Part 14 (1/2)

At last, Greta came into the kitchen, where Shoshana was just throwing out the last of the many sponges she'd used along the counters and cupboards. ”Come, honey, let's have us a gla.s.s of wine,” she said. So the two women walked back over the black ink hills to Joe's house, polished off a bottle of wine before the fireplace, watched the two dogs wrestle and bark at P-Hen, and chatted about the past.

Later, Shoshana walked back from the mansion and her eyes widened when she saw the farmhouse. It glowed, the full yellow moon behind it lighting it as if with a thousand bulbs. She breathed in the sweet air, watched the apple trees sway as the wind picked up. She let herself into the house (the key turned easily this time!), and climbed into her father's old bed fully dressed. Tomorrow she would wake, check Fat and Fabulous, then finish cleaning when her mother and sister arrived. After that she'd come up with a plan to tackle the vines and weeds that grew among the apple trees.

Just before sleep's tide pulled her in, Shoshana lay there, looking at the peaked ceiling and listening to Sinatra's soft snores, thinking this might just be it, this home, the fate she always knew she was searching for, that craving for a special destiny that had never subsided deep within her. Yes, this house, these hills, these beautiful trees ... might just be part of a little something called fate.

Suddenly, without preamble or fuss, Alexis and Noah were inseparable. How strange it felt, to glide so effortlessly from being a single ent.i.ty on this planet to existing as one half of a couple. From food shopping for what Billy called her ”single girl salad” to planning meals with another person in mind, Alexis felt she was going through a metamorphosis. She'd existed solely inside her own head, walking around Manhattan, answering her own thoughts. Her days used to revolve around her six tiny meals, her workouts, her blog. Now Noah took up so much s.p.a.ce inside her it was like wearing a second skin.

It was Billy who changed her, of course. It wasn't falling in love with Noah, though the ways he made her feel certainly were the reasons behind pus.h.i.+ng her daily workouts to afternoons so she could help him set up his resturant across the street in the old fur store they'd danced in months ago. She'd also stopped weighing both herself and her food at his insistence.

No, it was Billy and his diagnosis of cancer that set the course of the new Alexis, as spring bled into summer and the flocks of tourists in all their suitcase-dragging glory roamed the streets. The bicyclists came out of the woodwork, block parties lit the nights with color and fire, pedestrians were dripped on by air-conditioners humming along in high-rise apartments, and Alexis's life turned over on its belly and was suddenly, and most completely, changed forever.

Alexis got Billy squeezed in to a doctor's appointment right away, and Billy came home the afternoon of his meeting with Aldo (Alexis had a hard time calling him Dr. Martinez, since she saw him frequently at the gym wearing dorky, navy blue knee-high socks to play racquetball) looking distracted. Noah had long since gone home to care for Oliver, and Alexis was staring at the m.u.f.fins on the counter as she tidied up the apartment, rebandaged her finger, and reminded herself of the ice-cream bars the night before. Fatness was a slippery slope. For all she knew, ice cream was a gateway ... snack.

Vanya had showered and dressed in a black velvet cape over black jeans and gotten on her broomstick ... well, not really. But she'd walked off to whatever job she worked at during the night. But not before talking to Alexis for the first time since she'd handed her a rent deposit in all silver dollars gathered together in a sparkly purple scarf that had littered pixie dust all over the floor when she opened it. Her voice was surprisingly feminine and little-girlish.

”Nice guy,” she'd said, putting her hand high in the air to indicate she was talking about the very tall man who had the softest, most plump lips Alexis had ever kissed.

”Er, yes. Seems like it. Thanks,” Alexis answered, hesitant to say anything else. Princess Pinkerton leaped onto her desk in a blur of gray fur and she shooed him off.

”He looks a little like Cernunnos.”

”Who's that?”

”The horned G.o.d.”

Alexis stared.

Vanya wasn't kidding.

”But he doesn't have horns,” Alexis said, not really knowing whether to ask for more info.

Vanya drew her cape (wasn't she roasting?) around her in a huff. ”It was meant to be a compliment. Cernunnos is the G.o.d of fertility. Wiccans, my people, wors.h.i.+p him.” And with that, she seemed to levitate down the hallway, until Alexis heard the front door slam. She rushed to the window to watch if Vanya actually flew away, knowing she was being silly, but Vanya simply turned left and disappeared into the crowd pus.h.i.+ng and shoving their way home after a long and grueling day at work.

Out of the ma.s.s she saw a familiar lone figure, slight and stooped, and her breath caught in her throat as Billy walked home from the subway, the brown leather purse he sometimes carried (”My murse!”) held away from his body. He walked stooped like someone much older. His head was down as though he were watching the sidewalk retreat behind his feet, his shoulders turned in like wings. She couldn't read the expression on his face from the distance of the window but something about his demeanor was different. It was as if someone had sucked out all the pizzazz, all the confident Billyness.

