Souvenir

Her page was her portal to the real world. And she hoped – hoped so hard that it made her stomach hurt – that her strategy had worked, that Kyle would become her companion and guide.

She traded IMs with Rachel about the guy they’d met up with earlier at the library. Some senior from North Marion High. She’d gone to the library as moral support, though Rachel, who’d practically licked the guy’s ear while whispering to him, seemed to not need any kind of support at all. Now Rachel was saying he’d promised to call her, but she’d forgotten to give him her number before her mom arrived. In typical Rachel fashion she wrote,

OMG!! wat do i do???? i just no i will never c him agn!!!!!!!

chill, Savannah wrote. In her opinion, the guy was too skinny, and he hadn’t seemed that into Rachel anyway.

Savannah kept up her end of the conversation mindlessly, waiting, waiting, her heart seeming to stall, until the chime of Kyle messaging her jump-started it again:

hi babe, wassup?

To Rachel she wrote hurriedly, its him! gtg.

If what he’d said in their first chat was legitimate, he was twenty-three years old and had a bachelor’s degree in marine biology. He loved music, including some of her favorite bands: No Doubt, Evanescence, Nickelback, and Carson McKay. He sounded perfect.

Everything she’d posted on her page was accurate – well, except for her age: long wavy red-brown hair, 5´8´´ (too tall, she thought, but what could she do?), green eyes, 127 lb. She hadn’t revealed her whole name, just first and middle, wise to the risks of giving too much information. Savannah Rae. If she ever got into professional songwriting or performing in public, that was the name she planned to use.

i’m studying 4 bio quiz, she replied. She’d told him that first night that she was a student at the University of Florida – but only after making sure he hadn’t gone there.

ah, the good old days, he wrote. He was working on his PhD now, doing some kind of research for a professor at Harvard – fieldwork around the western Everglades, only a few hours south of Gainesville, he’d said. Gainesville, where she supposedly lived in an apartment with three girlfriends.

Kyle’s very first message included a picture of himself standing on some decrepit dock wearing only cargo shorts that hung low on his hips, and hiking boots with socks showing above the tops. He was trim and muscled like the Greek sculptures she studied in art history. She thought his body was amazing, but it was his face that really drew her in: his wide, long-lashed eyes looked kind. Caring. Dedicated to his passions – which would include her, she hoped. His dark, curly hair and café au lait complexion made her think he might be part Latino or black – something her dad wouldn’t approve of, but she didn’t really care.

wut r u up 2? she asked.

sos. waiting 4 the wkend. i really want 2 meet in person, he wrote, thrilling her. wut r u doing sat?

it’s my dad’s b-day, she wrote, adding a frowning-face icon. Another white lie, but it wouldn’t be good to sound too eager. She waited anxiously for his reply.

idea: meet 4 may day in miami?

Savannah perked up. wut’s in miami?

my bros. we meet every yr 4 beach party. got a bikini? duh. He’d seen the pictures of her on her webpage.

got a car?

duh, she wrote again, though she wouldn’t have one until her birthday in mid-May, a small detail she could work out later. She wiped her damp palms on the bedspread, waiting to see if he was serious.

Kyle wrote, luv 4 u 2 hang w/us. try?

sure! she replied, though she didn’t have a clue how she could get there without her parents’ permission. Not that they paid close attention to what she did with her time, her dad in particular. They believed whatever she told them. If she planned things carefully, she might be able to make it work. ‘Holy shit,’ she whispered, but played it cool, typing, will check to see if I’m free.

hope so, Kyle wrote. hey babe, gtg – frenz here. Call your cell sat?

Disappointed to be done so soon, she wrote, ok. ttyl! and added a smiley face, to show she was just fine with letting him go. Then she signed off, so that none of her friends could interrupt her glow.

Wow, she thought, snapping her laptop shut: Kyle. Miami. She couldn’t wait to talk to him about it – it would be only their second conversation, the first having been Monday night. They hadn’t talked for long, but long enough for her to determine that he wasn’t geeky or weird. Long enough to discover that his voice, a midrange tenor that might complement her alto if he could sing, filled a hole in her heart – or maybe her soul, she wasn’t sure – in a way nothing else quite managed to. She stood and stretched and grinned.

