Page 103 of We All Live Here
“Ah. Getting there. Bill—my stepdad—had a heart attack. It was pretty scary but he’s on the mend, we hope.” She can say these words with practiced ease now, as if they happened to someone else.
“Oh, how awful. Can we send flowers?Gracie, can we organize some flowers for Lila? No carnations. Remember what we agreed.”
“You don’t have to. Really.” Lila scrubs at a particularly stubborn piece of dried tomato on the hob.
“So do you need an extension? I’m sure we can arrange that. We don’t even have to tell them the exact reason: family emergency is quite enough.”
“Actually, that was what I needed to talk to you about.”
Anoushka is unusually quiet as Lila takes a deep breath and explains that she needs to pull out of the contract. She tells Anoushka that she cannot write the book as planned because of the potential impact on her children, because her life has not worked out in the way that is needed for her to write about a woman’s sexual escapades, that she feels the impact of it on the people she loves is too much.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, into the resulting silence. “I really don’t want to let everyone down. I should never have agreed to do it in the first place.”
And this is the thing she has felt most braced for. She has misled Anoushka, misled the publishers. She has promised something she can’t deliver, and pulling out will be as bad for Anoushka as it is for her: it may affect her reputation as an agent, future deals she may want to make with the same publishing house.
“And I’m especially sorry to you. I—I totally understand if you don’t want to represent me any more. I should never have put you in this position.”
She closes her eyes as she says this. Waiting for the outburst. But there is a tiny sliver of relief in it too: there is something liberating in simply telling the truth, in the black-and-white knowledge of what she can and cannot do.
“Oh. Darling,” Anoushka says, after a moment. “Well, it is what it is. I’ll get on to them. But please don’t worry. You’ve got enough going on. No money has changed hands yet so no real harm done. We’ll just say your family circumstances have changed and made writing the book impossible.”
“Really?”
“And then we’ll work out something else you can do. Of course I’m not going to take you off my list. We’re friends, not just business associates. Goodness me. You just focus on your family for now. That’s what’s important after all.”
“Oh, God, Anoushka, thank you. Thank you. I can’t tell you how much I’ve dreaded making this call.”
“Lila darling, you were an absolute trouper going through with theRebuildpublicity despite everything Dastardly Dan did at the time. You’ve just bitten off a bit more than you can chew with this one. Life happens. Put all this to one side, and let’s speak when you’re ready. We’ll come up with something else.”
•••
The Mercedes isworth seven thousand pounds less than Lila paid for it. It is partly the dent in the roof from the falling tree, but apparently the salesman who had assured her it would only ever increase in value had failed to account for the normal vicissitudes of the economy and right now people are just not buying vintage soft-tops. The salesman tells her this with the bland, unconvincing sympathy of a man who knows you are basically going to take what he gives you. Lila haggles a little, manages to get another eight hundred added to the price, and decides not to wonder whether her sex played a part in the total sum she was offered. Even with the loss, though, she walks away from the saleroom with a sense of relief. She will have some money in her account again. Plenty of people in the city survive without a car. It is all just stuff at the end of the day. And there is something about the Mercedes that just makes her sad now. She walks away from it without looking back.
•••
The day beforeBill is due to return home, Lila goes for a massage. Eleanor has booked it for her as a treat at the parlor where she goestwice a week: a high-street place that Lila had previously assumed was probably a knocking shop, but turns out to be full of brisk, middle-aged Eastern European women who are unfazed by body types or inappropriate body hair and are uninterested in conversation. At midday, feeling the odd sense of subversion that comes with taking time out of a normal working day, she lies face down on the warmed, towel-covered bed and feels herself surrender for the first time in as long as she can remember. She’s lulled by the pummeling and the hot oils, the low, ambient music interrupted only by the occasionally audible breath of Agnes, her masseuse, as she un-knots some particularly knotty part of Lila.
At first Lila’s thoughts race, her self-consciousness about her body, and anxiety about Bill’s return, what she will cook, how she will take care of him well enough, whether the girls are okay without her. And then, gradually, her mind slows, and she just lets it all happen, sinks into the human touch she has been missing for so long. And for a while it’s blissful, having capable hands on her, feeling her body ease after months and months of tension, feeling long-tightened muscles start to let go. But somewhere in this relaxed state, something wells in her, an emotion unlocked by the reality of another human being touching her, listening to Lila’s body, feeling its pain and its tensions and carefully remedying them. Suddenly, she feels a great swell of something overwhelming her. Grief? Gratitude? She isn’t sure. She becomes aware that she is weeping, the tears running unchecked through the hole where her face is nestled, dropping onto the floor, her shoulders vibrating with an emotion she can no longer hold back. Agnes slows her hands as she becomes aware of what is happening. Lila pleads with her silently not to say anything because she cannot name what she is feeling. She cannot apologize. She cannot say anything. And perhaps Agnes, so attuned to the human body, understands. Because she simply places a hand on the space where Lila’s neck meets her shoulders and lets it rest there, soft enough to be kind, firm enough to reassure her of its intention, perhaps just a silent messagefrom another woman: I see you, I understand. The hand rests for some unknown length of time while Lila cries, a human connection in a world of complication and grief. When she finally dresses and leaves, twenty minutes later, and walks out into the blustery day, wrapped up again in her coat and scarf, Lila suspects that she will never forget it.
•••
There is abewildering amount of procedure and paperwork involved in Bill being able to leave the hospital. Consultants must be consulted, forms must be signed off, pharmaceutical collections must be made and apparently involve waiting for interminable lengths of time until the appropriate pharmacist has returned from her scheduled break. Lila goes through these steps with one eye on the clock: Celie has Animation Club today and cannot pick up Violet, and Violet needs picking up from school at half past three. She had assumed she could collect Bill at lunchtime and go straight home, but so far the process has lasted almost two hours.
Not for the first time, Lila thanks God for Penelope, who has a car, and who has waited in the ward with Bill while all these errands are run. Penelope has taken to her new role as Bill’s helpmate as if it is the one she has been waiting for her whole life. She has endless patience, positivity, and grace. When Bill fusses or worries about his clothing, she is there, holding up shirts she has pressed, the right socks and jacket; when he grows anxious about remembering the correct timings and dosages of his new medications, she has already written it down in a little red notebook with a panda on the cover, assuring him that everything is taken care of. She is just what their little family needs right now, and Lila is infinitely grateful.
Lila is just headed up to the ward again with a large white paper bag filled with bottles and packets of pills, when she realizes she is walking behind a familiar figure, taller than everyone else, with jeans that looklike they may have been worn for days, and a leather jacket, his hair an unnatural shade of chocolate brown now. He pauses to look up at the signage, checking the numbers, then presses on the buzzer to be let in to C3. Lila has skidded behind him by the time the door clicks to let him in. “Gene?”
He turns and sees her, and it takes a moment too long for his smile to appear. “Oh, hey, sweetheart.”
She pulls the door shut in front of him. “What are you doing here?”
“I—uh—I just came to see how Bill was doing. I heard, you know, about what had gone down. I just wanted to check—”
“That he was still alive? That you hadn’t killed him?”
“Wha—”
“Why do you think Bill had a heart attack, Gene? Could it possibly have been related to the discovery that the love of his life had been seduced by her ex-husband? That you had made the last fifteen years of their marriage a sham?”
