Matchmaking for Beginners(45)

Patrick and Noah are arguing. Noah says maybe there’s something else they can do. To buy more time. I can’t hear what Patrick is saying, but I hear his tone of voice—low, loving, gentle.

Patrick knows I don’t want more time. Not unless I can have eons of it.

Marnie. That’s it, that’s what I will think about. I wrap her in love and light. I send her a message: Love is the only thing that matters. I want to stop the men from talking; I want to tell Patrick about her, but something says not to, that Noah would hear. What a funny business love is, and these two men sitting here, one the past and one the possible future.

There was so much I still wanted to do.

And then I’m up on the ceiling, looking down at myself, a perfect little wrecked body there in the bed, beautiful and strange. That body of mine, so useful and brave, wrapped now in a white gown. The gown I’d picked out and made Noah help me get into. Patrick is there on the bed, too, looking down at me. I feel it when he notices that I’m not there anymore. He reaches over and touches my hand, curls my fingers in his own large hand, the hand that was burned.

Thank you, I say. And now it’s time. So much left undone. So much I still want to feel and know.

But I’ve already let go.





EIGHTEEN





MARNIE


I wake up in the middle of the night, startled into sitting upright in bed, noticing my heart hurts.

The air feels sharp in the room, as though it has an unfamiliar smell. Like a candle has burned down somewhere. I want to awaken Jeremy, just for company. It’s so nice turning over at night to find somebody next to me in the bed again.

Yet I don’t wake him up. I lie there, longing for something I can’t quite name.

What woke me up?

Happiness. Happiness woke me up, but there’s something else. Something about life feeling so fragile. Something about love being the only thing that matters.

I go to the window and look out at the blackness of the night. There’s a shooting star and I watch it, unsure whether it’s really the trail of an airplane. But no, it’s a star. Blazing out, probably from millions of years ago. Isn’t that what they say? That when we look at the stars, we are seeing the past.





NINETEEN





MARNIE


The envelope is from the law firm of Brockman, Wyatt, and Sanford, and by the time it arrives at my parents’ house, it looks like it has been through the worst that the postal system has to offer.

I pick it up by its halfway torn and blackened corner and take it inside with the rest of the mail. It’s about a million degrees outside, and I’m excited because tonight Jeremy and I are going to talk about taking a vacation together, just the two of us. He says we should rent a red convertible and drive up the coast through Georgia, go to Savannah and up to Charleston.

And—well, there is some indication that Jeremy might propose. That’s what Natalie thinks, and just talking about it makes her so happy that I go along with it, even though I told her that it seems crazy somehow, even trashy, to have two marriage proposals in one year from two different men.

She said, “It’s not trashy if it means you’re getting your life on the right track. And anyway, it’s a great story you can tell the grandchildren when you and Jeremy are celebrating your golden wedding anniversary. The year you married two men. I think that’ll be a wonderful story.”

I walk into the kitchen, ripping open the envelope as I go, and then I hold the letter in one hand while I open the refrigerator to get the pitcher of iced tea and then get a glass out of the cupboard. The birds are chirping madly at the feeder—probably complaining about the heat—and I stop to watch them while I’m sipping my tea.

When I look down, Blix’s name jumps out at me.

“Dear Ms. MacGraw . . . I am writing to you because our law firm is representing the estate of Blix Marlene Holliday . . .”

Estate?

Blix is dead?

Oh my God. Blix is dead.

I sink down onto one of my mother’s kitchen chairs. I put the letter on the table and close my eyes for a moment, remembering the night of the wedding when she said that she was at the end of life, and I didn’t make her tell me what she meant. So long ago.

I have meant to keep in touch with her—honestly I have meant to—to tell her about Jeremy and that I’m living in Jacksonville now and that I’m going to be okay and to thank her for all the good wishes about the big life and all that . . . but, well, I’ve been terrible. So much has happened to me in such a short time, and I didn’t keep her filled in about any of it. But, really, why would I? She was Noah’s great-aunt, and yes, she was kind to me, but she belonged to him. And even as I’m saying this to myself, I know it’s just an excuse I’m making up because I feel so guilty. All this new life in Florida: Had she somehow known this would be where I would end up? And damn it, I never even knew that she was sick.

And now she is dead.

Shit.

I pick up the letter again and scan it quickly.

“Our client, Blix Holliday, recently deceased, has named you in her last will and testament as the owner of a property belonging to her, a house on Berkeley Place in Brooklyn, New York . . .”

I drop the letter.

Of course this is a mistake. It has to be. Surely Blix left it to Noah, and the post office forwarded it on to me because he’s in some forsaken place in Africa with no forwarding address . . . or maybe she left it to the two of us during the twenty minutes or so that we were husband and wife, and she never got around to changing her will and taking my name off.