‘No,’ he says. ‘Well . . . I touched her ponytail. It flew up as she fell. It touched my hand.’
‘I see.’ Tamil makes a note of this. Then she looks up. ‘Can you show me how you lunged? Act it out? Over here.’
Gabe nods, moving across the grass to where she has gestured. ‘She . . . uh . . . started to fall and I . . .’ He steps forward, his arms starting wide and then slowly closing until he’s nearly touching either elbow. Detective Tamil watches him for a second, then she looks back at her notebook.
‘And I understand she screamed?’
Gabe straightens up. ‘Yes. At least I think she did.’
‘At what point did she scream? Before she jumped? During?’
‘During,’ Gabe says. ‘But again, I may have got it wrong. Maybe it was the wind.’
Tamil scribbles some more in her notebook. ‘All right. Is there anything else? Anything she said or did that you haven’t mentioned?’
‘No.’
‘In that case, thank you very much for your time,’ she says, returning her notebook to her pocket.
‘That’s it?’ Gabe says.
‘For now. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.’ Tamil looks like she’s going to walk back to her colleagues, but she hesitates a moment. ‘I read the article in the local paper. It’s pretty impressive, the number of lives you’ve saved. Focus on that.’
She smiles, then moves off to join her colleagues, who are huddled under the newly fixed tent. The mood feels casual, I notice. A couple of them are talking about where to stop for lunch on the way back to Somerville.
No one suspects Gabe of anything, I realise. I know I should feel relieved by this, yet all I can think about is the position of Gabe’s hands when he acted out the lunge for Tamil, and how it looked nothing like what I’d seen out the window.
10
PIPPA
THEN
‘Pippa? You might not remember me. It’s Gabe Gerard, from the Botanic Gardens?’
It had been three weeks since our ill-fated first meeting. After he failed to call, I’d played out every possible scenario in my head, and eventually decided that my meeting with Gabe, and his subsequent invitation to the wedding reception, had been imagined. It made sense. So much about that meeting had felt strange and otherworldly. And so, when the call finally came, I was genuinely startled.
‘Pippa? Are you there?’
‘I’m here. And I remember.’
Of course I remembered. The man had stopped the rain for me! I’d been thinking about him for three weeks.
Wondering if he’d been horribly drunk and forgotten about our meeting.
If he’d met someone else on the way to the wedding reception and fallen in love.
The entire thing – coming to talk to a crying dog walker during a wedding ceremony and asking her on a date – had been a dare that he never intended to follow through on. （Stopping the rain, I had to concede, was a lucky coincidence.）
Eventually, I’d had to put the whole encounter in the same category as my relationship with Mark: things that I had unwittingly screwed up for reasons that weren’t clear to me.
‘I’m so sorry I haven’t called earlier. But I can explain!’
His excuse, of course, was magnificent. He’d been helping an elderly wedding guest across the road to the reception venue when a car had come around the corner at high speed. Gabe had managed to get the elderly guest to safety but he’d been clipped by the car, breaking his leg in two places. His injuries had required a week’s stay in the hospital （something that was verified later by the groom as well as by the gruesome scar on Gabe’s leg）， and the subsequent two weeks had been spent on opiates, falling in and out of sleep and wondering if our initial meeting was something he’d dreamed up – much like I had.
I wanted to say no to the date. I told myself I had some dignity. But it turned out I didn’t have much at all.
On this occasion, having the advantage of prep time, I looked nice. I wore a short white sundress with sandals, my hair was washed and in a bouncy ponytail. I wondered if he’d comment on my appearance, but he didn’t. Knowing Gabe as I do now, it doesn’t surprise me. As good-looking as he is, looks are entirely irrelevant to him. He’s attracted to something deeper, harder to pin down.
We met at the Botanic Gardens – his idea, and a sweet one. This time, though it was cloudy, there was no rain. Gabe arrived on crutches, carrying a thermal picnic bag over one shoulder and a blanket around his neck. When I got close enough to him, I laughed and rolled my eyes, taking the blanket from him. Perhaps it was the crutches that made me feel strangely comfortable. As if they brought him down to a more human level, less the unattainable dream-like man I’d imagined the past few weeks. As I spread the blanket out for us, he said, ‘It feels like we’ve done this before, doesn’t it? In another life?’
Yes, I thought. Yes, it does.
‘So, you’re a lawyer?’ he said; I’d told him as much in our phone conversation. ‘What kind of law?’
It was a question I answered often. I was aware wills and estates was not the sexiest area of legal practice. It had never bothered me. But now, faced with a gorgeous man, I found myself wishing I’d chosen litigation, or mergers and acquisitions, or even family law.
‘Wills and estates,’ I confessed, then added in mitigation, ‘It’s most recession-proof.’
What happened next was the second miracle of our relationship （the rain-stopping being the first）。 Gabe rested his cheek in his hand, looked into my eyes and said, ‘Tell me about it.’
No one had ever said that before. No one has ever said it since. The craziest part was that it looked very much like he meant it.
So I told him. I was halfway through explaining escrow, when he took my chin between his thumb and forefinger, looked directly into my eyes and kissed me. Softly. Just once. Then he smiled and said, ‘Sorry. Carry on. Escrow.’
We talked about everything that day. Important things – like the fact that his father had died before he was born and that he still bore a grudge towards his father’s family, who never helped his mother out or made any attempt to meet him. We also talked about unimportant things – like what we watched on TV, why IKEA hot dogs were so good and whether we were going to get that Indian summer everyone was talking about.
We stayed in the gardens until the sky turned dark and the bats began to fly overhead. The air was warm and sweet, and our conversation was punctuated by short silences and shy smiles and comments of wonder （from Gabe） like, ‘It feels as if we’ve always known each other.’
It was an evening of that feeling you wanted to bottle, the feeling that no drug or orgasm could replicate – the skyrocketing high of limerence. I was delighted by everything: the way he paused to think before answering any question, as if whether or not he liked pickles was worthy of deep contemplation; the way he laughed loudly at my offhand jokes; the way his chest looked in his button-down shirt. And he delighted equally in me. It was delightful to be delighted in.
By the time we made it back to his apartment, which was just a short walk away, it was not a question of whether the night was ending but, rather, where we were going next. The idea of parting was simply unthinkable.