” Andrew said, but even he didn’t sound convinced.

“You know what, honey?” Elizabeth tried to speak in her mother’s voice — even and cool—“Why don’t you go on over to your yoga teacher’s house tonight? They have beds over there, don’t they?” She laughed. “Of course they do, what am I saying! With girls in them! Go and sleep over there tonight, will you? Because I don’t want to look at your face.” The coolness had evaporated quickly, leaving behind red cheeks and eyes filled with tears. She spun around and knocked on the window, startling Darcey. “And you!” Elizabeth said, through the glass. “Out!”

Darcey put a demure hand to her chest: Moi? Elizabeth yowled, and then Darcey quickly scrambled to the door. “Can I have the diary back?” she asked on her way out. Elizabeth gave her a look. “It’s really important to my process.”

“Have Naomi come get it later,” Elizabeth said. “Now, out, all of you.” She swiped some hair off her forehead, where it had begun to stick in stringy bits, and tucked it behind her ear. “I’m going to take a shower. When I’m done, I want all of you gone.” She could still hear Naomi’s throaty laugh echoing down the sidewalk. “Her, too,” Elizabeth said. She went inside and slammed the door, nearly catching Iggy’s tail. She wanted to call someone, but couldn’t think of who to call, and so she went straight upstairs and into the bathroom. The bathtub was a mess — it looked as if Harry had used every towel on the rack and then strewn them everywhere, as if he were trying to mop up blood at a crime scene, but Elizabeth didn’t care. She climbed over the damp mountain of towels, turned on the cold water, and then got in with her clothes on.

Sixty-one

Having sex again was better than going to Barneys and trying on expensive dresses. It was better than getting a facial by her favorite Eastern European sadist. It was better than fresh ricotta on toast. Zoe felt like she was twenty-five. Maybe thirty-five. Either way, she felt young and flushed with blood. Sweaty Brooklyn August didn’t bother her the way it usually did, but on a whim, she booked two nights at an Airbnb in Montauk. She left forty bucks on the kitchen counter for Ruby to order dinner. It was a Wednesday. The restaurant had weeks more work, at least, and she and Jane had been there every day, supervising. A little break sounded good. Zoe tucked a few vibrators in the bottom of her bag, and then they were driving down the LIE, holding hands.

The rental was a shacky little house just off Ditch Plains, where the cute surfers and their admirers hung out. All the kids had bare feet and sandy blond highlights in their hair, and Zoe wanted to swallow them whole. She’d loved growing up near the beach, and always felt sad that even though New York was on the coast, it just wasn’t the same. Ruby and her friends never cut school to go surfing or have bonfires on the sand. Zoe held Jane’s hand, and they walked up and down the beach, stooping over to pick up pretty little shells, tossing them back into the ocean when they were cracked.

“How’s your homework going?” Zoe asked. She hadn’t been keeping the diary for Dr. Amelia, not on paper. It seemed antithetical to their kind of marriage, which had always been about passion and taste. Zoe had never liked busywork, and that’s what this felt like — in reality, all she and Jane had to do was resolve their shit. Yes or no! In or out! How on earth was a shopping list of their problems supposed to help answer that question?

“I kind of like it,” Jane said. Sweet Jane. Before Zoe knew for sure that she was a lesbian, when she was still just a kid fumbling around with other kids’ bodies in their teenage bedrooms, several of the boys she’d romanced had looked more or less like Jane — tall, with fair hair and skin tan from the sunshine. Indoors, at night, their sweet little fish bellies would bump together in the dark. It had been such a relief when she slept with her first girl and suddenly all those little bumps were moving in the right direction. It wasn’t that way for everyone, of course — Zoe knew lots of women who were truly bi, but she just wasn’t. She loved bodies, and beauty, but just because she thought Brad Pitt had a lovely face, that didn’t mean she wanted to sit on it.

Zoe’s phone began to trill. “Hang on,” she said, and pulled it out of her pocket. Elizabeth. She pushed IGNORE and put it back in her pocket, but the phone began to ring again immediately. “She probably hit it again by mistake,” Zoe said, but the phone rang again, and Jane shrugged, so Zoe answered. “What’s up?” she said, plugging her finger in her other ear to block out the sound of the waves. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s going on? Are you okay? Slow down, I can barely hear you.” Jane waved her up the beach, where she could hear better, and then turned and walked down to the edge of the water. She slipped off her shoes and let the tiny waves slosh over her feet.

“Start again, I can hear better,” Zoe said.

On the other end, Elizabeth took a big gulp of air and then launched into Darcey and Naomi and Lydia and Andrew and fake Lydia peeking through the window at her while she yelled at her husband. Elizabeth sobbed through it, taking little breaks to blow her nose. Zoe wanted to say, I KNEW IT. Just in general, as a rule, she had known that something was happening between Andrew and Lydia and also that Andrew was kind of an asshole, but that wouldn’t have helped. “Oh, honey,” she said instead. It had been a long time since Elizabeth had called her like this, in a panic that had nothing to do with a weird rash on Harry’s butt or how to register for summer camp. Then again, it had been a long time since anything had seemed so urgent at all. Urgency was for younger people, for teenagers and dramatic twenty-somethings, for young hypochondriac parents. When you got older, urgency was for hearing that your parents had fallen ill, and you needed to book a flight as quickly as possible without maxing out your credit card. In between, things were sort of calm, running on autopilot. The kids were in school. The marriage was what it was. Everything was more or less fine.

Jane was facing the water. Her body bowed out slightly over the tops of her pants, as if in a sigh. Exercise was not something Jane had ever been interested in — no running, no team sports, no yoga. It all bored her. She’d probably have a heart attack when she was sixty, but Zoe could imagine even that as something of a joke, the two of them in a hospital room, and Jane telling Zoe all about which nurses were in love with her. They’d hold hands under the starched sheets and the paper gowns and look out the window at the city.

Elizabeth was still talking. Her voice was herky-jerky, and it sounded like she was banging around in her kitchen — there was the noise of doors opening and closing. At one point Zoe heard the toilet flush.

“Are you okay? Where is Andrew now?” Zoe waved to Jane, snapping her fingers to try to get her attention. The wind carried the tiny sound away.

It wasn’t clear if Elizabeth was slurring her words, or if it was just all the snot.

“Are you drinking?” It was just past noon. The sobs turned into whimpers, which Zoe took as a yes. It was like trying to have a telephone conversation with a Chihuahua. “Listen,” she said, “Jane is probably going to kill me for saying this, but why don’t you come out here? Just get on the train, we’ll pick you up at the station. You’ll be here by dinner. We’ll eat mussels and talk about what the fuck we’re going to do to your husband, okay? Come out. I’ll text you the info, okay? Okay?” Elizabeth agreed quietly, and after she hung up the phone, Zoe looked up to see that Jane had walked several yards farther down the beach. She didn’t have her shoes, or a wallet, or keys — everything was in Zoe’s purse. Marriage was about trust, and kindness. She and Jane were in a funny spot, or maybe they were just coming out of one, and wounds were still tender, but Elizabeth’s voice had made clear that things were worse next door. People didn’t take turns having difficult moments; they came all together, like rainstorms and puddles. Zoe could invite Elizabeth — could explain this all to Jane — because she knew that the sky over their heads was clearing up, and the clouds were still heavy and dark over her friend.

Sixty-two

Andrew didn’t like being told what to do, but he knew enough to get out of Elizabeth’s way when she was breathing fire. In their entire marriage, it had happened only a handful of times: when her younger brother had crashed his car into a tree, stone drunk, and walked away with a scratch; when Andrew had accidentally bought lobster rolls for a friend of Harry’s who was allergic to seafood. (The boy was fine. Covered in welts, but fine.) He walked over to EVOLVEment with his shoulders slumped forward, willing everyone in the neighborhood to leave him alone, and they did — the wrinkled old ladies sitting in front of the library, the people walking their dogs — everyone Andrew normally would have greeted with a wave and a smile, they all got nothing.

There was a yoga class in session when he walked into EVOLVEment, and so he entered the house as quietly as possible, slipping his shoes off just inside the front door. Salome winked at him from her spot by the altar and then pointed upstairs. Andrew climbed over people’s backs — there were new people all the time, the classes were full — and tiptoed up the stairs.

