chapter ten
They left SFO early, tipped a wing in acknowledgement to the Golden Gate, and hovered for a while over the soft downy hills of wine country before leaving California entirely. Laurie had the window seat, and a panoramic view of the endless trucker towns with their desolate motels and dried-up pools.
“I can’t believe you’re actually reading that trash,” Tara muttered to Mal, who was engrossed in some airport novel.
“I can’t take snobbery seriously from someone who dreamed of getting married at the Cheesecake Factory,” Mal said, without looking up from her book.
Tara scowled, and her knees resumed their nervous fidgeting.
“You can like what you like,” Laurie said. “You don’t have to justify it to anyone.”
“I know that,” Tara said.
Laurie waited. The truth would come out eventually. With Tara, it always did.
“My parents want me to major in Economics, but it’s so boring.”
“What do you want to study?”
“Economics would be good prep for Harvard’s JD-MBA. It’s a joint-degree program in law and business.”
She raised her eyebrow. Tara hadn’t answered her question.
“I like Cognitive Science, but—”
Mal wasn’t saying anything, but her head was turned slightly, so Laurie knew she was listening. She was exceedingly careful with Tara, as if worried she might shape her too much in her own image.
“Don’t you have a year to choose a major?” Laurie asked. “Why not just explore in the meantime? People tend to excel when they find their passion. It’s always better to lean into your strengths than try to fix your weaknesses.”
As soon as she said it she felt silly, hypocritical. Then again, if girls of Tara’s generation could make their choices out of desire rather than necessity, the arc of the universe was bending towards justice after all.
They lounged at a restaurant in DTW on their layover, with Mal offering Tara a thimbleful of champagne to celebrate her independence responsibly. Laurie turned her phone off airplane mode to check her messages and found a screed from Nick.
Her stomach sank.
“Now, you’ll likely drink in college,” Mal said, “but never drink alone. And find a friend who’ll keep you grounded, someone who makes sure you get home every night, that you don’t send long emails to your exes or puke all over yourself in public. Laurie’s saved me from myself more times than I can count.”
It was her cue to share some funny story about Mal making a fool of herself, but Laurie missed it, being too overwhelmed to speak. She’d told Nick about this trip as soon as Mal booked it, and he’d never said anything. But while they flew from San Francisco to Detroit, he’d apparently been composing a long email.
· · ·
It’s not that you keep running off with Mal that’s the issue, but that you didn’t even feel that you needed to ask me first if I’d made any plans that might be disrupted. I’m aware of how I’m coming across, like some 50s husband demanding a full account of your whereabouts. But if we don’t have the kind of relationship where we make decisions together, are we even in a relationship? I waited to send this until I knew you would have time to think away from me. I’ll ask again when you get back—what am I to you? No need to respond now, and email is likely the worst way to DTR. Just let me know what you want when you get back .
· · ·
It went on for a few more paragraphs, apologizing for raising the issue and reaffirming his love for her. Guilt made her skin cool with sweat.
She looked up, hoping for reprieve or distraction. She couldn’t think about this right now. At the next table, a harried mother said over and over, as if needing to play whack-a-mole with each of three kids, “I said no more Coke. I said no. You know what? You’re done.”
“Who charges four bucks for a Coke?” the father said, looking at the bill. “I’m not leaving a tip.”
“Laurie?”
“Hm?”
“Tara was asking where you worked while you were at Cornell.”
At Cornell glossed over the reality in a way she couldn’t take right now. She wanted to snap at the family at the other table, to tell them that if they couldn’t afford to tip they should stick to McDonald’s.
“I worked in the diner,” she said. “It was the only place that would take almost anyone, and I only had a high school diploma. The free meals were a big help.”
Tara’s eyes widened, but she said nothing.
They had to catch a connecting flight to Ithaca. Mal paid the bill and each took turns watching the luggage while the others went to the bathroom. In the stall, Laurie pulled open Nick’s message and read it again. Unpleasant shivers went through her arms. Between the contents of the email and the cross-country flight she was constipated, and she flushed simply to reassure anyone waiting outside that she had a valid reason to sit in a stall for five minutes.
“All right?” Mal asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
On the smaller plane going to Ithaca, she and Mal sat together, while Tara had her own row in the back.
“Oh, there’s something I wanted to show you before we need to turn off our phones,” Mal said. She showed her the website for a literary magazine, with her name listed as author.
