Chapter 28
Tara tries to decorate the Inn for Christmas.
She even paints a wreath on the front door—’tis the season and all—but it feels very empty. I’m almost glad to go back to
Michigan just for the change of scenery. I expect the usual assailment to come, with my mom grilling me about when I’m going
to settle down and how all the good men are dropping like flies and I’d better get snapped up soon and start getting my act
together. But it ends up being kind of the opposite. I’m thirty now and something about the number seems to have made my family
accept that the train has irrevocably left the station. It’s a lost cause. I’m a lost cause.
There’s a freedom that comes when people no longer have any expectations for what your life should look like, but it’s not
as happy a feeling as I’d hoped. It’s like you can’t disappoint them anymore because they’ve thrown out all their hopes about
you in the first place.
My little niece is one year old now and already walking and sort of talking too. The first word she learned to say was “no,”
which tickles my heart, though my sister tries to spin it and insist she was saying “ma” instead. It’s the type of suburban
delusion you’d expect.
My body has that hot-itchy-burny feeling the whole time I’m back, and I do my best to detach myself the whole trip. I keep my phone tucked under the table at Christmas dinner at my parents’ house, continually refreshing my socials to see if Chris has posted his engagement photo with Olivia yet.
By the time I get back to New York, there’s still no sign of it, but I douse the rising embers of optimism, spray a hose in
the firepit until the wood is soggy and useless. They’d be that type of couple that gets engaged privately and then does an
entire coastal photo shoot before posting about it, just to ensure that they elicit maximum jealousy among exes. That would
be Olivia’s thought process, not Chris’s. He wouldn’t want to make a fuss but wouldn’t push back either, complicit in the
pageant-queen crime.
Tara and I gear up for New Year’s Eve at the House of Yes. They’re having something called the Surrealist Ball. “Fancy fantasy,
psychedelic styles, grandiose illusions” is the tagline—exactly what Tara and I need. She’s been in a slump too, first with
Hal leaving us and then with rejection after rejection for new roles. She has it in her head that she’s already peaked, that
her nibble of success will have to sustain her hunger for the coming days, the coming decades.
“Stop that,” I tell her, as she talks herself down during our pregame at the Inn. “We’re just in a bit of a trough right now.
It’ll make the highs that much better once they come.”
“I don’t know,” Tara says. “I just feel like the gap between where I am now and where I want to be is too wide. I thought
it would feel smaller as I got older, more manageable to wrap my arms around, but it’s the opposite.”
“Well, who wants a small world?” I challenge. “Isn’t the whole point of life that it keeps getting bigger?”
“I guess you’re right. It’s just kind of demoralizing sometimes, that’s all.”
“Until you realize it’s all a simulation and we’ve been holding the remote control the whole time,” I say. “We are the remote controls.”
She smiles, like I’ve lost her someplace beautiful, a coral reef or a field of daisies.
It’s just the two of us tonight. Jenni and Peter are having a low-key night, what with the baby coming and all, and Hal and Astrid are doing some kind of hackathon for their start-up. And even if they weren’t, they would’ve bailed for another reason. That’s just the rhyme scheme these days.
The general admission party doesn’t start until 2 a.m. Tickets for the earlier thing are sold out. I could talk my way in
but why bother. Nothing good happens before midnight anyway.
We’ve got the record player spinning to Tina Turner and we’re both hollering along, inventing new notes as we go. The upstairs
neighbors, a cranky couple always in their dressing gowns as if reincarnated from a Charles Dickens novel, come down and bang
on our door, threatening a noise complaint. It lifts our evening into the stratosphere, catapults us out amongst the stars,
amongst ourselves. We take it as proof that we’re slaying it on our own, that we don’t need the others.
I’m taking the fancy fantasy theme seriously, which is to say frivolously. Candy-colored necklaces, a tasseled headdress,
and netted gloves, plus the light-up boots that I paid $3.50 for after bargaining them down from the thrift shop’s ten-dollar
discount rack. One of my best-ever purchases.
I’m hardly even drunk. It’ll be a long night, and morning and afternoon too if I play my cards right, so pacing is important.
As I’m pressing lightning bolt flash tattoos into my collarbones and Tara’s too, Chris’s name pops up on my phone screen.
My heart jolts up before I can tell it not to, then does a jagged nosedive once I remember he’s calling to tell me about the
engagement. I nearly let it go to voicemail but change my mind at the last second. Better to just rip off the Band-Aid.
