Chapter 28
EMILY DIDN’T LIKE LA on principle.
When Cecile suggested she attend the National Aquatic Museums conference there, Emily cited all the things she hated: traffic, smog, too many vegetarians, and too many try-hards.
“Well, I could go,” Cecile said, “and you can stay with the boys.” She squeezed Emily’s hand in that gentle way she did when she was trying to be completely reasonable in the face of what she saw as Emily’s annoyingly adorable stubbornness.
“But Em,” she tried again, gentler. “You’ll already be out there in California for your sisters’ week.
It makes more sense for you to just go to the conference on the way there.
I know you don’t like LA, but it’s three days. You don’t have to move there!”
Of course Cecile was right: If either of them had to go, it made much more logical sense for her to go, given she was already going to California around then anyway.
But she still didn’t want to go. She still couldn’t stop this surge of anger rising in her chest that Cecile was making her go to the one city, and more specifically the one exact place within this city, she had successfully managed to avoid her whole adult life: Santa Monica.
On the first morning of the conference, Emily skipped out of the ten o’clock session she had signed up for and decided she would just walk by the mailing address that had rattled around in her brain for twenty years, face what she had been afraid of for so long. This place. This person.
Emily walked out of her hotel, pulled up the map app on her phone, and took a deep breath. Then she typed the address in that she had memorized twenty years earlier. Or at least she’d thought she had. When she typed it in the map app, no such exact address seemed to exist.
Had she imagined the whole thing? She’d been in so much pain that stupid morning, maybe she’d hallucinated something in Grandma Vera’s armoire that had never even existed.
In Emily’s memory, the address on that envelope was 45 Ocean Boulevard, the street name just like Grandma Vera’s. An odd echo that only now seemed too coincidental to have ever been real.
In her map app, she found an Ocean Avenue, an Ocean Park Place, an Ocean Park Boulevard, and an Ocean Lane.
But as far as she could tell, there was no Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica.
Also, there seemed to be no number 45 on any of those three streets, perhaps further proof that she had hallucinated the whole thing.
She laughed out loud—relief or nerves or just this momentary inability to control any of her emotions.
She could forget all about this, go back to the conference.
She should go back to the conference, but then for some reason she couldn’t quite explain, the Ferris wheel caught her eye in the distance, and she found herself, instead, walking toward the Santa Monica Pier.
The May sisters never went to amusement parks when they were kids.
Maybe it was Julia’s motion sickness, or Dad just struggling to get by caring for three girls, so it never occurred to him to take them on such a frivolous trip.
Nora said the first roller coaster she’d ever ridden was Space Mountain, the day before Emily and Cecile’s wedding when they all did a group family day at Disney World.
Emily, in fact, had never actually been on a Ferris wheel, and she wasn’t exactly sure what the draw was now except for some wayward silly thought that if she got high enough, she could see the whole city.
Like what she was looking for, what she had been avoiding, would suddenly become clear.
She was in this sort of odd daze standing in line, waiting her turn, when she realized the woman right in front of her had turned around and was talking to her.
“We’re wearing the same shirt,” the woman said. “How embarrassing.”
Emily, having almost sleepwalked out of her hotel, realized she was still dressed in the T-shirt she’d slept in, a light gray one with I’M WITH HER boldly emblazoned across her chest. Cecile had approved when Emily had it in the packing pile for California.
After their neighbor across the street in Tampa hung up a huge Trump flag, Emily and Cecile had disagreed over whether it was still safe to wear all their Hillary gear out in public.
Emily had said fuck the neighbor. Cecile had said it made her nervous.
California was the perfect place to wear it.
Emily looked up now and indeed, this woman was wearing the same shirt. Emily chuckled, thinking about how Cecile would get a kick out of this when she told her later. And then the woman gasped. “Shit, Emily? Is that really you?”
She looked up, above the shirt, and then saw the woman’s pretty, familiar heart-shaped face. There’s no way. “Cara?”
“Oh my God,” Cara said. “What are the chances? And I never come here. I haven’t been here since I was a kid.”
What were the chances? Emily felt trapped somewhere between an unbelievable coincidence and some sort of darkly comical kismet.
They suddenly reached the front of the line, and the ticket taker asked if they were together or single riders.