“Mal! This is incredible!”
“My first publication under my own name,” Mal said, drumming on her knees with excitement, “and you’re the first to see it.”
Laurie threw her arms around Mal’s shoulders as best she could over the plane seat armrest. “I knew it would happen eventually.”
“Well, I didn’t,” Mal said. “Anyway, I’ll let you read it.”
Laurie read the short story, recognizing it immediately as a twist on Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband . There it was a morally inflexible Lady Chiltern who could not abide her husband having the slightest flaw, as their marriage was based in her idealization of him. Here, it was an uncompromising Indian woman who could not stand the shame of her husband leaving a high-profile job for a more relaxed one. But he’d done it to spend more time with his family, when he realized his perpetual sore throat was in fact terminal throat cancer.
She reached over the arm-rest to hold Mal’s hand tight. She didn’t have to ask if it was autobiographical. Mal kept her face turned to the window, but her fingers tightened around hers.
“Please turn all electronic devices to airplane mode, and stow your tray tables for takeoff.”
She finished the last of the story and put her phone away, but didn’t let go of Mal’s hand. The rumble of the plane reverberated through their clasped palms, and as they left the ground she felt a slight squeeze. The barest hint of nervousness. Somehow the thought that Mal, who flew around the world four times a year, who sauntered through security in her pocketless yoga pants after hitting world-records for unpacking her things into plastic trays, could still be nervous about flying, about her reaction to the story, about anything at all, tugged at a protectiveness she’d buried for years out of self-preservation.
She wasn’t about to cuddle Mal and feed her soup, but she didn’t let go of her hand until they were over Lake Erie.
· · ·
As the small plane lurched towards the tiny Ithaca airport, Laurie itched to read Nick’s email again, to torture herself with it. Her hand tingled with the memory of holding Mal’s, as if singed by betrayal.
Mal procured and drove the rental car. Laurie adjusted to the shock of seasons. Fallen leaves blew across the windshield like harbingers. She’d forgotten what it was like to feel time pass, without being caught up in trying to save it or hold it back or convert it to other timezones to schedule meetings for executives.Forgotten what it was like to feel change in the bones instead of trying to make it happen on a screen.
They moved Tara into Dickson Hall. Laurie felt the stares of the other parents trying to make sense of their trio and tried not to squirm at the ghost sensation between her shoulder blades. Ithaca was a tiny blue star in an otherwise red sky. It was easy to forget that twenty miles out in any direction were conversion camps and conspiracy theories. It shouldn’t have bothered her but it did, the thought that Jack or one of the people who used to know them might still work here and recognize her and think—
—So what if they did? What would be worse to them, Mal’s race or her gender? Or would it be neither of these, but the ultimate betrayal of town versus gown? She could almost hear Jack growling, You think a brown Barbie ain’t a Barbie?
The tension in the air crispened as they approached their hotel. She’d let Mal make all the plans, so she didn’t know that they’d be staying at the Statler, where bellboys came to take her luggage as if she hadn’t been working in the kitchens not too long ago.
“Are you all right?” Mal asked. “You’ve been off lately.”
“Overwhelmed, that’s all.”
Her face softened. “It is strange being back, isn’t it?”
Settling into the hotel made Laurie feel better. Mal lived out of her suitcase, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Laurie always preferred to nest, to discover the amenities of each place they stayed at, and put her things away in the little drawers and cupboards. She tidied up after Mal, putting their shoes into the closet.
“You don’t have to do that,” Mal said.
She hadn’t said what Vic would have— you’re my admin, not my wife —but Laurie’s nose curled anyway. It was automatic, cleaning up the physical world when her mental world was a mess. Her first real date had been with the fry cook at the Cornell diner. He took her to the mall for Buffalo chicken pizza. She’d really wanted to make it work, had started to sense the edges of her attraction to women and wanted to reassure herself that a more ordinary future was possible. But he didn’t try to kiss her, and it terrified her. Crying, she shampooed her carpet until two in the morning.
There weren’t carpets for such catharsis in San Francisco. There were apps for door-to-door laundry service, for food delivery. Nick’s studio was minimalist; if they fought she’d have nowhere to blow off steam.
“I remember thinking the Statler was so grand when I was a student,” Mal said. “Now, it just feels a bit old and musty.”
It was still grand to Laurie. None of the luxury hotels she’d booked for either the Unicorn or the Darling came close to having any history or character.Then again, she’d never have picked something truly beautiful for several hundred drunk guys to stay in.
