Gabe talked, and Rosa let herself imagine how it would go: the plane ride （she pictured Amanda throwing back those miniature bottles of vodka and flirting with whatever men were nearby）。 The airport in Boston, where she’d never been. Seeing Gabe, for the first time since the pandemic. She’d run to him and hug him, so hard she’d probably leave bruises; she would bury her face in the space between his ear and his shoulder, letting the smell of his skin surround her. The last time she’d seen him, he’d had a new, short haircut, and his clothes had smelled of a different detergent from the one she used, but beneath it all, he was still Gabe, her beloved angel boy. She would hold him, and he’d smile down at her. Let me have this, she would think. I won’t have it for very much longer.
Sarah
On Thursday afternoon, Sarah played hooky, slipping out of work early to meet Owen in front of the Guggenheim. They spent two hours in the museum, looking at the Picasso prints and the Frankenthaler watercolors, at Owen’s favorite Matisse sculpture and Sarah’s favorite Degas paintings. Then they’d gone to a café, where they’d lingered over drinks, asking each other polite questions, learning the contours of how the other had spent the last twenty-plus years.
Owen had talked about the Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where it turned out he’d spent a semester abroad. “There’s this one sculpture of a man on horseback with, um, an erection. Only the pope was a great friend of Peggy Guggenheim’s, so the sculptor made the penis detachable.”
“Handy,” said Sarah.
“Yes,” Owen had deadpanned. “But is it art?”
Sarah had listened, and stolen looks at him, appreciating the way his blue button-down stretched against his shoulders, the economy and grace of his movements. He’d always been comfortable in his body, at ease in his skin. Eli, she knew, had shot up six inches between junior high and high school. He walked with a permanent stoop, the result of the years he’d spent bumping his head on doorframes and ceilings that weren’t sized for a man of his height. Eli was still sometimes oblivious to the way his body occupied space. Owen always seemed to know exactly where he was.
“I’m glad I ran into you, because there are things I want to tell you,” he said. “Things I should have told you a long time ago.”
“Are these things I’m going to want to hear?” Sarah asked, feeling her heart start beating hard.
“I think so,” Owen said. “I hope so, anyhow.” He ran his hands over his close-cropped hair. “I wasn’t honest with you, back then. And you deserve to know what was really going on.”
She held herself very still, hoping none of what she was feeling showed on her face. “Okay,” she said. “I’m listening.”
Owen rolled his shoulders and began to shred his paper napkin. “You remember what the Camp was like, right?”
Sarah nodded. She had lots of memories of the Camp: the peeling paint, the single toilet, in its cinder block enclosure; the way Owen’s tiny cabin had smelled of mouse, and was so small that when you were lying in bed you could touch both walls with your outstretched arms. She remembered the boathouse, full of abandoned and broken things, with its roof caving in. Back then, she’d been charmed by some of the Camp’s idiosyncrasies and oblivious to the rest. She hadn’t cared where she was, as long as she got to be with Owen.
“I know your mom thought that it was a performance, right?” Owen asked. “Rich WASPs pretending they were poor, just for the hell of it.” His voice had a hard, ironic edge.
Surprised, Sarah asked, “Did she say that to you?”
He raised his eyebrows. “You told me she called us the Pond People. Remember?” Sarah cringed. “And I might have done a little eavesdropping the first night I came over for dinner.”
“Exotic,” Sarah murmured, hoping she and her mother hadn’t hurt teenage Owen’s feelings. “My mom said you guys thought it was exotic, and amusing, to live that way.”
Owen made a scoffing noise. “Maybe it was fun, for some people. Maybe some of them were just pretending to be broke. But we weren’t. We were the actual item.”
Sarah sat very straight, waiting. Owen went on.
“Our house—our real house in Connecticut—was just like the Camp. It was enormous, and drafty, and nothing worked right. It was falling down around our heads.” He gave her a tight-lipped smile. “But it didn’t matter, because it was big, and in the right zip code, and it looked fine from the outside, if you didn’t look too closely.”