Dave usually used the bedroom at the far end of the second floor, an almost empty room with a few cinder-block shelves holding up his sacred texts — the Bhagavad Gita, some Pema Chödrön, some Sharon Salzberg, The Artist’s Way, several books about medicinal plants, plus Meditation for Dummies, which Andrew thought showed that Dave had a sense of humor, probably rare in a guru. Humble, even. Being in the house made him begin to calm down a little bit, and he thought about how he would describe his fight with Elizabeth to Dave. You know, he’d say, it’s kind of a funny story. And he’d tell him about Lydia and about being young, and Dave would nod along, maybe stroke his beard, understanding everything perfectly. Andrew started to laugh to himself, just thinking about it. It wasn’t that big of a deal, what had happened with him and Lydia. The ice block of the secret had already started to melt. Elizabeth would probably get over it soon — it was ancient news that had no bearing on their future. Andrew rolled his shoulders around as he walked down the hall. He cleared his throat and knocked on Dave’s bedroom door.

“Just a minute,” Dave said. Andrew drummed his thumbs together. The door opened, and two young women came out, their otherwise naked bodies wrapped in sheets. Through the doorway, Andrew could see Dave’s bare butt. He was standing up, facing the window. It overlooked the back of the house, which meant that no one walking by would be able to see him, but there were no curtains, and this was still Brooklyn, so the odds of someone in a neighboring house seeing his junk were extremely high. When Dave turned around to face Andrew, he was still erect, and his penis swung toward Andrew as if it, too, were saying hello.

“Oh, sorry, man,” Andrew said, closing his eyes before turning away. “I can come back.” Then he felt like he was being too prudish, and swiveled his body back toward Dave.

Dave put his hands on his hips and looked down at himself lovingly. “No reason to cover up. It’s pretty as a picture!” He laughed and bent over to scoop up a pair of shorts off the floor.

Andrew was about to open his mouth and begin his rehearsed tale of marital woe, but Dave started talking before he could get out the first word.

“Listen, man, I’m glad you’re here. Got some news this morning. From the city. It’s a no go.” Dave stretched his arms overhead and leaned to his left, his thick body a taut rubber band.

“What’s a no go?” Andrew crossed his arms.

“The city denied the rezoning. No hotel, at least not there. It’s cool — I was starting to get some pretty dark vibes from the neighbors, so I think somebody probably ratted on us, you know? People can be so negative.” Dave stretched the other way.

“Okay, well, that sucks.” Andrew heard his stomach churn and bubble. He put a hand flat against his belly. “What happens now?”

“We look for a new location. The plans will roll over — we’ll have to get new drawings, of course, but the vision remains the same. We just need to find a new slice of property. These things happen.” Dave straightened up and clapped Andrew on the biceps. “It’s all a part of the process. Worst-case scenario, we have to raise a little more money, maybe start looking more on Long Island or up in the Hudson Valley. There’s a lot of land out there, you know? Just waiting.”

“But wasn’t part of the idea to revitalize the Rockaways? To bring in business? I have the papers from my lawyers, too,” Andrew said, and then he suddenly felt a jab in his lower intestine. “I’ll be right back.” He walked quickly to the bathroom in the hall, where there were two young women dawdling outside, not the ones wrapped in sheets — there was an endless supply of twenty-three-year-olds at EVOLVEment, and the fact of their youth shoved Andrew in the gut even harder. “Excuse me,” he said, and locked the door behind himself, just barely making it to the toilet before his insides commenced their immediate evacuation. He heard the women outside giggle and hurry away, and he let his head fall into his hands.

Andrew’s phone buzzed, and he dug it out of his pocket, baggy by his thighs. A text from Elizabeth: GOING TO STAY WITH ZOE AND JANE IN MONTAUK FOR THE NIGHT. YOU MAY GO HOME IF YOU LIKE. FEED HARRY. A bubble appeared with three dots — she was typing more — but then disappeared. He gave it a few more minutes, but clearly she was done. It wasn’t like Elizabeth to drop out like that — that had always been his final move, the melodramatic walkout. Andrew flushed twice and washed his hands. He wanted to deserve his wife. He wanted to deserve his beautiful boy. He wanted to trust that their marriage was strong enough to vanquish old dragons. Didn’t everyone secretly think that, that their tiny rowboat was somehow sturdy enough to sail the entire ocean?

When he opened the door to the bathroom, one of the sheeted young women who had ducked out of Dave’s bed was standing across the hallway, leaning against the wall. She had gotten dressed, barely, and Andrew felt like a lech for even noticing.

“I’m Lena. You’re Andrew?” She stuck out her hand, and Andrew offered an awkward fist bump in return.

“My hands are wet,” he said.

“It’s okay,” Lena said. She had curly hair and a mole on her cheek. “You know Ruby, right?”

“Ruby Kahn-Bennett?” Andrew had a brief panic that this Lena girl went to Whitman with Harry.

“I thought so. She’s been here some, and she was asking some questions. I think she’s worried about you.”

“Worried about me? Ruby?” Andrew ran his hands through his hair. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Dave appeared in the doorway, still half naked. “You two met! I love it. Andrew, Lena does the best reiki in the house. You should try her — magic hands, seriously. You want to head downstairs and grab a kombucha and we’ll talk?”

Lena looked at Andrew with tight eyes, and he thought he saw her shake her head, just the tiniest fraction of a movement, before turning toward Dave and smiling with all her teeth.

“You know, I was just stopping by to say hi,” Andrew said. “I’ll come back later, cool?”

“Cool, cool,” Dave said. He flashed a peace sign. “Lena, can you come work on my neck?” He winked at Andrew and went back into his room. Lena followed quickly without another word.

Sixty-three

Harry liked the idea of a grand gesture. It had worked so far. Since the fire, he and Ruby had been together almost every night. All four of their parents were on Mars. Zoe and Jane were locked in their room, or cuddled up on the couch, or laughing in the kitchen, and they didn’t seem to notice or mind that Harry darted up the stairs every night. His dad was acting the same way he’d acted the summer that Harry was nine, when he’d gone upstate to “wander around in the woods,” as his mother put it. He’d come home with a shaved head and a tan and a small tattoo on his calf of the number 8, which he said was for infinity and also because Harry’s birthday was on the eighth of October. Elizabeth was the worst of all — it seemed like she’d mostly stopped going to work and also washing her hair. When Harry tried to talk to her about it, she got this look on her face like she was trying to look cheerful when really she just looked like an ax murderer. Harry wanted to help, but he also just wanted to spend as much time as possible with Ruby, Ruby, Ruby.

She was the one who’d mentioned a ring. It wasn’t exactly in context — they were watching The Bachelor, and the bachelor in question was picking out rings for his two potential brides, a dental hygienist named Kimberly and a medical assistant named Kenderly, and all the rings on display were so gigantic they could be seen from space. They didn’t look like diamonds, they looked like small drinking glasses turned upside down. Ruby had stuck out her tongue and blown a raspberry. “Barf,” she’d said. “I want the opposite of that. A black diamond. A tiny black diamond. Like a poppy seed. Something that no one else could see unless I stuck it right in their eyeball. Who is that even for? How do you live your life with something like that on your finger? Do they wash dishes? Do they wake up with weird scratch marks all over their body? It just seems dangerous, you know? Not to mention a giant waste of money that young couples have been tricked into spending by the patriarchy of advertising.”

So Harry was looking for a poppy seed. There was one sort of crafty place in Park Slope that sold jewelry. His mother had dragged him there a few times after school, when she needed to buy a present for someone, and that was the only place Harry could think of. It didn’t seem exactly like Ruby’s taste, but he’d spent a few hours scrolling through rings on Etsy, and that seemed even worse. How could he describe how big he thought her fingers were? He couldn’t. So he took the train to the Slope and walked down Fifth Avenue until he found the place. Something buzzed when he walked in the door, which made him immediately start to turn around, but the young woman behind the counter was already smiling and waving, and so he was stuck.

“Can I help you find anything?” The woman had dark hair and heavy bangs and an extra-large stud in her nose.

“I’m looking for a ring. For my friend. She wants something little and black. Do you have anything like that? Her finger is sort of medium-sized, I think. Kind of long and bigger than mine by a little.” He held up his hand. “But I don’t know which finger I’m supposed to be talking about, really, so I guess it depends.”

The woman sucked in her lips and nodded. “I think I have a few things that you might like. What’s your price range?”

Harry hadn’t thought about the money. He had his parents’ credit card, which is what he planned to use. It wasn’t exactly kosher, but both his mother and father had forgotten all about him all summer long, and so he didn’t think they’d notice one small charge on their card, especially since it was a place he knew his mother liked. He wasn’t at Tiffany’s. He wasn’t in the city, somewhere fancy. “A hundred?” Harry said. “I’m not really sure.”

The woman reached down and slid open a case. She plucked out a few rings and set them on a square velvet pillow on the counter. One had a little green stone, one had a pink stone, and one was dark red, like a tiny drop of blood.

“You don’t have anything black?”

“We have one,” the woman said, “but I think it might be on the expensive side.” She cocked her head to one side and gave him a look. “Is this for your girlfriend?”

Harry coughed into his hand, trying to hide his proud blush. “Yeah.”