“I think it’s lovely,” she said, then added, so Mal wouldn’t think she was ungrateful, “Thank you for bringing me here.”
“No prob. Shall we go for a drive before dinner?”
There was something about Mal at the wheel that felt safe, and every adventure they’d ever had only strengthened that belief. Once, in the early days of living together, they’d been on the 101 doing 80 mph in the carpool lane, when Laurie heard a loud Bang! and the car jumped and thudded.
“What was that?” she screamed, clutching the handle above her window.
Mal looked at her side mirror and frowned. “Hm… looks like the tire burst. Can you do me a favor and look out to your side into my blindspot? I need to get off the freeway.”
Laurie did as told, not knowing what it meant to have a tire burst, telling herself that if Mal was so calm it probably wasn’t so bad.
“Nice job,” Mal said soothingly, as they crossed two lanes. “Just a little more to go.”
In a daze, Laurie pointed out to her when it was safe to move lanes, and Mal took the exit and pulled the car over. Only then did Laurie see that the tire had blown out entirely, and shreds of rubber trailed the smoking rims.
“I was worried,” Mal said calmly, “because the rims were sparking and they could’ve started a fire.”
Laurie crouched in the grass with her head between her knees while Mal phoned Zipcar and let them know where they were. Even that wasn’t enough to stop Mal short though—they’d abandoned the Zipcar to the company’s GPS locator and continued onward in a taxi.
She didn’t know her feelings for Mal then, but remembered noting the contrast between Mal and Cam when under pressure—Cam had entered a full-blown anxiety attack when a bike knocked the mirror on his parked car askew.
They drove up 89 towards Taughannock Falls. Laurie stretched her arm out of the open window as if to touch the shimmering lake to her right.
“You’re a million miles away,” Mal said.
She shook her head. It was a frivolous thought, and not one she wanted to share with a published Writer. But Mal was looking at her expectantly, so she said, “It’s strange that women are the primary readers of romance novels, but the books have the same structure as the male orgasm.”
Mal blinked, once, then threw her head back and laughed so hard the car swerved.
Laurie yelped.
Mal stopped laughing, wiped her eyes, then started again. “I couldn’t agree with you more. Maybe that’s why I’ve never liked romance. Or weddings. How does it make sense to invest all your energy and money into one climactic moment? Where’s the ROI in that?”
“You never even dreamed of getting married? Not even as a child?”
Clouds rolled in on her happiness.
“Weddings in my family are unpleasant,” Mal said. “Everyone remotely related feels they can impose their opinion. Was the match appropriate? Was the event grand enough? Were the right dignitaries given due respect? Heaven forbid you didn’t know your father’s third cousin is a professor at the London School of Economics, or that somebody’s grandmother was a princess before the old kingdoms united.”
“Sounds… like a lot.”
“It’s a colonial scab. First they pick at it, then they go to make new cuts on fresh generations. All they need is the slightest reason, whether it’s that you went to a lesser Ivy, or had an unconventional marriage—by which I mean marrying an Indian from a different state , not something truly absurd like marrying a divorcee or someone from another caste.”
Her playful sarcasm did nothing to soothe or smooth Laurie’s way. All she could think was, Her family will never accept me.
“Hold on,” Mal said, and pulled the car over into a driveway. They rolled up to a butter-yellow cottage at the top of a small rise, surrounded by an acre of lawn and wildflowers.
Laurie stepped out of the car and saw the For Sale sign. She was about to say they ought to book a viewing, call the number on the sign, but Mal had already walked up to the front porch to knock on the door.
The lady who invited them in had short, white hair in a neat bob. Pockmarked hands quavered on a hand-carved cane.
“We’re really sorry to bother you,” Laurie added to soften Mal’s request to see the house.
“No, no trouble at all,” she said cheerfully, and let them in. “I like visitors. The real estate agent says the clients don’t like having the owner hovering, makes them feel pressured. But me, I want to know who’s going to have my house.”
They stepped into a large room with enormous, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Cayuga lake.
Mal gasped. “This is stunning!”
The lady chuckled, pleased. “Yes, I know French windows are all the rage these days, but when I saw these in Venice I couldn’t help myself.”
“What do you think, Lo?”
“I could paint for hours with light like this.”
Mal asked questions about the insulation and the roofing, while Laurie stared out at the lawn, wondering what she was planning. They got back in the car and continued driving, stopping at overlooks and parks along the way.
