On Second Thought Read online

  I watched Nathan go from smiling to startled to dead. Just like that. My Spidey-senses had been going crazy, soaking in the happiest moment of my life.

  There was the tag on Rachelle's dress. Jonathan's face of constipation. Nathan, carrying Kate's glass of wine.

  Then he tripped on Rob's foot. It wasn't Rob's fault; it was crowded in here. The wine sloshed over the rim and sloshed down Beth's back, making her yelp, and Frank turned. If Frank hadn't turned, Nathan would've hit him, but he did turn, and Nathan fell forward, nothing to stop him.

  His head hit the edge of the granite counter with a soft thunk, and his eyes widened, and just like that, he was dead.

  I knew it before it was pronounced. I knew CPR wouldn't work.

  Eric and I followed the ambulance, Candy and Kate in Jonathan's car, since he was parked on the street and able to get out without ten other cars needing to move first.

  As we drove, I knew the ER doctors would try and fail. I don't know how I knew, but I did.

  "This is unbelievable," Eric said, his face grim as he took a turn too hard.

  I realized I should call Sean. "The kids are okay," I said the second he answered, hearing laughter and silverware clinking in the background. So they had gone out to dinner instead of coming to the party. "But Nathan's in the ER, Sean. Hudson Hospital. It...it's pretty bad. Esther and Matthias are at our house with Eric's parents."

  "Oh, my God. What happened?"

  "We're not sure. He...he fell and hit his head. They gave him CPR."

  "Oh, fuck," Sean said. He was a doctor, and his words didn't bode well. "I'm on my way. Jesus." He hung up.

  "I can't believe this. I can't believe it," Eric said, careening into the hospital parking lot. "He has to make it. He has to pull through."

  He wouldn't. Please God, let me be wrong about that.

  We were put in a private waiting room while they worked on Nathan. I held my sister's hand, and she looked at me, her eyes open too wide, as if she didn't know who I was.

  Sean and Kiara came, hugged and waited. The Coburns, thank God, someone had called the Coburns; Nathan's parents, sister and brother-in-law came in, white-faced, panic-stricken, and Candy opened her arms without a word and just held Mrs. Coburn, murmuring quietly.

  Then the doctor came in and confirmed what I already knew.

  I'll spare you the next hour.

  In a weak voice, I offered to drive Kate home and stay with her, but Candy said she'd take care of it. Sure. A person needed her mother at a time like this. That made sense. I called Dad's phone and left a message for him to call me, no matter how late, that it was important.

  It occurred to me that Dad had gone through this, too, when my mother died. I remembered when the police came to tell us. One of them gave me a little toy, a cat whose head bobbled, how I had loved it and hadn't wanted to stop playing with it as my father tried to get my attention. He'd been crying and said Mommy had gone to heaven.

  Was Nathan there yet? Did it happen that fast? Or was he lingering, here still, or with Kate?

  I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.

  "I'm gonna call my folks," Eric said. His eyes were red. He squeezed my shoulder and went outside.

  My feet were throbbing. Right, I was still wearing those slutty red shoes. And the white dress.

  I left our "quiet room"; it hadn't been quiet, not with the sound of poor Brooke wailing, and Mrs. Coburn's sobs, and Mr. Coburn breaking down, saying, "My boy, my boy." Oh, God, this was unbearably sad! The main waiting room of the ER was filled with the usual suspects--someone holding a bloody towel to her hand; a teenager slumped next to his mother, a little green around the gills; an older lady in a wheelchair with an aide, who was checking her phone.

  And Jonathan. I'd almost forgotten about him. He stood up as I came over.

  I swallowed, my throat aching. "He didn't make it," I whispered.

  "No, I...I assumed. From all the... From their faces." He put his hands in his pockets.

  "Thank you for trying." Tears sliced a hot path down my cheeks, and my face spasmed.

  A normal person would've hugged me then. A family tragedy had just occurred, for the love of God, and no one knew it better than the giver of the unsuccessful CPR.

  But Jonathan was not normal. He looked like an alien's take on what a human should look like. Not enough emotion flowing through to really pass.

  Instead of a hug, he looked at me, his pale blue eyes unblinking, and offered his hand, as if we'd just been introduced.

