Hanging by a Thread Read online

  He glances around. “Yeah, maybe you’ve got a point,” he says, then leads me across the floor and outside a pair of French doors, onto this flagstone patio that overlooks the pool. It’s nearly dark, the sky a luscious, diamond-studded violet edged in persimmon at the horizon. One of those summer breezes you can sense more than actually feel wicks the moisture off my skin; I shiver as Luke dances me over to a pocket of shadow, out of the line of sight.

  “Now you can lean on me all you want, and nobody will know.”

  So the question is, is he being protective of me (for whatever reason) or himself? And why can’t I push that question from my brain to my lips?

  I look up at him. “But I’ll know.”

  A funny little smile plays over his mouth, then he—cautiously—presses my head to his chest. My hair crunches like cellophane as I settle in. I should be thinking about all of this, trying to make sense of it, but my brain has gone night-night. So we just move slowly to the music, some ballad from before my time, my hair crunching, Luke humming (off-key), and this very pleasant warmth washes over me, a feeling of possibilities I’d never allowed myself to feel before, I realize.

  I decide, because this is what I want to believe, that Tina’s not back in the picture, because this is cozier than Luke would let us get if she were. Right? Of course, we are in the dark and he hasn’t made a pass. A significant observation, I’m thinking. But then, why would he?

  How’s he gonna know it’s okay to take a giant step if I don’t say Yes, you may?

  I think of all that stuff Jen said about our family always playing it safe, not taking risks. And to somebody on the outside looking in, maybe it seems obvious that I should just tell him how I feel, already. But aside from the fact that he’s just come out of a very long-term relationship, there’s the little matter of my not being hot on the idea of sounding like some pathetic loser who’s been pining away for him for a million years. Not that I have been pining, although I’m not going to pretend the seed hasn’t been lying there, dormant and waiting. But timing is everything, you know? And speaking of seeds…

  “Did you know,” I say into his chest, “that we can order a paternity test kit online and get results in like a week?”

  He squeezes the hand close to his chest. “You sure?”

  “I checked several sites—”

  “No. About doing this.”

  “Yeah,” I say on a gust of breath. “And I really am sorry I freaked on you the other night. There’s no excuse for how I behaved. Or what I said.”

  “Other than my behavior over the last five years? Ellie, you had every right to say what you did. Especially as I’m thinking maybe you weren’t all that far off the mark. Maybe, subconsciously, I dunno…maybe Tina and me splitting up did have something to do with the timing.”

  There’s that word again. I swallow.

  “I have a confession to make—”

  “You told Tina. That Starr might be mine.”

  My eyes bounce up to his. “How’d you—?”

  A dry chuckle sifts through the humid air. “I told her, too. Which is when she told me you already had.”

  Shit.

  “Oh, God, Luke—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve said anything without your knowledge—”

  “Yeah, well, same here. So we’re both blabbermouths.”

  Like I can dance with all these questions zipping around my sleep-deprived brain. So I stop, staring at the white glow of Luke’s pleated shirtfront.

  “When did you talk to her?”

  “About a week ago. I would’ve told you, but Mom told me how busy you were—”

  “She didn’t sign the papers, did she?”

  Luke lets out a harsh sigh. “She wants to get back together, El. And there’s too much history between us for me to just blow her off. I figure it’s time I start figuring out how to fix problems instead of running away from them—”

  “There you are! God, I’ve been looking all over the place for you!”

  Luke practically pushes me away as his pregnant sister-in-law, my daughter in tow, make their way across the patio toward us. “Poor kid,” Monica says as we emerge from the shadows. “She must’ve eaten too much and got sick.”

  “Sweetie, ohmigod!” I drop to my knees in front of her, my heart twisting at the miserable look on her face. “Did you make it to the bathroom?”

  At that, her face crumples. “N-no. An’ now everybody thinks I’m disgusting.”