She hardly ever saw him alone, he usually insisted on at least Alexis plus a boyfriend or two to go everywhere with him, grocery shopping or manicures or a museum opening or to the movies ... but for his meeting with Aldo he'd insisted she not come. She followed his slow shuffle up the street, and had the door to their apartment flung open before he could get out his key.

He'd arranged his expression to hide what came off him in waves, fear. But Alexis knew fear immediately; it was an emotion she was familiar with because it had painted the walls in her house after Mark was killed in Iraq. Her parents feared they'd never get over it, feared their own searing emotions, feared Alexis, their child who was still alive ... It had been the catalyst to end their marriage, because although her parents still were legally married, in the months after the funeral Alexis almost never saw them speak to one another. Her father slept in the guest room, or in a hotel near his office. Fear was the secret ingredient sprinkled in with the vodka tonics her mother drank by the truckload each day. Having this knowledge, being able to sniff it out in people, was a skill Alexis learned from her father, who had a near-perfect success rate in the courtroom. Though she'd stepped off the path on her way to becoming a lawyer, this skill made Alexis win every argument. And now her Billy, the person she loved most in the world, was pretending nothing was wrong. Yet she knew something was definitely wrong. Everything about his posture read: scared. Whatever it was, it was bad.

”So?” she asked, trying to keep her tone neutral.

He was startled, lost in thought and not expecting Alexis to be waiting for him. He put down his bag and flopped onto the couch, placing his feet on the coffee table and draping his left arm over his eyes. His black hair shone under the lights.

”Ugh. Turn the light off,” he said.

She rushed over and did so. He said nothing, so she followed his lead and sat back down next to him gingerly, hoping she was giving off a supportive vibe.

She listened to him breathe.

After a few minutes, a dark eye peered at her from beneath his blue cashmere Ralph Lauren sweater. ”Where'd beefcake go?”

She smiled. ”You mean Noah?”

”Yeah, Noah. I like him. I like him for you.”

”But we don't like anybody,” she said, putting her arm around him, the side of her forehead against his. She settled down onto the couch, tucking her feet underneath her.

”True,” Billy said. He was eyeing the beer m.u.f.fins, and after a moment got up to put three on a plate before sitting back down. Alexis rested her hand on his skinny thigh. He stuffed a large piece in his mouth.

After a couple moments of chewing, he returned to the conversation. ”But the man is something.”

It was true. She had to admit, Noah certainly was something.

”Did he slip you the salami?” Billy asked, eating another beer m.u.f.fin.

”Of course,” she said. Alexis was no prude. She always told Billy about the guys she slept with. Sometimes with full details of s.e.xual capability. They swapped stories and techniques. They were that close.

”And?” He wiggled his eyebrows at her.

She turned toward him. ”And nothing. I don't know. I actually might keep it to myself.” She glanced at him anxiously.

Billy was moody. He was known to turn in an instant from relaxed to b.i.t.c.hy. He was notorious for his stubbornness; once, he'd dumped a boyfriend over an argument while on a date at the Museum of Natural History. Wanting to wander off on his own, he'd asked the guy, a lawyer, to meet him at the Tyrannosaurus bones. After showing up at the designated time and not seeing him, Billy waited nearly two hours before locating his date on the third floor, wandering, confused. ”There are Tyrannosaurus bones up here as well,” he'd related to Billy.

”Everyone knows that one is made out of a mold, the real bones are in the lobby!” Billy had exclaimed. ”How am I supposed to date such an airhead?”

Alexis had pointed out that it was an innocent mistake to make, she wasn't sure she knew which bones were real, but Billy had moved on.

To her surprise, now on the couch, he nodded, seeming to make up his mind about something. ”That's how you know.”

”Know what?”

”That he's The One. Because you don't want to ruin it by talking about it.”

c.r.a.p, he was right.

”Just tell me one thing,” Billy said, rising to place yet another m.u.f.fin on his plate.

”Hmmm?” She took the bandage off her finger and peered at her st.i.tches, which itched.

”Did he have a big one?”

”Huge.”

They grinned at each other.

It was only later, much further into the night, after they'd split a bottle of wine and gotten Chinese takeout (from that shady place on Broadway they loved that always seemed to have stray cats hanging around), that he told her what had happened.

Dr. Martinez had sat in his office, listening closely to Billy explain his symptoms. He'd then furrowed his brow and examined Billy.

”That was when I first knew something was up, when he frowned like that,” Billy said. ”He didn't seem like a frowny kind of guy.”