As she washed her face, she imagined walking with Kyle on soft white sand, holding hands, kissing … French kissing, like she’d done experimentally a few times with her friend Jonathan, who lived two houses over. She was fascinated with the male body and the way she felt when she thought about getting firsthand knowledge of Kyle’s. Now that she’d found a guy worth her time, she was ready to try out a lot of the things she knew most of her friends were doing already. Had been doing since eighth grade, some of them. Her stomach turned a funny little flip when she thought of how it would be to slide her hand inside the waist of his cargo shorts.

She leaned close to the mirror to inspect the few blackheads dotting her forehead and the top of her nose. She’d need to get rid of those before Miami – what twenty-year-old girl would still have blackheads? Getting rid of the freckles banding her nose and cheeks would be nice, too, but that wasn’t going to happen. Her height, her freckles, her smile, and the red highlights in her brown hair were gifts from her mother – that’s what her Grandma Anna used to say; she tried to appreciate them, but what she wanted was to be petite, with blond hair and spot-free skin. Or that’s what she often thought, but now that she’d snagged Kyle’s interest, she might concede that she looked okay as is.

With his perspective in mind, she peeled off her T-shirt and looked at her breasts critically. ‘Average,’ she said, turning sideways, then facing front again. Not like she could do much to improve them, short of getting implants, and she was not an implant kind of girl. She knew girls who were, though – girls who’d already had nose jobs, girls who were all about improving their bodies so they could get better guys. Girls who knew how to flirt. Girls who wore those mini-stilettos called kitten heels, and big smiles for their daddies so they could get more money to shop with.

Savannah knew she wasn’t especially good at flirting, not with boys and not with her dad, but she was a straight-A student, good at figuring things out – which was much more valuable in the long run. Besides, Kyle obviously liked smart women, seeing as how he thought she was a college student with serious career aspirations and all.

She’d just changed into the yellow Earth Day tank top and gray knit shorts she slept in when she heard a tap on her bedroom door.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

The door opened. ‘Hey, sweetie, you ready for bed?’ her mom asked.

‘What does it look like?’ Savannah said, moving her laptop from her bed to her desk in a show of being finished with it. She knew that once her mom left the room, she could play guitar or make a phone call or open up the computer again without any fear of being interrupted. Her mom was nothing if not predictable; once she said good night, Savannah wouldn’t see her again until the next morning. Some kids might take much better advantage of this predictability than she ever had – sneaking out, for example, or sneaking someone in. She never did that kind of thing, never had a reason to, before.

Her mom sat on the side of the bed. ‘You’re such a wise guy. What does it look like? It looks like you’re ready to race sled-dogs in the Iditarod. But I think maybe a good night’s sleep is in order first.’

Savannah sat down near her pillows and pulled her knees up to her chest. ‘Funny,’ she said. ‘Not.’

‘Actually, you look like you might be about to audition for a strip-club job.’

‘Mom,’ Savannah said.

‘What? Those shorts are scandalous.’

‘You bought them.’

‘When you were twelve, if I remember right. What is it with teenage girls and short clothing?’

‘It’s just a style.’

‘Hmm. Well, don’t wear those in public. Dad would kill you.’

Savannah looked down at the shorts, which she was planning to wear in Miami. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said.

‘So … do you need anything?’ her mom asked, looking around her bedroom in that way Savannah knew parents did when searching for signs that their kids smoked or drank or whatever. This made her feel guilty before she’d even done anything wrong.

She took a bit of her hair and pulled it in front of her face, braiding it quickly. I need my car, she thought. She said, ‘Shampoo.’ And then, seeing an opening, she added, ‘Oh, and I have this question: Remember how, when we were in London last fall with Aunt Beth—’

‘Wasn’t that a great trip? This fall, the conference is going to be in Singapore. Do you think you’d like to go? Dad’s been there and he loved it – well, he loved the golf courses, anyway; the food wasn’t his thing. But—’

‘Mom,’ she interrupted, now unbraiding her hair.

‘Oh, sorry. What about it?’

‘I was thinking it might be cool to fly out to visit her this summer, like, just on my own. Can kids do that, fly alone, I mean?’

