Chapter 25
JULIA AND TED WERE not quite speaking to each other on the day they boarded the flight to Chicago in February.
Julia didn’t want Veronica to catch on and so she decided, sitting at the gate at the airport, that she would resume speaking to Ted, cordially, for at least the next seventy-two hours, while they were away from home and would be in the constant company of their daughter, and also her sisters.
Ten minutes later, when Ted had walked out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, Julia was trapped somewhere between shock and anger. “I was trying to help you set up your iPhone and I saw your texts,” she said.
Ted nodded and pulled the towel from his waist, then strode across the room stark naked to grab his boxers from his chest of drawers.
In that moment, it suddenly bothered Julia that he was still so at ease in his forty-year-old body, fit from running most mornings, trim from being overworked, forgetting to eat lunch.
He still looked good naked, not in the slightest old or saggy, or even middle-aged.
Had she not been fuming about the texts, Julia might’ve stared at her husband naked and remembered why exactly he’d dazzled her in the first place, almost twenty years earlier, back in law school.
He pulled on his boxers, walked over to the bed, and plopped down next to her. “What about my texts?” he asked.
Julia seethed at the way he was always so goddamn calm, and then, suddenly, her phone rang.
Hospice.
The call she’d been dreading for weeks, as Dad had made a rapid decline since the start of the year.
She’d ignored Ted’s question, answered the call, and then had immediately thrown herself into organize mode.
There were so many details to take care of and people for her to call that she and Ted never finished their conversation about his texts.
(To be fair, they’d never actually started it, really.) But they hadn’t spoken to each other either.
At all. About anything. Julia had compartmentalized whatever was happening in her marriage and had booked Ted a flight to Chicago alongside her and Veronica.
Her father was dead, and nothing else really mattered.
There wasn’t time, there wasn’t space in her brain to process all the things she had read on Ted’s phone.
Still, it gnawed at her, there, in the back of her mind.
Those texts resurfaced in small moments, in between ordering flowers and deli trays.
Who was EM? Julia couldn’t think of anyone she knew with those initials, aside from her sister (and certainly, those texts were not to Emily).
Why was Ted texting this EM constantly, telling her she was beautiful, and making plans to meet her for drinks, dinner, a weekend (a goddamn weekend!) in New York City back in December?
Ted had told her he was on a work trip at the time.
The idea of him having some torrid affair with some woman he worked with, whom Julia had never even heard of—it all felt so cliché that Julia actually disdained him even more for his lack of creativity.
“Julia.” Ted said her name gently now, touched her on the shoulder. She flinched and drew back. “We’re boarding.”
“Right.” She stood and doled out the boarding passes from her purse. “I’ll take the aisle. V, you’re in the middle, and Dad can have the window.”
“But Dad hates the window,” Veronica protested.
“Does he?” Julia was in no mood to argue with V. Or try to placate Ted. Or obsess over why their daughter always seemed to take his side. “Well, so do I.”
“Mom can have the aisle this time, Ron.” Ted winked at their daughter in a way that made Julia’s stomach clench. Had he always been this way, and she just hadn’t noticed it before? So calm, so smooth. So full of shit.
Emily was still in bed when Julia called to tell her the news.
It was a Saturday morning in February. The sun was shining in through her large bedroom window, and normally she would be up and getting ready to go to the museum. But it was a rare Saturday off. And besides that, the first time Cecile had spent the night.
Emily had woken up first, and for a little while she’d been turned on her side, watching Cecile sleep.
She looked so peaceful, so beautiful. So very at ease.
I can’t believe she’s actually here, Emily thought.
With me. Years of longing had finally surfaced, been given room to breathe over the last few months.
And, for the first time in her life, Emily actually felt light. Even, dare she say, happy?
Emily had waited until last October, a few months after the divorce was final, to finally work up the courage, admit to Cecile how she really felt.
Even then, she’d worried it was too soon.
Too much. Cecile was her best friend. (Let’s be honest, her only friend.) She didn’t want to ruin it or lose her.
All of that, and all of her feelings, had finally tumbled out of her, a confession, then a rambling apology, one night over a bottle of wine.
“Em.” Cecile had said her name softly. Then when Emily kept on rambling, Cecile had put her forefinger up gently to Emily’s lips. “Stop. I feel it. You know I feel it too.”