She held up a finger and walked over to another counter. She came back with the ring slung loosely around her pinkie and held it up in front of Harry’s face before she let it slide onto the pillow.

The ring was perfect — a thin gold band that looked like a woodpecker had hammered it, with a million little holes and notches, and a small black pebble on top. It was bigger than a poppy seed but smaller than a watermelon seed, and perfectly flat. “It’s two hundred ninety-five dollars,” the woman said. “I guess it depends how serious you are.”

Harry picked up the ring and put it on his middle finger. It slid down to the knuckle. If that was a challenge, she didn’t know who she was messing with.

“I’ll take it,” he said, and slapped his mother’s credit card on the counter.

Sixty-four

It was officially the most horrible time of the summer, when everyone was starting to come back, unpack, do laundry, repack, and go to school, all while noisily updating social media with pictures of everybody hugging each other and their stupid siblings and their stupid dogs. Ruby had been dreading the end of August ever since graduation. When her entire class was off in the Hamptons or the Berkshires, it was gloriously easy to pretend that her life was still perfectly on track, and that nothing had gone disastrously wrong. But soon it would be September, the first September in twelve years (fifteen, counting preschool) that Ruby hadn’t gone back to school, and she wasn’t exactly feeling great about it.

That morning, she had woken up from a sex dream. In it, she and Harry had been at the beach, their beach, only it was completely abandoned, and it was only after Ruby realized that her body was covered in goose bumps that she noticed it was winter and there were huge mounds of snow all around them. She and Harry were kissing, and then they were doing it, and then he was on top of her, but instead of Harry, it was Dust. Harry/Dust opened his mouth and said, in a perfect Harry/Dust voice, “It’s just you and me next year.” And that was so horrifying that Ruby sat up in bed and was awake for good at seven a.m., which was practically a crime in and of itself on a summer morning.

Her phone had been blowing up all night — she almost didn’t want to look at it, but she had to, because she was a glutton for punishment. There were six texts from six different friends, plus group texts — Chloe was inviting her to Bridgehampton for one last slumber party, Anika wanted to go do karaoke in Chinatown, Sully was going vintage shopping on Saturday, and did she want to come? All summer, they’d been off having adventures, and they wanted to squeeze as much of high school as possible into their last five minutes in the city. Ruby didn’t want to get squeezed.

A new text came in — Sarah Dinnerstein: MEET ME IN THE PARK? HAVE A JOINT. Ruby imagined the whole scene: she’d meet Sarah, they’d smoke the joint, and then Ruby would punch her in the face. For Hyacinth. For her moms. It sounded like a pretty good way to spend the afternoon. They made plans to meet by the dog beach and then walk together to the hidden spot behind the natural playground, which was always empty except for sometimes when old men with radios would sit and listen to baseball games.

The walk to the park was sticky — Ruby was wearing as little as possible, but by the end of the summer in New York, you could be naked and still feel overdressed. She should have put on sunscreen; she should have worn a hat. By the time Ruby got to the dog beach, Sarah was waiting, in one of her countless hippie-dippie dresses that showed off her boobs, which weren’t even that impressive.

“Hey,” Ruby said.

“Hey-o,” Sarah said, opening her arms wide for a hug. Ruby could smell the patchouli before they were even five feet apart.

“You know,” she said, stopping just before Sarah’s arms could reach her, “I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”

“Is this about Dust? I’m so glad we’re talking about it. Because he told me that you knew, but then I thought he was bullshitting, and I really didn’t want to leave for school with, like, unfinished business between us, you know?” Sarah put on her concerned face, which looked like the love child of a Gremlin and a pug, squashed nostrils pointing in the wrong direction.

“Fine, whatever, let’s walk,” Ruby said, turning on her heel and walking down the hill into the woods. If she were going to college, if she were leaving New York, Prospect Park would be the thing she’d miss the most. Unlike Central Park, where you could always see identifiable buildings and therefore know exactly where you were in space, Prospect Park felt like the wilderness, filled with dark paths and secret corners. Whenever she came to the park with her moms when she was little, Ruby loved to scare them by running away and hiding behind trees, just off the path but tucked out of sight. Bingo would always find her first, but for a few minutes Ruby could pretend that she lived in a magical forest and that her mothers were witches or fairies and that she alone could save the world.

“I never come here,” Sarah said. “There are too many crackheads. And yuppies. Both.” Ruby didn’t even respond. Sarah lit the joint, and they walked a little bit more slowly, curving by a small waterfall and then turning deeper into the wilderness. “I heard that there’s a really big cruising spot right here. For gay sex.” Ruby raised an eyebrow. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, obviously, I’m just saying, that’s what I heard.”

“I’m not the gay police,” Ruby said, taking the joint out of Sarah’s hand.

They got to the main road, and Ruby tucked the joint into her hand. The coast was clear, and they walked through the playground, which was empty. The hidden spot was empty, too, except for an old guy in a tank top doing half push-ups on a bench, but he wouldn’t bother them. That was another thing Ruby would miss about New York, if she were leaving: she’d miss how much space people gave you. You could have a fucking sobbing fit on the subway and no one would mess with you. You could barf in a garbage can on the street corner and no one would mess with you. If you were giving off invisible vibes, people respected that. People thought New Yorkers were rude, but really they were just leaving you to your own stuff. It was respectful! In a city with so many people, a New Yorker would always pretend not to see you when you didn’t want to be seen.

“So, he told you?” Sarah said, once they were sitting on a bench in the shade.

“He didn’t have to tell me. It’s pretty obvious that you guys are together.” Ruby passed the roach back to Sarah and pulled a cigarette out of her bag.

“Oh,” Sarah said. “No, I mean, we are, but I meant about your parents’ place.” She clipped the roach and held it still until it had cooled down, and then tucked it into her little crocheted weed necklace. “About the fire.”

“He told me that you did it by accident, basically on purpose. That’s what he told me.” Ruby stared at Sarah, whose eyes were streaked with red, like little peppermints.

Sarah giggled. “Are you serious? Then why would you come and meet me? Jeez, Ruby! Are you going to kick my ass?”

“I was thinking about it,” Ruby said. She crossed her arms, but then she couldn’t smoke, so she uncrossed them again and just cracked her knuckles instead.

“Oh, my God, Ruby, no!” Sarah waved her hands like they were stuck on a deserted island and she was trying to signal a passing airplane. “It was Dust! That’s what I was trying to talk to you about! Dust totally set the fire! I was right there. We were in the little alley, you know, behind Nico’s house, and behind Hyacinth, and Dust was all, ‘Let’s go down here and see if we can get into the kitchen, I want some of that cheese’—what’s that cheese you guys have?”

“Mozzarella?”

“No, the fancy kind, on the sandwich with the eggs and the cucumbers? It’s like cream cheese, only sort of sour? Anyway, he was like, ‘Let’s see if we can sneak in there after Ruby closes,’ which, I grant you, would have been a fucked-up thing to do anyway, but it probably wouldn’t even have happened. Anyway, so we get to the fence, and we could see the people leaving, and you and the other guys cleaning up, and then I look at Dust, and he’s got this little wad of newspaper and his lighter, and he’s trying to light the fence. I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ and he was like, ‘Sarah, this doesn’t concern you,’ and I was like, ‘Hell yes it does, if you go to jail for setting something on fire, because obviously I’m the one who’s going to have to hire a lawyer, you know?’ And so I went back into Nico’s house, and then a little while later Dust came back in, and then we all heard the sirens, and I was like, ‘Shit.’”

“He told me that you set it by accident, with some candles.” Ruby couldn’t tell if the fogginess in her head was the weed or what Sarah was telling her. “But you’re saying that Dust did it? Actually on purpose?”

Sarah giggled again. “I know it’s not funny, but seriously, Ruby, you are way, way weirder than I thought. How many times do I need to say it? Dust set the fire. On purpose.”

“And he’s your boyfriend.” Ruby knew she sounded like a moron, but her brain wouldn’t make better sentences. She felt like she was trying to talk with her mouth full of cotton candy.

“It’s pretty serious,” Sarah said, happy to switch topics of conversation. “We’ve been talking about moving in together, up at school. He could get a job, maybe audit some classes. Dust wants to be an architect, did you know that? He’s got all these models at his house, little things he’s built. He’s really good.”

“You’ve been to his house?” This was the twilight zone. It must be the weed. Sarah was probably saying something completely different. Maybe Ruby was still asleep! That must be it.

Sarah looked offended. “Of course I’ve been to his house. I’m his girlfriend.” She narrowed her already beady eyes at Ruby. “You never went to his house?”