Her mom said, ‘Sure. Remember, there were three little boys in matching tie-dye shirts and airline badges on that flight to London?’

‘Oh, yeah. So then, you don’t have to be eighteen or whatever?’ She began braiding again, then caught herself and pushed the hair back behind her ear.

‘Nope. As I understand it, the airlines all have special services for unaccompanied children – they have flight attendants assigned to them, and a parent or relative has to meet them at their destination gate.’

‘So basically I’d be tracked like a convict.’

Her mom laughed. ‘No, you’re old enough to go on your own, the program’s for younger kids. Do you know, I heard on the radio not long ago that Atlanta has the busiest airport in the world? I always thought it would be New York – but they’re not even in the top ten! I think O’Hare was the second busiest, and then Heathrow …’

Savannah listened with half attention while thinking of how to buy a ticket to Miami. Her mom was always taking the long way through explanations, which used to delight her but now often felt unnecessary. Sometimes she wanted to say, Just get to it already. She never did though, maybe because a small part of her still liked seeing her mom as an all-knowing authority. Maybe because she knew that asking questions was a good way to get and hold her mom’s attention – not that she wanted so much of it anymore. She didn’t. She wanted her own life, a life where she fit, a life where no gung-ho dads looked down on low-money career aspirations. A life where she was important to the people around her. To Kyle, maybe. With her Grandma Anna gone now, most of the time she felt invisible. And that was on a good day.

Her mom was still talking. ‘Well, I know Aunt Beth would love to have you, no question. She could tour you around Berkeley, introduce you to some of the other professors – you really should apply there, you’d be a shoo-in. I’m so pleased that you want to spend time with her. What a nice idea!’

Savannah nodded. She probably would enjoy going, though she hadn’t thought about it one way or the other until this minute. And attending Berkeley for its environmental science program was a possibility, if she wanted to work for the manatees through politics and policy. Right now, though, all she cared about was whether she could hop a plane to Miami with nothing more than a ticket and ID. From the sound of it, she could.

‘I’ll talk to Beth,’ her mom said, ‘and if you think you might want to go to Singapore, I should get that arranged before too much longer.’

‘I’ll think about it.’ She was impatient now to be alone so she could get online and look into airline schedules. She gave a smile that was meant to encourage her mom to move alone. ‘So … good night,’ she said.

‘Oh. Okay then.’ Her mom stood, smiling back in a way that made Savannah fear she’d been too abrupt. Again. She never meant to be rude; things just came out that way.

She watched her mom walk to the door, then turn and look at her.

‘Honey?’

‘Yeah?’

‘This weekend, let’s have that chat about birth control I’m sure you’ve been dreading.’ Before Savannah could answer, she was gone down the hallway.

Savannah sat as if frozen, though her face was ablaze and her mind was spinning. Did her mom suspect something? An impulse to forget the whole Miami idea swelled inside her, but then she thought of Kyle, brought that image of him on the dock to mind, and the impulse subsided. It had to be the fact of her sixteenth birthday coming up that provoked her mom’s suggestion. Knowing her mom, the birth-control chat had been scheduled since the moment she heard ‘It’s a girl!’

Suppose during this chat she just up and told her mom that she wanted to go on the pill? Suppose she said she had a boyfriend and they were considering having sex. Right – that would go over well. Going from having had no real boyfriend ever, to the announcement of having not only a boyfriend but also a sexual relationship with the guy … it just wouldn’t work, even if she wanted to tell her about Kyle – which she didn’t. Couldn’t. He was definitely not who her parents would have in mind for her, not by, oh, six or seven years and, in her dad’s case, several shades of skin color.

So no birth control pills for her, not just now. But as soon as she got a chance, she’d pop in to Wal-Mart or someplace where she could be anonymous, to buy a box of condoms. It was no big deal; she knew girls at school who did it all the time. She liked to think that if her parents found out she bought condoms, they’d be proud of her for being so responsible and mature.

What would probably happen, though, was that her mom would feel betrayed and her dad would just shrug and head for the club.

