‘I used to pray a lot when I was little,’ Lennie interrupts, catching Ruby’s alarmed look and changing tack. ‘I truly believed I could wind all the world’s terrible things back on themselves, stop them from happening. Maybe that means I do indeed believe in destiny. Or the idea you can control your fate, if you ask the right way.’
Sue nods at this, the small diamonds at her ears sparkling.
‘I prayed for a while, after the accident. I prayed for us to go back to that night we were headed to the movies, so that I could be in the driver’s seat instead, be the one to absorb the impact of the crash. I used to lie in bed and try to bend time, fold it back on itself. I prayed, I bargained, I pleaded. And sometimes, when I finally managed to fall asleep, it would happen. The whole night would play out differently. It would snow so much that the roads closed, or we would find out the 8 p.m. show was sold out, or Lisa would ask me to drive, and I would slide into the driver’s seat, and that man looking down, changing his CD, would hit me, take me, not her.’
She pauses, before continuing.
‘Those prayers changed nothing, naturally.’
‘What do you think your life would be like now, if it had snowed, or the movie was sold out?’ Lennie asks softly, and I know they are done talking about me tonight.
‘If Lisa had lived? I think’—Sue looks to the ceiling, takes a deep breath—‘I think I would still be living in that nice, big house in Connecticut, and she would live here in New York, and my unhappy marriage to her father would have lasted, and I would be living a relatively unremarkable, albeit privileged life. Summers on Martha’s Vineyard, instead of visiting Auckland and Paris and Marrakesh. Ladies’ Book Club instead of Death Club. That’s how it would have played out for a woman like me.
‘But, ultimately, I don’t know what Lisa’s life would have been like’—Sue looks at Ruby now—‘because, at seventeen, she went too soon for me to really get to know her, or what I would have been like as her mother as she grew into a woman.’
For the first time, I understand it’s not only the dead who have lives they don’t get to live out. The people left behind have as many versions of themselves unexplored, as many possible paths that close off. Some versions are better, and some, no doubt, are worse. There is a Sue outside of Lisa’s death. A woman Sue understands she will never get to be, because of a night when it didn’t snow, and a movie was not sold out, and a man looked down to change his CD, and entire worlds were lost and begun again before he had a chance to look up and take note of where he was headed.
No one lives just one life. We start and finish our worlds many times over. And no matter how long or short a time we are here, I’m beginning to realise we all want more than we get.
As the Death Club members continue talking into the night, I leave them be, and return to where we started. A question I had not thought to consider at the time.
If my death was indeed fated—was it my fate or his, in the end?
If I had lived.
If I had reached for Mr Jackson the last morning we were together, stopped my mouth against his, kept the words down. If I had let the fact of my impending birthday slide down his warm skin, dissolve into nothing as important as our bodies and the snow outside and the heaviness of him, wrapping over and around me like a sheet. If we had made love that last day of me being seventeen, and if the next day I had decided birthdays weren’t important to anyone but your own self, and asked him to paint me instead, so I could have something of my new, adult self to keep—would I have lived?
Would I have added years in this way, silently slipping into a life with Mr Jackson where I was twenty, thirty, forty years old, waking up next to him before another birthday and thinking: I have made it another year closer to 79.1! Would we have emerged after that first winter as a real couple, and made a real life together, one that included a wedding, and children, and a house in another town where he could teach art and I could—
Here, like Sue when she imagines Lisa, I don’t know how to see the world that might have grown up around us. Would I have gone to college? Stayed home with the beautiful babies we made? Helped Mr Jackson sell his art and remained his muse, even when I passed my own mother’s age and kept going, getting older and older, with him immortalising every new line on my body?
No lines, I don’t want lines. He said this before our very first afternoon together. Would he still have loved me when my body turned into a well-read map?
If I had lived.