The wedding people laugh again.
“Or that he must have really fallen for my daughter.”
Everyone claps. And that’s how Phoebe falls asleep—on the bathroom floor with the balcony door wide open so she can listen to all the impromptu speeches that the mother inspired. All the others who were not given a designated time to speak, like Gary’s cousin Roy, a former sniper who flew all the way from Kennebunkport to suggest inappropriate things about a secret tattoo that Gary might have on his thigh. Suz, one of Lila’s best friends from Portsmouth Abbey, who had nothing else to say other than that she loves loves loves Lila so so so much and thinks Gary is so so so wonderful. And finally, the father of the groom, who concludes the night with his gravelly Boston accent. He thanks everybody for coming to the reception, says they should all look out for tonight’s dinner bill in the mail.
“Just kidding,” the father says. “You all know I’m not paying for this.”
Everybody laughs.
“More seriously, Lila and Gary, we’re so thrilled to be celebrating with you this week. Let’s all raise a glass to the happy couple.”
WEDNESDAY
Sailing
When Phoebe wakes, it takes a moment to remember who and where she is. But then she sees the tassel lamps. She smells the coconut pillow.
“I am alive,” she says out loud, just to make sure.
Outside, the patio is quiet. The party is over. And the pillow smells so much of coconut, it actually makes it difficult to get back to sleep. So does the giant alarm clock, keeping time quite dramatically. It’s three a.m. The grief hour, according to Phoebe’s therapist. The demon hour, according to medieval peasants. The hour that you wake up when you have excess cortisol in your body, according to a doctor Phoebe once saw.
Whatever it is, it’s the hour that Phoebe often wakes up.
The bride is right. Phoebe has been to enough weddings to know that the bride is always right. Phoebe has to do a thing. She has to get up and do any single thing because she knows the feeling that will come if she lets herself sit in the empty shame of three in the morning, especially after trying to kill herself.
Normally, she would just sit in bed and ask herself questions that made her feel like garbage, like, What kind of psycho tries to kill herself? And, What is her husband doing at this exact moment? Was he sleeping? Was he having sex with Mia this very second? Was he still at a bar somewhere, getting free drinks because people always liked to give him free things for some reason? Then she would probably pull up Mia’s Instagram page, even though it made her feel like shit. Because it made her feel like shit. There Mia always was, in bright lipstick, saying, Look at my big red lips. Look at us on our autumnal weekend. Look at this pie that I made for July Fourth and look at my baby taking a tiny baby bite of this pie, isn’t she such a baby.
But luckily, Phoebe’s phone is dead. She decides never to look at her phone again. She doesn’t see the point in staying alive only to do all the same things that made her want to die.
So Phoebe thinks: What is one thing I can do right now instead?
Lila’s question surprised Phoebe, and she’s not sure if that’s because she didn’t expect insightful questions from someone wearing so much self-tanner or if it’s because she spent the last few years overwhelmed by all the things she could not do, the papers she could not grade, the conversations she could not bear to have, the baby she could not create, the awards she’d never win, the marriage she could not fix.
It’s time, she knows, to imagine the things she can do.
Right now, it’s not much. Her body feels worn out and weary. But she can brush her teeth. She can use mouthwash. She can drink a bottle of water. Then she can take a very long bath in the beautiful soaking tub.
But when she turns on the faucet, she realizes she can’t actually take a bath. There’s no drain stopper.
But that’s fine, she thinks. Even better. She can go down to the hotel’s hot tub and look at the ocean instead.
She undresses to her underwear. Black lace, the fanciest she owns, because she had refused to die in bad underwear. She wraps herself in the giant fluffy robe, the kind she’s seen at hotels before but for some reason has never once thought about wearing. Yet now it seems like it was put there by God just so she could feel soft in this moment.
She reaches for the door handle and looks down at her wedding ring. She takes it off, puts it on the black marble tray in the bathroom, and decides never to wear it again.
DOWNSTAIRS, SHE WALKS through the empty lobby. She passes the built-in oak bookcase and for the first time notices something very wrong with the books. They are all turned backward so only their pages show. It creates a monochromatic scheme—a trend she saw once on an HGTV show. Madness. She was offended by it then and is more offended by it now in real life.
She pulls out one of the books.
Sonnets by Shakespeare.
She looks back at the front desk to see if Pauline is watching, but it’s Carlson.
“Hello, Phoebe,” Carlson says.
It must be a house rule to say hello to each guest, to learn their name, the way it is also a house rule never to set any house rules. Never question what the guest is doing. The guest is paying too much money to be questioned. Make the guest feel the hotel is their home, even at three-thirty in the morning when the wedding people at the bar demand one more Manhattan. She sees the bartender pour them with the energy of a man who just woke up.
“Hello,” she says.
She puts the book back on the shelf so that the spine is showing. Then she walks out to the hot tub, proud to have saved Shakespeare.
PHOEBE THINKS YOU can tell a lot about a hotel by its hot tub, the way she could tell a lot about her husband by looking at his fingernails when she first met him in the computer lab. She could see that he clipped them short, all the same length. He was not a nail-biter. If he had fixations, they had nothing to do with his hands.
And this hot tub—if it has flaws, she cannot see them. It sits right on the edge of the deck, like nothing separates it from the ocean in the distance.
She steps into the tub and feels her whole body warm. She sits with her back against the jets. It doesn’t really feel like a massage, but she pretends it’s a massage. She closes her eyes. Lila is right. Water helps. It feels good to be warm. Good to have a body. She dangles her arms out and lets them float. She sits like that for a long time in a sleepy haze. When she finally opens her eyes to look up at the stars, she sees a man stepping into the tub.
“Hello,” the man says.
There really is no getting away from the wedding people here. And this one—he looks directly at her as he gets in. Normally, this would be enough human interaction to make her leave a hot tub, but she’s electrified by the direct eye contact. It’s nice to be seen in this moment. Nice not to fear the sight of other people. She is the only person she is afraid of now—she is the only one here who just tried to kill her.
“Hello,” she says.
The man has a long, angular face, softened at the edges by a beard. He is handsome in the way Phoebe always imagined coastal New Englanders to be. A kind of beauty that’s been weathered by wind and water, like he’s been out sailing every day of his life for a little too long. And maybe he has been. Maybe that’s why he’s wrinkled around the eyes or why he slowly sits down in the tub with a long sigh.
“I didn’t think anyone would be here at four in the morning,” the man says.
“Neither did I.”