  “Hey,” Luke says, bending down, close enough for me to feel his body heat. My brain does an instant replay of his last words, and I kinda feel like tossing a few cookies myself. “Everybody gets sick sometimes,” he says to Starr, “especially at things like this. Nobody thinks you’re disgusting, okay?”

  Holding my quietly weeping daughter, I look up at Monica. “Do I need to get it cleaned up?”

  “Are you kidding? Like ten people swooped out of nowhere, had it taken care of so fast nobody even noticed, hardly.” She touches Starr’s hair. “So don’t you worry about this another minute, sweetie, okay?”

  Starr nods in my arms, but I can tell she’s not convinced. She looks up at me. “C’n we go home now?”

  “Sure, baby, right away. Let me just go find my purse—”

  “I’ll call you later,” Luke says behind me.

  I turn, just as the first clear thought I’ve had all night occurs to me. Which is that there are no absolute guidelines for how, or when, or even if, to tell the truth. That there’s no point in saying Yes, you may take a giant step before, and unless, someone asks if he may. All I’d be doing is confusing the issue even more. If Luke’s on the fence about this, then…then he’s just going to have to decide which side to climb down on all by himself. Besides—and here’s where being a basically honorable person is a real bitch—I did promise Tina I’d stay out of her way. So that’s what I’ve gotta do.

  “Luke, please—” Feeling my throat go tight, I haul my smelly daughter up into my arms. “Just…just leave me out of it, okay?”

  Then I walk quickly away before I fall completely apart.

  chapter 23

  My mother absolutely adored Manhattan.

  When Jen and I were kids, Mom used to take us into the city at least once a month, sometimes to shop, but mostly to go to the museums or to sightsee—she couldn’t wait to take us up to the top of the World Trade Center the year it was finished; she insisted she could see our house from the observation deck. And of course, there was always the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show, with hot chocolate at the Rockefeller Ice Rink afterwards. Admittedly, all schmaltzy, touristy stuff, but I ate it up. To Mama, Manhattan was another word for “magic,” and my sister and I caught her enthusiasm like it was a benign, and incurable, virus.

  And like all good little carriers, I fully intend to infect my child as well.

  The tail end of a tropical storm swept through the mid-Atlantic states a couple days ago, leaving behind clear blue skies and temperatures that feel more like mid-September than late June. “A perfect day to go to the Central Park Zoo!” I announced to Starr when I got her up this morning. “And while we’re so close, you wanna go to FAO Schwartz?”

  Most kids would have been hopping around like a flea at the prospect of going anywhere, especially anywhere that potentially involves animals, toys and/or junk food, but Starr simply said “Whatever” as she shrugged into a long-sleeved purple T-shirt with glittery butterflies on it and a pair of yellow capris. And the boots. Never mind that they must be hot as hell.

  “But we’re going into the city!” I said, wondering what I was missing here.

  She patted my arm, solemnly said, “You’ll make yourself sick if you get too excited,” then calmly went downstairs for breakfast.

  How is this my daughter? How?

  Anyway, we’re on the train at last, me fidgeting in my seat, Starr still as a mouse next to me, impassively studying the other passengers. We’d invited Jen, but she said it would kill her to go into the cit
y and not be able to go shopping (apparently it’s harder to resist the flagship stores in Manhattan than their miniclones in the mall?), so she decided to stay home and go through several boxes of Leo’s papers she’d found in the closet in his room. She actually asked if I minded. Like I’m dying to sort through forty years’ worth of paid Con Ed bills.

  “So what do you want to do first? The zoo or the toy store?”

  Starr shrugs. “Whatever.”

  This is her new word. Which unfortunately is much easier to work into the conversation than esoteric, which was last week’s fave. Then my middle-aged baby snuggles up next to me, her arm threaded through mine. And I wonder, will she remember this moment twenty years from now? Or even five?

