Chapter VII
VII
The ghost’s face is a little more bronzed than I remember, with a sprinkling of fine lines around his eyes and mouth earned from decades of expression, softened beneath the smoggy LA sun.
Under the too-bright lights of the movie theater, I can see that his hair is still thick, still mostly oil-spill black, but a little shorter now, with flecks of salt and pepper along the temples.
Time has been good to this ghost. Maddeningly good. He looks better now, even, than when I knew him first.
And the ghost is looking at me too. Looking like he, too, is seeing some spectral something that can’t possibly be real.
I can’t help what happens next: I take Emme’s hand and walk—no, I drift—toward where he stands, still magnetized by the pull of him.
Somewhere in the distance, I hear my daughter protest-panic.
Please don’t make me confront her in public, I think I hear her say.
I give her hand a squeeze, trying to reassure her that this is not about to be a teachable moment for her.
It’s only when I’m face-to-face with him that I realize that I have brought myself over here, clutching my daughter’s hand like a life raft, and that I should probably say something.
And that what I’d known in my gut was true.
It’s Reid.
I might be shocked, but I’m not entirely surprised to see him here.
A small part of me hoped that Reid might be at this show.
Hoped it despite the fact the occasional furtive, wine-fueled Google searches over the past however-many years confirmed that he still lives in LA, where he’s now a successful screenwriter.
I had chastised myself for such a quixotic line of thinking, then remembered what my therapist said about my tendency toward an unkind inner monologue: that I would never talk to my daughter the way I talk to myself.
I tried to give myself some grace for imagining a romantic future for myself.
As Blondie says, dreaming is free.
Now the smile that breaks across Reid’s face alleviates any anxiety I’d had about whether he’d be happy to see me. Whether he would even recognize me.
It’s the same smile I once loved: upside-down, like a shrug.
His eyes scan my face, and I don’t even have it in me to feel concerned about what he sees there, to consider all the ways I’ve changed since he saw me last. My hair still falls in long waves, though hints of silver now weave between the dark blond.
The remainders of the baby fat that clung to my cheekbones dissolved decades ago.
And despite the retinol, the red-light therapy masks, the collagen supplements and medical-grade tinctures, a feathering of fine lines fan across the corners of my eyes and sit contentedly between my brows.
But before either one of us can break this increasingly long silence, Emme interjects, “I saw you in the bathroom, right?”
My gaze falters to the girl standing beside Reid.
She looks to be a year or two older than Emme.
It becomes instantly clear to me that this is Reid’s daughter.
They don’t look alike, exactly, but I can see him in the arrangement of her features, like glimpsing the silhouette of a person from behind a silk screen.
She is ethereally beautiful, an Instagram filter in real life.
Her skin is milky, poreless, luminescent along the bridge of her nose and the corners of her almond-shaped eyes, which are the same almost-black color as her hair.
Her mother must be a showstopper, I think.
Momentarily, I marvel at the fact that Reid has a daughter. And then I lose my mind and think, Isn’t he too young to have a teenager?
Beside me, Emme drops my hand and straightens her posture.
To Reid’s daughter, she’s saying, “Have you ever heard of the concept of a line?”
My eyes briefly catch on Reid’s again, and in that look between us, we have an entire conversation: Yes, this is me, and yes, this is really happening, and how much time has passed? And what are you doing here? And is this your daughter? And are they about to have a fight right now?
We drag our gazes away from each other when Reid’s daughter responds. She looks genuinely confused, a jut of her lip, and then, all at once, clarity breaks across her features like sunshine.
There it is, I think. There’s Reid.
“Oh my god, that was you,” Reid’s daughter says. “I’m sorry. I was distracted by my friend, and I was literally about to pee myself, and I just—”
“Is this your dad?” Emme cuts in.
Quickly, I turn to Emme, unsure whether I want to warn her about her insolence or applaud her for her chutzpah.
Then Reid responds. “I’m her dad, yes,” he says, “but I’m not going to apologize on behalf of my daughter. Gracie has to do that for herself.”
That voice. That goddamn voice. It’s even deeper now, with the barest hint of grit, but it’s still the voice that had my underwear around my ankles in an instant.
“I’m sorry,” Gracie says. “It was a shitty thing to do. I honestly didn’t realize there was a line until I got out of the stall. When you gotta go, you gotta go.”
“I mean, when you gotta go, you gotta wait until other people who gotta go who got there first go. You know?” Emme snips back.
I muster every ounce of restraint to stop myself from telling her to take it easy, to spare me the awkwardness.
Then to Reid, she says, “And you need to get her some AirPods. You can’t take personal calls at a fucking—” Emme turns to me, pink cheeked “—sorry, at a very loud, very public concert!”
