The Life You've Imagined (2 page)

“Are you feeling okay?” I ask her. “About everything?”

“About August being dead, you mean?”

That’s Anna, cutting through the euphemisms.

“Well, yes, if you want to put it that way.”

“I’m okay,” she says, leaning on the mop wringer with more force than I could have imagined she had under that fancy suit. She straightens back up and puffs a loose strand of hair that’s dropped out of her bun. “It’s sad. Kind of hard to be around there now.”

She doesn’t look at me for any of this. I’ve tried to catch those avoiding eyes for twenty years now. I miss the childish openness she used to have. I miss the glimpses into those eyes that always reminded me of that line of poetry
Nature’s first green is gold
. . .

“Let me know if you need anything, and sweetie, you really don’t have to do that.”

“I don’t mind,” she says, and she slaps the mop onto the floor again.

I hope someday she meets just the right man and has babies—a whole passel of babies, more than I could have—so she understands how it kills me now that she won’t let me hug her when she’s in such obvious distress. Well, maybe not obvious to anyone else. But I’m her mother. I knew the moment she called me.

“Hi, Mom,” she said, and that was all I needed to hear.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, and then she sighed as if I’d done something wildly irritating.

It was the forced brightness that gave her away, which made her voice just as brittle as she looks here in living color, right now, wielding that mop with the same determination she gave to spelling bees, exams, her finals, and she must now apply to court papers and trials, though I don’t see her in action anymore.

Sally has gone silent, thank goodness. It’s rare, but even my daffy sister-in-law can be sensitive to atmosphere and know to shut the heck up. She’s biting her tongue and working on a sudoku puzzle now, in the office chair behind the counter, that stupid chair her brother bought that is so pointless behind the waist-high countertop.

It was comfortable but useful only if no one was in the store. Like so many of Robert’s grand intentions that only sort of worked out.

“Good morning, Maeve!” calls out Mailman Al, his shadow slicing the June sunshine. I wave at him and begin ringing up his Diet Coke and Snickers while he’s still plopping the mail on the counter.

The top piece of mail nearly makes me gasp aloud. I slip it off the top as Al turns to get his drink. I slide the letter into the pocket of my pants, where it fits awkwardly, one corner poking out.

Al leaves exact change for his snack and heads back out with a jaunty wave. Anna has disappeared into the utility closet to dump the mop water down the big sink.

“Sal? Keep an eye on the door for a sec, okay?”

“Hmmph.” She’s chewing on her pen and not looking at me, which is just as well.

I scuttle sideways like a crab to the office, where I yank open a file drawer and drop the letter in the first folder I see, which happens to be
H
, maybe for
husband
, which Robert technically still is. I thank the heavens that Mailman Al started his route only ten years ago, not twenty, when Robert was still here, because then he’d have caught on by now that my husband is writing me letters, and I’m not sure if I could stand his knowing that.

“Oh, Mom, there you are,” Anna says as I emerge. “I might run upstairs for a bit, if that’s okay.”

“Of course. Have a rest, dear. You’ve had a long train ride.”

Sally has closed her sudoku book and she’s riffling through the mail now.

“Sally! Do you mind!”

“Just wondering if you have any good catalogs.”

“Honestly, Sal. What would I do with a catalog? You think I’ve got any room for any of that Crate and Barrel crap?”

I snatch the mail away from Sally and steal a glance at the stairs where Anna has just disappeared. Maybe I need to tell her that Robert is writing, not to mention what’s coming in September.

But she’s had such a shock already, with her friend dying. No. Now is definitely not the time.

Chapter 3

Anna

B
efore my eyes are even open, I’m confused. What’s under my arms that’s so scratchy?

So I wake up to the sight of brown fake-wood paneling and what’s under my arms is a scratchy, nubbly bedspread instead of the smooth comforter that was back home and is now in some storage locker.

Oh, shit,
is my first thought.
Back in Haven again
.

Then,
August is dead.

I told him not to jaywalk and talk. Over and over, I told him. I’d hear air brakes and honking in the background and say, “You’re not crossing the street, are you?” and he’d laugh and say “Yes, Mom, I’ll be careful,” which made me smile because he is thirty years older than I am and has this huge white sweep of hair that makes him look like a lion.

Was
thirty years older, I mean.
Had
the hair.

And I
was
supposed to be staying with him since the lease in my apartment had run out and I couldn’t close on the condo yet. And for that matter I was supposed to be taking a deposition today and working on that brief, only Mr. Jenison made me take a bereavement leave, though August was not a relative but a mentor, a professional colleague with whom I’d had a pleasant relationship.

I pull off the bedspread and touch my hair. It feels like Velcro that’s been ripped too many times. I should have left the bun in and just slept on my side.

Stupid bereavement leave. I should be working, because I’m coming before the partnership review committee soon and now is not the time to be swanning off for a visit home, only Mr. Jenison made it clear that I had no choice.

I open my closet to look at the few clothes I’d unpacked. I brought home primarily my weekend grubby stuff because the rest got all packed up in anticipation of moving in with August for a bit, only then he got hit by a bus. I had to wear my favorite trial suit to his funeral. He would have appreciated that, come to think of it.

I don’t want to wear the crummy stuff, so I step back into my skirt and blouse. I skip the pantyhose and heels, though, and slip into my flat sandals. No one will see them behind the counter, anyway.

My phone bleeps. Shelby, sending me a link to an obit about August in the
Tribune
.
August Canfield, a fixture on the Chicago legal scene for decades, was known for his fierceness in the courtroom and his gentleness outside it, where he served as a volunteer on several . . .

