Whole Latte Life (2 page)

She opens the note again, but stops and looks out the window from where she sits, in Sara’s seat, which faces the doorway. The street is narrow and the tops of the buildings reach up beyond her view. From where she
had
been sitting, her back faced the door and she would not have seen Sara Beth leave. So was this all planned?

Really, you can’t plan to disappear and not show it. The plan is too big. So then is this unplanned? Carefully reading the note again, there it is, that familiar handwriting, easy cursive that graced two decades of beautiful Christmas and birthday cards with love and sentiment and wishes for
Much Happiness!
and
The Very Best!
The note is short, written on a piece of the hotel stationery. Sara Beth collects stationery when she travels, folding pieces of paper from inns and Marriotts and now the refurbished Plaza into her purse. But this doesn’t jive, her strange message about life, and turning forty, not with the sweet messages of the past. Finding her way? She feels lost? Rachel’s eyes fly over the words. She has to do this, she says. She can’t go back home feeling this way.

“What on earth,” Rachel says. “What way?”

Please don’t tell Tom about this. I really need some time alone, Rachel, to sort things out. I am so sorry to do this now, on our fortieth birthdays. I know it means a lot to you and I promise you another celebration. But we go back a long time and you’re the only, only person who will understand and let me do this, let me walk away from it all for a little while. It all sounds crazy, gosh, I know I sound crazy, but please don’t worry. Please give me just these couple days alone to try to figure this out, to figure me out.

Wait.
Wait,
Rachel’s thoughts cry out, as though Sara Beth can hear them. But they often do know the other’s thoughts. She stops reading and looks around the restaurant again. Time alone? Here? Outside the window, the city buildings crept a step nearer in the one minute since she last looked out. She can almost yell Red Light, the way everything presses in, in a matter of seconds. Red Light!

It’s just that my life is a mess right now and I feel so lost. I need this one weekend alone to think, to fix things, to find room for me again, my dreams. When else could I ever—

Rachel squints to read a line Sara Beth crossed out. Something about if she doesn’t do this. Well now. If she doesn’t do this, what? Will she come right back and resume the weekend? If she doesn’t do this, what exactly will happen? What kind of nonsense is this? Will she find herself standing on the George Washington Bridge, or buying a pair of designer boots to alleviate some midlife crisis? Instead, past the crossed out line, Sara Beth writes,

Please try to understand. Like we’ve always done for each other. We’ll talk soon. Promise.—Love, Sara Beth

“Okay, enough.” Rachel grabs her cell from the table and starts to dial again. “Shoot!” she whispers half way through, then disconnects and drops it in her bag. Worry has never felt so scary, not in all her livelong life. After several moments when she hopes beyond hope that Sara Beth changes her mind and comes rushing back, breathless, apologetic,
What was I thinking?
she’d ask, Rachel finally leaves enough money to cover the lunch tab, gathers the shopping bags and walks herself straight out into the city. After checking back at the hotel for Sara Beth, she flags down a mounted police officer a few blocks further.

“That’s a difficult situation,” he tells her.

“I know. That’s why I need your help,” Rachel says, stepping back when the chestnut horse shifts its stance beneath him, nodding hard against the reins. She squints, but can’t see past the black sunglasses, the helmet, the dark uniform. Right now, more than anything, what she needs is a cop, and this officer is the only one in sight.

“What you should probably do is call your friend’s family, or go home to your husband. She’ll show up in a day or two.” He glances down Fifth Avenue before pulling on the reins and turning his horse back to work. “With that note, I wouldn’t worry too much.” His booted foot digs in a heel, moving the animal into traffic.

There is a boutique where the cop had been standing, a small shop with pastel clutches in the window, pink and yellow and blue, and summery wrap dresses. Cars are lined up three deep on the Avenue; clear sunlight glances off steel and windows. The people, the shops, the streets connecting them all through Manhattan, it’s a carousel whirling around Rachel, the city spinning and rising, standers and jumpers, all cabbage roses and flying manes and twinkling lights and contorted whinnies and she wonders how these things happen. Twice now in the past hour she’s been left behind from a situation spinning around her. Gosh darn it, right when she desperately needs help, this cop brushes her off like lint from a sweater.

“Wait a minute!” Rachel calls out, squeezing through a group of students on a class trip. “I wasn’t done.” She’s half jogging along the curb near the horse, keeping pace with it. Oh, the officer’s lengthy sidelong look doesn’t escape her as she shoulders herself through Manhattan. “I am
not
leaving New York without Sara Beth,” she yells over the noise of a passing bus, shielding the sun from her eyes.

Stopping alongside the curb, the police officer turns back. He already told her that since there is no indication of abduction, the NYPD can’t do anything. This is still the land of the free. Free to come and go, to hide and seek.

“Can’t you make an exception?” Rachel asks. “Because something’s really wrong.” Her hand still shades her eyes, and she can’t read his behind those sunglasses. “I checked back at the hotel, the restaurant. I don’t know what else to do.”

“You might want to stop at the Precinct to file a Missing Person Report.”

“A report.” It begins to feel like all this, this insistence to authority, this nerve, like it’s all been summoned for nothing. Like she’d taken a deep breath but never dove in. Sara Beth could be three states away by the time a report is filed. A stream of cars moves by and she steps closer to the curb, daring to reach up and grip the horse’s leather bridle, not letting them slip away again until she is finished. The soft warmth of the horse presses against her fingers.