“What makes you think that I’m not going to call the police?” Ruby was flushed, and sweating. She piled her hair up on top of her head and stuck it there with a big plastic clip. The old guy was peeling off his tank top and laying it over the back of the bench. He dropped to his knees and started doing crunches, squeezing his wrinkled brown belly together over and over again.

“I would, if I were you.” Sarah shrugged. “I mean, obviously, I don’t think you should, because I don’t want him to get into trouble, but I think that if I were you, I totally would. It’s up to you. We’ll be gone soon, you know? Like, who would it help? He’s not going to set your house on fire. He’s not even going to be here.”

“Even Dust isn’t going to be here,” Ruby said, more to herself than to Sarah. She took a long drag of her cigarette and then let it drop to the ground. “Fuck it,” she said. “Fuck it all.” Ruby stood up and walked away without saying good-bye. Behind her, she heard Sarah start to sing some Bob Marley, and so Ruby jogged until she was out of earshot and out of breath.

Sixty-five

Elizabeth arrived at the Montauk station with nothing but a prickly straw hat, a bottle of wine she’d plucked out of the fridge, a toothbrush, a bathing suit, and a clean pair of underwear, all of which were jammed into a tote bag on her shoulder. The hat had been scratching her arm since the Atlantic Terminal station, but the train was crowded, and there was nothing to be done. Add one more wound to the pile. The train car was full of frat boys and other summertime revelers at full tilt, and so Elizabeth decided to stay seated until they’d all stumbled off. She wasn’t in a rush. The invitation had barely been real — she knew that. But she also knew that she needed to get out of the city, and that Zoe was her friend, and if Jane didn’t like it, well, tough. She’d had two glasses of wine at home and another two on the train, which was way more than she ever drank, especially during the day. Even though the train had stopped moving, it still seemed to be swaying slightly, and when the rest of the car was empty, Elizabeth clutched the back of her seat and stood up, knocking her forehead on the baggage rack overhead.

The Kahn-Bennett Subaru was waiting, just as Zoe had promised. Elizabeth waved and squinted, trying to make out who was inside, and hurried as quickly as she could, though her flip-flops kept sliding off, and then she’d have to chase them a bit. When she finally made it to the car, it was only Zoe.

“You okay?” Zoe asked. She looked great — summer was her season. Her skin was clear and glowing like bronze, and her hair was pushed off her face with a colorful scarf. Bingo poked his head out of the backseat, and Elizabeth leaned over and let him lick her on the nose.

“I’m pretty much not great,” Elizabeth said. She pulled the bottle of wine out of her bag and handed it to Zoe.

“Let’s go back to the house before we open this, okay? I don’t think a DUI is going to help any of us.”

Elizabeth puffed out her lower lip and turned toward the window. “It’s just been a weird summer. And there was no toilet paper on the train.”

Zoe murmured her disappointment with LIRR and then didn’t say anything for the rest of the ride, but held out her hand for Elizabeth to hold in the center well, above the cup holders.

• • •

The rental house was small but cute. An easy sell. It had one bedroom and a pullout sofa, which either Zoe or Jane had already pulled out, and a small kitchen/dining room. It smelled like salt, and there was sand underfoot. Jane was grilling something outside on the deck when they walked in, and Zoe slipped the tote bag off Elizabeth’s shoulder and set it down on the floor.

“We’re back!” Zoe called, even though the sliding door to the deck was open and there was no way that Jane could have missed their entrance. “She’ll be fine,” Zoe said, and patted Elizabeth on the arm.

“Is something wrong?” Elizabeth asked, steadying herself on the kitchen counter. The wine sloshed in her stomach. She should have eaten lunch. She shouldn’t have had so much to drink. She should have stayed home.

It was so pretty out at the very end of the island — Elizabeth always forgot that. It was an occupational hazard, sizing up real estate. Montauk was a decade behind the Hamptons, but ahead of the North Fork. The houses were small, and most of them were a short drive away from the main street, which, after all, didn’t have that much. But who was Elizabeth kidding? She didn’t care about selling beach houses to the party animals she’d been on the train with, or to their calmer older brothers with wives and toddlers. Brooklyn was bad enough. She didn’t need to deal with people who had so much disposable income that they were buying a second house.

“I think I need to sit down,” she said, and then collapsed onto the pullout sofa, leaning against the foam backrest with her legs extended in front of her.

“Me too,” Zoe said. “But hang on.” She walked around the sofa bed and out onto the deck. Elizabeth watched as Zoe put her arm on Jane’s back and then rested her head on Jane’s shoulder. They were facing away, pointed toward the wild grass and, somewhere in the distance, the ocean. It was impossible to tell if they were talking, but they didn’t move for a few minutes, except when Jane picked up her tongs and flipped something over on the grill.

It was a pretty night — there was a steady breeze, and the sky was washed with pink. Elizabeth wished that she and Andrew had a place like this, a modest hut somewhere in the country — why hadn’t they ever done that? All their vacation time had always seemed so precious, especially after Harry was born — his day camps and art classes, his creative-movement classes in Prospect Park, where the children just rolled around in the grass at a coordinated time every week for two hundred dollars. In theory they were free to go wherever they liked, and they had traveled some — a trip to Mexico when Harry was eight that horrified Andrew’s parents, a drive up the California coast wherein they learned that Harry got carsick when there were lots of turns, and so they drove on the highway instead, getting to San Francisco four days earlier than planned. One trip to Italy. It was scattershot, random. Elizabeth had gone to the same girls’ summer camp every summer of her life, then Cape Cod for August, and she’d wanted to give Harry more adventures. But instead they’d just stayed home, with views of Argyle Road and the Q train rumbling in the distance.

Zoe kissed Jane on the cheek, and then Jane turned around to wave at Elizabeth. It was all going to be fine. Elizabeth raised an invisible glass their direction. “Clink,” she said.

• • •

They ate at a small round table outside. There were ants, but nobody cared. Jane opened the wine that Elizabeth brought, and they drank it all, though Elizabeth had to squint a bit to make sure she had one glass and not two. Grilled fish, an avocado salad, little mussels that popped open over the flames. A peach tart made upside down, so the little peaches looked like they were mooning you. Fresh whipped cream. Elizabeth wouldn’t divorce Jane either.

“So, what’s this place he’s been going, Lizzy?” Jane asked, forking a flaky piece of fish into her mouth. “It’s Buddhist? Or something?”

“Or something,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t really know. I think they do yoga, and maybe have orgies. They sell juice. Kombucha? Is that different from juice? It seems like a nightmare, but what do I know? I’m a square.” She poked the bowl of whipped cream with a finger and then licked it off. She was truly drunk now, and feeling loose.

“You’re not a square,” Zoe said.

“You’re a little bit of a square,” Jane said, and Zoe pinched her on the arm. “What? There are worse things to be. Also, kombucha is totally different than juice. It’s fermented. Like beer. Do they make it themselves? That seems a little bit dodgy. And they sell it? Are they licensed to do that? I would look into that, if I were you. Or if I were trying to get them in trouble.”

Elizabeth lowered her head to the table and then bolted back up. The room spun. “You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about trouble lately. Did Zoe tell you what Andrew did? Before the yoga, I mean?” In her head everything was a straight line, and it was all pointing backward. “He slept with Lydia. When we were kids. Not just once. If it was just once, eh.” She waved her hand in the air like she was signaling a waiter for the bill. “If it was just once, that would be one thing. But this was over and over and over again, when we were together. And so when I signed his name on the form, he’s just picturing his bare ass, you know? And I’m thinking it’s about him being a snobby cinephile or something. Ha!” Zoe and Jane both looked confused, but Elizabeth forged ahead. “I mean, I wouldn’t want my naked butt in a movie either, even if it is some eighteen-year-old’s adorable butt. It’s still my butt, you know? So that’s why I’m mad. Because it’s not like I never thought about it. I’m not a saint! But if I had, I would have told him before we got married, or at some point in the last seven hundred years.” Elizabeth swiveled her head toward Jane, pointing a finger. “Speaking of, did Zo ever tell you about the night we almost got together?”

“No,” Jane said, amused now. “She didn’t. Do go on.”

Elizabeth put her hands up next to her face, forming a little wall blocking Zoe from view. “This is totally different, of course, because nothing happened. But at Oberlin, we were at her apartment one night, watching Bonnie and Clyde, and she put the moves on me.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Bonnie and Clyde,” Zoe said. “Who’s in it, again?”

“That’s your response?” Jane looked tickled, and leaned forward. “Tell me more, Lizzy.”

“Nothing happened,” Elizabeth said, waving her hands in front of her face and accidentally flinging a fork into the bushes. “But it could have.”

“Wait, are you being serious?” Zoe put her hand on Elizabeth’s arm to steady it in the air, narrowly avoiding being clonked on the head.

