The Queen of Hearts(97)
It was a tricky question, because I exposed how needy I was by asking it, but also because I had no way of knowing if Zadie had told Nick the full extent of my behavior. But it was a reasonable gamble. She must have protected me this one last time.
He considered this. “I think she’s forgiven me,” he said. “Especially now. But that’s mainly because she doesn’t care much about me anymore. For what it’s worth, I did ask her to come here with me tonight.”
I waited, dread descending on me again.
“She said no.”
“That’s understandable,” I croaked.
He regarded me intently, searching my face for something. Finally, he reached into his pocket and flipped something in my direction: a letter.
“From Zadie,” he said. He watched as I unfolded it: a single line of print on stationery from the Ritz. With a start, I remembered this was the weekend Drew had planned a downtown minibreak for her, with a night at the Ritz, followed by the Panthers game. I folded the note and put it in my bag.
“Okay,” said Nick. His voice—full of studied nonchalance—was at odds with the disquiet in his eyes. “That wraps up a decade of weirdness, then. Are we good?”
“Yes,” I said, meaning it.
He turned toward his car and then abruptly turned back. “I know why I fucked things up with Zadie. But I’ve never understood why you did it. She genuinely loved you.”
“I know.”
“And your boyfriend. I always wondered: did you know that he knew?”
I thought of the week Graham had discovered my betrayal.
“No,” I lied. “I had no idea.”
Chapter Forty-one
THE COSMIC CALENDAR
Emma, Present Day
I don’t believe in fate. When people say, “Everything happens for a reason,” they are correct: technically, things happen because some series of events happened in precisely the order necessary to produce that occurrence. But that, of course, is not what the saying means. People want to believe that everything happens for some greater good. But if a child dies, it’s not because she’s needed in heaven, or because there was some cosmic plan for her to die so another child could be born. It’s because her mother was distracted when backing up the car, and her surgeon made a series of judgment calls that turned out to be wrong.
I thought about Eleanor constantly, and even now, walking away from Nick, I knew I’d never be free of that. I’d felt it before in my profession, the guilt that comes from the tie of your actions to someone’s death. A sense of inescapable doom hovered over me and around me and in me, so pervasive I could see how it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy: a person might do anything to make it stop.
Like Graham did. If I hadn’t understood at the time how some miseries were too much to be borne, I did now. I’d never act on these urges—I hoped—because Henry and Wyatt were my buffer against self-harm.
But Graham had not had anyone else to protect him.
—
When I was little, I had a lengthy fascination with metaphysics. While the other girls longed for Cabbage Patch dolls and Jordache jeans, I became obsessed with cosmology after an accidental viewing of the Cosmos series on PBS—one of three channels we got—one night when my mother had fallen asleep with the TV on. Right away I liked watching Carl Sagan, whose brilliance was evident even to an eight-year-old girl. It was a revelation to me that there were empirical studies of the physical world, that there were people—scientists—who had such novel and keen ways of thinking it was almost as if they were another race compared to the people I knew. Each new discovery about the universe and its origins led to another, more startling direction of wonder.
Take the conceptualization of time. Essentially what you had to do was imagine the entire history of the universe—more than thirteen billion years—squashed into one action-packed calendar year. You started with the Big Bang on January first. A whole lot of things, like the shaping of the universe, took place in that first magical second. Spring was consumed with the formation of the Milky Way; appropriately, the Sun was born sometime in late summer. The formation of our solar system didn’t occur until September 9, and the Earth sprang up around September 14.
In December, things really started smoking. The first interesting multicelled organisms, like worms, flopped into the picture in midmonth. The great geologic periods on Earth began: Cambrian period, Permian period, Jurassic period. Then, in the waning days of December, primates appeared. They developed bigger frontal lobes and got smarter as, around them, the giant mammals flourished: dim-witted giant sloths, which could reach twenty feet in length; armadillos the size of Volkswagen Beetles; hippopotamus-sized rats; terrifying, voracious short-faced bears, more than twice as tall as a human.
But it was the last day of the Cosmic Calendar that really grabbed my attention. December 31 started out kind of slow, just more primates lurching out of trees and ambling around the savannas. Their brains grew, and their pelvises shrank. (The significance of this last fact would not fully dawn on me until I experienced Henry’s birth some three decades later.) The sun set and night fell, and still the earth spun about on its axis, innocent of humanity. Finally, finally, sometime around ten thirty p.m. on the last day of the last month, premodern humans joined the party.