Chapter 8 – June
JUNE
The orchids Denise sent have outlived their apology, so I'm cutting them down to stems and refilling the vase with peonies I bought myself when the door buzzes.
I look at the clock. Two in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Nobody buzzes at two on a Tuesday unless the building's on fire or Tanya's had a breakthrough about napkins.
"Mrs. Tierney? Courier."
I sign for a garment bag. Long, flat, expensive-looking, no return address.
I carry it to the dining table, stepping around the debris of Matt's week-long penance—it's been seven days since the birthday that wasn't, and the man has been trying to crack a code he won't let me help him with.
Flowers every morning, but never the same kind twice, as if variety might jog something loose.
Dinners where he watches me over his wine glass with this searching expression, waiting for a tell.
Two nights ago he suggested, out of nowhere and with forced casualness, that we should "watch one of those travel documentaries sometime," and I almost felt bad for him.
Almost. I made him sit through ninety minutes about the Galápagos.
I unzip the bag.
Gold. A dress in gold—silk, bias-cut, the kind of gold that catches light and holds it, floor-length, with a neckline that manages to be both elegant and a little bit scandalous.
It's exactly my size. It's exactly my taste.
I hold it up against myself and the fabric falls in this liquid column, and for a second I just stand in my dining room holding a golden dress with my mouth open.
There's a card. Heavy cream stock, his handwriting—his actual handwriting, not Denise's, I know the difference, Denise dots her i's and Matt doesn’t.
Pack your bags. Athens is waiting.
I read it four times.
The Parthenon at dusk. Gold light on old stone.
Before I'm too old to enjoy the stairs. One idle sentence, eight months ago, tossed into the dark of a half-watched documentary, and he kept it.
Or he lost it and found it again, went digging back through the years for it, which might honestly be better.
Anyone can remember what they never forgot. He had to go looking.
My heart does something I haven't let it do in a long time.
He got it.
I don't let myself think too hard about it, because thinking leads to auditing, and auditing leads to standing in the dining room crying into an orchid graveyard. Instead I take the dress to the bedroom and pull the suitcase down from the top shelf of the closet.
I pack the way I used to teach—methodically, with a system.
The gold dress gets the garment sleeve. Sandals for the stairs, because I intend to enjoy them.
The good linen pants. Three books, because Athens deserves better than an e-reader.
I find my passport in the desk drawer where it's been sleeping since before the move, and I hold it for a second, running my thumb over the cover.
Greece. Tonight. He's booked it for tonight, apparently, which is either romantic or insane and I've decided to let it be romantic.
I'm folding a sundress when I hear the door.
"June?" Footsteps, quick, down the hall.
He appears in the bedroom doorway, out of breath, tie loose, and stops dead at the sight of the open suitcase on the bed.
His eyes go from the suitcase to my face and back, and something crosses his expression that I've never quite seen on him before. Fear, plain and unguarded.
"Please tell me that's for Athens," he says, "and not because you've come to your senses and decided to leave me."
"It's for Athens," I say, folding the sundress with great care. "But the night is young."
He laughs—startled out of him, genuine—and then he crosses the room in three steps and wraps me up, arms around my whole body, face in my hair.
He holds on. Not the habitual hug, not the greeting-and-goodbye hug.
He holds on, and I feel him shaking, just slightly, and I understand that he's been living all week with the possibility that the answer wouldn't come to him in time.
"I'm sorry," he says into my hair. "I'm so sorry. I should never have needed a week to find it. I should never have needed to find it at all. It should have just been—" he pulls back and looks at me, "—there. On the surface. Where I keep you."
"You kept me in a drawer, apparently."
"A locked drawer. In a bad neighborhood.
With no signage." He winces at himself. "I sat at that table after you left and I went back through everything.
The old kitchen. Lisbon. The freight elevator year.
And then I heard you. Eight months ago, on the couch, saying the thing about the stairs, and I remembered saying then we'll go and I remembered meaning it, and somewhere between then and now I—" He stops.
"I don't have a defense. I have a plane. "
"A plane."
"The company's. It's fueled, it's filed, it leaves tonight.
Teterboro, ten o'clock. Denise handled the hotel—something with a view of the Acropolis from the bed, allegedly.
We'll find out together." He takes my hands.
"Four days. Phone off. No Milan, no reviews, no fit models.
Just you and me and two thousand five hundred years of stairs. "
I'm smiling. I can't stop it. I've been braced against this man for months, sandbagging my heart, and he walked back through sixteen years of his own neglect and surfaced holding the one thing that was mine, and I'm smiling.
His phone buzzes.