  Memory’s such a bizarre thing. When you’re in the moment, you think it’ll be emblazoned on your brain forever. But although I remember the fact of snuggling up to my own mother like this, I don’t actually remember doing it. The feel of it. And other memories, especially from when I was littler, are fragmented and out-of-focus, like looking down through twenty feet of water at shards of pottery scattered along the ocean floor. Occasionally snippets of a conversation float through, or the vague impression of the look on her face or the sound of her voice, but very little that I can actually define. Which leads me to wonder just how much is actually memory, and how much is imagination.

  The human brain is one bizarre organ, that’s for sure.

  For instance…when I finally recuperated enough from the weeks leading up to Heather’s wedding to address cleaning the hellhole that used to be my basement, I realized that, despite the exhaustion and the craziness, I really had gotten a real kick out of making all those women look good.

  And that, maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t mind doing it on a regular basis.

  Do I perceive a collective rolling of the eyes? A chorus of “Oh, brothers”? Okay, fine. But here’s the thing: I still haven’t got what it takes to make a splash in high fashion. That’s not fear, that’s fact. My brain simply doesn’t work that way. However (it occurs to me) there’s a lot of real women out there, with real breasts and real hips and rounded bellies from having kids (or not) and not a whole lot of designers catering to their needs. And I think—maybe—my brain does work that way.

  In theory, I could do this. In fact, the other night after I put Starr to bed I was suddenly attacked—that’s the only word that fits—with a whole bunch of ideas. I was up until nearly three in the morning, sketching my fingers off. A lot of the designs were crap, but some of them weren’t too bad, I don’t think. A few more, and I’d actually have enough for a modest start-up line.

  Even so, coming up with the ideas—even for me—is the easy part. It’s making the damn clothes that’s a killer. Hey, I felt bad enough about basically ignoring Starr for the last few weeks while Dolly and I pushed to get those dresses finished. I sure as hell couldn’t do that to her—or me—week after week. But as I sketched, and the more possibilities came into focus, so did that nebulous almost-memory that had hovered over my conversation with Jennifer several weeks ago.

  I was still pretty little, maybe Starr’s age, and we were all over at my grandparents’. I can’t recall if Jen was there or not, which might account for why she didn’t mention this when we were talking the other day. Either that, or her memory’s crappier than mine. In any case, Nana was riding my mother about her failure as a performer—and taking great delight in it, as I recall—when Mom noticed me standing in the doorway, taking it all in. With a smile, she held out her arms to me, scooping me up into her lap when I ran over to her.

  “I didn’t fail, Judith,” she said calmly, her breath sifting through my hair as I cuddled against her chest. “I simply chose my children over something that would have taken me away from them more than I could bear. Maybe when they’re older, I’ll start up again….”

  If my grandmother had a rebuttal, it’s been mercifully expunged from my memory. And of course, Mama never got her second chance at a career. Did she regret her choice? I have no idea. I doubt she would have admitted it even if she had. But even though this may sound selfish, I certainly didn’t. I interpreted her sacrifice as her not wanting to do anything that she saw as hurting Jen or me. Unlike Tina’s mother, for instance, whose kids didn’t even rank a distant second in her life, let alone first.

  Of course, I now know there’s a balance. That having a job or career has nothing to do with how involved someone is with her kids. Take Tina’s mom, for instance—she was always around, but she sure as hell was never there, if you know what I mean. But there’s a huge difference between starting up a clothing business, and a job that has regular hours and weekends off and paid vacations and benefits. Nobody succeeds in the rag trade without working their butt off and putting in long hours. If I don’t, I’ll be lucky to last ten minutes. Aside from the tremendous financial risk (Start-up capital? What start-up capital?) there’s an even bigger risk that I’d never see my daughter again. Her finding me asleep on the couch downstairs once might have been amusing, but any more than that…no damn way. Look at Nikky and her relationship with her kids, for God’s sake. Do I really want to end up like that? Or worse, for Starr to end up like zombie-girl Marilyn?

  Maybe I didn’t choose to get pregnant, but I definitely chose to become a mother. A choice which, for better or worse, impacts all my other choices, for the rest of my life. I know this. More to the point, I’ve accepted it.

