Patrick and Sydney gave me the best, the most blissful time of my life. We kissed on ferries and drank champagne by the harbor. We saw plays and movies and bands. We took Jack, grinning down at me from Patrick’s backpack, on long walks through the green dappled light of the national parks. We held his hands on the beach and said, “One, two, three!” and scooped him up high over waves that frothed around our ankles.
I was so in love with both of them. I remember saying to my mother, “I didn’t know it could be so easy to be this happy.”
And she’d say, “Hearing you say that just makes my day.” I could imagine how she’d be smiling as she scrubbed energetically away at her kitchen with a dishcloth and a bottle of Spray n’ Wipe.
Because all Mum ever wanted was for me to be happy.
I always thought she was just weirdly selfless, until I started taking care of Jack, and that’s when I began to get an inkling of how your child’s moods dictate yours and how maybe that becomes a habit.
I do remember that once she said, “Do you think Patrick is as happy as you?” and I said that of course he was just as happy as me.
There was a pause, and then she said, very carefully, tentatively, “It’s been less than a year since he lost his wife. He must still be grieving, Saskia, it takes such a long time, just maybe … keep that in mind.”
She was qualified to talk on the subject because my dad died when I was a toddler. I don’t remember a thing about him. I certainly do not have any repressed feelings of abandonment by my daddy.
I know my father was the love of my mother’s life, according to her, and I know she said she missed him every day, but that doesn’t mean Patrick was the same. For one thing, Mum didn’t meet anyone else who could have made her happy. Patrick met me. I made him happy. I know I made him happy. I’m not stupid. I didn’t imagine it.
Of course, I knew part of him was still grieving for Colleen. I was deeply respectful of Colleen’s wishes about Jack’s upbringing. She had written down a list of instructions. Her writing was shaky because she must have been quite ill by then. Her spelling wasn’t the best. It was uncharitable of me to notice that, I know, but there you have it; I have never held myself out to be a particularly nice person. Colleen believed in vitamins, so I gave Jack his vitamin tablets every day. Colleen believed that singlets somehow protected children from all evil, so I put singlets on him even when I knew he was probably going to be too hot. I’m sure Colleen didn’t mean for the poor child to wear a singlet on warm days, but Patrick took everything on that list literally.
And Patrick was happy with me. He said he was happy. He said, “You saved my life.” He said, “I’m keeping you forever.” He said, “I would have been lost without you.”
Today I lay on the beach and dreamed of Colleen. In my dream I was screaming at her, “There is no need for an apostrophe in the word ‘vitamins’!”
So that’s a pretty embarrassing, nerdy dream: screaming at a dead person about her grammar.
Somebody said, “Big night?”
And I opened my eyes and there was a man standing on the sand staring down at me. I was looking straight into the sun, so I couldn’t see much of him except that he was wearing a knee-length wet suit and carrying a boogie board under one arm and had woolly hair that seemed too young for him.
I sat up and looked down at my red dress. I guess I did look like someone who had passed out after a big party, except I’m too old for that kind of behavior. I said, “Sort of.”
Then he didn’t seem to know what else to say. He smiled and put his fingers to his forehead in a sort of salute and kept walking down to the water. I sat on the beach and watched him on his boogie board. He wasn’t very good at it. He kept trying to paddle for waves and then missing them, but each time he finally managed to catch one, he got such a funny excited look on his face, his woolly hair lying flat against his forehead.
This afternoon I went into one of those surf shops, and I don’t know what came over me, but I somehow walked out carrying a wet suit and a boogie board.
I guess I’m going to have to learn how to ride it now. Or surf it. Or whatever the right terminology is. I’m quite chuffed about it.
Ellen woke on Monday morning feeling drained and wrung out, and was horrified when she opened her appointment book to find her day filled with back-to-back appointments without even five minutes for a lunch break.
She could vaguely remember thinking blithely to herself, “Oh, I’ll manage!” when she’d scheduled so many appointments. Now she thought longingly of her bed and how truly, amazingly glorious it would be to slide back under the blankets and sleep the day away. If only she felt properly, contagiously ill, with actual symptoms, then she could get on the phone and cancel all her appointments. But she knew she was just worn out. There had been too much eating and drinking and nervous socializing on the weekend. Too much heightened emotion. Too little sleep and too much sex. She suspected she was coming down with a bad case of cystitis.
She was also out of milk, which for a few moments as she stood at the open fridge seemed like the end of the world. She actually stamped her foot. She needed the crunch of cereal contrasting with the coolness of milk.
She put stale bread in the toaster with fast, sulky movements, as if the person responsible for the lack of milk was watching and feeling guilty. She went and picked up the newspaper from the front yard, where the delivery person had considerately thrown it straight in the middle of her front hedge so that she had to rustle through unpleasantly damp, dewy leaves to retrieve it.
Then, to top it all off, as she was eating her toast (which tasted weirdly acidic) and reading the paper (which was full of bad news: murders, fatalities, wars and suicide bombs—the world was adrift on a sea of tears) she came upon an article under the heading “A-List Turns Out for Society Wedding.”
And there was a picture of her client Rosie. It had been about two months since Ellen had last seen her, and during that time she’d lost a lot of weight. All her curves were gone. Her shoulders were bony and hunched in a strapless wedding dress, and she was surrounded by four tall, skinny bridesmaids in floor-length gowns. So she’d gone ahead with the wedding. Her revelation under Ellen’s supposedly skillful hypnosis that the reason she wasn’t having any luck giving up smoking was because she didn’t really like her fiancé had meant nothing at all. Either she’d decided that she didn’t really feel that way, or she was marrying him anyway, maybe for the money or the prestige or because she didn’t have the courage to cancel the wedding after all the invitations had gone out to the “A-list.”