Chapter 5 #2
“Okay,” Brooke continued, “but see, Mom, the thing is? To me, all of that sounds exactly like being in love.”
Under her breath, Claire sang, “Mom and Sadie, sitting in a tree. D-E-N-Y-I-N-G.”
“Not helpful, Claire,” Brooke snapped.
Anne pressed her lips together before remembering she had on a fresh coat of Dior Addict. “Never mind all that. I just—I don’t know what Sadie meant by saying she can’t live without me. And I need to figure that out. So either help me or you both can just go home.”
“All right, fine,” Brooke said. “I haven’t had nearly enough wine to get Kaisley’s screams out of my ears, so going home isn’t happening for at least another glass. What exactly did Sadie tell you? There’s a big difference between ‘I don’t want to live without you’ and ‘I can’t live without you.’”
“No, it wasn’t just ‘I don’t want to live without you.’ She told me ‘I can’t live without you.’ Word for word. I can’t forget it.”
Brooke and Claire exchanged another look, the kind that always made Anne feel shut out, and then Claire tented her fingers on the table.
“Okay. Was it ‘I can’t live without you’ like ‘I’m too used to borrowing your measuring cups whenever I make tzimmes cake for Torah study’ or ‘I can’t live without you’ like ‘I would rather cover my house in Live, Laugh, Love signs than be somewhere where I couldn’t gaze at your impossibly symmetrical face at least once a day? ’”
Miserably, Anne said, “I don’t know. But Sadie really does hate inspirational slogans.”
“And you looove that about her,” Claire crooned. “You looove Sadie.”
With effort, Anne resisted the temptation to cover her face. “Claire, you’re thirty-three and a designer for a luxury brand. Act like it.”
“I am acting like it. Childish teasing is a perfectly respectable fashion accessory.”
“Have you tried just asking Sadie what she meant?” Brooke inquired. “I know healthy communication isn’t how this family handles things, but there’s a first time for everything.”
“Oh, sure.” Anne threw up her hands. “So I’m supposed to just walk up to her and say, what?
‘Sadie, I never would’ve thought of combining a black velvet choker with a purple bouclé vintage Chanel jacket, but somehow you make it work beautifully.
By the way, when you told me you couldn’t live without me, what exactly did you mean by that?
Because I’ve just realized that I can’t live without you either, and I need you to tell me what that means so I know what it means, and then maybe I can stop feeling so fucking terrified and start living my life again like a normal person whose best friend just happens to have a bigger wig collection than a spy with alopecia. ’ How about I do that?”
“Great,” Claire said. “Yeah, everything you just said sounds incredibly chill and totally not like you’re in love with Sadie at all. You know, maybe in a couple years, I’ll write a sequel to Heather Has Two Mommies and call it Claire Has Four Parents, and They’re All Gay, All of Them.”
“You don’t have to be in love to have strong feelings about someone!” Anne cast around for an example. “What about those New England women in the 1800s? The ones who lived with each other because their friendships were more important than men?”
“Right. Boston marriages. By the way, Mom, most of those New England women were clamming each other’s chowder behind closed doors.”
“Okay, time out,” Brooke interrupted, glaring daggers at Claire. “Mom, I really think you should just do whatever makes you happy. No matter what, we’ll support you, just like we support Dad. Right, Claire? We’re going to be supportive?”
Claire sighed. “Obviously. Look, Mom. I sort of…you know…” She gestured vaguely in Anne’s direction. “…that whole love thing. About you.”
“Thank you,” Anne said dryly. “I sort of ‘that whole love thing’ about you, too.”
“What I’m trying to say is—look, Brooke and I, we really can’t tell you what Sadie meant or what you mean.
Or what either of you want, or who you are.
Maybe you’re gay—stop, Mom; let me finish.
Or, maybe you’re bi, or asexual, or you’re straight and Sadie’s your platonic life partner, I don’t know.
The point is, figuring that out isn’t up to us.
So you should probably spend some time on your own thinking about what you want.