  Then why won’t this crazy, impractical, totally unfeasible idea simply lie down and die, already? The idea is to make my life less complicated, not more. The idea is…

  I suck in a breath, willing the knot at the back of my throat to go away.

  The idea is to not let myself ache for things I can’t have.

  By the time we reach Manhattan, I’ve talked myself back down off the ledge. Even if I hadn’t, though, just walking into FAO Schwartz would’ve done it. There’s just something about three floors full of nothing but toys that makes me feel all Christmasy and giddy and goofy inside. Even if most normal—and sane—people wouldn’t dream of paying several hundred dollars for a life-size stuffed tiger, or as much for a toy car as a real one might cost. There’s just something about the place that turns everyone who comes in here into a kid again.

  Even, amazingly enough, my kid.

  She’s dragged me up and down the escalators three times, looking for the perfect (as in, I won’t have to sell her in order to afford it) reward for her being so good while I was swamped with work these past weeks. Of course, she doesn’t know it’s a reward, but far be it from me to pass up a guilt-assuaging opportunity. At last, she picks out a chubby, grinning stuffed hippopotamus (not life-size, unless there are foot-long pygmy hippos roaming around somewhere); the cashier’s ringing up the sale just as I hear:

  “Ellie?”

  I turn, frowning, unable at first to link the voice—low, male, English-accented—to any of the roughly ten thousand bodies in the store. A second later, however, a smiling, familiar-looking dark-haired man appears in front of us.

  “I’m sorry, maybe I have the wrong person?” he says. My brain dimly registers the open-collared black linen shirt, the casually rumpled Dockers, the expensive-looking tan bag slung over one strong-but-slim shoulder. That I’m looking up at him. Even in shoes that add half a story to my height. “It is Ellie Levine, isn’t it?”

  “Yes…”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” Damn. His eyes—a stunning silvery gray, long lashes—actually sparkle. “We only met once, and for all of ten minutes at that. It’s Alan. Stein? Daniel’s brother? We ran into each other at the Met several years ago?”

  Oh, boy. I now know you don’t have to be staring death in the face for your life to flash before you. In a pinch, your former lover’s brother will work just fine.

  Okay, God? Not to be a pain in the butt or anything, but how is this less complicated?

  “Alan!” I say, smile frozen in place like a ventriloquist. “What a surpr
ise! What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I’m in New York on business—”

  (If I ever knew what he did, shock has totally eradicated it from my memory.)

  “—and I thought I’d pop in here to get my nephew a gift.”

  I’m guessing that’s the little darling who made that life-altering trans-Atlantic call six years ago.

  Grinning (the dimples now register. Oh, boy), Alan says, “You look fantastic! Your hair’s…shorter, isn’t it?”

  I nod, simultaneously wishing the floor would swallow us up and thanking my grandmother for drumming into my head that you never know who you might see when you’re out, so you should always look your best. Of course, her definition of “best” and mine probably wouldn’t jibe (I can’t exactly see Nana in baggy, bright red monkey print overalls), but that’s neither here nor there. Then I realize Alan’s smile has drifted down to my daughter, who has been quietly sizing him up. My hot dog (with everything) from lunch threatens to make an encore appearance. “And who’s this?” he asks.

  Since I’ve been holding her hand the entire time, I don’t suppose he’d buy that I’d never seen her before.

  “This is…Starr.”

  “Is she yours?”

  I can’t exactly deny it. At least not while she’s within earshot. So I nod, praying he won’t ask her how old she is.

  Alan tells her she’s got a lovely name and promptly asks her how old she is.

  “Five,” she says with all the ennui she can muster as the clerk hands me back my charge card and our purchase and I pray like hell the guy’s math challenged. Starr cocks her head. “How old are you?”

  Alan laughs while I make one of those embarrassed I-have-no-idea-where-she-gets-this-from faces. “Thirty-eight.”

  It takes a second. Then, right on cue, platinum eyes bop back up to mine. Brows lift. Questions hover. Expletives burst like fireworks in my brain.