  I sighed and shook it.

  Then he brought up his other hand and held mine in both of his. For a long minute, he just looked at my hand. Human hand: warm, smooth. Interesting.

  "I'm very sorry," he said without looking up. He did have a nice voice.

  "Thank you."

  He let go. "See you Monday."

  "Jonathan. My brother-in-law just died. I won't be in."

  "Oh. Right." Human wants time off. Fascinating. "Call Rachelle and let her know your schedule."

  "I will," I said through gritted teeth.

  He left--finally--and Eric came back in. His thick lashes were starred from crying, and my heart pulled hard. He was such a softy. "I just can't believe all this," he said, his voice rough.

  "I know."

  "I can't believe it." He hugged me for a long minute, and my tears dampened his shirt. "I love you," he said, his voice rough.

  I started to cry in earnest.

  My poor sister. Nathan was so nice! How could he be dead, just like that?

  Eric's arms tightened around me. "I can't believe this happened to me."

  I jerked back and looked at him.

  "To us, I mean," he corrected. "Tonight of all nights. You know?"

  Right. The ring. The party. It seemed like a hundred years ago.

  "Let's go home," I said, acutely aware of just how lucky I was to be able to say that, to have someone to go home with. Kate didn't have that anymore. Gone in an instant.

  She was supposed to be a newlywed, not a widow. Nathan had died at Eric's "To Life" party. He was gone. Forever. How could that be?

  One image kept coming back to me, over and over.

  Jonathan, his hair flopping over his forehead as he did compressions, his face tight and grim.

  He'd known, too--Nathan was dead. All the other stuff had just been for the living.

  For my sister.

  Chapter Five

  Kate

  It didn't surprise me to be widowed.

  I mean, it surprised the shit out of me. Who the hell dies like that? What the hell had happened?

  But what I meant was, Nathan always did seem a little too...serendipitous? Too good to be true? Just what the doctor ordered?

  All of the above.

  You have to understand. I was single for twenty years. Meeting the man of my dreams...well, come on. The phrase becomes ridiculous after you pass twenty-six or so.

  I dated in high school and college, casual, mostly happy relationships that never ended horribly. After college, I dated nice men, though there was always a sense that maybe someone better would come along, someone I hadn't yet met, my soul mate. There was never that gobsmacked thunk, oh, God, he's it, as my sister had described when she met Eric at the age of twenty-one. My parents were hardly role models.

  So if it happened, it happened.

  It didn't happen.

  In my two decades as an adult, I had three serious relationships. First was Keith, a fellow grad from NYU. He was terrifyingly handsome, the kind of guy who made people walk into lampposts. Beautiful smooth skin, green eyes, dreadlocks, six foot three, hypnotically perfect body. That relationship was tumultuous and spicy, lots of fights and making up and storming out (mostly on his part). I finally broke things off for good, unable to picture a future full of that kind of drama. He went on to become a model, and I got great pleasure out of pointing him out in magazines and telling friends that, no, seriously, I had seen him naked.

  My next boyfri
end, Jason, was the opposite. We started dating in our late twenties, which is still infantile by New York standards. He was a very nice guy. Things were steady and reliable...and bland. After a year and change, we just ran out of things to talk about and spent lots of time watching TV in a pleasant boredom until he finally euthanized the relationship by moving to Minnesota.

  And last, there was Louis. We met at a gallery opening, just as cheesy as it sounds, when I was thirty-two. We enjoyed each other's company. Moved in together after a year, laughed a lot, felt comfortable enough that he knew that my eating popcorn drizzled with Nutella meant my period was nigh, and I knew that if he ate cabbage, he'd be in the bathroom six hours later. It felt real, and happy. Louis was smart, a psych nurse with a lot of compassion for his patients and great stories from work.

  Then he got a tattoo. And another. And a third and fourth. And then, just after he got a Chinese character depicting commitment, he dumped me for his tattoo artist.

