Chapter Thirty-Six
Ben was tossing and turning in his lonely king-size bed. He had composed and deleted ten different apologies to Addison since returning to the beach the day before. For an author, he was having an unusually hard time putting his feelings into words. He had gone home to the city to get away from her but, apparently, out of sight, out of mind was ineffective when it came to Addison Irwin.
In the city, the day before, Ben had stopped at Zabar’s to pick up a babka before heading over to Julia’s parents’ place on Central Park West for their sacrosanct Sunday brunch. After her death, Ben had continued the tradition whenever he was in town. At first it was out of guilt, because Julia’s father had asked him to, but later, after Julia’s sister, Nora, had had a baby, it was more about his wife’s adorable little namesake, Juliette.
Ben’s heart had been like a bear in hibernation until the first time he held Juliette. The love he felt for this little brown-haired, blue-eyed baby, who shared Julia’s DNA, poked at the cold, dead organ in his chest and alerted him that it was still viable. Of course, now, after having met Addison, he was fully aware of the viability of his heart—or more accurately, of the chance of it being broken again. He was sure if that were to happen, he would drop dead on the spot, or worse, have to live once more with the unyielding misery he waded through for so long after Julia had passed.
“Hi, Henry,” he greeted his in-laws’ doorman with a casual wave as he entered their building. Henry, who had been the doorman ever since Julia was a baby, wore his heart on the sleeve of his uniform for everyone to see. He had watched Julia and Nora grow up and was devastated by Julia’s death. He once told Ben that he always thought he would go first. At the time, Ben was in his asshole stage of mourning and had to stick his fingernail into his arm, nearly drawing blood, to stop himself from laughing. He still had more than a little of that “screw the world and everyone in it” sentiment running through his veins, but those feelings that once ruled his every thought were seldom now.
“They’re not here, Mr.Morse,” Henry informed him.
Ben corrected him for the seven hundred thousandth time—“Call me Ben”—before looking at his watch. He was a bit early.
“I have a book, I’ll wait,” he said, moving toward the couch in the lobby.
“No, no. They’re really not here, they’re in Italy. Back Labor Day weekend, I think.”
Ben felt overly embarrassed. He hadn’t been in touch much that summer. It wasn’t unusual to arrive on Fire Island and forget that the rest of the world existed.
“I forgot,” he fibbed.
He took his babka and headed out of the building and then out of the city.
An hour later, Ben parked his car at the Wellwood Cemetery out on Long Island, to visit Julia’s grave. It had been seven weeks since he had been there, a record for him. He wondered if Nora, who often stopped there on the way home from the Hamptons, had visited in between. Each of them gave a beachcomber’s twist to the Jewish custom of leaving stones and pebbles on the graves of their loved ones by placing shells and beach glass on Julia’s headstone instead.
It had become obvious that the two of them were the only regular visitors. Both believed that, while their relationship with Julia had moved from physical to spiritual, it still very much existed.
A few months back, Nora had begun arranging their now massive collection of tiny sea treasures into words. She’d started out with mundane greetings like Hi, to which Ben responded, Yo, and advanced from there to more ghostly sentiments like boo, to which he added hoo. It worked well for each of them, sandwiching their sadness with the giving and receiving of laughter.
Today, the new phrase that Nora had last left Ben felt a little judgy. It read: Go away.
Ben analyzed what Nora meant by it and deduced that she thought him too long at the fair. He smiled as he thought it. “Too long at the fair” was the kind of saying that Julia would have edited right out of one of his novels.
Who are you? Mother Goose?she would have teased, before suggesting something like, Her sister thought it was time that Ben move on in life.
“Go away?” Ben had repeated it out loud before contemplating whether he had the patience, and sea glass, to spell out his reply—“Piss off, Nora!”
“Ooh, inappropriate cemetery language, Ben Morse!” Nora scoffed in the flesh. Juliette was strapped into a front carrier, kicking her feet in the air as if they were at a playground. It was the first time Ben and Nora had ever bumped into each other in the graveyard, though both of them carried on like it was a regular occurrence.