The rest, as Julia might say, if she were trying to tie it up into a neat little bow, was history.
Of course, there wasn’t really anything neat about dating a newly divorced woman who had shared custody of her seven-year-old twin boys.
No matter how Emily felt about Cecile, she remained strong in her conviction that she could not and would never be any kind of mother.
Something she had yet to actually mention to Cecile.
But on that bright morning in February, with Cecile sleeping so peacefully next to her, Emily couldn’t bring herself to worry about that yet. She could only feel. Warmth. Happiness. Relief.
Then her phone rang.
“He’s gone,” Julia said as soon as she picked up.
“Fuck.” Emily had known it was coming. They all had. But still, actually hearing the news felt like a punch to the gut and she momentarily struggled to breathe. Cecile sat up, mouthed: Are you okay? Emily shook her head. She wasn’t okay. She might never be okay again.
As soon as she hung up, she got out of bed and grabbed her suitcase out of the closet.
“Your dad,” Cecile said sadly, hugging her knees to her chest. “I’m so sorry, Em.”
Emily didn’t know what else to do but start packing her suitcase, so she went into the closet and blindly grabbed a handful of clothes off hangers. When she walked back out, Cecile had gotten out of bed, thrown on a sweatshirt. She gently grabbed Emily’s shoulders. “Put the clothes down,” she said.
“I have to pack,” Emily insisted. “I have to go to the airport.”
“Let me make you a cup of coffee,” Cecile said. “Then I’ll get your laptop and find a flight to book for us first. Then we can go to the airport.”
“Us?” Emily asked. “We?”
Cecile nodded. “I’m not going to let you go alone.”
“But the boys…” Emily protested.
“The boys can stay with Rick for a few days.”
Emily had never been an us, a we. Not in any way that counted. Not in any situation like this, and even though, under normal circumstances, that might’ve scared her, all she truly felt right now was grateful.
Nora was floating when Julia called her.
Hera was finally, at long last, going to transfer to Broadway in June, and the news had just been announced on Playbill’s website. Nora had clicked to refresh, but before she could actually read the full story, her phone was buzzing with Julia’s call.
Then Daddy was dead. And Nora was sinking.
She didn’t understand how the world could be so cruel and so kind to her all at once. She was about to have everything she’d always dreamed of! How could Dad no longer be here to share it with her?
“Dad knows,” Julia assured her when she blubbered all of this over the phone, through tears. “Dad was super proud of you, Nora.”
Nora had last talked to him a week ago. He’d called her in the middle of the night, sounding more lucid than he had in months. The last thing he’d told her was that she should use some of the money she’d inherit from him to go back to school, and to invest the rest wisely.
“Don’t talk about things like that,” she’d said, half-asleep.
“Honey, I’ll be gone soon.”
“You can’t,” she’d insisted. “I won’t let you. I’ll be on Broadway by the summer, and I want you to come to opening night.”
It turned out, they were both right. She would be on Broadway by the summer, and also now he was gone.
A few days later, Nora was numb from cold.
She suddenly remembered how much she hated Chicago in February. But it felt colder than she remembered from her childhood, her three years at Northwestern, and the chill went straight to her bones.
The ground was frozen so solid, Julia told them, that the funeral home said they’d needed a jackhammer to dig the hole at the cemetery. Nora hated thinking of her father being put into the ground when it was this cold. Even standing under the heated white tent at the grave site now, she shivered.
“Is he being buried next to Mommy?” Nora asked her sisters, trying to recall if she had ever been taken to this cemetery as a kid. She couldn’t remember if she had. But if he was being laid to rest near her now, somehow she felt that would bring him peace.
Julia was attempting to smooth her staticky hair with her fingers, to no avail, while Nora noticed Ted stood off to the side, hugging Veronica, trying to warm her.
Emily clung tightly to her new girlfriend’s hand.
Julia didn’t say anything as she was still trying to fix her hair, and it struck Nora that it was a slightly different color than usual.
Julia’s natural medium brown had new red overtones.
“Mom was cremated, remember?” Julia finally said.
Nora shook her head. She didn’t remember. She didn’t remember a cemetery, or an urn of ashes. Who’d kept them? Dad, most likely, but maybe it had been Grandma Vera.