  Then came the online dating years. Sure, sure, we all know the happy couple who met online, who exchanged fun, flirty emails and then finally met, and voila! They were in love. Oh, the fun stories of the losers they'd endured before they found each other! Daniel the Hot Firefighter and Calista, who lived on the same Park Slope street I did, had met online, though they divorced after a few years so Calista could devote more time to her yoga. But there were others who'd met online, married, and were still very happy together. I was game. I gave it a shot.

  It was a fail. Same for my closest friend, Paige. Like me, Paige was abruptly and completely unable to find a guy. Like me, she was a successful professional--a lawyer--attractive and interesting. Like me, she'd had a slew of nice and not-bad dates, never to hear from the guy again. We both bought a few dating books and followed the rules assiduously. We both wasted our money.

  Dating in your thirties becomes a second job. Some of the books remind you to Have fun! If you're not having fun, what's the point? The point was to find a mate. There was no fun involved, thank you very much. The fun would come after, when we could wear Birkenstocks and give up Spanx.

  Honestly, it was more work than my actual career. I knew what I was doing with photography. This, though... The writing of profiles, the witty exchange of emails, the blocking of perverts. The careful mental list of what to reveal, how to make yourself sound interesting without sounding dysfunctional--should I mention my terror of earthworms? Do I admit that my parents have married each other twice? What about the fact that I binge-watched five seasons of Game of Thrones in one weekend without showering or eating a single vegetable?

  Sometimes, the men who seemed nice at first would reveal themselves to be not quite so balanced. After a really fun online exchange with Finn and a perfect first date that involved a tiny Colombian restaurant, much laughter and great chemistry, I got a text that was one giant paragraph without a single capital letter or punctuation mark.

  kate you are really great i hate dating dont you we should definitely be exclusive because tonight showed me youre a good person i had a girlfriend who was such a slut she blew my brother in the gas station bathroom btw we were on the way to my grandmothers funeral then they wondered why i was mad seriously people can be such assholes but tonight your eyes told me you have compassion and are fun and wont judge me for things i maybe shouldnt have done

  You get the idea. I printed it out for posterity. It was five pages long.

  Even when I'd mastered the art of conversing politely yet genuinely and humorously yet seriously while making sure I listened carefully and attentively...well. All those adverbs were exhausting.

  And even then, even if I liked a guy and the date went well, nothing came of it. In five years of online dating, I had two second dates. Zero third dates.

  Paige and I would cheerfully obsess--Why hadn't he called again? He said he would! We had a good time! We laughed! Hard! Two times!--and complain--His hair smelled like pot. A noodle got stuck in his beard, and then he got angry when I told him about it. He stormed out of the restaurant because they didn't have local sheep cheese. We'd laugh and order another round, trying to protect ourselves from too much discouragement or hope.

  The single guys we knew, like Daniel, the now-divorced and still-hot firefighter, dated twentysomethings--the False Alarms, Paige and I called them, since nothing serious ever developed after Daniel's divorce. The False Alarms were all pretty much the same--shockingly beautiful, thigh-gapped, vapid. There was a new one every month or two.

  Occasionally, we'd run into Daniel, his cloud of pheromones thick enough to make us choke. Paige called him Thor, God of Thunder, and yeah, he had that kind of effect. Once, Paige and I were sitting in at Porto's Bar & Restaurant, and Daniel walked in at the very moment the jukebox started playing "Hot Stuff" by Donna Summer. Even the machinery knew.

  He was friendly, sure, slinging an arm around my shoulders. "Hey, Kate!" he'd say, his eyes flickering from their usual good cheer. After all, I'd known him as half of a couple, back when he and Calista were newlyweds. I'd seen him sitting on their front steps, waiting for her to come home, unsure of where she was. I knew that he'd been heartbroken, and she had not. Calista moved to Sedona after the divorce, taught meditational movement and spiritual cleanses. I still got a Namaste card for winter solstice each year.

  But Daniel and his ilk--the cheerful man-children of Brooklyn--didn't give women like Paige and me a second glance. Marriage? Tried that, didn't work. Those guys just kept buying lemon drop martinis for their just-graduated girlfriends, women a decade (or more!) younger than I was, who considered Britney Spears songs classics. They didn't care about things like fatherhood potential, didn't care about depth of character. They were simply smitten by the FDNY insignia on Daniel's T-shirt and the bulging muscles that were showcased by it. (To be fair, I'd once seen Daniel shirtless, and I stopped caring, too.)

