The Futures(82)

I have a stack of books from the local library. I’m filling the holes in my education, all those English classes I never took because I thought I hated the subject. Austen, Dickens, Bront?. Ovid and Homer, Woolf and Joyce. I have a vague plan to work my way up to the present. Some of the books make me laugh, some make me cry, some bore me to death, some I suspect I am utterly missing the point of. It doesn’t really matter. It’s the act of concentration that I need to relearn. I am trying to be present. Some afternoons I go to the Boston MFA, where I spend hours sitting in the galleries, losing myself in the artwork, grasping at the feeling I had in Paris.

In the mornings, I scan the news for a mention of Spire. The coverage has lessened as the months have gone by. In the beginning, the story was everywhere: the investigations, the plummeting of WestCorp’s shares, the promises of full cooperation with the authorities. Michael Casey ducking and covering his head whenever the cameras chased him. In those early weeks, every ringing phone or approaching car put me on edge. I was certain it had caught up to me. An officer at the door, ready to serve me with a subpoena, ready to haul me off and take my statement.

But that’s not what anyone cared about. The leak paled in comparison to the laws that had been broken, and Spire and the feds had bigger fish to fry. What mattered was the crime, not the telling. And I bet no one suspected Evan of being connected to it. Evan was chosen precisely because he would never run his mouth. I studied every picture in the paper and every clip on TV for a glimpse of his face, for evidence of what had happened to him. But there was nothing. The cameras were focused solely on Michael Casey, the one whose head the public demanded. Once or twice I saw Adam on TV, commenting on the latest update in the Spire story, grinning broadly under the hot studio lights. He’s finally as famous as I always thought he would be.

*

My mother, meanwhile, has been watching from a wary distance.

Most days she’s out the door before I’ve even left for my run, on her way to one of her appointments or Pilates classes, but the other morning she lingered at the kitchen table. I looked up from the paper and found she had a rare gaze of contentment.

“Julia.” She reached for my hand. “Sweetie, I’m proud of you. I’m so glad you’re feeling better. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

She stood up. Sentiment over. While she fussed for her purse and car keys, she kept talking.

“You know who I ran into at the coffee shop yesterday? Rob’s mother. She didn’t know you were back.”

“Oh. That’s nice.” I hadn’t told Rob, or anyone, that I was back. I couldn’t find a way to mention it without inciting cloying pity.

“Rob’s coming out from Cambridge for dinner on Friday night. His mother’s invited you over, too. I think it would be really nice if you went. She seemed a little hurt that you hadn’t been by to see them. She’s always loved you.”

“I don’t know. I’m not—”

“She’s not going to take no for an answer. I’m not going to take no for an answer. Call her and tell her you’ll see her on Friday. It will be good for everyone. Okay?” She kissed the top of my head, rearranging a few rogue strands of hair before she left.

Friday evening, I knocked on Rob’s parents’ door. In the past, I would have let myself in.

Rob opened the door. He grinned and kissed me on the cheek. “Come in,” he said, gesturing me into the front hall. “They can’t wait to see you.”

Rob’s parents weren’t so different from my parents—this was true for all my friends except Evan—and the flow and contour of the conversation made me feel at home. It was instantly comfortable in a way I hadn’t quite expected: the same worn wood of their kitchen table, the familiar view of their backyard through the window. Rob’s father was a lawyer, and his mother had a successful career as a cookbook ghostwriter. She was an excellent cook. The wine, the chicken Marbella, the fragrant basket of bread and the yellow butter—the flavors were unchanged. His mother had a deep, lusty laugh I had always loved. His father still liked a Cognac after dinner. For a moment, it felt like the last four or five years had been a mere skip of the record.

After we finished dessert, a homemade pear tart, Rob and I stood to help his parents clear the table. His mother shook her head. “No—you two go on. I’m sure you want to catch up.” I wondered if she was in cahoots with my mother.

Rob held the front door open. “Let’s go for a walk. It’s a nice night.”

He filled me in on everything that had happened since Thanksgiving, when I’d seen him last. He had been accepted at Harvard Medical School. He’d also been accepted at Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Columbia, but he’d decided on Harvard. He wanted to be a neurosurgeon eventually.

“So you’re staying here? I mean, in Cambridge?”

“Yup. Hey, you remember Mindy? From biology senior year?”

“Yeah, why?”

“She’s going to be in my class at Harvard.”

“The girl who threw up when we dissected the pig? Mindy wants to be a doctor?”

He laughed. “I wonder how she’s going to handle anatomy.”

We walked in silence for a stretch. I was tempted to take his hand; it only felt natural to do what we’d done so many times before. I stole a glance at him when we got to the park near his house. His face was illuminated by the far-off floodlights on the tennis court. I was trying to decide if he was different. He looked almost the same as he had in high school. Maybe a fraction taller, more stubble in his beard. But he was still, mostly, the person I’d fallen for when I was sixteen years old. What I was wondering was whether I was mostly the same person, too.