He blinked. "I...I just meant life is short. You have to live life large."
"Not now, Eric."
"It's almost a message from the universe. You know I loved him, too. And I thought I'd be the one who died. You know? From my cancer?"
"I vaguely remember, yes."
"It's just so random. When I was getting chemo, there were days when I thought this was the end, and I said to myself-"
"Here, Kate." My sister pressed a glass of water into my hand. "Mrs. Coburn wants you to meet someone. Nathan's friend from Columbia."
Saved by the mourners. My sister steered Eric away, and I took another long look at my husband.
I love you, I thought desperately, and at almost the exact same time, another thought came, hard and defiantly ugly.
I wish we'd never met.
Chapter Seven
Ainsley
"Just when I'd accepted the divorce," Candy liked to tell people on book tour, "Phil showed up with his child."
I remembered thinking at age three and a half that it would be fun to live with a lady named Candy, that her house would be sparkly and we'd eat mostly pink foods. There'd be a lot of singing, I imagined.
There wasn't. Candy sighed a lot. She had a daily headache.
Hence, my childhood of guilt. Candy would buckle me briskly into a car seat, then wince as she stood up, hands on her back. She was in her forties when I came to live with her, and she'd tell her friends that she'd forgotten just how hard little kids were. She was dutiful, showing up at parent-teacher conferences because Dad was off with the boys of summer. She made sure I ate nutritious-and tasteless-dinners, but it was pretty clear. I was not her daughter. She already had one of those.
When I came along, Candy had been working on her PhD. It took her four more years to finish her dissertation, which became her most famous book-Stuck with You: Raising the Recalcitrant Stepchild. It took me decades to figure out it was about me.
Unlike Sean and Kate, I was a day-care kid. From their stories, it seemed they were raised in a magical kingdom of sibling friendship and parental delight. Candy baked back then, coconut cookies and angel food cake. Kate and Sean had stories of the time their mother made a tepee in the living room over winter break, or read The Wind in the Willows out loud, doing all the voices to perfection. Sean and Kate even shared a room until he turned seven.
There were dozens of pictures of them before I came along, laughing together, arms slung around each other, Sean steadying Kate on her bike, the two of them eating Popsicles on a summer day, or standing in front of the house on the first day of school, Kate's hair in neat ponytails, Sean's freshly cut.
Day care was fine. To the best of my knowledge, I was never dropped on my head or burned with cigarettes or put in toddler fight club. When I started kindergarten at the age of four and a half, I went to after-school programs, envious of the kids who got to ride the bus home.
As I got older, Candy signed me up for pretty much anything that kept me out of the house. I was a Daisy/Brownie/Girl Scout, played soccer from the age of five, was forced into volunteering at Adopt-a-Grandparent, spending many a high school afternoon talking to elderly people who kept asking me to take them home.
My father liked me quite a bit, though he wasn't around too much, always flying off somewhere to do his umpire thing. But when he was home, life was a lot happier. "I'm taking the Ainsburger on some errands," he'd call to Family 1.0, and once or twice a month he would take me off, my little hand so happy in his. We'd visit one of his friends, and I'd get to have ice cream and watch TV, maybe play computer games, something Candy forbid. Dad and his friend would go into the bedroom to "have a little talk in private," and hey, I didn't care. Dad often took me to the toy store for a new stuffed animal after the visit. For years, I thought errands meant visiting ladies.
Kate and Sean were fine. They didn't hate me, beat me, tease me. They just kind of...ignored me. Not in a mean way, but in a slightly confused way. I remember knocking on Sean's door, asking him if he'd play with me. He looked utterly baffled as he groped around in his desk for something I could do with him. (He showed me how to shoot an elastic band, then told me he had to study.) Kate wasn't the type to brush my hair or play dolls with me, though she would, if I asked.
I just got a little tired of asking.
So instead, I made up friends. Lolly and Mr. Brewster, the tiny humans who lived in the mountains of my blankets, would ski and slide down the hills made by my knees and have terrible crashes and vivid arguments about whose fault it was. There was Igor, a tiny elephant who lived in shoe boxes I decorated with scraps of fabric and paint.
I sound tragic, don't I? I wasn't, I'm pretty sure. By the time I was eight or nine, I had friends, and it was such a relief, having people who really seemed to like talking to me. In middle school, I joined everything, did the grunt-work jobs (always secretary, never president, equipment manager rather than star player). High school was the same; I was always Switzerland, staying friends with everyone, never taking sides.
I didn't have a boyfriend. But I was great at giving advice to my friends who did have boyfriends, and I got a vicarious thrill every once in a while, approaching Seth to tell him that Lucy really liked him, and did he like her?
When Kate went off to NYU, my parents and I moved to Cambry-on-Hudson, and I made the most out of being the new girl. I'd learned long ago that being a superfriend was the way to make people like me back. Adore, and ye shall be adored.
Sean went from Harvard to Columbia Medical School, because he was a show-off. After NYU, Kate got an MFA in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and immediately started working as a professional photographer. She was dazzling to me, so sophisticated and urbane, living in Brooklyn (I barely knew where that was back then, but it sounded so cool).
I went to a pretty nice college in New York City-well, it was Wagner College on Staten Island, in the shadow of the mighty skyline but technically still in New York City.
Unlike my siblings, I wasn't driven to achieve or study anything in particular. College was wonderful, and I loved being away from home. My siblings were off leading their fabulous, very adult lives; Sean married Kiara, also a surgeon, specialized in some kind of brain surgery and did the occasional TED Talk. Kate lived in her brownstone, a world away, it seemed, though she had me over for dinner once in a while, always nice but a little unsure where I was concerned.
Then, junior year, I met Eric.
Wagner was a small school, but somehow, we didn't know each other. He was an accounting major; I was studying philosophy, because doesn't the world need more philosophers?
I saw Eric as we were moving back in on the first day of the new school year. His parents were saying goodbye, hugging him, and his mom was laughing and wiping tears. He kissed her on the cheek, hugged his dad, not the awkward thanks, gotta run hug of most boys our age, but a real hug, a loving hug.
And Eric was handsome. Dark hair, dark eyes, attractively dorky glasses, lanky build.
He looked up, saw me watching and smiled, and that was it. I fell in love.
It took two weeks for me to speak to him, which was getting awkward, since we lived in the same dorm that year. But one happy night, my key card wasn't working, and I was patiently reinserting it for the fifteenth time when Eric came up behind me and said, "Want me to try, girl who doesn't talk to me?"
I blushed.
He smiled. "Maybe we could grab a coffee," he suggested, and my heart ricocheted around my chest.
We grabbed a coffee.
By the weekend, we were a couple. It took him all of two weeks to get me into bed; basically, the amount of time it took for the Pill to kick in. I couldn't believe love had finally found me in the form of affable, well-liked, dorktastic Eric Fisher...my boyfriend!
And even more remarkable...he felt the same way about me.
We could talk all night. It was more important to talk than sleep. He was funny, and he was so nice that it took my breath away. I hadn't met any boys like that. Boys who held the door and bought you cold medicine when you were sick and snagged a blueberry muffin from the dining hall just because you loved them.
With Eric, I finally belonged. Finally, I was special.
That summer, we both got internships in Manhattan, me with a tiny publishing house, him with a bank. His parents let us stay in their apartment on 102nd Street-the building was named The Broadmoor, which I thought was so sophisticated. I'd never lived in a building with a name before. The apartment had belonged to Eric's maternal grandmother, and it was a tiny, unglamorous place with a bedroom so small it could fit only a double bed. The living room was also the kitchen, and our table could fit only two people, and even then, our knees had to touch.