Anybody Out There? Read online

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Tonight

  Just tried to call, but you’re on the line. Wanted to catch you before I left. See you tonight. Nothing to report, just wanted to tell you that I love you and will love you forever and ever, no matter what happens.

  A xxxxxxxx

  I read it again. What did it mean? He was coming to see me tonight? Then I noticed the date: the sixteenth of February, and today was the twentieth of April. This wasn’t new; all the adrenaline racing through my poor hopeful body pulled up in a big halt and went home in disgust. I was a dope and I could only blame the drugs. This must have arrived after I’d left to meet him that evening nine weeks ago. And because it was obviously personal, the temp hadn’t opened it and had left it for me to read.

  19

  The first time I met the Maddoxes

  What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” Aidan had asked.

  “Dunno.” Hadn’t given it much thought.

  “Want to come to Boston and spend it with my family?”

  “Um, okay, thanks. If you’re sure.”

  A low-key response, but I knew that this was a big deal. Not as big as I’d realized, though. When I told people at work, they freaked.

  “How long have you guys been exclusive?”

  “Since Friday.”

  “Last Friday? You mean the Friday that was five days ago? But this is way too soon.”

  In the unwritten New York dating rules, I was jumping the gun by at least seven weeks. It was forbidden—indeed, up until now, it had been thought technically impossible—to move directly from a declaration of exclusivity to meeting his family. It was most unorthodox. Highly irregular. No good would come of it, they all prophesied, shaking their heads despondently.

  “It’s still four weeks away,” I protested.

  “Three and a half.”

  I didn’t need their doom and gloom. I had my own worries: Aidan had told me about Janie.

  It should have been the subject of a late-night confessional, but circumstances dictated that it was a morning bean spilling—the morning after we’d first slept together and he’d gone weird on me. It had made me late for work but I didn’t care. I had to know.

  Here’s the gist: Aidan and Janie had gone out with each other for about a hundred and sixty-eight years. They’d been brought up a couple of miles from each other in Boston and had been an item for a long, long time, right since high school. They went away to different colleges and the relationship ceased by mutual consent, but when they arrived back in Boston three years later, everything kicked off again. All through their twenties they were a loved-up couple and they became part of each other’s family, Janie joining the Maddoxes on their summer vacations in Cape Cod and Aidan going along with the Janies to their place in Bar Harbor. Over the years, Aidan and Janie broke up a few times and tried dating other people, but they always returned to each other.

  Time passed and they moved into apartments—but not together—and the marriage hints from their families were starting to get a little heavy when, about eighteen months before I met him, Aidan’s firm transferred him to “the city.” (Everyone says “the city” when they mean New York, which seems hard to understand because Boston isn’t exactly a hamlet with three houses and a pub.)

  It was a bit of a shock all around but Aidan and Janie kept reminding each other that New York was a mere hour’s flight away, they’d see each other every weekend, and in the meantime, Aidan would look for another job back in Boston and Janie would apply for jobs in NYC. So off Aidan goes, promising to be true.

  “You can guess what happened,” he said.

  Actually, I was still trying to figure it out. That first night when he’d asked me to put him on my roster, he’d given the impression that he was available—albeit in a nonexclusive way—but had I been conned into muscling in on someone else’s man?

  “You’ve barely paid off the taxi into Manhattan when you’ve got your lad out and you’re trawling the bars, looking for takers?”

  He laughed a little sadly. “Not exactly. But, yes, I slept with other women.”

  In his defense he refused to blame the many temptations of NYC, the exquisite-looking, brazen ladies who’d done classes, learning how to twirl their bras over their heads like they were lassoing a runaway steer.

  “No one to blame but me,” he said miserably. “I wanted to flagellate myself with shame. That old Catholic guilt, it gets you every time. Don’t laugh, but I did something I hadn’t done for the longest time: I went to confession.”

  “Oh. Are you, like…a practicing Catholic?”

  He shook his head. “A recovering Catholic. But I felt so shitty I would’ve tried anything.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Janie deserved so much better from me,” he said. “She’s a great human being, a very good person. She sees the positive in every situation without being, like, a Pollyanna chump.”

  Oh God. I was going head-to-head with a living saint.

  “That first day we met, when I spilled coffee on you, I’d just made a fresh resolution—yet another one—that I was going to be totally faithful to Janie. I really meant it.”

  So that was why he’d been so odd when I’d asked him out. He hadn’t said, “Thanks but no thanks.” Or “Hey, I’m flattered, but…” Instead he’d given off waves of despair.

  “So what happened?” I asked angrily. “Am I another of your guilty slips? Another trip to the confession box on the cards?”

  “No. No, no, no, not at all! About a month later when I was in Boston, Janie said we should take some time out.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. And although she didn’t say it straight out, she hinted that she knew about the other women.”

  “Oh?” Again.

  “Yeah, she knows me very well. She said we’d been messing around for too long, it was make-or-break time. A final attempt to see if we were right for each other, you know? See other people, get stuff out of our systems, then see where it left me and her.”

  “And?”

  “I’d shredded your card. I was so scared I was going to call you that I made myself destroy it the day you gave it to me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I remembered your name and where you worked, but I thought it was too late to call.

