The Unsinkable Greta James(23)

The summer she turned fifteen, Greta saw an ad for a guitarist in the record store where she hung out after bagging groceries, and when she showed up to audition, everyone else was older, eighteen and nineteen and twenty. They looked at her with condescending smirks until she started to play; then they immediately offered her the spot. Practice started every night at nine, which was her weekday curfew, so she perfected the art of sneaking out and back in again. But sometimes she got caught, and when she did, there was always another fight, one more in a series of many, so many that she grew numb to them, so many it became hard to care what he thought.

By the time she was a junior, her bandmates had all gone off to college, which was fine. They had never really played any gigs, just practiced in a kid named Topher’s basement, and Greta was better than they were anyway. But she kept sneaking out all the same. Kept hiding cigarettes in her bedroom. Kept hitching rides downtown whenever a band she liked was performing at one of the music venues. And so the fights continued. Helen did her best to play referee, to absorb or deflect whatever bitterness flowed between the two of them, but even so Greta would usually find herself in the cool of the backyard afterward, sitting on that swing set, sometimes stewing, sometimes crying, sometimes just giving herself the space to wonder what it would be like to live a different sort of life, in a different sort of place, with a different sort of father.

Every once in a while, he’d come out and join her. He never apologized or explained himself, even though Greta suspected her mom had sent him out there to do just that. He was much too stubborn. And so was she. Instead, he’d just lower himself onto the swing beside her, the beam creaking above them, and for a long time, they would sit there together in the dark, gazing up at the wash of stars.

They’d always been better with silence.

“I feel bad,” Greta says eventually, the phone pressed hard against her ear, “that you’re going to miss Juneau.”

Conrad’s voice, when he answers, is softer. “Me too.”

“I’ll check in on you when I get back.”

“You can’t—”

“Quarantine,” she says. “I know. I meant I’ll call or something.”

“Oh,” he says. “Okay.”

In the deep, deep dark, she finds herself nodding. “Okay.”

And then he hangs up.

She falls asleep again immediately, into the kind of hard, dreamless sleep that usually follows a show. When she wakes, she fumbles around for her phone on the table, and sees that it’s almost nine.

The buffet is on the lido deck, and it’s crowded this morning. A couple of kids run past wearing powdery doughnuts like rings on their fingers, and an attendant pushing an elderly man in a wheelchair tries to fight his way past the line for coffee. The tables are arranged along the perimeter of the ship, pressed up against the windows, and Greta spots Mary and Eleanor sitting at one of them, their heads bent over a phone.

For a second, she pauses, struck by the sight of them together like that, thinking about how her mom should be there too. These women had been as much Helen’s family as Greta and Asher and Conrad, the three of them trading gardening secrets and tips on asking for a raise, organizing meals when one of them was sick, and throwing parties for every occasion. They spent summers in each other’s backyards and winters at each other’s kitchen tables. They were friends—best friends—but they were also family.

And now there are only two of them.

When Greta walks up to the table, Eleanor beams at her. “Mary was showing me some pictures of the proposal,” she says, turning the phone around. Greta doesn’t have time to prepare herself; just like that, she’s looking at a picture of Jason, down on one knee, grinning up at a beautiful Asian woman who looks like she’s straight out of a J.Crew catalog.

“He did it in Central Park,” Mary says proudly. “She was shocked.”

Who isn’t? Greta wants to say, but she doesn’t.

Years ago, she and Jason were at a bar in the East Village when a guy—through sleight of hand or maybe something more technical—made a ring appear in the token slot of a Skee-Ball machine. Right there on the beer-soaked floor, he dropped to one knee and the girl burst into tears. Jason had turned to Greta and rolled his eyes.

“What?” she asked. “What would you do?”

“I wouldn’t,” he said simply.

It was one of the things they had in common, this aversion to commitment, to knitting your life to someone else’s. When she used to stay over at his place, he would pointedly move the toothpaste back where it belonged after she used it. When they woke up in the morning, he would go about his routine as if she weren’t there. And that was fine with Greta, who did the same on the rare occasions when he slept at her place. They were two independent people who wanted it all: someone in their bed at night and also out of it first thing in the morning.

Until now, apparently.

“Wow,” Greta says, peering closer at the picture, searching for signs of Jason’s unhappiness like an FBI agent examining a hostage video. But there’s nothing. He looks overjoyed to be perched on a rock in Central Park, proposing to a woman he allegedly loves.

“What does she do?” she finds herself asking.

“She’s a vet,” Mary says, still smiling at the photo.

“Oh,” Greta says, surprised. “That’s amazing. Where did she serve?”