Both of us look at his pocket. The moment hangs there. He has a choice and we both know it.
He takes it out. His face changes as he reads—tightens, goes grim—and he doesn't put it away, which tells me everything.
"Tanya," he says.
"Of course it's Tanya."
"June—" He shows me the screen, because he knows that if he just tells me, I won't believe the scale of it. The message preview is three lines long and contains the words missing, police, and I don't know what to do.
"What happened?"
"She says nobody's heard from Rob in days.
He didn't come home when he was supposed to, he's not answering, his office says he never came in yesterday.
She's called his friends, his brother, his mother.
" He rubs his forehead. "She's alone with this and she's panicking. She's asking me to come over."
I stand there with a sundress in my hands and feel the whole afternoon tilt.
"Matt."
"I know."
"It's six o'clock. The flight is at ten."
"I know. June, I know." He pockets the phone and grips my shoulders, eyes steady on mine, and I can see him doing the math and I can see what the math costs him.
"She's pregnant, her fiancé has been missing for two days, and she has nobody else—Rob's family is in Ohio, her parents are—she has me.
If I don't go, I'm telling a woman I love like a sister to sit alone in the worst night of her life so I don't miss a plane that can wait. "
The plane can wait. The plane can't wait, that's the whole point of the plane, that's the entire gesture, but the sentence comes out of him with such certainty that I can hear how long he's been rehearsing this framework. Tanya needs him. It's the oldest fact in our marriage.
"Go," I say.
"June—"
"Go, Matt. If my husband ignored a missing person to get on a plane, I'd have questions about who I married." I smooth his collar. The practiced gesture. I could do it in my sleep. "But you're back by nine-thirty. Not ten-oh-two. Nine-thirty, in this apartment, bag in hand."
"Nine-thirty. I swear on the spring line." He kisses me, hard, grateful, and then he's moving, grabbing his keys, calling back from the hallway, "Wear the gold one on the plane, I want to spend eleven hours looking at you in it?—"
The door clicks shut.
I stand in the bedroom with my suitcase half-full and my passport on the duvet, and I finish packing.
Carefully. Methodically. I do not let myself calculate how many promises preceded this one.
I do not let myself hear the grooves, the old patterns, the worn channel that runs from Tanya needs me straight through the middle of every plan we've ever made.
I hope he means it, I think.
I pack the gold dress.
At nine-forty the driver texts that he's downstairs.
The building's doorman carries my suitcase to the freight elevator—Mark would be offended, and I make a mental note to send the crew a postcard from Athens, since they're apparently my most reliable relationship—and I ride down forty floors in the green-black quiet, watching the numbers fall.
Matt isn't in the car. Matt isn't anywhere.
I stand on the curb with my suitcase while the driver loads it, and I look up and down the street both ways, and at nine-fifty my phone lights up.
Matt
June. I'm so sorry. It's a full-blown crisis here.
Rob's brother just called, there's stuff about money, about a lease Tanya didn't know about—she's falling apart.
She needs me right now, she can't do tonight alone.
Take the jet. GO. I'll sort this and be on the first thing out.
I'll meet you in Athens. I swear to you. Don't wait.
I read it standing on the sidewalk, and the night air goes through my dress, and the driver pretends to be very interested in the trunk.
June
What is it now?
The dots come and go. Come and go.
Matt
No one has heard from Rob in two days. Not his family, not his work, nothing. Police took a report an hour ago. June, she's pregnant and she's shaking and I can't leave her like this. I can't.
I close my eyes.
And there it is—the board with no winning square, the game I never agreed to play. Because what do I say? Leave the pregnant woman alone with her missing fiancé and come drink champagne at forty thousand feet?
There is no sentence I can send that doesn't make me the villain of a story she's already writing, and Matt knows it, and Tanya—God help me—some part of Tanya has always known it. She doesn't even have to aim. The crises just arrive on schedule.
June
Deal with the Rob crisis. But you'd better be standing in that hotel lobby by morning, Matt. I mean it. I get on that plane alone tonight, that's fine. But I am not waking up alone in Athens. One morning. That's the deal.
The reply comes instantly.
Matt
By morning. I promise you. First flight, whatever it takes, I don't care what it costs. I'll be there when you wake up. I love you. Wear the gold dress. Athens is waiting, June. It's still waiting.
I look at the message for a long moment.
Then I get in the car, and the driver pulls away from the curb, and the penthouse goes dark behind me at the top of the skyline, forty floors up, all those windows and nobody in them.
Athens is waiting. He's still promising.
By morning, I think. By morning, or I'm done believing in the grooves ever changing.
The driver merges toward the tunnel, and I don't look back.