  “You know, I nearly didn’t go to that party that night, and when I saw you there, talking to that meathead, that made me believe in God. Seeing you, it was like…like getting hit with a baseball bat…” He looked like he was going to puke. “I don’t want to scare you, Anna, but I’ve never felt this way about anyone else, ever.”

  I said nothing. I felt so guilty. But I couldn’t help also feeling…a little…flattered.

  “I wanted to talk to Janie before I talked to you. I didn’t know if you’d want to, like, be interested in being exclusive—I hate that stupid word—but either way it’s totally over for me and Janie. But I feel bad that you know before she does.”

  Tell me about it.

  And shallow girl that I was, I wanted to know what Janie looked like. I had to clamp my lips together extremely tightly to stop myself asking, but it didn’t work and little sounds escaped. Mwahdoz zhee mlook mlike.

  “Wha—oh! What does she look like?” His face went suddenly blank. “Um, you know, nice, she’s got”—he made a rotating gesture with his hand—“hair, curly hair.” He paused. “Well, she used to. Maybe lately it’s been straight.”

  Okay, he hadn’t a clue what she looked like. He’d been with her for so long that he didn’t look at her properly anymore. Nevertheless, a powerful intuition was warning me that I should not underestimate this woman and the strength of Aidan’s attachment. They’d shared fifteen years of history, and like a boomerang, he kept returning to her.

  He went to Boston, and all weekend, I felt mildly queasy; contradictory thoughts chased one another in a never-ending circle. At the air-guitar competition, Shake a
ccused me of not paying attention when he’d been on, and he was right: I’d been staring into space wondering how Janie was taking it—I hated myself for being responsible for someone else’s unhappiness. And how much did I like Aidan? Enough to let him end a fifteen-year relationship for my sake? What if I was only messing him around? Or what if he changed his mind and got back with Janie? That terrified me; I really liked him. Really, really liked him.

  And what would happen if he couldn’t keep his mickey to himself? What if he wasn’t just unfaithful to Janie, but habitually frisky? I’d better not start thinking that I’d be the one to cure him; instead I should start running in the opposite direction at high speed. Then I was back to wondering how Janie was feeling…

  She took it pretty good.” Aidan showed up on my doorstep on the Sunday evening.

  “Really?” I asked hopefully.

  “She kind of hinted…you know…that maybe she might have met someone else, too.”

  This was balm—for half a second. You know how thick men can be; no doubt Janie had done what she could to save face, but right at that moment she was probably running a hot bath and getting the cutthroat razor out of the bathroom closet.

  As the plane touched down in Logan, full of Thanksgiving returnees, I asked Aidan, “Tell me again, how many girls other than Janie have you brought home for Thanksgiving?”

  He thought for ages, counting stuff out on his fingers and whispering numbers under his breath, and eventually said, “None!”

  It had become a familiar routine over the previous four weeks, but now that I had actually arrived in Boston I felt sick. “Aidan, it’s no joke. I shouldn’t have come. Everyone will hate me for not being Janie. The streets will be lined by angry Bostonians stoning the car and your mother will spit in my soup.”

  “It’ll be fine.” He squeezed my fingers. “They’ll love you. You’ll see.”

  His mom, Dianne, picked us up at the airport and instead of pelting me with gravel and shrieking “HOMEWRECKER!” she gave me a hug and said, “Welcome to Boston.”

  She was lovely—a bit scatty, driving erratically and blathering away. Finally we fetched up in some suburb that wasn’t a million miles different from the one I came from, in terms of demographics, cars in the drive, nosy neighbors staring like hostile village idiots, etc., etc.

  The house, too, seemed familiar: with horrible swirly carpets, awful soft furnishings, and crammed with sports trophies, nasty paintings, and gawk-making china ornaments, I felt right at home.

  I dropped my bag on the hall floor and almost the first thing I saw was a photo on the wall of a younger-looking Aidan with his two arms around a girl, hugging the back of her body to the front of his. Right away I knew it was Janie. So how did she look? Oh, you know, all smiley and happy, how do people usually look in photos? Those on display in curlicued, silvery frames anyway. I felt a little shaky even before I’d absorbed that she was beautiful: dark, long corkscrew curls (their beauty not even marred by a Staten Island topknot and a green scrunchy) and perfect teeth in a wide smile.

  But clearly it had been taken a long time ago, judging by the scrunchy and how bright-eyed and innocent Aidan looked—maybe she’d aged badly.

  Someone shouted, “Dad, they’re here,” and a door opened and a young man appeared: dark, built, very smiley, extremely cute. “Hi, I’m Kevin, the younger brother.”

  “And I’m Anna—”

  “Oh yeah, we know all about you.” He dazzled me with a smile. “Wow. Any more like you at home?”

  “Yes.” I considered Helen. “But you’d probably be terrified of her.”

  He didn’t realize I wasn’t joking and he laughed, a proper belly laugh. “You’re a riot. This is going to be fun.”

  Next to appear was Mr. Maddox, a lanky bloke with a vague, wavery voice. He shook hands with me but said little. I didn’t take it personally: Aidan had warned me that when he did talk, it was usually about the Democratic Party.