Emotionally. And physically. Please don’t make me be any more specific than that.
Not—” She made a large circle with her hand that included the table, herself, and Brooke.
“Not here. Think about it far away, at home, by yourself, where you’ve got some privacy. Okay?”
“All right. Fine.” Anne would gladly take the conversational exit route being offered.
The rest of lunch was surprisingly agreeable, given the intensity of the first half hour.
They ordered their food and a second bottle of wine, once the waiter got brave enough to come back, and Anne even managed to refrain from any additional comments on Claire’s dubious life choices.
But even though the discussion turned to Brooke’s plans to rejoin the workforce once Kaisley was old enough for preschool and Claire’s prediction for that fall’s pattern trend—houndstooth, apparently—Anne found herself drifting into unprompted memories.
Three years ago, just after a mild midnight earthquake, a panicked Sadie had banged on the front door, needing reassurance and company. She’d joined Anne in bed before Anne could find the words to protest and had fallen asleep within minutes. Anne hadn’t.
In the small hours before dawn, she’d been pulled back into semiconsciousness with the warm length of Sadie pressed up against her back.
She’d kept her eyes closed, stayed still, and felt something unnamed and heated and restless crawling through her body.
Told herself that it was perfectly normal to feel strange this close to someone; that moving away would be a kind of confession.
She’d fallen asleep again before she’d asked herself what she’d be confessing.
After lunch, the girls followed Anne out to the parking lot, the three of them walking together. It felt surprisingly nice.
“Bye, Mom. Love you. We’ll see you at your place next Sunday for Mother’s Day brunch,” Brooke told Anne and kissed her cheek. “Remember, all you and Sadie have to do is sit back and relax, okay? Claire and I are going to take care of everything. It’s our gift to you.”
Claire cleared her throat.
“All right, I’m going to take care of everything,” Brooke corrected, “and Claire will Venmo me a couple hundred bucks, get drunk, and draw giant dicks in the dirt with a stick.”
“Thank you,” Claire said sweetly. “I’m so glad you’re finally acknowledging my contributions to this family.”
Once Brooke said her goodbyes to Claire—with a mouthed holy shit Anne clearly wasn’t supposed to see—she left them both, walking toward her waiting rideshare.
Lingering, a little awkward with it, Anne turned to face her eldest. She adjusted her purse on her shoulder, opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again.
Claire looked at her expectantly. “Yes?”
“I know you said you can’t tell me anything about myself or about—I understand it’s an impossible question. But do you really think Sadie might—?” Anne didn’t know how her question ended. Her hands, looking for somewhere to go, each grabbed the opposite elbow in a defensive cradle. “Could she—?”
There was a genuine smile on Claire’s face, no teasing or hardness in it. “Yes, Mom,” she said and then reached out to squeeze one of Anne’s arms, a gesture that astonished Anne almost as much as everything else that had happened this afternoon. “Yes. I really think Sadie might.”
And then Anne was alone, and, for some reason, her body didn’t want to move. It was stuck standing in the middle of a Malibu restaurant parking lot on the Pacific Coast Highway. Caught in the possibility of might, a thing closing in on her and unfolding at the same time.
Her breath stuttered on a shaky inhale. She hugged her arms tight against her stomach and looked around, finally, at where she stood. It was a parking lot, but beautiful.
* * *
Think about what you want at home, by yourself, Claire had suggested, but Anne knew she couldn’t do that.
No such thing as ‘by yourself’ in a house where Sadie’s shadow blanketed every room and corner, casually haunting the periphery of Anne’s vision even when Anne was home alone.
It wasn’t just the hand-crocheted drink coaster with a little lump in the middle, or the half-written poems on Anne’s personalized stationery, or the couch blanket that Sadie always folded just so.
If Sadie was everywhere in her home, Anne had no space to look at herself and see just how much Sadie was there, too.
So Anne decided not to head back just yet.
It was probably best to wait out the slight fuzziness from those glasses of wine anyway.
