150 PM Mia
Mia found an empty room upstairs where she unpacked a few of her things and changed into a black bathing suit.
White gossamer curtains swayed in the breeze, and through the open window she heard the thin echo of voices.
After laying her clothes out on a four-poster bed, she walked to an adjoining bathroom for a glass of water.
From the window above the sink, she could see lush branches of trees and a sloping, overgrown lawn; to the left, there was the westward half of the swimming pool, framed in stone and set squarely in the grass.
Late-morning sun swirled on its surface, and an inflatable unicorn drifted to one corner, its nose bobbing side to side.
Marco stood a few feet away from it in the water, his daughter held against his chest as he talked to Sasha.
She watched him, the way he slowly rocked back and forth, how his daughter reached up to touch his ear.
His shoulders were dark and dotted with freckles; he had lost the baby fat that followed him throughout his twenties; and despite what Richie had said to her years ago, he wasn’t balding at all.
Mia waited to be disappointed by this, but realized that now she didn’t care either way what happened to his hair.
Drifting closer to Sasha, he said something that Mia couldn’t quite hear, and Sasha laughed, the sound clapping against the house.
A second later, water splashed over Mia’s fingers. She shut off the faucet.
In the bedroom she stood before a full-length mirror, pulling her hair up and turning from side to side to inspect her neck, the handful of moles that dotted her ribs and spine; then she decided that her hair looked better down and let it fall to her shoulders.
Pulling a tube of lip gloss and some mascara from her purse, she applied a little of both before digging through her suitcase for a bottle of sunscreen.
She was coating one of her arms with a layer of it when Lev walked in, his bag hanging from one shoulder.
“Get my back?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
He worked his hands over her, rubbing away the knots in her shoulders, slipping his fingers beneath the band of her bathing suit.
Mia closed her eyes and smiled. She smelled the coconut of sunscreen, the scent of fresh-cut grass.
Her head fell to one side as Lev kissed the side of her neck.
He kept his lips pressed against her when he said: “I didn’t know that Marco was going to be here. ”
Mia kept her eyes closed.
“I guess I just forgot.”
“You forgot?”
She turned her body around in his arms and kissed the tip of his nose.
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “I forgot.”
She squirted some sunscreen on her hands and rubbed it on her face, working it over her nose and the tips of her ears.
Then she slapped his ass and said, “I’ll see you outside.”
On the way to the pool she stopped in the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine.
The cake she’d bought earlier was where she had left it on the kitchen counter, the blue box pressed up against bags of strawberries and bright red tomatoes.
Adam stood near the sink, peeling husks off ears of corn.
He didn’t notice her at first, and for a moment she watched him work, picking away at thin gold filaments.
Faint tan lines circled his arms, and the bathing suit he wore was damp.
A small puddle of water gathered at his feet.
“Hey,” she said, and he jumped.
“Jesus. You scared me.” He set down the corn and pressed his cheek to hers. “When’d you get in?”
“About ten minutes ago.”
“How was the drive?”
“Long.” She leaned against the counter, the marble cold against the small of her back. “Lev rented a car.”
“Is that it out in the driveway?”
“Yeah. That tank.”
“It looks nice.”
“If you’re planning on going to a monster truck rally, I guess.”
Adam smiled. He set the shucked cob onto a cutting board and reached into a paper bag for another one.
The peach that Mia had bought earlier sat next to the cake on the counter.
She gave it a quick wash and then bit into it, the juices running down her fingers.
She felt a physical urge to say something else about the car.
She wanted to underscore to Adam the extent to which she found it ridiculous.
What made things difficult was that the issue was not actually the car—she didn’t care about it all that much—so much as she found herself wanting to prove to Adam that she was still largely who she was before, even though she didn’t see him much these days, and she didn’t know how to do that without turning Lev and his decisions into a punchline despite how much she loved him.
Rotating the peach one hundred eighty degrees, she bit into the other side of it.
She wished Adam would do it for her, and say something funny about Lev that she could get behind, but she knew that this was unlikely: Adam would never say something cruel for the sake of saying it.
Once in a while it would be nice if he could also be a dick.