“Single,” Emily said.
“Together,” Cara insisted.
They were shoved into one cart, and the ticket taker locked the door. What else could Emily do but sit down, stare at Cara across from her, and let out a nervous laugh.
“You know what this is?” Cara said as the Ferris wheel began its slow ascent. Emily shook her head. Suddenly she knew nothing. Her stomach lurched, and she understood how Julia always got motion sickness. “Fate,” Cara said.
“I’m married,” Emily said, extending her left hand, showing off her pretty lattice rose-gold wedding band.
Cara ignored her. “I mean, this is the second time we’ve run into each other in some random place unintentionally. Logan Airport. And now the Santa Monica Pier. All these years later, and we’re even wearing the same goddamn shirt.”
“It’s a very popular shirt right now,” Emily said. “We’re about to have our first woman president.”
Cara laughed, that deep, beautiful, familiar laugh, and Emily felt something stir inside of her. It was the feeling of forgotten possibility, of youth, of wanting so much but having nothing. It was simultaneously joy and heartbreak.
She felt completely off-kilter now, and maybe it was this ride, or maybe it was that what Cara said had struck something. Fate. What were the chances?
“So, by my estimation,” Cara continued. “The universe wants us to be together.”
Emily let out another nervous laugh. “I don’t think my wife would agree,” she said.
Cara nodded. She leaned back against her seat and then turned and stared out the side of the cart.
They were almost at the top now, and in the distance, everything looked miniature, pretend, like none of it was even real. Ocean Boulevard, Park Place, Avenue, Lane, whatever it was—people and houses were too tiny to be anything but fake, props.
“At least let me buy you lunch,” Cara said. “So I can apologize and finally explain what happened between us years ago. I tried to do that once before, and you ran away. And it has never sat well with me how I left things.”
Emily blushed, embarrassed now, remembering the way she’d left Cara standing on Orange Avenue, unable to hear her out. Her defense mechanism was, and always had been, to run away first, farther.
“What does it even matter now?” Emily finally asked. “It was a million years ago, and I’ve moved on. I’m sure you have too.”
“But if the universe keeps bringing me back to you again and again, there must be a reason, right?” Cara said. “Just lunch. What harm can lunch do?”
Just lunch. She wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Still, Emily found herself guiltily checking her phone as she sat across the table from Cara at a seafood restaurant down the pier.
Like she was waiting for an angry text from Cecile, who might wonder why she wasn’t at the conference, and why she was eating lunch with an ex-girlfriend on the pier instead.
Of course, Cecile knew none of this. They had Find My set up on all of their phones, but Cecile likely wasn’t bothering to check it.
Across the country, it was three hours later, and Cecile had probably just left work to collect the boys from school.
“Do you have something to get to?” Cara pointed to Emily’s phone as she checked it yet again.
Emily nodded. “I’m actually here for a conference. I missed the morning so I should probably get back soon…”
The waitress walked over, they ordered fish sandwiches, and Cara ordered a glass of Chardonnay. Emily sorely needed a glass of wine, but for once she declined, not wanting to show up back at the conference after this, both late and tipsy.
“My mom got really sick back then.” Cara finally said it, like it was bursting to get out of her. Like it had been bubbling inside her for almost fifteen years.
“That’s why you ghosted me?” Emily asked, glad there was an actual word in the lexicon she could grab on to now that made sense. Ghosted. She hadn’t known the term back when Cara had actually done it to her. All she had known was the terrible, shapeless way she’d felt in the aftermath.
Cara nodded. “It’s hard to explain, but suddenly I was faced with her death, and I was like twenty-five at the time. I wasn’t ready to lose her. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle anything.”
“You know, my mom died when I was three,” Emily said.
“I remember,” Cara said. “And this is going to sound awful, but I didn’t want to be in your club.
I couldn’t handle your sympathy, or you telling me I would be fine because it happened to you when you were just a little kid.
” She paused and took a sip of her wine.
“The truth was, I couldn’t handle anything back then. I was a fucking mess.”
“I’m sorry,” Emily said. And she genuinely did feel sorry. It was a lifelong process, being a motherless child, knowing how to exist in the world without the woman who gave birth to you. She was still trying to figure it out.