“Listen. She’s my best friend. And only an hour ago, I was sitting in a perfectly charming restaurant when the maitre d’ handed me a note. We came to the city for our fortieth birthdays. A girls’ weekend out, you know? Sara Beth left the table to use the Ladies’ Room and never came back.” Rachel’s free hand feels around deep in her shoulder bag and pulls out the folded square of paper. “It’s all in her note. Something about her life not being right, and before she goes back to it, she has to find some answers. Here, of all places.”

She looks over her shoulder back toward the restaurant, still clutching the bridle. It’s easy to not recognize someone out of context, out of their normal place beside you thumbing through boho tunics on the rack, standing behind you at Dean & Deluca, jogging through the park. Is Sara Beth close by?

“I’m sorry I can’t do more,” he tells her again.

“Well, where’s the Station for this Precinct? Maybe I’ll file that Report.”

“The 18
^th
Precinct? Over on West 54
^th
.”

Rachel starts to walk away, leaving the officer and his horse watching. He sits with the reins folded in his crossed hands, NYPD insignia and a shining badge pinned to his leather jacket.

If she wasn’t so darn busy fighting back tears, she’d have turned to ask him if they needed a recent photograph, to see the beautiful auburn hair Sara always fusses with, tucking it behind an ear whenever she gets nervous, or self-conscious. Or if it would be better for Sara’s husband to file the report. He’s a lawyer after all, and has lived with her for all these years, sat with her in her kitchen, slept with her, landscaped their yard, helped with the new baby, checked her car oil, and held her close when her mother unexpectedly died. Or if the Missing Persons Bureau would ask personal questions about risk factors, like the sadness Rachel hears when Sara sometimes answers her phone, or the fatigue she sees in her eyes. Or questions about any crisis Sara Beth might’ve had before disappearing. Something that might have pushed her over the edge, forced this weekend escape from all that filled her life. Three children, soccer, high school, dance lessons, playgroups, library fund raisers, a colonial home, grocery shopping, cooking meals, dentist appointments. Those wonderful antiques gathering dust in the garage, novels unread, a collection of vintage leather journals she hasn’t used in ages, probably long tucked away in the back of a drawer now. Dreams waiting to awaken.

Rachel quickly walks another block, leaving the officer far behind and realizing that Sara Beth didn’t disappear today. She turns into a coffee shop and plants herself at a window table for a couple hours, her gaze riveted on each passerby. Have any of these people done what Sara Beth did? Are they walking out on a life-in-progress? As the shock of her friend’s running away wears off, the truth grows clearer. Rachel has been losing her friend in pieces over the years.

Gone was a huge piece of her heart with her mother’s death a year ago.

Gone was her desire to move to a smaller historic home with her unplanned pregnancy two years ago.

Gone was her fine arts degree, folding laundry now rather than unfolding an easel.

Gone was a certain courage returning home from a college-year abroad in France with a free-spirited boyfriend, one who’d made her daisy chains and taught her to ride horses and dared her to spend her life with him there.

Carefree became careful.

Daring became denied.

Her best friend had been disappearing for a long time now.

She pays the bill and heads out into the waning afternoon sunlight, eventually turning the corner on West 54
^th
, intent on finding her friend.

The Precinct’s American flag catches her eye first, a couple of blocks ahead. As she nears, the line of police cruisers parked outside the sandstone building has her pick up her step. Help is right here, she feels that assurance as two uniformed officers walk through the black double doors, into the station house. One detailed Missing Person Report might very well reel Sara Beth right back. The department will track her down, somehow, someway.

Rachel slows as she approaches the granite stairs leading to the double doors. The day seems to pause again right here at the police station as she seriously considers what she must do next. It comes down to a choice, and with it, she feels some of the difficult choice Sara Beth must have felt a few hours ago. With each step, she’s locked in one conflicting moment.

Time is so fluid. It changes its course, rises and falls like the tides, disguising eternal moments beneath a weekend of days. Years of friendship surge into tethered memories. A moment of death becomes an ocean current of perpetual loss. A split-second relationship decision arises with waves of doubt. Hours of a regretted pregnancy stream into days of relieved love. An hour at a time, a cry at a time, a decision at a time, a worry at a time, regret, relief, love, a sea of moments, they all swell into one emotional note of paper tucked into her handbag.

It is one of the most daunting choices Rachel has ever made. Her one decisive second, right now, at the Precinct doors, will stay with her always. She can walk away and give Sara Beth the time she wants or she can try to find her. Without a second glance back, she walks up the stairs, pulls open the door and steps inside.

Chapter Two

I
n the past, she’d turned to art for comfort, losing herself in paintings as she studied the works of the masters. If she were to commission a portrait of her family, you’d see a Tonalist painting. From a distance, no distinction would be visible in the gradations and variations of deep paint shades. From a distance you would notice, with the diffusion of tone, the atmosphere that surrounds her family rather than the family itself. There’d be mystery in the dusky painting. A dark, muted undertone. Lean in and study the details, and the family wouldn’t appear whole, Sara Beth an unfinished compilation of strokes. Her edges would blend with her family’s, yet she’d be nearly transparent at her heart, a part of it washed away now, a vacuity separating her from the others. Yet close or distant, you’d notice the laying of Tom’s hand on her shoulder, Kat’s gaze at her mother’s face, Jen secretly looping arms with her sister, the baby.

Like an artist feeling inspired, she couldn’t shake an idea. It would be so easy to take herself out of the portrait for a while, to restore the painting. How often do we get this chance to spend a few days alone, reflecting on who we’ve become, who we’ve lost? Maybe this was part of the painting of her self, the first thin layer of pigment laid on the canvas, making pensive, pivotal decisions. The thought had her set down the menu and take this chance, stepping out of the restaurant alone.