  Kevin insisted on carrying my bag to my bedroom, a room that could have been twinned with the spare room in my parents’ house. They could have done a cultural exchange and put a sign saying so outside each door; ferocious curtains, a matching ferocious quilt, and a wardrobe crammed with someone else’s old clothes and about half an inch of space and two hangers for mine. Lucky I was only staying one night. (Taking no chances, Aidan and I had decided not to overdo things on the first visit.)

  Then I saw it. On the dressing table: another picture of Aidan and Janie. A “motion” shot; they were turned toward each other and it had been taken half a second before they kissed. This time there was no scrunchy—her hair was held back from her face by Aidan’s hand.

  Again I felt queasy, and after eyeballing it for a few minutes, I laid it facedown. No way was I going to sleep in this room watched over by a prekissing photo of Aidan and Janie. A light knock on the door made me jump guiltily and Dianne breezed in with an armload of stuff. “Fresh towels!” Instantly she noticed the toppled picture. “Damn! Oh, Anna! It’s stood there for years, so long I don’t even see it anymore. That was so tactless of me.”

  She picked it up, left the room with it, and returned empty-handed.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “Truly.”

  This was no Mrs. Danvers situation. She seemed sincerely sorry to have upset me.

  “Whenever you’re ready for dinner, come on down.”

  The dinner was the whole Thanksgiving nine yards: a massive turkey and millions of spuds and vegetables and wine and champagne and crystal glasses and candles. The atmosphere was very friendly, I was almost a hundred percent sure that Mrs. Maddox hadn’t spat in my soup, everyone was chatting away, and even Old Man Maddox made a joke, and although it was about the Democratic Pah-dy and I didn’t understand it, I laughed obediently.

  There was just one thing: not every one of the many photos on the dining-room walls was of Aidan and Janie, but there were enough to keep giving me little shocks. Over the years Janie’s hair had got shorter. Good. Men like woman with long hair. And she’d plumped out a little but she still looked very cheery and pleasant, the kind of woman that other women like.

  In the middle of swallowing a mouthful of turkey, I spotted yet another picture that I’d missed earlier and once again my gullet shut down briefly. I took a swig of wine to assist things along and Old Man Maddox asked, “Janie, dear, can you pass the roast potatoes.”

  Who?

  I looked from side to side, but as the dish of spuds was in front of me and Old Man Maddox was looking my way, I concluded that it must be me he was talking to. Obediently I shunted the bowl along and Kevin gave me a comforting wink and Aidan and Dianne looked horrified and mouthed, “Sorry.”

  But two seconds later, Dianne said, “Oh, Aidan, we met Janie’s dad at the hahd-ware stoh, he says to tell you he finally finished the shed and to come by to see it. How long ago was it that you guys stah-ted on it…?”

  Then Old Man Maddox piped up. “You might like to know what he was doing at the hahd-ware store?” he asked Aidan. He’d suddenly gone all bright-eyed and amused—it must have been the drink. “Buying paint, that’s what. White paint, by the way. For their place in Bah Hah-ba. He gave it one summer like you asked him to, but we still can’t figure what came over you two guys, painting the place pink.”

  Flushed with amusement, he looked from Aidan to me, then panic flickered behind his eyes. She’s not Janie.

  After dinner, Aidan and I sat in the den; things were a little tense.

  “I don’t belong here, I shouldn’t have come.”

  “No, you should! Really, you should. It’ll get easier. I’m so sorry about my dad, he’s a bit…he doesn’t mean it—he’s in a world of his own half the time.”

  We sat in silence.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “About the carpet.” It had some funny spiral pattern. “If you stare at it long enough, you feel like your eyes are on springs. It’s like they’re zooming out of my head, then
bouncing back in.”

  “I feel more like the floor is lifting up toward me, then falling down again.”

  We sat in companionable silence, watching the carpet do its thing, and suddenly we were friends again.

  “It’ll be okay,” Aidan said. “Just give it time. Please.”

  “Okay,” I said. “My parents used to treat Shane like family, too.”

  “They loved him?”

  “Well…no…actually they hated him. But they still treated him like family.”

  The following day we went to the mall because there’s only so much sitting around your new boyfriend’s parents’ house, living in fear of hearing further reminiscences about his ex-girlfriend, you can do. I kept stumbling over conversations like “Remember that holiday on Cape Cod. All of us in the RV? Remember Janie did something or other?”

  But once we were in the mall I cheered up because when I’m away from home, even shops that are normally beneath me suddenly become exciting. I visited CVS, Express, and a whole load of other crappy places, Aidan bought me a souvenir of Boston—a snow dome—then said, “Guess we’d better go back.”

  So we got in the cah and had just left the pahking lot, when it happened. Even before Aidan made a funny, involuntary noise, I’d noticed the jaw-clenching tension suddenly emanating from him.

  I looked out of the window, my eyes scudding from side to side, desperate to see what he’d seen. A woman was walking toward us. But we were moving quite fast, we’d already passed her, and my intuition was yelling, Look around, look around, quickly.