Elizabeth dissolved into giggles. “Is this for her benefit?” she said, talking as low as she could. She looked at Zoe, beautiful Zoe. She was wearing a loose white button-down shirt, and it looked like something in a store window, with a breeze from an unseen fan blowing the hem just so. Sometimes Elizabeth thought that if she’d met Zoe a little bit earlier, or a little bit later, her whole life could have been different. Not that she and Zoe would have ended up together, but that every domino started a new chain. Maybe it wouldn’t have been Andrew — maybe it would have been the redheaded boy in her English class or the spazzy drummer they got to replace Lydia, who she’d once seen getting out of the shower and thought, Oh.

Timing was everything — that was more and more obvious the older you got, when you finally understood that the universe wasn’t held together in any way that made sense. There was no order, there was no plan. It was all about what you’d had for breakfast, and what kind of mood you were in when you walked down a certain hallway, and whether the person who tried to kiss you had good breath or bad. There was no fate. Life was just happenstance and luck, bound together by the desire for order. Elizabeth understood why so many people believed in God — it was for precisely this reason, so they’d never have to close their eyes and think, What the fuck did I do to my life? She had a storm-cloud headache brewing, the kind you could see coming six miles away. Cumulous clumps of regret were already low on the horizon line, but she couldn’t stop herself. It wasn’t funny; none of this was funny. “I don’t think she’ll be jealous, Zo.” Elizabeth tried her best to smile, and then she tried her best to keep her eyes open. It had been such a long day. Sleep sounded good, especially since she was half sure that she was already dreaming. She gripped the lip of the table with both hands and set her forehead down between them.

A glass of water appeared in front of her, and Elizabeth drank it. Both Jane and Zoe were helping her up, and then pulling down the sheets on the fold-out sofa. She rolled over and said good night, but the words didn’t come out.

• • •

The sun was bright, and it took Elizabeth several minutes to remember where she was. The windows were in the wrong place; so was the door. Slowly, the previous evening came back to her.

“Oh, God,” she said, and yanked the sheet up to her chin.

“Hi.” Zoe was sitting at the table outside with a cup of coffee and her laptop. “Jane’s a late sleeper.”

“Good morning,” Elizabeth said, scooting up so that her back was against the cheap foam back of the couch. She rubbed her eyes. Her mouth felt like sandpaper. “I don’t usually drink that much.”

“I know,” Zoe said. “Come out here.”

Elizabeth rolled off the sofa bed. The floor was cool. She grabbed the knit blanket that she’d kicked to the floor at some point during the night and wrapped it around her shoulders. It was early — before seven, probably, and the only sounds they could hear were seagulls and waves. Elizabeth settled into the chair next to Zoe. “That hurt,” she said. “My whole body hurts. I’m too old for this.”

“Tell me again what you were saying last night,” Zoe said.

Elizabeth hid her face. “Oh, come on,” she said. “I was drunk.”

“Yes, you were. But I want to know what you were talking about.” Zoe leaned forward, her face serious but soft. “Tell me. Not the part about Andrew. The part about us.”

Elizabeth wasn’t sure what was more embarrassing — the fact that she’d kept the secret for so many years, or the fact that she remembered it at all. There were layers of shame, ending with the moment that she was sitting in, with the salt air and the smell of Zoe’s coffee, which smelled both completely delicious and like it might make her throw up. “Okay,” Elizabeth said, and she started at the beginning. When she was done — TJ, the hallway, the two of them on the stairs — Zoe was smiling.

“I do remember that,” she said. “I definitely was hitting on you. Pretty hard, too. If someone did that to Ruby, I would call it sexual assault. It’s appalling! You should have called campus security and gotten a ride home.”

“But you don’t remember Bonnie and Clyde?”

“Not a second of it. That’s how beautiful you were, Lizzy.” Zoe reached over and squeezed Elizabeth’s cheek. “So, were you interested?”

“I was interested. I mean, I loved you! I love you! You were like a goddess to me! But I didn’t know about, you know, all that. I was too scared. And plus, there was Andrew.”

“Who was having sex with Lydia.”

“Who was having sex with Lydia! God!” Elizabeth let out a huge gulping laugh. “The irony.”

Zoe took a slurp of her coffee. “Isn’t it so funny, to think about whatever we were doing a hundred years ago, as if it actually mattered? I had so many girlfriends who I thought I was going to be with forever, you know, go on old-lady bird-watching cruises with when we were eighty, or whatever, and then we’d break up in six months. I can’t even picture their faces. And when I met Jane, I thought we’d be together for six months! And here we are. So. I don’t know.”

“I guess that’s the question,” Elizabeth said. “Does it matter at all, what happened a million years ago? Is it relevant? In some ways, I think of course not, it’s all ancient history, but then again, I don’t know. It matters to me that Andrew slept with Lydia, but mostly because of the way he’s acting now. And that night with you on the couch, it does mean something to me — otherwise I would have mentioned it a hundred times, whenever I wanted to tease you, you know? It’s hard to explain.” Elizabeth reached one hand out of her blanket and pinched the air, reaching for Zoe’s coffee cup. “You actually wanted to kiss me?”

“I sure did, babe,” Zoe said, and handed her the cup. She picked up her chair and scooted it closer to Elizabeth’s. She leaned over, giving Elizabeth a sweet, small kiss on the mouth. It wasn’t romance; it wasn’t sex. Elizabeth had given Harry the same kiss a thousand times, and her own mother, and Andrew, even stupid Andrew. It was just love.

“You’re my best friend,” Elizabeth said.

“Ditto,” Zoe said, and leaned back in her chair, smiling at the sun.

Sixty-six

No one was anywhere. Ruby called her mom’s cell, her mum’s, the restaurant. They were still in Montauk, she assumed, but usually they checked in to make sure she hadn’t had a party or set anything on fire. They’d already had the fire, maybe, so why worry? In two weeks, Harry had to show up for senior orientation at Whitman, which was when the college counselors split everyone into groups and talked about the process — where eventually, as Ruby had discovered last year, you found yourself sitting in a semicircle with your friends, talking about the three schools you already knew you wanted to apply to. Harry would be fine — he’d be with the dorks, talking about how Providence really was a cool town, they’d all heard. He’d apply early. He’d get in. Ruby could already see the text message popping up on her phone, maybe a sheepish emoji face. He’d be happy.

But for now Harry was still asleep in her bed.

His hair had gotten longer in the last few months, which was starting to pull the curls down. There was a little spot of saliva on the pillow just below his lips, which Ruby thought was cute. Being with Harry was kind of like doing Teach for America or being a Big Sister or something — really making a difference in someone’s life by giving him or her some attention they might not get otherwise. A sex mentoring program. Not that she didn’t like Harry — she did, a lot. But Ruby was sanguine about the affair. It was a practice run. Everyone did it, whether anybody admitted it or not — almost all teenage love was a performance, with real emotions and real heartbreak. But it was a performance just the same. How else would you ever tell someone that you loved them and mean it, if you’d never said it before? When Ruby thought about Harry, she liked that they’d know each other forever. He wasn’t going to vanish like Dust, or any of her friends from Whitman, people who could just choose to go to college and completely change their personality overnight. Harry was always going to be Harry, and his parents were always going to live up the block, and they would always be in each other’s lives, and some year, twenty years or more in the future, they would all be together for Thanksgiving, and Harry would be married with kids who looked just like him, and she’d be really fucking glamorous and exciting, and they’d kiss each other on the cheek and think about this summer, and they’d go to bed with tummies full of turkey and memories of each other’s bodies.

Lena had texted her about seeing Andrew at EVOLVEment. Elizabeth was right — the whole thing seemed super shady, not to mention sad. Lena said that she’d seen Andrew and Dave talking, and Andrew seemed kind of weird. OH, she said, I REMEMBERED HIS ACTOR NAME — DAVE WOLFE. LOOK HIM UP — YOU’LL TOTALLY RECOGNIZE HIM. Ruby opened her laptop and typed the name into IMDb.

The photo in the corner looked like an ad for body spray — Dave was shirtless, with a chunky beaded necklace at his clavicle. Instead of showing off his full, dark beard, his cheeks were freshly shaved, leaving only a small triangle of hair beneath his lower lip. “Not a soul patch,” Ruby said, groaning. “That is the worst.”

“What’s going on?” Harry said. He rolled and stretched and reached for her. Ruby picked up her laptop and climbed back into bed.

“This is your dad’s yoga guy,” Ruby said.

“Oh, God,” Harry said. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Wait a minute — isn’t he from that movie, you know, the one where the juvenile delinquents get sent to prison? From the eighties? And they lead a revolt?” Harry rubbed his eyes. “I swear that’s him.”

Ruby clicked on his filmography. “Bunk 6? That was him all right.”

