No matter how hard she tried to be her old self,
Annie couldn’t quite manage it. No matter how many of the old routines she pushed herself through, she felt herself slipping away. With each day, she saw the future approaching in a low-rolling fog of lost chances and missed opportunities.
Summer blasted through Southern California on a tide of unseasonable heat. The Malibu hills dried up and turned brown. Leaves began, one by one, to curl up and die, dropping like bits of charred paper on artificially green lawns.
Blake stood on the deck outside his room, sipping a scotch and soda. The wood was warm beneath his bare feet, the last reminder of a surprisingly hot day.
He hadn’t slept well last night. Hadn’t, in fact, slept well in weeks. Not since he’d apologized to Annie and discovered that she didn’t care.
She was trying to make their marriage work. He could see the effort, in the way she put on makeup every morning and wore the colors she knew he liked. She even touched him occasionally—brief, flitting gestures that were designed to make him feel better, but that had the opposite effect. Every time she touched him, he felt a tiny, niggling ache in his chest, and he remembered the way it used to be, the way she used to touch him all the time and smile at his jokes and brush the hair away from his face, and when he remembered he hurt.
She wasn’t herself anymore, that was obvious. She lay in their big bed like a silent, pregnant ghost, and when she smiled, it was a brittle, fleeting thing, and not Annie at all.
She was . . . disappearing, for lack of a better word.
She used to talk and laugh all the time. She used to find joy in the craziness of life, but nothing intrigued her anymore. Her moods were a flat line, even and smooth. So smooth, there was no hint of Annie inside the quiet woman who sat with him in the evening, watching television.
Last week, when it rained, she had sat up in bed, staring through the silver-streaked window. When he called out to her, she’d turned, and he hadn’t missed the tears in her eyes. She’d been holding some ragged scrap of a hair ribbon as if it were the Holy Grail.
He couldn’t stand this much longer. He wasn’t the kind of man who liked to work this hard for what he wanted. Enough was enough.
He set down his drink on the table and strode back into the house. He knocked on Annie’s door—quickly, before he lost his nerve.
“Come in,” she called out.
He opened the door and went inside. The room was as comforting as ever, with its sea-blue walls and carpet and white bedding.
Annie was in bed, reading a book called How to Run Your Own Small Business. Beside her, there was a pile of similarly titled self-help books.
Jesus, was she thinking of getting a job?
It would humiliate him if she sought employment; she knew how he felt about his wife working. Especially with her lack of skills. What would she do—pour lattes and pick croissants from a glass case?
He had no idea who this woman was who sat in bed and read how-to books. He felt unconnected to Annie; he had to do something to get them back together.
She looked up, and he noticed the dark circles under her eyes and gray cast to her skin. In the past month, she’d gained a lot of weight, but somehow her face looked thinner. Her hair had grown out some, and the tips were beginning to curl wildly. Again, she looked like a woman he didn’t know. “Hi, Blake,” she said softly, closing the book. “Is it time for the movie to start? I thought—”
He went to the bed and sat beside her, gazing down into her beautiful green eyes. “I love you, Annie. I know we can work all this out if we’re . . . together. ”
“We are together. ”
“Where’s your wedding ring?”
She cocked her head toward the mahogany highboy. “In my jewelry box. ”
He got up and went to the highboy, carefully opening the hand-painted box that held all the treasures he’d given her over the years. There, among the black velvet rolls, was the three-carat diamond he’d given her on their tenth wedding anniversary. Beside it was the plain gold band they’d originally bought. He picked up the two rings and returned to the bed, sitting down beside his wife.
He stared down at the fiery diamond. “Remember that vacation we took, years ago, at the Del Coronado Hotel? Natalie wasn’t more than a year old—”
“Six months,” she said softly.
He looked at her. “We brought that big old blue and red blanket—the one I had on my bed in college—and laid it out on the beach. We were the only people out there, just the three of us. ”
Annie almost smiled. “We went swimming, even though it was freezing cold. ”
“You were holding Natalie, with the waves splashing across your thighs. Your lips were practically blue and your skin was nothing but goose bumps, but you were laughing, and I remember how much I loved you. My heart hurt every time I looked at you. ”
She looked down at her hands, folded on her lap. “That was a long time ago. ”