Instead, she’d walk down toward Big Rock Beach.
Inappropriate footwear be damned; she could take off her heels after the stairs and before the sand. A little abrasion never hurt anyone.
Because she needed to hear it spoken out loud, and because Sadie wasn’t there to remind her, Anne said, under her breath, “You can do this. You can do anything. You’re Anne Harris Lowell.”
The first few steps across the pebbled parking lot were a little shaky, but by the time she’d reached the access path down to the beach, there wasn’t a sign of tremors in her legs or feet.
Think about what you want. Emotionally. And physically.
Emotionally. That seemed much more doable. She’d start there. Small bites.
Well, Anne supposed she wanted what everyone else wanted: to feel cared for, to be seen, to be heard. That certainly seemed like a reasonable list of requests. It wasn’t like she needed someone to give her the moon. Just someone, maybe, who asked her to look at it with them.
She’d spent half her life with a man who hadn’t provided her with any of those wants, despite the vows he’d made in front of family and friends and God.
And maybe she’d mostly moved on, but a hard kernel of pain pricked Anne when she thought about her marriage, and time wouldn’t ever be enough to dislodge it.
Thirty years of a gray, lonely existence. Of her walls bumping up against James’s barriers, neither of them yielding. Of feeling, somehow, wrong.
No more. Anne would never settle for gray again.
Yes, she wanted to be cared for, to be seen, to be heard—but she wanted glitter, too, and not just the kind on Sadie’s jackets.
Light, like what sparked in Anne each morning when she opened her eyes because she remembered she had a place she didn’t have to fight to make, and someone next door who thought she was a marvel.
Really, what she wanted was what she and Sadie had together, and what they had together was what she wanted. Simple as that.
Except—
She stopped abruptly at the bottom of the access stairs, just before the sand took over, and carefully removed her heels.
Except that what Anne wanted wasn’t only what she currently had with Sadie. She wanted certainty—or as much certainty as she could get—that what they had together, she’d keep. The job offer had made that clear.
Not being able to live without Sadie, taken to its logical conclusion, meant that it was no longer enough to rely on the inadequate labels best friend and neighbor.
So, if Sadie didn’t want to live without her, if Anne didn’t want to live without Sadie, if they couldn’t live without each other—and that phrase she’d dismissed all her life as a cliché sounded, all of a sudden, ludicrously wonderful—then they needed to be reasonably sure nothing would separate them.
They needed a more permanent tie than they already had.
By the time Anne had made her way over toward the big rock formation in the water, the sand coarse and gritty against her bare feet, she’d crossed over from certainty and had arrived at the word commitment.
What might a commitment look like in practice? A verbal promise? Something more contractual? They were already each others’ emergency contacts. But a real commitment would mean the two of them choosing to prioritize the other for the rest of their lives.
Do you really think Sadie might— And Claire, smiling, had told her yes. Yes.
A promise like that would likely mean no more dates with men, an insight that made Anne’s breath come a little short.
That felt like a massive step, but there didn’t seem to be any other way around it.
Dating meant the possibility of a serious relationship, which could get in the way of their promises.
The longer Anne considered not dating, though, the more plausible it felt.
Since her divorce, Sadie hadn’t sought out any relationships at all, preferring her large social circle to a partnership.
It was possible, even probable, that she’d be fine with continuing on in the same way.
As for Anne herself, well—despite some regret that plucked at her ego, leaving behind those exhausting dating rituals didn’t sound terrible.
After all, she’d never really enjoyed sex all that much, even with men who weren’t gay, so not needing physical intimacy might come in handy.
Sex wasn’t nearly as important as true companionship.
Maybe she should finally try a vibrator.
Anne dug her toes into the hard, wet sand, feeling the grains give. A pelican landed on the top of the rock formation, and then a second pelican. A friend. Or a mate.
Emotionally. And physically.
Water, cold and sudden, pooled around her bare feet. Anne jumped, her heart shouting an unnecessary alarm. The tide coming in. Only that.