“Congratulations!” I blurt into the phone, wanting to beat him to the punchline, avoid having to hear him say the actual words.
There’s a pause on the other end and I wonder if he butt-dialed me. But then he speaks, his voice more coarse than cottony, not what I’m used to. “I haven’t asked her yet,” he says.
“What do you mean?” My breath bounces back into place, toes unclenching.
He says he kept meaning to do it over Christmas but it never felt like the right time, and now Olivia’s given him an ultimatum
to propose before midnight or it’s over.
I check the clock on my phone, giddy when I see the time. “That’s eleven minutes from now.”
“I know,” he says. “She’s out with our friends and I’m supposed to be there too, but I haven’t left the apartment yet. Emily
Jane, I don’t know what to do.”
“Of course you do.” I go into my bedroom and close the door, Tara listening from the other side. “Let’s look at the facts.
You could be in an Uber en route to Olivia, but instead you’re still at home calling the most anti-marriage person you know.
I mean, it’s not like you thought I’d talk you into proposing to Olivia. Did you, Chris?”
Silence squeezes out, the last drops of a dried-up lemon. “I do want to marry Olivia, though,” he says.
“Is that what you want or what you think Luke would’ve wanted?” I press.
He tightens up at that, asks what I mean. I dive into some of the stuff I’ve alluded to before, back at Bubby’s diner. I don’t
want to drive a wedge between us again, but there’s no time to hold back now.
“Look, Chris,” I say, padding my voice so he’ll know it’s safe to fall, safe to break. “I’m no psychologist, but I still think
you might be coping by living out Luke’s dream life and calling it yours.”
My words seem to hit him harder than I mean for them to. Perhaps that’s the only way for them to stick. “I’m not trying to talk you out of proposing to Olivia,” I say. “I’m trying to talk you into being honest with yourself. Can you really tell yourself that it feels 100 percent right?”
“Nothing’s ever 100 percent,” Chris says. A rebuttal of the lamest flavor. “That’s not realistic.”
“How about 90 percent then?” I ask. It’s the most I’ve used numbers in a while, but that’s the language Chris speaks. Like
raves and rants are for me, or used to be at least. “If you’re not even 90 percent sure, that might be a red flag. But this
is all just my perspective. You and I see the world very differently, obviously, so you can take it or leave it.”
I’m proud of how balanced I’m being. My natural tendency would be to tell Chris that of course he shouldn’t propose, that
it would be a lifelong prison sentence. But I’m overcoming that inclination and trying to impart some advice that actually
helps him, not just me.
“You can’t bring Luke back by following in his footsteps,” I go on. “But you can carry him forward by letting him inspire
you to blaze your own trail.”
The line comes out nicely and I file it away to put in a script one day. A long pause follows. I worry that Chris has hung
up the phone and gone to chase after Olivia because she never gives him lectures like this. But then he asks what I’m up to
tonight, if he can tag along in any of my crazy schemes. “I just need something different,” he says. “While I think it all
over.”
Different is a promise I can deliver on, just about the only one I can. “Yeah, sure, whatever,” I tell him, quietly dripping with joy
at the prospect. “You can meet us at the House of Yes if you want. We’ll get there around two if you can stay up that late.”
“Great,” he says, no delay. “See you then.”
I’m convinced that he won’t actually show, that he’ll talk himself out of it.
But when Tara and I walk over through the flutter of snowflakes just starting to stack up on the pavement, Chris is already there, standing in line by himself, hands in the pockets of his dark-wash jeans.
It’s like he knows he’s out of place, and that’s the proof that he’s actually in the right place, the right time, the right line.
It’s the first time Tara and Chris have ever met, but Tara wraps him in a hug right away. “Finally,” she says. “I’ve heard
so much about you, Chris.”
“That’s not true. I only really mention you in passing when I can’t think of anything else to talk about,” I say to Chris,
popping out my tongue to let him know I’m kidding, not that I need to be that overt about it. Chris is fluent in my sense
of humor by now, took long enough.
“And I only talk about you when I’m looking to get into trouble,” Chris says with an equally mischievous grin. I’d expected
him to be downtrodden and stressed, but here he is all spunk and fun. His usually pale cheeks are ruddy, and there’s a luster
in his eyes, like he’s ready for whatever comes next.
We cut the line and slide inside, touching and teasing the party before we see it. Chris joins the coat check line but I say