The Nest(80)

“We were just about to come out,” Louisa said, blowing her nose and trying to collect herself. Melody saw that Louisa was crying.

“Oh, no.” She rushed over and knelt in front of them. “What happened? Oh my God, did something happen on the street? Did someone hurt you?”

“No,” Nora said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“I want to know the truth!” Melody grabbed each of their hands and shook them a little. “If someone hurt you, you have to tell me. I don’t want you keeping things from me.”

Louisa started to laugh. “Mom. God. Nobody hurt us. We’re completely fine.”

“We were just talking about school,” Nora said.

Melody looked back and forth at both of their faces. Louisa was staring at her lap. “Is she telling the truth,” Melody asked Louisa. Louisa shrugged. Nora looked worried. Melody held Nora’s gaze, trying to spot any tiny sign of deception. “What’s going on in here? What are you not telling me?” Louisa fiddled with the tissue in her hand. Melody put a finger under Louisa’s chin and lifted it until Louisa looked her in the eye.

“We’re not leaving this bedroom until you two tell me what’s going on.”





CHAPTER THIRTY–THREE


You’re so beautiful,” Leo had said to Stephanie the first night they’d slept together in her dingy apartment on the ground floor of an even dingier building. It was late August and air-conditioning was a luxury she couldn’t afford. The box fan, which made an aggressive click with every full rotation, whirred and rattled in the bedroom window, muffling the sounds from the street: the teens across the way who hung out on the stoop blaring a car radio and arguing until sunrise; the bleating taxi horns three blocks over where traffic backed up from the entrance ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. But that night, the night Leo told her how f*cked up he was, the cacophony that usually made her grind her teeth in frustration had seemed romantic, urban and wild, the perfect soundtrack for her lust.

“You’re so beautiful,” he’d said to her, as she slowly undressed in front of him and he watched, still and admiring on the edge of her unmade twin bed. His voice held such a rare note of wonderment that her throat tightened. And then he covered his face with his hands.

“Leo?” she whispered.

“I’m so f*cked up,” he said into his palms.

Oh God, not now, Stephanie thought. Not a precoital unburdening, a completely unnecessary recitation of all the ways he was so f*cked up. Hadn’t she seen him in action for years already? Didn’t she know his flaws? She looked down at the curve of his back, the thread of his spine, how his dark curls, on the long side then, rested against his almost feminine neck. His skin glowed in the moonlight, like the lustrous surface of a pearl.

He looked back up at her. “I’m really f*cked up, Stephanie.”

She understood with complete lucidity what he was offering her in that moment—not a confession or a plea, but a warning. He was offering her an elegant escape. In those days, one of Leo’s gifts was an uncanny ability to predict how things would play out. His favorite expression was from a speech he’d heard some king of finance give once: If you want to predict a person’s behavior, identify his or her incentives. Leo wasn’t saying, I’m so f*cked up, he was saying, I’m going to f*ck this up. He knew something about his incentives that she didn’t.

But there he was, shirtless, on her bed. Leo, whom she’d been a little in love with for always, and all she cared about in that moment was the length of his body against hers.

“Everyone’s f*cked up,” she said, even though she didn’t believe that for a second. She wasn’t. Most people she knew weren’t. But she also knew this: Nothing was a sure thing; every choice was just an educated guess, or a leap into a mysterious abyss. People might not change but their incentives could.

So the first time she and Leo combusted she’d practically been poised for the breakup. In some inexplicable way she’d been looking forward to it and all its attendant drama, because wasn’t there something nearly lovely—when you were young enough—about guts churning and tear ducts being put to glorious overuse? She recognized the undeniable satisfaction of the first emotional fissure because an unraveling was still something grown-up and, therefore, life affirming. See? the broken heart signaled. I loved enough to lose; I felt enough to weep. Because when you were young enough, the stakes of love were so very small, nearly insignificant. How tragic could a breakup be when it was a part of the fabric of expectation from the beginning? The hackneyed fights, the late-night phone calls, the indignant recounting for friends over multiple drinks and in earshot of an appropriately flirtatious bartender—it was theater for a certain type of person, a certain well-educated New Yorker, and it was, then, for Stephanie, too.

Until it wasn’t. Until she stopped being young enough. Until, like an allergic reaction, every time she exposed herself to Leo, the welts rose more rapidly, itched more intensely, and took longer to go away.

She didn’t remember which time (second? third?) she’d caught Leo cheating and kicked him out and he was apologizing and begging and she was mustering her reinforcements (whose patience was almost gone, strained to the limit, incredulity replacing empathy, what did you expect? why would this time be different?) and her assistant, Pilar, wrote the Kübler-Ross stages of grief on a cocktail napkin to chart her breakups with Leo: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.