The Last Romantics(92)

I had hired Hannah, but there were times when I deeply regretted it. “Yes, very lucky,” I said. “Okay, put her through, please.”

And then I was hearing Caroline’s voice for the first time in nearly five years.

“Fiona,” she said without preamble, “I’d like to see you. Lunch, with Renee, too.”

“Oh,” I said. “When?”

“Maybe, gosh, I don’t know. Tomorrow?”

I had a meeting tomorrow at eleven o’clock, another at one that was sure to go late. In the lull before I answered, I heard Caroline’s breathing, the delicate in-out of my sister’s lungs.

“Okay,” I said. “Where?”

We met in the city, at an Italian place that none of us had been to before. Only half full on a Friday afternoon, with plastic flowers on the tables and a balding waiter who stood at the back of the room and jiggled change in his pocket. The kind of restaurant frequented by lost, footsore tourists or illicit lovers looking to hide.

I cancelled all my afternoon meetings. We stayed three hours and drank two bottles of wine.

Caroline told us she was leaving Nathan—had left him, in fact, although they both still remained in the Hamden house. He was looking for another place, but these things took time. They had told the kids, who were understandably upset but coping, she said, as best they could. There was a counselor, the school had been notified, the parents of their best friends.

“But why?” I asked Caroline. The table had been cleared; we awaited our dessert of tiramisu and affogato. Caroline’s marriage had always seemed immutable, incontrovertible as a law of physics. Till death do us part. The happily ever after.

“Nothing happened,” she explained. “I mean, nothing dramatic. No affairs. No drug habits or porn habits or anything like that. I just couldn’t become the person I wanted to be. I couldn’t even figure out who that person was. With Nathan I could only be the same old Caroline.” She took a sip of wine and then shook her head, flapped her hand to signal a change in topic. “And listen, you won’t believe it, but yesterday I saw someone who looked like Luna Hernandez. On the train platform, just as the train was pulling in. She got onto a different car, and I wanted to go look for her, but I hate stepping between cars when the train is moving.” Caroline paused. “I’m sorry we never found her,” she said.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said.

Renee rolled her eyes.

“Don’t do that,” said Caroline to Renee.

Pointedly, Renee did it again.

“I know it’s silly,” Caroline continued, shifting her attention fully to me, “but . . . I think about Luna a lot. I joined that thing Facebook. Have you? It’s so easy to look for someone. I looked for her, but maybe she changed her name. Or maybe she’s not on it yet.”

“I think about Luna, too,” I said. I considered telling my sisters about my walks, my lists, my belief that Joe was leading me somewhere, that I would see him again someday. This was the place, this was the time to talk about these kinds of things. Finally together again, a blanket of otherworldly calm thrown over us by the wine and the dim lights. If I didn’t tell them now, I never would. But I stopped myself. It seemed too unreasonable, too self-important. Selfish, almost. Of course they missed Joe, too. Of course they had loved Joe, too. But hadn’t I loved him the most?

“Please stop. I don’t want to talk about Luna,” said Renee. “I can’t talk about this.” Her face was drawn. As she pushed hair behind an ear, I saw her hand shake.

I grabbed Renee’s hand to steady it. “How’s work?” I asked. “How’s Jonathan? Tell us.”

Renee gave me a half smile. Jonathan’s retablos were selling well, almost too well, she said. He could barely keep up with production. He’d been invited to a residency in Rome by the American Academy; she would lecture at a hospital there, returning to New York every other week to consult with the lung transplant team. This was when we first heard the name Melanie Jacobs, thrown by Renee into the discussion as an example of how punishing the transplant surgery was on the human body, most of them ravaged already by disease and months of waiting.

“Melanie was so funny,” Renee said. “Like stand-up-comic funny. She’d had cystic fibrosis since she was thirteen, and I suppose humor was how she coped.” Renee paused. “I hate losing any patient, but I really hated losing Melanie.”

There was a certain degree of melancholy in her voice, but I didn’t view it as extraordinary. It had been too long since I’d communicated with Renee for me to judge what was normal professional concern and what suggested something deeper. Later I came to understand that Melanie Jacobs had been different for Renee.

Renee told us that she and Jonathan had recently bought the apartment next door and were planning to knock through the dividing wall, expand Jonathan’s studio, add a guest bedroom. And they were building a sauna, a small room of cedar.

“You guys will have to come over,” Renee said, leaning forward, grabbing my hand. “I got so hooked on them when we were in Finland last year. Twenty minutes on a winter’s day. It’s life-changing.”

“You’re lucky, Renee,” Caroline said then, almost like an accusation. “I mean—I know how hard you work. Lucky maybe isn’t the right word.”