“Such a beautiful house,” Mal sighed, as they crossed it again on the way back. “Three bedrooms, for a tenth of the cost of a smaller place in San Francisco. And close enough to the university that I could sublet it.”
“And far enough away from everything else,” Laurie pointed out. “Your job, the A.C.T., the ocean…”
Me.
“I can work over VC from anywhere. Well, it’s something to think about.”
Mal parked the car in the garage and they walked towards the Ithaca Commons. Again, Laurie became aware of how little she’d thought about the details of this trip, as Mal led them to Just a Taste , a restaurant so expensive she’d walked past it a hundred times. Her feet stopped at the entrance, like a horse shy of a puddle.
“Tara will be eating at the university,” Mal said, as if that was what she might be worried about.
Laurie stared at the menu, her eyes scanning the prices. When the waiter approached, Mal ordered a flight of white wine for her and a flight of red for herself.
“I’d love to taste some of your whites too, if that’s all right,” Mal said.
She didn’t usually seek any special permission about the finer points of ordering or sharing restaurant meals, so Laurie had to wonder if they had doubled back, suddenly, to a time when she used to pay her own way. The thought left her unsettled, on the edge of panic, and she turned to look out the window, where leaves scattered as if blown by an impatient breath.
When the wines arrived but she still hadn’t chosen anything, Mal said, “I’ll order a few things to share and we can go from there.”
Laurie nodded, heartened. Their financial arrangements were one thing when they were roommates. But there was something about this trip, maybe that they were dropping off Tara like surrogate parents, or sleeping next to each other without a wall between them, or something that Nick’s email had forced into the open—Laurie could see too clearly now what that relationship was not, and a sense of what she and Mal were was beginning to form, like an impressionist painting finally coming into focus with some distance.
The bill arrived and Mal placed her card in the folder and closed it decisively.
“Thank you,” Laurie said.
“Stop thanking me for things.”
As they drove up the steep hill on Buffalo Street, back to the Statler, Mal said, “I want to walk around campus tomorrow. See old haunts, help Tara settle in.”
It wasn’t an invitation, but with Mal this was often the closest it came to being one. It was always I’m thinking of driving to Muir Woods; want to join? all the way back to ordering a pizza in a hotel in Tahoe and knowing that it wouldn’t go to waste. A pragmatic generosity, not a romantic gesture. Then again, why should love require impractical compromises, sacrifice… Laurie shook her head. She needed to slow down, back up to take in the whole scene.Nothing was clear to her; the dew collecting on the windshield seemed a sign.
“Can I borrow the car while you walk?” she asked. “I’d like to see my mother.”
“Of course. If you’re free in the afternoon, we can go for a hike in the gorge. It would be a shame to have come all this way and not do that.”
Laurie banged her head slightly against the head of the car seat. She should be planning to see her mother all day, and now she knew she wasn’t going to.
· · ·
As she drove alongside the rusty train-tracks, Laurie braced for the confrontations she knew were coming. Cayuga Lake looked so foreboding on the Lansing side, near the salt mines that ran for miles underneath the bedrock.
She pulled over into the driveway, wincing at all the things that hadn’t changed since she’d been here so many years ago. The broken wheelbarrow tipped over onto its side, the chipping paint, the coffee stains on the porch, all signs of a house unloved brought into sharper relief by the memory of the Palladian windows on the house for sale they’d seen yesterday, on the more hospitable side of the lake.
Her mother opened the door and let her in, and she managed to keep her face expressionless despite the stale smell. She hugged her, noticing that she’d settled into the same squat, rural obesity as the GMO soy on the hills. They sat down at the dining table.
“Luke’s at work, but Micah’s out back.” Mom sat down with a worrying groan, and her small hands trembled visibly. Her arthritis was worse. She probably couldn’t play the piano anymore.
“How’s Luke?”
Mom shrugged, as if there wasn’t much difference between husbands when it came down to it. Maybe there wasn’t. She’d never quite told Laurie what went wrong with Jim, or how she’d managed to keep the house in the divorce. Maybe Laurie didn’t really want to know.
“How’s Nick?”
Of course, Mom would ask after him first. Laurie had forgotten how glad she was when she told her they were dating, as if she’d been wandering in the forest and had found her way back to civilization. She needed to set expectations. “I don’t think he’ll ever pop the question.”