SEVEN

When Brian strode into the living room Friday night, Meg saw he had showered before coming home. Comb marks angled through his thinning dark hair. A lightly starched golf shirt – not the same one he would have worn while playing – was tucked into tailored navy shorts. His waistline swelled over his belt like the top of a muffin. She had never thought him unattractive. His style, though, wasn’t her preference. She liked a more rugged look. Less refined, more adventurous. Brian was so … tidy, she thought. Orderly. Like their home, like their life.

She put aside the stack of blue notebooks, which she’d forgotten in the car until this evening. She’d been trying unsuccessfully to free them from the string, wanting to make sure they weren’t anything important before putting them in a box for Goodwill.

‘Been at the club?’ she asked Brian, to snag his attention. She needed to make an effort more often; in two years, Savannah would be off to college, and then where would they be? Familiar but distant occupants of their six-thousand-square-foot, professionally decorated house. A house with too many unused rooms as it was; how hollow things would be with Savannah away.

Brian stopped and set his gym bag on the polished hardwood floor. ‘Yep,’ he said, perching on the side of an armchair opposite her. ‘Got nine holes in, with those clients from Germany I was telling you about the other day. They’re really bad – don’t know a wedge from an iron – but good-natured about it. We stopped keeping score.’

Meg nodded, empathetic to the German men’s plight; she hardly knew the differences between golf clubs herself. She supposed she should know, golf being Brian’s life outside of work. It just didn’t interest her, and her mind was crowded enough with the things she had to know.

Perhaps he understood this; he never bothered to discuss the particulars of his golf games. Their conversations molded around common interests: the house, Savannah, their families, their careers. A movie, if by long odds they’d seen it together – or separately, if one of them was traveling and caught it on the plane or late at night in a hotel.

Sometimes, now that Savannah was watching many of the same movies, she joined the conversation. If they had all seen the movie and were all in one room or one vehicle at the same time, an occurrence about as rare as conjoined twins.

Manisha Patel, Meg’s partner, assured her that her reality was nothing unusual; Manisha’s family’s worked the same way, which was like that of most other families they knew and was often the subject of talk shows Meg came across late at night, times when she couldn’t sleep. She and Brian and Savannah were planets orbiting a common sun, occasionally swinging into close proximity. Held together by the gravitational pull of a shared address, they had little in common with what had once made the ‘traditional’ family. She felt guilty about this as regularly as she felt defensive about it and figured she’d come to terms with the whole muddy issue just about the time Savannah was grown and gone.

‘You look refreshed,’ Meg said. ‘I’m going to hit the shower in a minute myself. But it feels so good to just sit here.’

Brian smiled in that way he had, slightly condescending and self-affirming. He could put in a full, hectic day and still have the energy to entertain clients and play nine holes of golf, that’s what she imagined him thinking. He was never overtly critical, but still, she felt his judgment, felt the comparison – it was his nature to think that way. She half expected him to give her a Team Hamilton pep talk.

‘Was it a busy day?’ he asked – his attempt to connect, she supposed, given that he knew all her days were busy.

She sighed and put her feet up on the sofa, taking up the space that he might have filled if he’d tried a little harder. If he had wanted to try. If she had wanted him to.

‘Yeah, busy, but also taxing,’ she said. ‘I had a pre-eclamptic mother with back labor who dealt with it by screaming, and then a transverse baby I practically had to climb inside with to get out.’ She rubbed her arm, thinking about that one. ‘And two new high-risk patients this afternoon; you probably know the one’s husband: McKinney? Joseph, I think his name is.’ The surname, when she read it on the chart earlier in the day, had made her think of McKay, of Carson, of how she’d learned a week ago that he was planning a May wedding. To a much younger woman, the news website’s headline announced – ‘Musician McKay Robbing the Cradle for a May Bride?’ – and Meg had elected not to click the link to read the details. Since then, even the weakest prompts called him to mind.

‘Yeah, I know him, Joe McKinney,’ Brian nodded. ‘Partner at Decker McKinney Peterson. He’s pretty good – at golf, I mean – though judging from that little black Ferrari I saw him in, likely at law, too. What’s his wife’s trouble?’

‘She’s forty-three.’

