What's Mine and Yours(94)

She shook her head. “It’s been just me for so long. You didn’t bring one?”

“I was spending the day with my mother.” He was naked, still kneeling over her body.

“I don’t care if you don’t care,” Noelle said.

“All right.”

He crawled forward to rest his elbows on either side of her head. He kissed her long and slow, parted her legs with his, and lowered himself into her. She shuddered under the warmth and weight of his body. It was everything she’d been missing. He worked himself up, and Noelle panted along with him, although she knew she wouldn’t come again. He unloaded himself with a gorgeous grunting in her ear. She kissed his shoulder over and over again, as if she loved him, as if she were offering him a benediction. She felt herself begin to weep.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

He rolled onto his side, knit his hand with hers. “Why are you apologizing?” He handed her the bundle of his T-shirt. She blew her nose on Clementine Farms.

“I just haven’t felt that good in a long time.”

“The pleasure was all mine. I’m tempted to write home about it.”

Noelle laughed through her tears. “Don’t you tell your mama.”

“She’d be thrilled,” he said. “But I won’t.”

They lay for a while, catching their breath, soaking in the scent of each other’s skin and wetness, the water and silt from the sound. Noelle felt herself recovering from the onslaught of feeling: how she had wanted Bailey and missed Nelson at the same time, how deep she had been in her body and her mind all at once. Bailey leaned off the bed and rummaged in his jeans. He withdrew a slender brown cigarillo, pointed it at Noelle.

“Do you mind?”

“Those are bad for you.”

“Get out of here. Are you serious? No one’s ever told me that.” He winked at her and lit up. He smoked silently, his free hand massaging her thigh. When he was done, he stamped out the butt and dozed off. Noelle figured she’d let him sleep, wake him up in a few hours for his drive. From what she knew, work started early on a farm, and he’d have to get back.

With his eyes closed, he looked like Ruth, his skin easily weathered, lined. It occurred to her that she should have slept with more men when she had the chance. She wouldn’t be able to do all this when there was a child in the house.

It might have been the sex, or the news of Diane’s wedding, but soon her mind turned to Nelson. She thought of him often, although he had gone out of focus for her, their life together blurred, as if by a merciful trick of memory. She remembered vaguely how it felt to argue with him, to miss him when he was away. She remembered how he’d tended to look at her, how his kisses tended to feel. It was all habitual. The discrete moments she remembered most clearly were all from the end: the terrible phone call on Diane’s porch, the morning she’d sent him away.

When she first arrived on the coast, they were still sending emails back and forth, settling what to do about the house, the furniture, the little fund in the bank. In the end, they’d sold everything, split it all down the middle. The only thing either of them wanted was cash. It was as amicable as divorces went. Noelle had given some of the money to Margarita to help her get a stable place in L.A., and she had saved the rest, decided to live meagerly because she could. She had nearly enough for the adoption, but she wanted enough for a down payment, too, a place they could move into when the child got older. She wanted a boy from Colombia; there were already too many women in her family. But she wasn’t opposed to a girl, or a child from elsewhere in Latin America.

Nelson knew she planned to adopt, but they stuck to divorce business in their emails. They were cordial, passive, in their negotiations. Sure, if you like, they said, and That’s fine with me, whatever you need. Eventually, they were done dividing, and the emails stopped. Then he wrote to her again.

He had landed somewhere else in Europe for a long residency. Noelle hadn’t paid attention to the details of his new life. What was it, now, to her?

But he had written to her so baldly, so wholeheartedly, she had wondered if he hadn’t meant to send the email at all. It was what she had been missing all the time she was his wife. She had read his email many times since it arrived. While Bailey slept beside her, she searched for it on her phone. She turned her blue screen away from him, read it again feverishly.

Noelle—

Every city in Europe seems to have a river running through it. I know it’s a holdover from when there was trade along these waters, but it never stops seeming symbolic to me. There’s this bank and that bank, an east side and a west, like every city in the world is the same.

Sometimes, I like to think we’re still in the same city, and there’s a river between us, but at any time, one or the other of us could cross over. Our lives are separate but still close. I know that’s not the case.

I should have told you about how losing the pregnancy affected me. I thought mostly about you, my duty to snap you out of it, to get us back to our life. I always felt like our life was something we could lose if we weren’t careful. I couldn’t see our life was everything all around us, the things we shared every day.

Maybe there’s nothing I’ve ever held dearer than my own potential—the idea of it, the idea that I had to make good on all my luck, my life. But one day I’ll be fifty or a hundred, and all the things I’ve done, or could have done, won’t matter. No one will have anything to say about my potential, which doors are open to me, and which are closed. No one will remember me at all. I don’t mean to sound like a nihilist.