“And he teaches yoga?”

“And makes juice?” Ruby chewed on a fingernail.

“Huh,” Harry said.

“Do I have something in my teeth?” Ruby said. She leaned over him, her hair falling in his face. Harry pushed it aside and looked.

“No,” he said. “But that reminds me. I got you something.”

“Is it a bacon, egg, and cheese? I really hope so.” Ruby flopped over onto her back. “What do you want to eat? There’s a shitload of pesto in the fridge, I think Jane is preparing for the apocalypse. Want some pasta? It’s sort of lunchtime.”

Harry was digging around in his pants pocket, his body half on and half off the bed. “Here,” he said, wiggling backward until he was sitting cross-legged in front of her.

All jewelry boxes looked scary. This one was a small, white rectangle, which was better than a black velvet square, but still, Ruby recoiled.

“What is that?” She pointed at it.

“It’s just a present, Ruby.” Harry lifted the lid of the box with his other hand.

Sitting inside, on a bed of cotton fluff, was a tiny, perfect ring. No one except her mum and grandma, maybe Chloe or Paloma, had ever given Ruby jewelry before, and those were usually made out of string or little vintage things her mum found at a flea market. Nothing from a boy. Nothing from a boyfriend.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a ring.” Harry’s cheeks were pink, but he was smiling. It wasn’t nerves; it was excitement. “Go on, look at it. It’s like a poppy seed, like you said.”

Ruby reached in with her thumb and pointer finger and plucked it out. A thread of cotton stuck to it, and Harry pulled it off. It did look like a poppy seed, sort of. Had she said that out loud?

“I think he’s a total fraud, and that he’s trying to steal your dad’s money,” Ruby said, holding the ring in front of her face. She slipped it on her middle finger, where it slid easily down to the knuckle and then, with a little nudge, down the rest of the way.

“Why do you think that? Also, I was thinking maybe about that finger,” Harry said. He touched her ring finger.

“What are you talking about?” Ruby scrunched up her forehead.

“Marry me?” Harry was kneeling now, on the bed, his bare legs sinking into her comforter. Harry, who had never had a job. Harry, whom she’d bathed with as a child. Ruby imagined Thanksgiving again, this time with herself as Harry’s wife, wearing pearls and a twinset and a puffy headband. It was like the last scene of The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy looks around and realizes that her friends are still her friends, no matter if they’re people or lions or made out of tin. It was supposed to be comforting, like, oh, yes, they’ve been there all along, but Ruby thought it made the whole world look tiny and claustrophobic, like you could go to a whole other dimension and just see the same people you’ve seen your whole life, and she wanted more faces than that.

“I’m going to sail a boat to Mexico,” Ruby said, and just like that, she was.

Sixty-seven

It was almost noon, and Elizabeth still wasn’t back. Andrew wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He’d cleaned the entire house, and cooked a lasagna, even though it was too hot to eat it. It was something to have in the fridge, a bona fide meal that Harry could pick at whenever he wanted. There was a yoga class at EVOLVEment, but Andrew felt weird about going back. He sat on the couch for a few minutes, bouncing on his heels, and finally decided to just go. The lawyer was expecting him to return the signed contracts, the pieces of paper that said how much money Andrew had given Dave, and why, and for now Andrew had no idea if any of his money would ever reappear again. But he wasn’t sure what else to do, and so he walked the three blocks and unrolled his yoga mat in the only available spot, right next to the door, so that anyone else who came in would have to climb over him.

Dave was teaching. It was Thursday, which meant that the class was a mix of dharma talk and asana, with a focus on maintaining energy. Other studios focused on different things — Bikram was all about sweat, and Iyengar was all about precision, or that’s what Dave said — but Dave was all about energy. He was shirtless, as usual, and bowed to Andrew when they finally made eye contact. The class was full of people Andrew had never seen before — young, flexible bodies. Andrew was doing better than he had been at the beginning of the summer, though, and he could keep up. Every now and then, he felt someone looking at him, and he’d swivel around just in time to see one of Dave’s minions turning away.

“Draw your breath in through your rib cage,” Dave said, “and then exhale through your toes.”

All around him people were doing what Dave said. Andrew was trying, but every time he tried to breathe through his ribs, he felt like something was in the way — his liver? his heart? You couldn’t breathe through your ribs, you just couldn’t. And you definitely couldn’t breathe through your toes. Andrew opened his eyes.

From his spot by the door, Andrew could see through the foyer and onto the porch, where there were two uniformed policemen peering through the glass. They knocked, but Dave never answered the door during class. Andrew stood up and walked to the door.

“May I help you?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, we’ve had some reports that we’d like to follow up on, some illegal activity. Is this your place of business? Do you live here?” Andrew recognized one of the policemen from when he and Elizabeth had gone to fetch their delinquent son.

“Well, yes and no,” Andrew said. “I don’t live here.”

“May we come in?” A walkie-talkie on the cop’s hip blared out something indecipherable.

Andrew turned back to face the room. In the hall leading to the kitchen, several of the EVOLVErs were scurrying around, several holding large buckets.

“Um,” Andrew said, and the cops pushed past him into the house.

Everyone was in downward dog, their bottoms poking into the air. Most people were peeking through their legs, watching the action unfold upside down, but some had decided it was going to be worth seeing right side up and had come out of the pose to sit and watch. The two policemen stood on the side of the room, as if they were about to play a game of Frogger and hop across the yogis to the other side but didn’t know how to start.

“May I help you, Officers? We’re in the middle of a class.” Dave was as cool as a lake in Maine, with nary a ripple of anxiety.

“Are you in charge here? We’ve had reports of some illegal activity. Some illicit substance being sold without the proper licenses. We’re here to seize”—here the officer paused to look at a note on his sheet of paper—“some kambacha. Some illegal kambacha. May we see your kitchen, please?”

Dave rose slowly, his bare feet sticking to the wood floor with a little thuck-thuck sound. “Everyone, please continue your own practice as needed. Salome?” She was lurking in the hall, and shook her head vigorously. “Annaliese?” A girl Andrew hadn’t seen before quickly popped up from a mat in the third row and made her way to Dave’s mat, where she began to move through some sun salutations. Several people rolled up their mats and hung around for a few minutes before leaving, but other, more dedicated yogis stayed and moved from upward-facing dog to plank and back again.

Andrew watched Dave lead the officers into the kitchen, and then up and down the stairs, on a full tour of the house. There was weed everywhere — Andrew had never noticed it before, not really, but now the house stank of it, and of the vats of kombucha in the basement, and the unpasteurized juices, and the herbal supplements that Salome put together herself for teas. Of course there were no licenses. Where were all the signs like they had at Hyacinth, EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS, or the one with the cartoonish description of the Heimlich maneuver? EVOLVEment had no signs. He’d been so eager to find something to devote himself to that he hadn’t noticed he was spending all of his time in a glorified flophouse.

Several of the bearded young EVOLVErs were pacing the front room or talking in small, hushed huddles. Andrew tried to listen in, but they’d just shuffle a little farther away, until they were standing in the far corner of the room, leaving Andrew alone at the center.

After about ten minutes, the cops came back through. One of them, the young man that Andrew recognized, was gripping Dave tightly on his elbow.

“Wait a minute,” Andrew said. “This is my partner — where are you taking him? What is going on?”

The officer stopped. Dave exhaled loudly, emitting a low om. “Will you stop doing that?” the cop said. “It’s freaking me out. What do you mean, ‘partner’? Do you know this guy?” the cop asked Dave, who was staring straight ahead, at some unseen drishti.

Dave’s eyelids fluttered. He stared at Andrew, and then slowly shook his head. “This man is one of our yoga students, but I’ve never spoken to him before. Peace for your good thoughts, friend.”

The officer shrugged. “Whatever, man. Excuse us,” he said to Andrew, and led Dave by the elbow out to their waiting squad car. Trailing behind, the other cop carried two barrels full of liquid that smelled like beer, one under each arm.

“I see,” Andrew said to no one. “I see.” He walked outside the house and watched the cops maneuver Dave into the back of the police car. Dave stared straight ahead. A woman walking her fluffy white dog down the street stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, waited for the cop car to drive off, and then shook her head.

“It’s always the good-looking ones,” she said. “Criminals.”

• • •

If it hadn’t been for the money, Andrew would have taken this as a sign: he was free. The correct choice had been butchery, or maybe rooftop beekeeping. He hadn’t built anything in two months. He wasn’t becoming a hotelier, at least not with Dave. He was just a patsy standing in front of a yoga studio. In his pocket, his phone started to ring. When he slid it out, Elizabeth’s face filled up the whole screen, and he was so happy to see her that he nearly burst into tears.

“Honey,” he said, talking before she had the chance. “I am so, so sorry.”