“Do you want him to?”
She looked up at her mother in surprise.
“Take it from someone who’s been married three times. It’s rather overrated.”
“And yet you always seem to find people ready to ask.”
“Men of my generation tend to view marriage as a status symbol,” Mom said. “It makes them feel respectable. Doesn’t do much for the woman.”
“Financial security,” Laurie pointed out.
“That matters less than who sticks around to push you when you’re in a wheelchair.”
She blinked. Why was Mom talking like this? She was the one who’d once told her, “Never shop at Walmart, never let anyone see you there. The day you believe you’re poor , you’re done. People think poverty is infectious.”
A door slammed shut, and Laurie turned to see her eldest brother. Micah had lost his hair, and the scar he’d acquired in prison gave him the look of a villain in a mob movie. He scraped the dirt off his boots and nodded at her.
“Hey, chiclet. Remember me?”
No biggie, he’d only tried to take her savings to invest in a scheme to steal people’s social security funds, and then called her from jail after he was caught selling weed to university students.
“Hey, Micah.”
He gave a loud guffaw, flashing yellowed, rotting, leaning teeth. A chill went through Laurie. He’d moved from marijuana to meth.
“It’s been a wild few years,” he said. “Jim defaulted on the house in the 2008 crash. The bank foreclosed, but they couldn’t find a buyer because the house is shit. Covered in lead paint. I bought it for peanuts.”
Laurie’s jaw dropped. All these years, while she’d been watching Breaking Bad , she’d taken away intellectual insights from Walt White, and her brother had taken away a shoddy plan of action.
And now he had a house, while she didn’t.
She stayed a little longer, but it was as if a great chasm had come between her brother and her. Her mother used to be the bridge between siblings, but somewhere down the line she’d made a choice, and let Laurie go.
It stung.
She got up to leave. Mom got up with another groan to see her out, and Micah headed out back. She didn’t want to stay to find out what he did there.
“You shouldn’t judge your brother too harshly,” Mom said. “We all make the best choices we can.”
“I’m worried.”
“People usually are, when they see other people doing things they wouldn’t do.”
Laurie frowned. She thought she might be trying to tell her something important, trying to connect past the chasm.
Mom’s voice trembled. “You will visit again? And not let so many years go by?”
“I want to,” Laurie said. It was the truest thing she could say.
“Not if it’s a hardship,” Mom said. “The last thing I want to do is to drag you down.”
“You don’t.”
She looked away.
Heartsick, Laurie drove back to meet Mal on North Campus, where she was saying her goodbyes to Tara. The teenager surprised Laurie with a hug, whispering in her ear, “She’s an oblivious idiot. You’re going to have to spell it out for her.”
Laurie didn’t bother denying she knew what Tara meant, just glared in warning.
She and Mal climbed down the trail into the Fall Creek gorge, pausing at the outlooks to catch their breath.
“She’s going to be okay,” Mal said. “Tara, I mean. The whole truth of the matter finally came out. She was dating some guy back in California, who dumped her when she got in to her top schools but he didn’t.”
“What an ass,” Laurie said.
Mal shrugged. “It happened to me too, a few times. Sharing my salary was the easiest way to weasel out of arranged marriages.”
Laurie snickered. She could see the affront on those placid and self-assured faces when they found out the truth. When Mal first joined the Unicorn, so many people had started off with some version of “ Who does the new girl think she is? ” and come back a few months later as devotees, prefacing every sentence with “ Mal says ” as if she were some minor deity. Laurie couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be a man raised around the identity of being a provider and husband, only to meet someone like Mal and discover that those services were no longer necessary.
“Is it common to just share your salaries outright?” she asked, closing her eyes for a moment to take in the familiar silisilisili of the flowing creek below. “When does it come up, the second date?”
“They’re more like interviews than dates, but it’s usually a first date sort of thing. Some people even put it in their online bios. Why?”
“Salaries change. Seems like a stupid thing to veto a marriage over.”
“People don’t have to get married.”
“No, but they do have to pay rent.”
Mal frowned, as if she couldn’t understand how the two things were related.
They continued climbing, reaching an area where the river was shallow enough that they could walk through it. Behind them was the loud hiss of a steep waterfall, a precipice of about thirty feet. Ahead was a smaller waterfall, only five or six feet, over which the water fell softly as a curtain, smooth and translucent. They walked over to the side, where they could hang on to the overhanging rock of the cliff for support as they climbed. Laurie went first, her callused palms gripping easily onto the shale as she stretched for the next foothold. She reached up and launched herself over the last few feet. She stood at the top, grinning, and turned to offer Mal her hand for the final ledge.