Gracie takes Emme’s castigation in stride. “Yeah, sorry about that. My headphones were dead, but my best friend is obsessed with the nineties and wanted to see some of the show. I couldn’t leave her hanging like that.”
Emme frowns, but she’s seemingly appeased by this explanation: She, too, is obsessed with the nineties, treating the decade with the same idealized fascination with which I imagined my parents’ youths in the sixties.
It’s not uncommon for her to come to me with logistical, borderline anthropological questions about the preinternet era: What did you do if you didn’t know the answer to something?
(You asked someone.) What if you got lost somewhere?
(You asked someone.) But seriously, what if you needed the answer to something and no one around you knew the answer either?
(You accepted the not-knowing and moved on with your life.)
“Understood,” Emme says now.
Confrontation over, the four of us stand in silence for a moment. But Reid is still looking at me. Like that.
“Lili,” he says at last.
“Reid,” I say back.
Our names are the spell that breaks the dream. I feel crazy then, the dam of self-control utterly broken, and I start to laugh.
Reid joins me, a big, bold laugh that’s exactly as easy as I remember it.
Our daughters just stand there, jaws agape, clearly in shock.
When we calm down, Gracie says, “You know each other?” She points a sharp shell-pink nail between us.
“We . . . yeah,” Reid says.
I run a finger underneath my eye, cleaning up my smudged mascara. Emme looks horrified—by my sudden hysteria or by a past life she doesn’t yet know about, I’m not sure. But I know I need to tread lightly here.
“We used to be friends,” I tell the girls.
Over Gracie’s head, Reid gives me a semiamused look. Is that what we were?
“It was a long time ago,” I add.
“I mean, it wasn’t that long ago,” Reid says.
“The MetroCard wasn’t even invented yet,” I say. “That’s how long ago it was.”
“A MetroCard is how you get into the subway,” Emme says to Gracie. I know she’s working on asserting herself, but I don’t love the condescension. Something to contend with later.
“Mm-hmm,” Gracie says. “I gathered that.”
OK, then. Confrontation not entirely over.
Reid and I share a look that lands somewhere between alarm and resignation. This, we both know, is what it’s like to raise a teenage girl.
For a moment, I wonder what it would be like to co-parent with him.
This is not an unfamiliar thought. Sometimes, in the throes of my unhappiness with James, my mind would drift to Reid, to what might have been had he stayed in New York and things had worked out between us.
I’d told myself he would have been supportive, encouraging, and loyal.
To Emme—I could never imagine my daughter being anyone but Emme, even with a different father—he would have been patient and endlessly kind.
Now I get to see it for real. Unconsciously, his hand brushes the back of Gracie’s head in a protective motion. The sweetness almost breaks my soul in half.
I need to regain control over this situation. To get a handle on what is real, even though reality admittedly feels tenuous.
Trying to play it cool, I ask, “What are you two up to now?”
Reid nods toward Gracie’s phone. “We were finding a place to grab a bite. Gracie wants to try this vegan soul food spot on Seventh Street—”
“Cadence?” Emme says.
Reid points a finger-gun at her, a move that would’ve been pocket-protector-dad nerdy had anyone other than him done it. “That’s the one. But I’m trying to convince her to go to John’s of 12th Street. I saw they have a whole plant-based menu going on.”
“You’re vegetarian?” Emme asks Gracie.
“Vegan,” Gracie says. Emme makes a surprised humming noise in approval. “But TikTok says there’s a line, and if I don’t eat something in the next ten minutes, I will scream.”
Somehow, I believe her. “I know the owner,” I say. It’s a little pathetic, the ding of pride I feel when Reid gives me an impressed look. “My mom babysat for him when she was a teenager. I can get us a table, if you don’t mind us joining you.”
Emme and I have always been close, but since the divorce, and then lockdown, she and I have developed an uncanny ability to communicate silently. Now the look I give her is a question: Are you OK with this?
The look she gives me back says, I’d rather not, but I’m hungry, so I’ll do it.
Then I say, I love you. You’re the coolest.
Reid sticks his hands in his pockets and nods at me slowly. “Interesting,” he says. “I don’t remember you taking advantage of your connections when we were . . .”
He doesn’t finish that sentence. When we were . . . what? Sleeping together? Obsessed? Falling in love?
“I’ll make up for it now,” I say.
I see Gracie and Emme trade a look like What the fuck is going on between our parents?
Then Reid grins at me. I notice the smallest chip in his front tooth. That didn’t exist thirty years ago.
“OK, then,” he says. “Let’s see what’s happening on Twelfth Street.”