Sixty-eight

And on the other end, on the train platform in Montauk, Elizabeth pulled her straw hat over her face and listened to her husband talk. In some ways, it was both better and worse than she imagined. Andrew hadn’t slept with any of the mostly nude young women at the juice emporium. He hadn’t slept with the guy with the beard, which had crossed her mind briefly, and which had bothered her somewhat less, as an idea, than the nude young women. Andrew told her about the money, which stung, though she certainly didn’t think of it as her money, or even their money, and so she was willing to chalk even that up to Andrew’s stupidity and/or open-mindedness, one of which she felt pretty good about, in general.

In a funny way, everything that Andrew was saying made Elizabeth think that a long marriage truly was possible, in part because it only ever seemed like they’d told you all their secrets. There were always more.

“Who did I marry?” Elizabeth asked, out loud, amazed. The train was scheduled to arrive in five minutes. Zoe and Jane had dropped her off at the station together. They’d gone swimming that morning, and the tips of Elizabeth’s hair were still damp on her shoulders, slightly crunchy with salt and sand. Her headache hadn’t gone away, but it was getting better. They were all getting better, at least some of the time.

“Listen,” Elizabeth said. “The train is about to come. I’ll be home in a few hours. Be there, okay? I want to really talk to you.”

“Of course,” Andrew said.

“When we were kids, I almost kissed Zoe once. And we just talked about it for the first time.” She wanted him to know that he wasn’t the only one who hadn’t opened all his doors.

“When?” Andrew asked.

“At school. When we were young. When we were children. Just like you. I mean, almost. I didn’t actually do anything. But I know, Andrew, I know that we were children then. We were Harry’s age, more or less. Can you imagine?” What Elizabeth couldn’t imagine, not really, was that all the years in between had actually happened to her, and to Andrew, and to all their friends. That they had passed through those years unscathed, escaping with their lives and one another. It seemed mathematically unreasonable, to think that they were all still standing. Except for Lydia. Lydia was doing something else entirely — not standing, maybe, but simulated, reproduced. In certain ways, Lydia would outlive them all.

There was a little fluttering in her stomach, exactly the feeling that she’d had when she and Andrew decided to get married. Nerves, or excitement. The unknown. The train was pulling in to the station, and a new crop of drunken louts poured out. Elizabeth tucked herself as much out of the way as she could without getting swept along. Life swept you along enough — she planted her feet and sharpened her elbows.

“I’ll see you soon,” she said. “I miss you. I hate you and I miss you.” Elizabeth was talking to the angry boy who’d ordered her the scrambled eggs from the diner near his parents’ house. He still didn’t know better. She could help, or not. It was all up to her. Elizabeth took off her hat and fanned it in front of her face. “I will be calm calm calm,” she sang, at full volume. The kids looked at her like she was crazy, and she said louder, “I will be calm calm calm!” When it was time to board the train, Elizabeth took a window seat and held her notebook in her lap and didn’t stop writing until she was home.

Sixty-nine

Jane came back from Gosman’s Dock with their evening’s lobsters, either Minnie and Mickey, or Fred and Ginger, Jane couldn’t decide. She found Zoe on the porch, hunched over a notebook.

“Are you working on your diary for Dr. Amelia?”

“Sort of. Come here.” Zoe patted the chair next to her, and after Jane put the lobsters in the fridge to chill them before the ritual murder, she sat down and looked at what Zoe had been working on.

Zoe flattened her hands over her notebook. “Listen,” she said, her voice low and even. “Here’s what I think. Hyacinth will be back up and running soon, which is great, but I think it’s time for something new. I think we need a change.”

“Shit,” Jane said. “Shit! I really thought that things were getting so much better, Zo! How do you not see it? I know my temper isn’t great, and I know that I’m moody, and that I haven’t been to the gym in ten years, but come on! How do you not see that we are good?” Jane could feel her heart rate skyrocketing. “I love you. Don’t leave me. I will do anything.”

Zoe smiled and moved her hands. Hidden underneath them was a drawing of a storefront. There were windows all along the street, like at Hyacinth, but with small round tables facing out. Above the door, the sign read HOT + SWEET, with a drawing of a pretzel. “It doesn’t have to be a pretzel,” Zoe said. “I just like the shape. It could be a croissant. Or a muffin, maybe. No, I don’t like the way muffins look. But it could be a croissant.”

“What is this?” Jane turned the page and saw that there was more. More drawings, more notes. “Ditmas Park’s First Gourmet Bakery.” A list of their suppliers, some menus.

“We make everything. You make everything. I already know what light fixtures we should have. This kid out in L.A. makes these lamps that look like mod octopuses….” She was still talking when Jane stopped her with a kiss. Zoe was laughing, and they were kissing, and then Jane was laughing, too.

“You scared me,” Jane said. She shook her head. “Don’t scare me like that.”

Zoe took her wife’s face in her hands. “Never again. Now, tell me, what do you think?”

“Hot and Sweet,” Jane said. “I love it.”

“Good,” Zoe said. “Because Elizabeth thinks she has a place. You know where the hair salon is, with the yellow awning? Before that, like maybe ten years ago, it was a tiny little Dominican coffee shop? Right across from the fire station?”

Jane closed her eyes. “With the patio. We could have outdoor seating on the side.”

“Exactly.” Zoe reached over and slid her arms around Jane’s waist, folding herself onto Jane’s lap. “A new project. A new baby.”

“A new baby made out of butter.”

“Best kind,” Zoe said, nuzzling in as close as she could, and then even closer.

Seventy

The office was just as Zoe had described — nicely messy, with stacks of books on the floor beside the bookshelves. Elizabeth and Andrew shuffled in awkwardly and sat down next to each other on a well-worn tufted couch.

“So,” Dr. Amelia said, “what brings you here? Elizabeth, we spoke on the phone briefly, but I always like to start out couples that way, so that we can all be on the same page. In the same boat. On the same team.” She nodded at both of them, her lips pursed with anticipation. The appointment had been a gift — Jane and Zoe were skipping their session and sent Elizabeth and Andrew instead. It wasn’t a present you could give to everyone, but there you were.

“Well, I, um,” Andrew began. “I think I’ve been feeling a bit lost, professionally, for, um, for some time.” He paused. “I think that’s where this started.”

“Really?” Elizabeth said, her head rearing back. “I think this started when we were about nineteen years old, don’t you?” Ever since leaving Montauk, Elizabeth had slowly been feeling layers of her anxiety flake off, like a snake’s old skin. Bits and pieces dropped off all the time — Harry having sex, Harry having sex in public, her first gray hair, the fact that her boss sometimes still called her Emily, the way Lydia looked at her a million years ago, the way fake Lydia looked at her now, the way she’d always been worried about how Andrew was feeling. Dr. Amelia and Andrew were both looking at her with wide eyes, and Elizabeth realized she was talking.

“And then I also think we should talk about how you basically just joined a cult by accident because you need friends, and a job, and a vocation, which I know isn’t easy to come by — I mean, I’m a real-estate agent, which isn’t exactly something children dream about becoming, you know?” She was panting slightly, but it felt good, like she’d just run around the block. Elizabeth wanted to run. On the train home, she’d written three songs, and she was pretty sure that at least two of them were as good as “Mistress of Myself.” She wanted to play them for Andrew, but she also wanted to make a demo and send them to Merge and Sub Pop and Touch & Go and say, Hey! Here I am! I’ve been here all the while! She knew some of the right people, at least to start. She just needed to figure out which direction to go. It was exciting, almost, like having a fever so high that you thought you were on another planet. “I think I need a break, maybe. Like a few months. I think I need to travel by myself for a little bit.” Elizabeth rubbed her hands on her thighs. “Maybe rent a house somewhere, record some music, just take some time.”

“Okayyy,” Dr. Amelia said. “Let’s start there. Andrew? Jump on in here, the water’s fine.”

“The water is definitely not fine,” Elizabeth said. She threw her head back and laughed. “The water is not fine.”

“Come on, Lizzy,” Andrew said. “We were totally cool a few minutes ago, weren’t we?”

Elizabeth looked at her husband. There were so many pieces of advice she’d heard over the years: not to marry someone she wouldn’t want to be divorced from, not to marry someone she wouldn’t want to be, not to marry someone who didn’t treat her as an equal if not a superior being, not to marry someone for sex, to marry for sex, to marry for friendship, not to marry for companionship. They’d been together for so long that Elizabeth didn’t know which of those rules she’d followed — she certainly hadn’t known when they got married. Those guidelines were all for people like Ruby and Harry, city kids who probably wouldn’t get married until they were thirty and wouldn’t have kids until they were thirty-five. Somehow, though they hadn’t meant to, she and Andrew had behaved like they lived in the 1950s, rushing into adulthood with no sense of themselves as individuals.