“What’s the wine situation?”
“There’s some in the fridge. Want me to—”
“No. I’ve got it.”
She found an open bottle of Sancerre, wet and slippery with condensation. Upstairs she heard the creak of floorboards as Lev walked between the bedroom and the bathroom. Mia filled a glass with wine. She took a sip from it, then poured in a little more.
“What’s for dinner?” she asked.
Adam nodded toward two cardboard boxes on the kitchen counter.
Opening one of their lids, Mia looked into it.
Inside were seven lobsters piled on top of one another, their claws held together with thick blue rubber bands.
She smelled a pungent, salty odor. One of the lobsters shifted slightly, as if it was trying to find a more comfortable position. Adam finished off another cob of corn.
“Lev keeps kosher,” Mia said. “He’ll ruin the planet with SUVs, but he won’t eat shellfish.”
She watched as Adam’s lips drew together in panic.
“Shit, I didn’t know. I bought some pasta too. I’m happy to—”
Mia picked up her wine. She wanted to throw it in his face.
“I’m kidding,” she said. “It was a joke.”
Outside, Marco was still in the water with Ava and Sasha.
Sasha flicked splashes at Ava, and Ava kicked at the water from Marco’s arms, the droplets glittering in the sunlight.
For a moment Mia stopped short of the pool.
Lately she had found herself thinking of Marco more often than she used to.
Something would happen to her over the course of her day, or she would read something interesting, and she would find herself wanting to share it with him.
Her relationship with Lev felt like a prize that she had finally won, and in transferring her love to him, it was as if she had inadvertently shifted something in how she saw Marco.
She was far enough away from their relationship now to have a softer perspective of it; it was a feeling that wasn’t strictly nostalgia, but rather a genuine curiosity over how and what he was thinking.
Lev’s opinions were predictable—they impressed her with their constructions, and occasionally intimidated her, but none of them surprised her.
She had been reading him long enough to know what he thought.
“How’s the water?” she asked.
“Freezing.” Sasha wore a red two-piece. Her hair was tied up in a loose bun. “The heater’s broken. You get used to it, though.”
Marco dipped Ava’s feet into the water. Sasha flicked at her again.
On the steps of the pool, Emily sat with Theo.
His chest was still broad and defined, though now Mia noticed a new looseness to it—there was, she was beginning to realize, a new looseness to everything, like they were all a pair of socks that had started to lose their elastic.
Emily said something, her eyes narrowing as she spoke, and Theo nodded, shifting Ethan in his arms. Mia walked over to the pool with her wine, sitting on its edge and dipping her legs into the water. Her skin prickled at the cold.
“Ethan’s gotten so big,” she said.
Marco lifted Ava into the air, then lowered her back down to the water. Sasha turned to glance behind her.
“When was the last time you saw him?” she asked.
Mia thought for a moment. She said, “Four months ago, I guess? It would have been the last time I saw you.”
“Four months? That can’t be right.”
“I think it is, Sasha. I really think it is.”
A fly landed on Mia’s arm. For a few seconds she let it rest there, rubbing its front legs together, but then a familiar frustration began to course through her and she swatted it away.
“Well, whatever,” she said. “I’m just glad everyone was able to make it.”
Sasha took Ava from Marco’s arms, cooing at her.
“And Lev?” she asked.
“What about him?”
“Is he having a good time?”
Mia glanced back toward the house, where Lev now sat on a lounge chair, reading a biography of Mao Zedong. It had an angry portrait of Mao’s face on its cover, and the way Lev was holding the book made it look as though he and the Chairman had exchanged heads.
“Oh yeah. He’s working on a huge story about whether robotic voting is the future of democracy, and he needed a little break.”
“What’s robotic voting?” Marco asked.
Mia didn’t know. She said, “It takes a long time to explain.”
“And how about you? How’s everything at the Times?”
“Yeah, it’s all good!” Lifting one leg out of the water, Mia flexed her toes.
“I’m going to London next month to profile a young lawyer who’s teamed up with indigenous groups in Brazil to sue these huge multinational corporations that are funding the destruction of the .
It’s pretty fascinating. She’s found this loophole in international law that—”