She hadn’t imagined that Mal would be looking at her instead of finding her next foothold.
One moment she caught sight of an awed smile that made her chest expand three sizes, then the next, Mal’s hand slipped, and she fell eight feet down the small waterfall, landing in the shallow river with a sickening crunch among the stones.
No.
For a long moment, Laurie stood in stunned silence.
The river, though shallow, was strong, and the current began to pull Mal down towards the steeper part of the incline. Laurie screamed, and Mal seemed to hear it because she started to grab for something, anything, to avoid being pulled farther down over the precipice of the steeper waterfall.
“Hold on, I’m coming!”
Laurie climbed down the way she’d come up, working to slow and measure her movements, knowing that if she went down too, they could both be killed. Her hands shook. Flakes of shale slid off the cliff. Was Mal holding onto something? Had she already fallen over the lower edge? Would she have heard a scream over the roar of the waterfall? She didn’t dare look. If she did, she’d lose time and possibly her balance.
She stepped into the river, crouching low and keeping her eyes only on Mal, who was holding onto a large rock with her left arm to keep from being dragged further downstream.The water was deeper than it looked, and it rooster-tailed up over her torso and thigh as it bore down and past her. Laurie reached for her freer arm. Both their hands were wet, slippery, and it took a couple of agonizing tries before Mal caught her wrist and she hers.
Laurie pulled with everything she had, until Mal’s feet found purchase against the rock and weren’t hanging off into the air. Mal got to her feet, stumbling, and Laurie dragged her to the side of the river, to where they’d left the trail.
They sat down heavily. Blood flowed down Mal’s legs, and there was an endless array of cuts down her knees and shins. More stains started to bloom on her shirt and against her khaki shorts.
Laurie’s vision felt super-saturated, as if she was seeing high into the ultraviolet.
“I need to see if anything’s broken, okay?”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“That can be bad. Shock comes first, pain later.”
Laurie was crying, sobbing openly even as she spoke what she knew were facts.
Mal reached over to cup her face. “Come here.” She pulled her into a hug.
“I was so scared. I thought you were going to die,” Laurie said.
“I’m here,” Mal said, and kissed the side of her head. “I’m here.”
Laurie pulled away abruptly, adrenaline still coursing through her, making her actions stuttering, erratic. She didn’t trust herself not to shatter into a million pieces.
“Lift up your shirt,” she said, rubbing her arm across her nose to clear away the snot. “I need to see if you broke any bones.”
Mal winced as she did, but there didn’t seem to be any restriction of movement. Laurie ran her hands over the cuts on her ribs. They bled freely but they weren’t too deep.
“You’re okay.”
“That’s what I said.”
Laurie didn’t stop crying. Something in her had shaken loose, and she couldn’t stand the thought of being separated from Mal, even for a second. She reached for her hand, and Mal let her hold on tight.
“Thank you,” Mal said softly.
“Shut up. If I can’t thank you for dinner, you can’t thank me for this.”
Laurie felt rather than heard her laugh, the vibrations doing more to calm her than all her careful breathing. With difficulty, she got up and they started walking back up the trail. From time to time, she’d have to let go of Mal’s hand to climb a particularly difficult part of the path, but they both reached for each other as soon as the trail widened into flat, soft, mulch.
Once they were back on campus, heading towards the Statler, fear drained slowly away and embarrassment seeped into the spaces it left. They were dripping wet, bras showing through now-transparent shirts. University students turned to gawk. Mal simply walked into the Statler, bleeding knees and all.
A group of housekeeping staff stood near their room. Their joined hands broke apart like legos.
“Can I have some bandaids sent up, please?” Mal asked.
The staff scurried to accommodate, and Laurie couldn’t help but remember the waiter in the taqueria falling over himself to fetch her a chair.
What did it take to walk through the world as Mal did, a free intelligence, a sovereign nation unto herself?
Mal rinsed off quickly in the shower while Laurie opened the door to accept the box of bandaids. Mal sat on the bed in her bathrobe, revealing her legs to be bandaged. Laurie wouldn’t let her apply the bandages, but cried again as she did so herself.