Dr. Amelia stuck the tip of her pen into the hollow of her cheek, leaving a small blue polka dot. “What do you think about that, Elizabeth? Are you cool?”

The air-conditioning clicked on, sending a sudden blast of freezing cold air onto Elizabeth’s right side. Andrew gave an involuntary shake, and she saw a path of goose bumps pop up on his bare forearms.

“I don’t think we know the answer to that yet, Dr. Amelia,” she said. She tugged a pillow from behind her back and laid it on her lap. “I think we’re really just getting started here.”

Andrew had the strangest look on his face — partly a grimace, and partly a grin, like he couldn’t tell his lips what to do and so they were making their own suggestions.

“You know what, though?” Elizabeth said. “This just occurred to me. I actually don’t think it’s all your fault what’s happening here.”

“That’s good, sharing the responsibility,” Dr. Amelia said.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Yes. It’s also clearly my fault for not losing my mind ten years ago,” she said. “Or twenty. If I’d been more wild, more willing to experiment and crash and burn and fail, then I don’t think we’d be here right now. We might not be here at all.”

“What do you mean? That we’d be dead?” Andrew, the poor dear, looked so confused that Elizabeth wanted to sit him in the corner with a dunce cap.

“No, not dead. Just not married. I’m not saying that I want that. Maybe I want that, I’m not sure yet. But I do think that we’re both so static — and that’s why we’re sitting here.”

“This is such a good session already,” Dr. Amelia said. “I’m really impressed.”

Elizabeth beamed. “Thank you,” she said. “No one’s complimented me for what feels like a really long time.” She turned to Andrew, whose face had turned pale. “You can start there, if you like.”

Andrew swallowed. “I will.”

“Now would be a great time, Andrew,” Dr. Amelia said. “Why don’t you tell your wife what you think she’s great at? It can be something big or small, doesn’t matter.”

Andrew looked down at his hands and knocked his thumbs together. The room was silent. “You’re a great songwriter,” he said. “Truly great.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth said.

“And you’re an incredible mother. Harry adores you.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth said.

“That’s a great start,” Dr. Amelia said. “Elizabeth?”

“Hmm?” She looked up.

“Anything you’d like to compliment Andrew for?”

“Maybe in a little while, but I’d really like Andrew to keep going, for now, if that’s all right.” She crossed her arms and waited.

Seventy-one

Once Ruby decided she was going, the plans came together fast. She would fly into San Diego on the last day of August, and fly out of Loreto, Mexico, three months later. The program was for people over seventeen, offered college credit and provided all the equipment. After Mexico, she was considering doing a program in South America, but it was mostly hiking, and she wasn’t sure. Harry was helping her pack. Ruby’s flight was in two days.

The proposal hadn’t gone precisely the way he’d hoped — Ruby had slipped the ring onto her middle finger and said “No,” clear as day, but he understood. They were too young. He still had a year of high school left. No one got engaged in high school, not really. He was glad she’d kept the ring.

It was late in the afternoon. Ruby’s mothers and his mom were at the new space — they couldn’t stop talking about it, the three of them, cackling like witches about doughnuts and jam. It was cool, Harry thought. They were making something out of nothing.

Ruby was standing in front of her closet. She wasn’t supposed to bring any clothes like the ones she wore — there was a list, and everything was made of out bathing-suit material. She was going to be sitting in a kayak for three months, but still, for now, Ruby was trying on dresses, maybe to say good-bye. She was pulling on hangers over her head, so that she looked like Frankenstein’s monster, with metal bolts jutting out of her shoulders.

“That’s the one you wore to graduation,” Harry said. The white tassels swung by her bare thighs. She was wearing only underwear. Harry wanted to take pictures of every part of Ruby’s body, but knew that was no way to keep her.

“When you were my hero,” Ruby said.

“You were always my hero,” Harry said. “Let’s be clear about that.” He got up and walked over behind her. “I want to hug you, but I don’t want to impale myself.”

Ruby laughed and pulled the hangers off. “You may hug,” she said.

Harry wrapped his arms around her and looked at the two of them in the mirror. “Hey, you know what? You were supposed to bleach my hair, but you never did.”

“Want to do it now?”

“Are you still my girlfriend?” Harry wasn’t sure why it mattered, but it did.

“I think I’m your girlfriend until I get on the airplane,” Ruby said. “How does that sound?”

“I can live with that. Let’s do it.”

She clapped her hands and pointed to the bathroom. “Step into my salon!” Harry sat on the lip of the bathtub while Ruby opened and closed all the cabinets. “Aha!” she said, and started performing a chemistry demonstration in a plastic bowl in the sink.

Ruby started painting his hair with some cold, white goop. After a few seconds, Harry’s scalp begin to itch and then sizzle. “Is this normal?” he asked, and Ruby rolled her eyes.

“Guys are such wusses,” she said. “Yes, it’s normal.” She worked her way around his head, section by section. When she was done, she pulled a giant plastic shower cap over the whole thing.

“Will you play some music?” Harry asked. He needed something to take his mind off the fact that his head felt like it was on fire. Ruby pulled out her phone and scrolled through until she found what she was looking for, hit the button, and then set the phone on the lid of the toilet.

It was a slow song, one Harry didn’t know. A guy sang “Love and happiness,” and then a guitar did a little wail behind him, and the rest of the band kicked in.

“It’s Al Green,” Ruby said. She started to dance. Harry put his hands on her thighs and closed his eyes, trying to memorize everything he could. They listened to the song three more times before she hit a button and played the rest of the album. “Okay, let’s check your hair.” She pulled back the shower cap and peeked. “Oh, shit,” she said. “It’s kind of orange.”

Harry pulled the cap off the rest of the way and stood up. It looked like he had bright orange dreadlocks. “Well, let’s wash it out, maybe it’s not as bad as it seems.” He shoved his head under the faucet, and Ruby rinsed, her fingers separating the bigger clumps. She washed it twice before she let him get up and dry off with a towel.

They stood next to each other, shoulder to shoulder. Instead of blond, Harry’s hair was the color of bright new rust, or a very dirty traffic cone. He touched a curl and then put his hand on his chin. It was terrible, so terrible that Ruby couldn’t even argue otherwise for show. They grimaced in unison.

“Do you have clippers, by any chance?”

“I think my mom does. Hang on.” Ruby scampered up the stairs to her parents’ bedroom and came back wielding a pair, the cord dangling behind her. Harry plugged them into on the wall and switched them on. “Have you done this before?” she asked him.

“Nope,” he said. “But there’s a first time for everything.” He started at the front — you had to start somewhere — and dragged the clippers back along his scalp. A long strip of hair fell first to his shoulders and then to the floor.

“Wow,” Ruby said. “Keep going.”

He did the right side first, leaving the hair about an inch long, maybe less, with no trace of the bleach. He stopped long enough for Ruby to take a picture, one half orange, one half gone. She put a towel on the floor to catch all the falling locks.

It only took a few minutes. “I guess I wasted your bleach,” Harry said, swiveling from side to side to look at himself.

“Here,” Ruby said, and handed him a mirror. “Look at the whole thing.” She held it up in his hands like he was in a barbershop, and spun him around so that he could see the reflection of the back of his head in the mirror.

“I look like my dad,” Harry said.

“Kind of,” Ruby said. “I think you look more like you.”

He knew what she meant. Harry looked like a different person — older. Tougher, even. He ran his hand over his head, which was both prickly and still itchy from the bleach. He didn’t look like a kid anymore, and he didn’t feel like one, either.

“I should go home,” Harry said. “Just for now. I’ll come back tonight.”

Ruby nodded. “I love you, Harry Marx.” She kissed him on the cheek, both of them covered in strands of his hair. There were so many ways that he wanted to remember Ruby, images of her that he wanted to freeze forever, but this was what Harry wanted to freeze for himself — however he was, right at this second, when those words came out of her mouth, and he was still standing, still able to walk out the door. There would be no better summer, as long as he lived. Harry kissed her back and then closed her bedroom door behind him.

He went down the stairs slowly, petting Bingo’s head on the way out. The day had started to fade. Harry wanted to walk past someone he knew, someone from school, just to see if they’d recognize him, but Argyle Road was empty. He was at his own driveway, and the garage door was half open. Through the four feet of open air, he could see his mother’s legs, and her amp. She was playing something quiet, and Harry walked a little bit up the driveway to listen. It was pretty — something new. There were fireflies starting to flicker, and Harry turned around to watch one float up into the tree. The garage door opened a few more feet, and his mom ducked underneath, poking her head out. “Harry, is that you?” The air smelled like fall, and Harry watched the firefly go all the way under the canopy of leaves before turning back around.