The Drifter(69)
Gavin reached over to click on the light on the nightstand. He sat up in bed with his hair sticking up in every direction, squinting in the light.
“I know it’s hard to take me seriously when I’m not wearing a shirt, but you have to listen to me, Betsy, and listen very carefully,” he said. “I have been in love with you since that day on the dock at J.D.’s. You are kind and curious and smart. You are wry and observant and funny as hell. When I watch you look at some work of art that I don’t even try to understand, you concentrate so hard that your face contracts into these weird expressions that I have honestly never seen on another human being. You are braver than you think you are. You work so hard to do better, to be good. You always have. I didn’t know anybody else who was getting on a bike at 5:00 a.m. to go to work when we were in college, only you. Sometimes you struggle to fit in because, I don’t know why, maybe because you take things so seriously? So personally?”
“Gavin, I . . .”
“No, wait, let me finish. I am as surprised as the next guy that I met the woman I was going to marry when I was twenty-one years old. And, I admit, things have not been perfect between us every step of the way. But we are supposed to be together. I know we are. That day you lost Ginny, you found me. I wish like hell you could have had both of us, but that’s not how it worked out. And I’m sorry.”
She reached out and combed his hair with her fingers.
“I am nervous about so many things. I’m nervous about everything, really. But I am not nervous about you,” Betsy said. “You are the one thing I know I got right.” Gavin rested his head back on the pillow and pulled her close.
“You know, if you weren’t a little sad about the memories of Ginny fading, that’s what would make me worry.” He moved her hair out of her eyes. “And one thing I know, I really know for sure, is that if Ginny could see you crying about her on the night before your wedding, she’d kick your ass. Hard.”
“You definitely have a point there,” she said.
“So let’s just do this, together, like we’ve done all of that other crap, OK? Then when the chaos is over, we’re going to go back to being just fine. Or even better. I can feel it.”
CHAPTER 18
THE TOURIST
February 17, 1998
Six months into marriage, either the novelty had worn off, or February’s punishing deep freeze had muted her heady newlywed optimism, but life had gone back to business as usual—minus the blackouts—with impressive speed. Then she got the voice mail.
“Betsy, that’s as clean as that shower is ever going to get,” said Gavin. She had one toothbrush in her mouth, and another old one in her left hand, working at the graying grout under the showerhead. The mine-cut diamond and simple band on her ring finger was coated with a fine dusting of Comet, which would have bothered her eighteen months ago when he first slipped it on her finger, but didn’t anymore. The bathroom wasn’t great. No amount of Comet was going to change that.
“I know you’re nervous about our houseguest, and she rattled you with that Elizabeth bullshit on her voice mail message,” he said as he crouched down to tie the laces of his boot. “But trust me, she’s not going to inspect the shower grout.”
“Yeah, right, Caroline would never do that,” she said. Then you don’t know Caroline.
Betsy had been in New York for seven years before she heard from Caroline. She had called Betsy’s mom to get her phone number, and when she played and replayed Caroline’s voice mail, it became clear that Kathy had informed Caroline of her professional name change.
“Why hello there, Elizabeth, sophisticated woman in New York. It’s Caroline.” Betsy stood dumbstruck, holding the receiver as the voice registered in her ear. “I’m looking for my friend Betsy. Perhaps you remember her? One time, we wore fake grass skirts and bikinis to a luau-themed fraternity party in January. Of course, you would never do something like that, Elizabeth. If you see Betsy, tell her to give me a call. I’m coming to New York, or The City, as I’m sure you call it now. I’ll be there next Friday.”
Betsy wrote her number, with a Miami area code, on the palm of her hand and then replayed the message three times. They exchanged a couple more messages and finally connected by email. Caroline’s writing style had always been terse, stingy with details, and in this medium especially, it came off as especially cold. The gist of it was that Caroline was now a real estate agent in Miami, working with her mother.
Betsy had seen Caroline only once since she left Gainesville, at Teddy’s wedding in 1996. He married Melanie, a serious and quiet sorority sister whom Betsy couldn’t remember, even after she saw her photo. As the best man, Gavin flew down to Palm Beach on Thursday and the plan was for Betsy to meet him there Saturday morning. She claimed that she couldn’t get the time off of work, but the truth was that she was crippled with anxiety about the wedding, knowing how many ghosts would be lurking there, all of those uncomfortable blasts from the past. Betsy bought her ticket using her coworker Shana’s ninety-nine-dollar Delta flight coupon from Amex, and then had a fake I.D. made in some back alley on the Lower East Side with her name on it in case anyone checked, which they didn’t. She didn’t want to spend money she didn’t have on cab fare, so she took a bus to LaGuardia and missed her flight, despite the fact that an airline employee threw her garment bag over his shoulder and sprinted through the airport with her to the gate. She sat waiting for the next flight to Palm Beach International, listening for them to call her alias when they found her a seat. Six hours later, she was changing into a black thrift store cocktail dress in the ladies’ room at the airport. She hailed a cab and made it in time to snag the last remaining place card at the Everglades Club. She ordered a martini, dirty but dry with three olives, at the bar, and wove her way to her seat through the maze of tables just in time to hear Gavin’s speech. She scanned the crowd of four hundred faces in the dimly lit ballroom looking for Caroline. Word had traveled fast about Caroline’s first job out of school as a pharmaceutical sales rep. She’d aced the recruitment process, beating out hundreds of other recent graduates from Southeastern Conference schools like Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana State that churned out pretty, well-spoken girls with big smiles who could sell Lipitor with their eyes closed. It was a coveted job with a decent starting salary, plus commission, in a part of the world where the average resident—median age in Coral Gables, sixty-two—choked down six prescriptions a day.