  The other single men I knew...well, the truth was, I knew only a few. Most of them were ex-cons, as I volunteered at the Re-Enter Center of Brooklyn, a place where parolees could take classes to help them adapt to life on the outside. I taught small business management with a little photography thrown in for fun. And while I was all for forgiveness, chances were quite small that I'd marry a guy with a teardrop tattooed under his eye.

  Paige and I would assure each other that being single was great. Our lives were full and fun and we loved our careers. Look at other women! Just because they were in relationships didn't make their lives meaningful! Paige had two sisters and seven nieces and nephews, and both sisters were wretched and exhausted. One was contemplating a mommy makeover to lift her boobs and shed her fat and get her husband to sleep with her again; the other, Paige was pretty sure, was about to come out of the closet.

  My own sister...well, okay, Ainsley was happy, but kind of...how to put this? Naive. Retro in her worship of all things Eric, always putting herself second, despite the fact that she'd had a very impressive job. She took care of Eric in a way he never took care of her; he was the star in the couple, and she had a supporting role. It bugged me.

  I was different. Paige, too. We were self-fulfilled. And what about that fabulous trip we'd taken last year to London, huh? We should plan another! Vienna this time? Or Provence?

  Then a couple would walk by, a baby strapped to one parent, an adorable toddler wearing an ironic T-shirt holding hands with the other, and we'd falter. "Screw it," Paige would say. "If only there were mail-order husbands."

  If only I had a gay male friend who'd pony up and coparent with me! Not only would we have a wonderful child, we could write a great screenplay about it. Alas, no--my gay friends, Jake and Josh, already had Jamison, so that was out.

  I told myself it was okay. After all, I didn't need a baby. The world was overpopulated, there were teenagers I could adopt, etc.

  But then I'd visit my brother and watch him and Kiara with their kids. The rush of love and gratitude I'd always felt over the years when my niece or nephew would run to see me, or more recently, a
t least come out of their rooms to see me. Sadie still snuggled, at least. Granted, I wasn't like my sister, who had to sniff the head of every baby we saw and chat up the mother for details on the birth, but I loved kids.

  Brooklyn was full of babies. I wanted someone to cuddle, someone I could carry and stare at during naptimes--not in a creepy way, but in a loving, maternal glow. Someone who would call me Mommy and reach for my hand without thinking, the way Esther still did with Kiara, the way Sadie reached out for my brother. I found myself eyeing pregnant teenagers, wondering what they'd say if I casually asked if they'd consider giving me their unborn child.

  It was always there, the primal call to procreate and protect. The maternal instinct is the strongest force in nature, they say. But I wanted the whole package, too. I wanted there to be a daddy. Aside from the maternal thing, there was that secret desire to be...well...adored.

  It was not something that was cool to admit. With each passing year, the idea of being smitten with someone, having someone smitten with me, became more and more distant, even a little absurd, as if I still expected Santa to come on Christmas Eve.

  Birthdays became a bit of a shock. Thirty-five, thirty-six...they were fine. They were great, even. I knew who I was, my reputation was growing, I was making a nice income, teaching classes, traveling.

  But thirty-seven...and then thirty-eight...the very digits had a tint of desperation to them. Late thirties sounded so much older than midthirties. Checking the box "never married" made me feel as isolated as an Ebola patient. I found myself getting more and more obsessed, looking at every passing male as my potential mate--the guy at the dry cleaners, the guy who delivered my pizza, the guy who bumped into me in front of Whole Foods.

  And then came thirty-nine, and something great happened.

  I just...stopped.

  My friends and siblings took me out for a surprise dinner--Paige; Ainsley and Eric; Jake and Josh; my occasional assistant, Max, and his wife; Sean and Kiara. They toasted me and gave me insulting cards. Paige gave me a box of Depends diapers, which was a little mean, I thought. She was only two months younger than I was. Jake and Josh gave me a full cadre of crazy-expensive skin care products specifically designed for aging skin. From Sean and Kiara, a day at a spa for a rejuvenation package. From Ainsley and Eric, same spa, same treatment.