‘Ah. It’s good, though, you getting all these new high-risk patients – obviously you’re building quite a reputation as a specialist. You should raise your rates, take space somewhere a little more … upscale, let’s say.’

‘We like where we are,’ Meg said. She and Manisha chose their office location, a modest brick building downtown, precisely because it wasn’t so upscale that they’d price out women less affluent than the Mrs Joseph McKinneys of the world. Or the Mrs Carson McKays, for that matter, she thought, wondering if pregnancy explained his short-notice announcement. Their wealthy patients came to them because they were good doctors, not because their offices looked like a luxury spa.

‘I just don’t see why you’d choose not to take advantage of an opportunity when it’s practically dropped in your lap,’ Brian said, standing up. ‘You’re savvier than that.’

His criticism, delivered beningly, still stung. ‘What does “savvy” have to do with anything? Just because I don’t feel like I need to earn more money, I’m not “savvy”?’

Brian pushed his hands into his shorts pockets, relaxed and confident in his opinions. ‘Look, ever since I’ve known you, whenever you’ve been faced with an opportunity to better yourself or improve your status, you’ve taken it. I don’t see why you’d stop now.’

He was right, and yet his assessment missed seeing her clearly, as though time had made his memory as farsighted as his eyes. Had he forgotten that her first opportunity was one he’d constructed so carefully that there was no way she could turn him down? Once he’d set the wheel in motion, then yes, she’d tried in every way to better herself. She was practical. There were limits, though, to her ambition. Maybe he didn’t want to believe this about her, or maybe he hadn’t noticed. He loved to tell people what a terrific pair they made, how alike they were in temperament and taste, how accomplished she’d become; he had constructed the reality he wanted in their marriage the same way he’d done for his business.

He had her all wrong.

She was not the woman of his tales, would never be that woman, but was there any value in arguing the point? In part, he didn’t know who she really was because she kept pieces of herself hidden from him. Money couldn’t buy everything.

Before she could frame any sort of response, Brian picked up his gym bag, said, ‘I have to make a couple calls,’ and left the room. She let him go.

He didn’t know, either, that she’d thought of leaving him many times, the way a blond woman might think about coloring her hair black: interested in the possibilities but unwilling to take such a drastic step. What if black hair looked awful? Was black an advantage, or was it just different? If she were the ambitious woman he saw, she would have divorced him as soon as she was earning enough to pay back her parents’ mortgage. She’d have moved ‘onward and upward’, as was Brian’s refrain. But no, she had already blasted apart the one bridge she’d want to travel again, and so because she wanted to keep Savannah’s life stable and she and Brian were as compatible as she needed them to be, she stayed.

Standing, she reached down for the notebooks and felt her left knee begin to buckle. She caught herself with one hand on the sofa’s arm. ‘Getting old, girl,’ she said, shaking her head.

Brian’s voice, persuasive and firm as he talked on the phone, resounded as she passed the kitchen. He was fixing a snack while he talked – warming up brownies, from the smell of it. He’d add vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup, which illustrated why she’d had to take his suits in for alteration despite his playing some twenty hours of golf a week. That was the other curse of middle age: a slowing metabolism. Keeping in shape was harder all the time – and she’d skipped her workouts more than she wanted to admit, these months since her mother’s death. There never seemed to be time for exercise; the number of hours in her day had shriveled like an unpicked orange, and she was just too tired to wedge in anything she could excuse as nonessential.

In the master bathroom, she set down the note-books and turned on the shower. While it warmed, she rifled through a drawer for the pair of tiny scissors she used to trim her pubic hair. Brian preferred her trimmed, almost hairless, except for the hair on her head, which he liked long, and the coppery down of her arms. How long since she’d bothered to trim herself up? She didn’t even shave her legs weekly anymore. They hadn’t made love in … what was this? April? Two months. Not since Valentine’s Day, and even then it had been more of an expected gesture, a guilty ought-to rather than an anticipated finally, which, honestly, hadn’t occurred even in the first months – for her, anyway. As steam drifted around her like unsettled ghosts, she took the scissors and cut the notebooks’ binding string, expecting that when she cracked open the first of them, she’d find blank pages filled with nothing more than pale blue preprinted lines.