“Says the woman holding a baby in a cemetery.”
“Says the man holding a babka, like he is still sitting shiva.”
He laughed. He didn’t know why he had taken the babka from the car, except that he was hungry and thought maybe he would stay for lunch. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d eaten a meal there.
“The babka was for your parents.”
“Who are in Italy.”
“Yes, Henry informed me.”
Seeing Nora, and now Juliette, was as close as he could get to being around a live version of his late wife. He hoisted himself up off the ground and gave his sister-in-law and nine-month-old baby niece a kiss.
“Should we worry that your parents are sitting on lounge chairs in the Mediterranean and we are still sitting in the cemetery?”
“That was kind of why I wrote go away—though in my heart I think Julia is happy that we both visit.”
“I think so too,” he said, changing the subject.
“How was your summer?”
“Not over yet,” she laughed, “but good, thanks, though Lars has been working a lot—he’s on a call in the car.”
“Better than not working, I guess.”
“True. He would be in the car, regardless. He’s not a fan of coming here really—thinks it’s weird. But he’s always good about stopping for me. How about your summer? Same old, same old?’
Nora always joked that every day on Fire Island, and therefore every summer there, was exactly the same, like the movie Groundhog Day. Ben was fine with her teasing. That kind of attitude kept out the riffraff—the riffraff being the fancier folks of the Hamptons. The same breed, Ben noted, that had been coming to Fire Island and building huge houses as of late. It was a generalization, of course, and Nora was really as down to earth as Julia had been.
“Good, good,” he replied with little enthusiasm to back it up.
Nora took a hard look at him.
“Really? ’Cause you don’t look so good.”
“I’m OK.”
“You left the beach on the weekend and missed your sacred ball game to have brunch with my parents—who are out of the country?”
“I met someone.”
“You met someone? That’s fantastic! Why don’t you look happy?”
“The question of the hour.”
Ben sat back down on the grass in front of Julia’s grave. Nora carefully kneeled down next to him. He opened up the babka, ripped off a piece, and handed it to her, before taking another piece for himself. They sat like that for a beat, thinking and chewing on the sweet braided bread, and putting little pieces into Juliette’s mouth, waiting for Ben to elaborate. He finally did.
“Hard as I try, I’m still married to your sister. And I’m not complaining about that. I want to still be married to your sister. But what if I fall in love and there is no room for her anymore?”
“It sounds like you’ve already fallen—and since you are sitting here with Julia, there seems to be room for both.”
“I wonder how the woman at the beach would feel about that?”
“It’s not about the woman at the beach, it’s about you.”
He looked skeptical. Nora placed a hand on Julia’s headstone.
“Look, Ben, here is my sister, Julia, and here is my baby, Juliette. One did not replace the other.”
Ben smiled down at the baby, who reached out for him with her chubby little baby fingers—tapping on his heart again.
“People thought I was crazy naming her Juliette—so close to Julia. My parents begged me to name her Jane or Jordyn or Jenna.”
She rubbed her hand over Ben’s back and smiled.
“But I knew Juliette would heal me. You may say that’s a lot to ask of a baby, but it turns out I wasn’t asking anything of her at all. I was asking something of myself. To love again. Love heals, Ben. Find someone who will sit in the car while you say hello to Julia.”
“I think I already have. But I screwed it all up. I’m scared. The last night we were together, I held her so tightly, as if she may slip away.”
“Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, you know,” Nora insisted metaphorically.
“That’s actually not true. It often strikes in the same place twice. Sometimes more.”
“Well, then, it’s a good thing you ran,” Nora joked.
“I thought that I got past the fear. Really, I did. I was all set to pack up Julia’s things and make room for Addison—literally and figuratively. But in the morning, I choked and ran.”
“Well, run back. What are you waiting for?”
Nora took her hand and, in one fell swoop, cleared off half of her snarky last message to him. The beach glass and shells that spelled out the word away fell to the floor, leaving just the word GO.
And he did.