“He can’t just sell our apartment, Sheila.”
“Actually, he can, it’s his name on the mortgage. As I seem to remember, it was something about protecting A Little Sunshine.”
She paused, perhaps hearing it in my silence—absolute terror.
“It’s a really good offer,” she said gently.
“We live on the best street in Tribeca,” I said. “Of course it’s a really good offer.”
She blew past this. “I’ve been speaking with the buyer’s lawyer all day, and in order for the inspections and everything to proceed in a timely manner, the apartment will need to be vacated by the weekend.”
“No, Sheila—this is all happening too fast.”
“According to the internet, actually, it’s been going on for the better part of the decade.”
“I’m hanging up on you now,” I muttered, trying to muster a last shred of . . . something.
“Look, it’s not the end of the world. In sixty days, you’ll have your half of the closing and you can get yourself a new apartment in New York.”
“And in the meantime?”
“Danny says you are welcome to take any of the furnishings with you. But you will have to vacate by the weekend.”
“I literally have nowhere to go.”
“Everyone has somewhere to go,” she said. Then she hung up.
July
12
There were three calculations that went into how I chose which college to attend. The first was who was willing to pay: University of Oregon, UCLA, and Brown University at the top of the heap. The second consideration was how difficult it would be to get there from where I grew up. Brown was a ferry ride and a relatively short car ride, so it was out from the start. UCLA was a car ride and a long plane ride. But if you made the right Hollywood friends, the ones who summered in the Hamptons and had a propeller plane that let them bypass the Expressway, you could potentially go directly from a cushy flight in Los Angeles to the propeller plane in New York City, and be in my hometown in a fun and reasonably quick way.
But to get to the University of Oregon, you had the car ride, a plane ride, and another lengthy car ride. Fourteen hours, door to door. It was easier to get to Europe. There was safety for me in that. There was safety in thinking there were indefinite obstacles separating me from Montauk. So maybe it’s not surprising that it took the destruction of my entire life—losing my husband, my career, my home—for me to return.
And to return at the worst time.
You haven’t experienced gridlock until you’ve been on the Long Island Expressway on the Friday before Independence Day. The traffic has passengers standing outside of their cars, looking out toward the ships and the shoreline—welcoming them like a postcard—and one traveler staring into her rearview in the direction of New York City, trying desperately to believe she can still see it.
I’d had no choice but to drive my car. Leaving it in the garage in New York was insanely expensive—a luxury I didn’t have, or I wouldn’t have been going to Montauk in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing, though. All the earthly possessions I cared the most about (including my egg chair) were stuffed into that car, and with everything else that had been lost in the last couple of weeks, I couldn’t bear to part with them too.
Besides the egg chair, I hadn’t taken any furniture. I’d left it all for Danny, a final gesture I knew he wasn’t capable of receiving. He could sell it to the new owners or he could keep it himself. I’d left him a note saying as much and signed (as ineffectually and sincerely as any words I had ever written), I’m sorry, S.
It pained me to leave everything for him, not because I wanted any of it (though I did want some of it—the yellow denim couch we had purchased at a flea market in Pasadena, which we had carried up the stairs together). It was more because those things were all that tied us together at that point. If I stayed and fought for the slick leather ottoman we’d purchased at The Future Perfect, it wouldn’t earn Danny’s forgiveness, but it would keep us in conversation—a fourteen-year conversation that I wasn’t ready to stop having. Didn’t that count for something that, because I knew he needed to, I stopped anyway?
After five hours of crawling traffic, I weaved off the highway. Fields and farms started coming into view. People opened their convertible tops, stared out at the trees and the green as far as the eye could see—but I couldn’t see any of it. I just saw failure.
I was overcome with a feeling that I was going to throw up. I don’t mean that as a way to emphasize my incredible discomfort. I mean that literally. I pulled off the road at Stop & Shop, which was jammed with folks stocking up for their holiday barbecues, and parked quickly. I ran toward the grocery store, but felt too dizzy to go inside, so I sat on the ground—on the concrete—in front of the store, trying to catch my breath. Trying to think of anywhere I could go that would send me away from Montauk, away from my childhood home.
I pulled out my phone—my new phone—to see if anyone had called. In a fit of rage, I had almost opted to get a new number. Let any of the traitors even try to reach me! They’d get a disconnected message, a robot’s nasally voice telling them they were out of luck. I wasn’t able to pull the trigger, though, hoping someone—Danny, Louis—would come to his senses and realize I deserved a second chance.
There were no new messages.
“Why are you on the ground?” I heard.
I looked up, squinting into the sunshine, to see a little girl in a red cover-up, looking down at me.
Behind her, the little girl’s mother wrangled two other children into their car seats. She looked up, noticing that her daughter was missing, and I waved as if to say, she’s safe over here.