“Please don’t cry,” Mal said. “I mean, this was just Darwinism at work. My soft, useless hands didn’t have enough calluses to hold onto anything properly.”
“ Don’t ,” Laurie said, suddenly furious. “Don’t do that.”
To Mal’s credit, she understood. “I’m sorry. I’ve trained myself to put my feelings aside when they’re inconvenient.”
“Well, don’t do it with me,” Laurie said, more sharply than she’d ever spoken to her. “Don’t ever do it with me.”
“Okay,” Mal whispered. “I promise. I was scared too… I must have been. But I don’t know how to let myself feel certain things anymore.”
Laurie was flooded with sudden, overwhelming pity. She buried her face in Mal’s lap and put her arms around her waist, and cried the tears Mal couldn’t.
· · ·
She was still shaken the next day, and flying back without Tara meant no distractions. Laurie ached to lift the armrest and feel Mal’s shoulder against hers. Instead she composed replies to Nick’s long email in her head, wondering whether and how to reassure him.
They landed at SFO and got an Uber. Mal threw her carry-on into the trunk and got inside, and was already fiddling with her phone by the time Laurie got in.
“Huh,” she said. Looked up at Laurie in wonderment. “I got the house.”
For a moment Laurie drew a blank, then it all hit her at once, like a rushed backstory montage in an indie movie. The drive up to Taughannock. The Palladian windows. But buying a house ought to be an ordeal, a matter of weeks of planning and thought, like having a baby. It wasn’t… you couldn’t just…
Apparently Mal could. She could buy a hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollar house with cash, on an impulse, in less than forty-eight hours.
“Wow,” Laurie said lamely, trying to muster up some enthusiasm.
Mal leaned back, grinning with satisfaction. “Well, that was a successful trip.”
Laurie fell silent, turning to the window. In the rear view mirror, her face had the sallow, dead-eyed stare of a Modigliani.
As always, the feeling came first. Cracking the window to let in the chilly autumn air did nothing to help. She doubled over and put her head between her knees, stiffening when Mal’s hand landed on her back to soothe.
Mal asked if she was all right. She’d been asking that a lot. The answer didn’t come to Laurie until they entered the city, when they pulled their suitcases out of the trunk and climbed the stairs together. Then she heard the words from Nick’s email in her head.
If we don’t have the kind of relationship where we make decisions together, are we even in a relationship?
She stared at the back of Mal’s head. We’re not in a relationship. I’ve just acted as if we are.
Humiliation. That’s what it was. A feeling so far beyond embarrassment that she’d skipped over burning cheeks and flaming ears and landed on hollow devastation. She wanted to lock herself in her room, to delete all her social media accounts, to move to a new state. Anything that could erase this lie of a life she’d lived, believing them to be more than roommates, friends.
Was it her fault? What had Mal been thinking, flying her to Hawaii and Ithaca as if they were on a honeymoon, providing her with champagne and romantic six-course meals at every turn?
Maybe—horror froze her limbs—maybe Mal was indulging her so she wouldn’t kick her out of the rent-controlled apartment. Maybe Mal knew her feelings perfectly well, and had been serving them well enough, but keeping her at arm’s length so she could save up for that cottage she’d just bought.
Making her believe she had a chance, when she was going to leave all along.
She picked up her phone and wrote to Nick.
If I asked Mal to move out, would you move in with me?
He’d probably be angry with her for not responding to his email right away. Or sore that when he’d asked her to move in with him, she’d said no. Or—
Yes.
Laurie stared at the message.
Before she could lose her nerve, she got up and walked over to Mal’s room and knocked on the door.
Mal let her in and resumed unpacking her suitcase. When Laurie didn’t say anything, she stopped and turned to face her.
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
Relief broke out over Mal’s features, lit golden by the setting sun. She gave her a warm smile. “Are you going to share whatever’s been eating at you this whole trip?”
Laurie nodded. She folded her arms to hide their nervous twitching.
“Nick wants to move in with me.”
Mal smiled widely. “Laurie! Congratulations! That’s such a huge step!”
Tara was right. She really did need things spelled out.
“But that means you’ll have to move out.”
“Sure,” Mal said. Her smile didn’t slip for a second. “Were you afraid I’d be angry or something? Of course, I understand. Will the end of the month be soon enough?”
Laurie couldn’t speak without saying something she’d regret, so she nodded and left the room, but not before she saw Mal return to her unpacking, as if nothing had happened.