The Drifter(95)

Betsy felt a painful jag of what must have been relief deep in her chest. She’d imagined so many scenarios of how this might happen, how she would be absolved, unburdened, and none of them felt anything like this.

“I can’t believe you knew all of this. I can’t believe you picked up Scottie McRae at a bar,” said Betsy in a low whisper, out of Teddy’s earshot. “And you never said anything.”

“You’ve got to remember. I hated your fucking guts for years,” said Caroline. “The last thing I wanted to do was make you feel better.”

Caroline opened the passenger door and slid in. Betsy blew Teddy a kiss.

“See you, T,” she said. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Tell that deadbeat dad back in NYC to give me a call.”

“Will do.”

“So how about I come for a visit?” asked Caroline. “I want to meet Remi Virginia. Do I get to call her R.V. for short?”

“We’ll set a place for you at Thanksgiving,” she said. “Gavin makes a mean fried turkey.”

“Thanksgiving, huh? I’ll consider it, but only if I get to hold down the Snoopy balloon in the parade.”

Betsy realized that she hadn’t made a plan more than a month in advance for as long as she could remember, like she’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Tonight, she felt different.

“Sure,” she said. “We can arrange for that.”

UPSTAIRS, THE COOL, dark room with the crisply made bed felt like the Le Meurice hotel. She lay down on top of the sheet and called Gavin.

“Oh, thank God, you’re still up.”

“It’s not even midnight, B. I was waiting for your call. How was the ride home? How’s crazy Caroline?”

“I have so much to tell you. I would bet you a thousand bucks that Caroline and Teddy hook up tonight. Plus, I threw up in the bushes.”

“You must be in Florida.”

SHE SLEPT ON top of the cool, clean sheets, lulled by the steady hum of the overworked air conditioner straining against that muggy night air. Her skin felt sticky from dried sweat and spilled drinks, but she was too tired for a shower. She’d get up early tomorrow and put Florida behind her again for a while. But right then she wanted to let her heavy eyes close, to visit her friend in her dreams, to tell her she was sorry one more time.





CHAPTER 26


COMING HOME


September 27, 2010

Hi, Mommy.”

Betsy opened her eyes to find Remi, blurry at first, then in sharp, beautiful focus, standing beside her bed.

“Good morning, sweet girl,” she said, lifting the bedcover with her left hand and pulling her daughter close with her right.

“I missed you,” said Remi.

“Oh, I know, I missed you, too. You were asleep when I got home and I didn’t want to wake you,” said Betsy. “But I tiptoed into your room and gave you a kiss anyway.”

Every time Betsy flew home to New York, she felt like she was reentering the earth’s atmosphere with a bang and a jolt. Even two days away, two stressful, humid, sweat-soaked days, interrupted her rhythm. The problem with being a transplanted New Yorker was that you no longer felt entirely at home anywhere, not in your adopted city, despite two decades spent trying to perfect it, and not in the place from which you emerged, whether it was a bloodless suburb, a slow beach town, or a dense but less kinetic American city. Each time the plane descended over the water and found, miraculously, the edge of the runway at LaGuardia, Betsy was amazed. She was proud of the life she’d built there, stunned that she had made it that far, and more than a little perplexed by how she would raise her child there.

Remi’s childhood was already so unlike her own. They were both only children, but that was the extent of their shared experiences. In Betsy’s case, it was due to a faulty marriage and an uncommitted father. Remi wouldn’t have a sibling because of Betsy and Gavin’s collective indecision. Then there was the trauma of Remi’s birth, which was enough to scare both Gavin and Betsy away from baby-making for good. They were so grateful for one, for their sweet and happy little girl, that neither of them had any regrets. Gavin and his brother would ignore each other for most of the year and then happily reunite for Christmas like nothing happened, so the importance of siblings escaped him. It was Betsy who worried.

Would Remi find someone to trust? And then would someone else, someone lurking in the shadows, take her away? Betsy pulled her daughter closer.

“Daddy said that we can have pancakes today,” said Remi, wiggling out of her grip and slipping back onto the floor.

“Oh, he did, did he? Well, I for one cannot wait to taste the pancakes Daddy is making this morning, in the next forty minutes, before we have to leave for school.”

Gavin was waiting at the door when she came home Sunday night, and Betsy, embarrassed, worn out, unable to keep it together a minute longer, wept as soon as she spotted him at the end of the hall. Graying at the temples, so much older than the man she first met, still not as lumpy around the middle as Betsy had predicted on their first trip to the lake. Gavin was the one she needed to see. They had arrived in New York with hopes that the constant thrum of life there would drown out their shared sadness, erase the blight on their past. She was slowly starting to understand that the blight was what made them. Without that premature reminder that life was often tragically short, would they have squandered even more precious time? Would they have made it as a couple for a few months and then drifted away after graduation, not feeling the urgency, neither one allowing the other to look at their weaknesses, the ugly parts, head-on?