I know all that stuff, so I toss the phone back on my bed.

Careful footfalls signal Mom’s approach. Aunt Sally would stomp, being constitutionally unable to do anything quietly.

Mom pokes her head in. A neglected pencil falls from behind her ear and she picks it up again. “Oh good, honey, you’re awake. You have a visitor.”

“I do?”

“Cami Drayton.”

“Really?”

“She’s back in town and stopped to say hello, so I told her you were home and I’d see if you’re awake. Should I send her up or tell her to come back?”

Back in town? I wonder if she means for a visit or that she’s moved back. That’s a girl I never expected would stick around this little speck on the map.

“I guess, send her up. Just stall her a few minutes first.”

As I wrestle the frizz back into a ponytail, I try to remember how many years it’s been. She was a skinny, sharp-edged girl with huge round glasses who did projects with me in school and worked at the store in the afternoon. We’d be elbow to elbow at the front counter, one of us punching the register, the other doing homework. People would sometimes ask if we were sisters, which we thought was terribly funny—since we looked nothing alike—until I got older and stopped finding it amusing at all. Rather, it was evidence of how little the customers paid attention to the living, breathing humans handing over the cigarettes. Anyone with eyes could see we weren’t related.

We lost touch after graduation, then briefly touched base again during my flirtation with Facebook, before I got tired of having old boyfriends and former clients try to be my pretend-friends on the computer and stopped updating anything on my page. I now try to remember what her page had said about her job, her life. Was she “in a relationship”? I believe she was. Her posts were always cryptic and funny but left few clues as to what her life was really like. Not unlike the flesh-and-blood Cami I remember. Her profile picture was windswept and romantic, black and white. Her glasses were small and rectangular, but she looked much the same as her girlhood self. She was turned slightly away from the camera, as if she hadn’t known it was there.

I hardly hear Cami coming up the steps and startle when she comes into the room.

“What are you, a ninja?” I say, smoothing down the last few strands of hair and trying to straighten my blouse.

“It’s my night job, yeah? Pays well, but the uniform doesn’t exactly catch the eye.”

She’s wearing a man’s shirt tied off at the waist and a pair of narrow black pants. She looks like a modern version of Audrey Hepburn. She’s taller than I remember.

“Well, hi,” I finally say, having put myself back together as best I can. “What brings you back to town? Vacation?” I smile but don’t try to hug her. Neither of us was much for hugging.

Everything on her face seems to pull tighter and close in. “Something like that. I’m home for the summer.”

“Home? At your . . . At your dad’s?”

“Yeah.”

I try not to visibly react to this, which means I’ve already reacted, in a way.

I clear my throat and say, “I’m home for a couple of weeks.” I don’t feel like elaborating, and Cami doesn’t ask. She was always good like that.

“I thought I’d see if your mom needs help at the store again. Like old times, yeah?”

“Yeah, exactly. Old times.”

We seem huge in this room, now that we’re grown-ups. If we stood hand in hand we could just about span it with our arms.

There’s nowhere else to sit in my room except on my bed. I sit down cross-legged on my pillow such that my back touches the headboard. Without needing to be invited, Cami sits down facing me, also cross-legged, her hands lightly resting on her ankles, posture straight, like a Buddha.

“We used to sit this way all the time, remember?”

Cami nods. “When we weren’t stretched out cross-wise on the bed. Not sure that would work these days, though.”

Indeed. My narrow twin bed isn’t suited for sprawling adults, just daydreaming girls on their stomachs, their legs bent at the knees and their sock-feet waving in the air, their chins propped in their hands. We used to talk about our crushes. Typical in that way, at least.

“Remember that kid, Damon?” I say now, picturing a boy with braces and a popped-up collar. “I used to write
A
loves
D
in my notebook, thinking I wasn’t giving anything away by using initials. I wonder what happened to him?”

“Dead.”

“What?” My hand flies up to my face, and then drops back to my lap as I wait for Cami to elaborate.

“Yeah, he fell through the ice out on the lake. Weeks before they found him. Left behind a daughter, too.”

“How did I not hear this?”

She shrugs lightly. “Why would you? You were in Chicago by then. I only heard because one of the parents where I tutor had been in Haven and saw it on the news. She knew I was from there—here, that is—so she told me. It was about three years ago.”

So he was about twenty-seven. Damon had graduated from high school, pumped his fists into the air and danced a little jig on stage in his cap and gown to the delight of the entire assembled crowd of parents and giddy kids. And he had ten years to live.

When I saw August last, he had hours to live, only.

“I don’t know why I’m so shocked. I mean, accidents happen. We’re not immune.” I wonder who else might be dead, the news not having reached my office on Wacker Drive.

Cami adjusts her glasses on her nose, not looking directly at me. “No, we’re most certainly not.”

A minute or two pass, punctuated by the sounds of cars motoring down the avenue and shrieks of gulls. I’m about to ask Cami about that tutoring job she mentioned when she points to my mirrored vanity.

“Hey, you’ve still got yours.” She indicates a magazine clipping on the mirror above the old brown vanity table.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,
it says.
Live the life you’ve imagined.

I shrug. “I never took it down when I moved out.”

Amy had photocopied it for us out of
Ladies’ Home Journal
, too many years ago to count.

“I never put mine up,” Cami says, her gaze resting on the tiny octagon-shaped window near the ceiling of my room. “I always thought it was bullshit.”