He shook his head. “You weren’t clueless. You knew. Maybe not exactly, but you knew. You knew it meant something that she put it in that chest, and that she didn’t show it off with all her stuff. You knew her, and you knew how she worked, and that thing in your head that makes you want to understand everything kept poking you and poking you until you figured it out. You don’t have anything to feel bad about.”
Laurie refused to let the tightness in her throat turn into tears. It would complicate everything. So she coughed a little. “I spend my whole life wanting to be independent and wanting people to respect what I can accomplish, and I didn’t even think to assume that if there was a mysterious beautiful thing in her house, maybe she herself is the answer to where it came from.”
“But why does that make you feel bad?” He put his hand on her knee. “Laurie, something is obviously wrong.”
She stood up with her hands on her hips, then sat on the edge of the couch. “I wanted to be a champion for her, I guess. I wanted to stick up for her life, for the way she was and the way she lived. I wanted to give her the same respect she would have gotten if she’d made different choices. I wanted her pictures and her precious things to be counted, even if they weren’t being fought over. And I can’t help feeling like I failed a little. I almost missed this huge thing, this big part of her life. I could have missed it. I could have given that duck to that jerk very easily.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I almost did. Almost.”
“Laur, ‘almost’ will drive you out of your head. I almost went to Michigan to work for the university when Becca did. I almost stayed married. I almost got back together with her a year after we were separated because I hated living by myself. A million different things almost happen.”
“I almost got married,” she said.
He nodded. “But you didn’t, and here you are.”
“And somehow, I still feel terrible.”
“Has anybody ever told you that your rich emotional life is full of pools of lava and trapdoors?”
She smiled. “I know. I know how it sounds. And the thing is, I love being here. I love Dot’s house, because Dot’s house is not sad. Look at her life, look at all these things she did. I was trying to be the one person who really thought I got all that about her too, and I never thought to give her credit for this amazing thing she kept to herself. I feel like I let her down.”
He rolled his eyes grandly. “Oh, brother. Laurie! I mean, what does being independent mean to you when you say it like this? When you talk about how much you care about it? What do you think you have to prove? What would happen if you stayed here, if you let yourself enjoy your friends and all these people who care about you, if you crawled into bed with me and we were happy? What is so scary about that? What do you think it’s going to cost you?”
Laurie thought first of her big bed at home, and the way she liked to sleep right in the middle, stretched out however she chose, various pillows arranged to facilitate the ideal splaying of her limbs. “Look, to be honest, I was going to say, before—yesterday even—that maybe I would do that. I was thinking about it. I thought about it a lot. But I can’t.”
He let out a breath. “Almost again, huh?”
She shook her head. “I’m not a person who’s ever going to want to share everything with somebody else, like my parents do, or like Junie and Charlie do, or like I think you want to. When I didn’t marry Chris, I started to suspect it about myself, and when I realized that I was very relieved about calling that off, I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
“That I would never get married,” she said. “To anybody. Ever. No matter how great they are.” Did she say this to him, for him? Did she say it for his benefit? She wasn’t even sure, until she saw that he looked just slightly stung by it, that she had disappointed him, just a tiny amount. And she knew then that, yes, she had wanted to make sure that this was something he knew as they were lying in bed together, if in fact they ever did again.
“You can’t imagine a situation in which you’d ever get married?” he said. She shook her head. “No matter what.” She shook her head again. All he said was: “Okay.”
She took a breath. “Nick.”
“No, I heard you.” He got up and resettled himself in the big armchair. “I heard every word, and I understand what you’re telling me.”
She wanted to kiss his neck, but she also wanted to tell him to stop it. “Nick.”