“Sure what?”
“That I want to try again.”
“Try again?” She laughs. “Are you kidding me?”
“I love you. I always will, Phoebe. What we had. It was the best part of my life.”
“But that’s over now.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You said that!”
“We were married,” he says. “I honestly don’t think I realized what it meant to be married until I left. How do you know, until you can look back at what it was? After I left, I could see it so clearly. I saw this beautiful thing that I had destroyed.”
He clears his throat. He sits down on the bed.
“But during it, I somehow stopped seeing the big picture. I was thinking so narrowly. I kept thinking everything had to happen a precise way. Like there would be something awful about adopting. Of course we can adopt. Of course we can do surrogates. We can do whatever. If we want a family, we can make it work. We can have a family, Phoebe.”
She feels herself softening at the word family. The whole gang shows up in her head again—their little family. Their little noses. Their little laughs. Their little fingers, picking strawberries. Always their fingers, always their noses, never their whole faces. When she tries to imagine their faces, all she can see is Juice, throwing up at the table. The bright red chunks of it all.
“How about a drink?” Matt says.
“No,” Phoebe says. “I need to go.”
“Go where?”
“I don’t know,” she says. She wants to call Gary. She wants to finish their conversation. But when she looks up, Matt has already poured something amber in the little glasses.
“I should warn you that’s like a million dollars,” she says.
“Good,” he says.
Maybe he is different now, too. She watches him take a sip. They sit on the love seat. Every time he leans forward to get a sip of his drink, their knees touch. She wonders if he is making this happen, if he keeps putting the glass farther and farther away from him on the table so he can touch her. It’s like Matt to appear so casual, so effortless, but as his wife, she is the only one who knows how much time and effort he puts into appearing relaxed and easygoing. He does breathing exercises in the morning so he can face the day. He does eighteen drafts of his lecture so it can sound off the cuff. He looks in the mirror and says, Okay, here we go.
“Bob is utterly dumbfounded that you took off,” he says. “The whole department is truly worried about you.”
“They should be.”
“They are.”
“Good,” she says. “They didn’t worry about me enough.”
“I know.”
The more her husband speaks about their life, the more it reminds her he was her husband. He is Matt, who got her a beer on the first date. Matt who wrote her letters from Edgar Allan Poe’s desk that month he was in Baltimore. Matt, whose brother used to bury him in the sand and put breadcrumbs around his head for the seagulls. She puts down her drink, reclines, and knows it’s him, and yet she stares at her husband like he’s someone she’s looking at from very far away. He has gained a little weight, now puffier in the cheeks. But it’s not just that. He is someone who has fucked Mia now. He parts his hair on the other side. He wears a shirt he must have bought after the divorce. And this all weirdly makes her want to touch him. Like this is really her fantasy now—her husband is a total stranger.
“Remember the eclipse, when I proposed?” he asks.
She nods. They were staring at the sky then, too. She listens to the fireworks in the distance. She feels that same feeling she had when they watched the eclipse, that same intense desire to make it meaningful, turn it into a metaphor. But she can’t quite make it work: The fireworks are the opposite of an eclipse, man-made light bursting open into a dark sky. She doesn’t know what it means.
He kisses her, and it makes her cry.
“I love you, Phoebe,” he says. “I’ve loved you since the first second we spoke.”
She hears the wedding people outside. She hears the fireworks in the distance. She feels the wedding going on without her. She knows that life, real life, is waiting for her on the beach. Yet in here, it is warm. Here is her husband.
He has learned a new way to kiss with Mia. He uses too much tongue. But when she turns away, he rubs his finger down her back. She can feel how he is ready to worship her in this moment if she lets him. She can see the whole thing, how he will spread her legs, how he will enter her, how good it will feel to touch this total stranger, even before it happens. It makes her feel excited and sick all at once. It feels like the worst part of her that wants him. But it has been so long.
SUNDAY
The Wedding
In the morning, Phoebe wakes to see her husband in bed. There he is again, the man who gets exactly eight hours each night. The man who wakes up without an alarm. The man who puts on clothes right after sex and maybe that is why he looks so strange to Phoebe—so naked—like some caveman unearthed and transplanted to the Cornwall.
She looks at her phone. No messages.
Should she text Gary? Should she call him? Should she say anything at all?
She looks outside the balcony for evidence of something, and she sees Aunt Gina and Uncle Gerald in their wedding attire, drinking coffee. So the wedding is on. Life is as it should be. And yet something feels very, very wrong. She has made a mistake. She has lost her opportunity. Not to mention, she has betrayed Gary, abandoned him for her husband, but that makes no sense. Today is Gary’s wedding day. And her husband is not her husband.
“Hey,” he says, reaching for her.
She slinks out of bed.
“I need to go to the bridal suite to get ready,” she says.
WHEN PHOEBE WALKS into the bridal suite, Suz and Nat are already on their way out with updos.
