Lost Along the Way(29)
“Okay. I have an idea. We can talk about it in the car, but I really think we should get going. Stop stalling,” Jane said.
“Just give me a few minutes to pack, okay?” Cara said.
Jane felt like she was having an out-of-body experience. Had she really just convinced Cara to run away?
“Just don’t bring those pearls. Actually, wait. I’m coming with you. We can leave Reed a note.”
Upstairs in the second bedroom, Jane watched as Cara packed pajamas, a few pairs of jeans, a pair of sneakers, three sweaters (none of them white), every pair of underwear she owned, and her toiletries. She placed everything in the tote bag she kept tucked in the back of her closet behind her heavy winter coats and walked back to the master bedroom she had been evicted from. “Where do you keep your stationery?” Jane asked, following behind her. Jane grabbed a pen out of her purse.
Cara opened the drawer in the nightstand next to the bed and removed a small white box. “Here. This is what Reed uses to send thank-you notes.”
“Such a good WASP. What is he saying thank you for? The latest round of golf or bottle of scotch or f*cking carved wooden mallard to add to the shelf in his library?”
“Basically.”
“God, I could puke all over this,” Jane said. She pulled Cara down on the duvet next to her and handed her the pen. “Are you ready to do this?”
“I don’t know what to say,” Cara admitted.
“Just write what I tell you,” Jane ordered. “I’d do it myself, but he’ll know it’s not your handwriting.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea, either.”
“Yes it is. Now write.”
Cara silently shrugged again as Jane dictated her letter.
Dear Reed,
I know that you will think it’s cowardly for me to write this letter, but I realize that caring about what you think is all I’ve been doing for years, and it’s time that it stops. I married you because I loved you and I thought you loved me. Maybe you once did—I don’t know—but this is no longer a marriage, as evidenced by the fact that I fear you coming home right now and yelling at me for sitting on your bed. I need to tell you how sorry I am for everything. I’m sorry for making you put up with such an incompetent wife for as long as you have. I’m sorry that I don’t work out as much as I should, that sometimes I don’t change the sheets on time, and that I buy too many boxes of rice. I’ve done so many silly things over the years they’re impossible to count. But out of all of those stupid things, I’ve finally realized that the stupidest thing I’ve ever done is wait this long to leave.
Now THAT was stupid.
Yours truly,
Cara
“Give me your necklace,” Jane said.
Cara stared at the note. “I’d never have the guts to say this stuff to him,” she said.
“Really? The old you never had a hard time sticking up for herself. The old you would have taken a tennis racket to his face and knocked him across the room. Maybe you don’t think you’d have the guts to say it, but I promise you, once upon a time you did. That’s the Cara I just channeled. Now give me the necklace.”
Jane took the pearls from Cara’s hand and placed them next to the letter on the nightstand. “Let’s go,” she said. Jane grabbed Cara’s bag off the floor, and before Cara could panic and change her mind, she got her the hell out of the house.
eleven
Meg decided to take the scenic route home and drive along the water. She was letting her mind wander as she went down the dark road that circled around the bend and along the ocean’s edge when suddenly an old song came on the radio. Out of nowhere she felt the bile rise in her throat and her insides begin to buck and heave. She had no choice but to pull over or risk driving her car into a pylon. It really was amazing how hearing certain songs transported her back in time to a place she really didn’t like to revisit. Whenever she heard Counting Crows’s album August and Everything After, a sound track to her adolescent life, her mind immediately snapped back to the drives she used to take with Cara and Jane, where they’d obsess over the huge issues they had in their lives: whether the frozen yogurt place had failed to put sprinkles in the bottoms of their cones, whether the football team would make the playoffs, whether they should take the SAT again. They never would’ve predicted that things would turn out like this.
She lowered the passenger-side window so she could stare unobstructed at the fishing boat lights as they headed out to sea and listen to the boats still on their moorings, bobbing back and forth and side to side. She looked at her reflection in the mirror and saw herself the way she used to be—tangled hair, an unlined forehead, and the sparkle in her eye that signaled a spirit that had yet to be broken. She had taken all of it for granted because she was too na?ve to realize that her beauty would eventually fade. Jane and Cara used to tease her for looking like a little girl—but now she felt old and worn. The world had changed so much since then, and so had she. They had been friends in a world where you didn’t have to take off your shoes at the airport and had to use pay phones to call home. It was a lifetime ago. She was so tired of treading water and drifting nowhere, alone. Just like the boats in the water in front of her, bobbing back and forth, and side to side.
When Meg left home for Vanderbilt University, her mother had told her to always act like a lady, to send letters home to her parents, to study hard, and to find a nice southern boy to marry. One of the main reasons Meg had wanted to go to school down south was to reconnect with her roots. While Meg had grown up on Long Island, her mother was a born-and-bred Virginia girl who was not at all happy when Meg’s father’s job relocated the family to New York. Meg’s mom fought hard to maintain the traditions that were important to her, like church on Sundays, homemade peach pie in the summertime, and daughters who knew how to write a proper thank-you note. When Meg decided to go to school down south, her mother was beside herself with happiness. The idea of a southern boy intrigued Meg not because she had a problem with the northern guys she’d grown up with, but because the way her mother told it, a southern man was more refined and more gentlemanly than his northern brothers. Who didn’t want a guy with good manners who would hold doors open and pull out her chair?