TUESDAY

CHRISTMAS EVE, 2013

CHAPTER 27

When Georgie woke up, she couldn’t believe she’d fallen asleep. (How could she have fallen asleep? She’d probably fall asleep during an air raid.) She sat up and looked at the clock, 9 A.M., then at the phone splayed out on the carpet.

What had she done?

She crawled out of bed, hands first, hanging the phone up before she even landed on the floor. It took a few tries and a few minutes before she got a dial tone again. Then she dialed Neal’s house impatiently, catching her finger in the next number before the dial had completely unwound. . . .

Busy signal.

What had she done?

Neal’s mom must be on the phone. Or his dad. (Jesus. His dad.)

Georgie thought about how you used to be able to break into someone’s call, if you had an emergency. You could call the operator and she’d interrupt. That had happened to Georgie once in high school, before they got call waiting; one of her mom’s friends needed to get in touch with her mom, and Georgie had been on the phone for two hours with Ludy. When the operator cut in, Georgie felt like it was the voice of God. It took a while before she could talk on the phone again without imagining that the operator was there listening.

She hung up the phone and tried again. Still busy.

She hung up—and it rang.

Georgie jerked the receiver back to her ear. “Hello?”

“It’s just me,” Heather said. “I’m calling from inside the house.”

“I’m fine,” Georgie said.

“I can tell. Fine people are always telling everybody how fine they are.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m leaving in a little bit, and Mom wants you to come out for breakfast and say good-bye. She’s making French toast.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“She says depressed people need to be reminded to eat and bathe. So you should also probably take a shower.”

“Okay,” Georgie said.

“Okay, bye,” Heather said. “Love you.”

“Love you, bye.”

“But you’re actually coming out to say good-bye, too, right?”

“Yes,” Georgie said, “bye.”

“Love you, bye.”

Georgie hung up and tried Neal’s number again. Busy.

She looked over at the clock—five after nine. What time would Neal have to leave Omaha if he was going to drive to California by tomorrow morning? What time had he gotten here that Christmas Day?

She couldn’t remember. The week they were broken up was a weepy blur. A weepy blur fifteen years in her rearview mirror.

Georgie picked up the phone again. One, four, oh, two . . .

Four, five, three . . .

Four, three, three, one . . .

Busy.

“Take a shower!” her mom shouted down the hall. “I’m making French toast!”

“Coming!” Georgie yelled at the door.

She crawled over to her closet and started pulling things out.

Rollerblades. Wrapping paper. Stacks of old Spoons.

At the back of the closet was a red and green box meant for Christmas ornaments. Georgie had written SAVE in big letters on every side with a black Sharpie. She pulled it out and opened the lid, kneeling on the floor next to it.

The box was completely full of papers. Georgie had started a second Save Box after she and Neal got married (it was at their house somewhere, in the attic), but by then, she had a computer and the Internet, and all her saves became bookmarks and screenshots—jpegs that she dragged onto her desktop, then forgot about, or lost the next time her hard drive failed. Georgie never printed out photos anymore. If she wanted to look at old Christmas pictures, she had to go searching through memory cards. They had a box of videotapes from when Alice was a baby that they couldn’t even watch because the cassettes didn’t fit into any of their machines.

Everything at the top of this Save Box was from just before Georgie moved out of her mom’s house. Just before her and Neal’s wedding. (Which has already happened, she reminded herself.)

She found the receipt for her wedding dress—three hundred dollars, used, from a consignment store.

“I hope whoever wore it first is happy,” Georgie’d said to Neal. “I don’t want leftover bad-marriage mojo.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Neal said. “We’re going to be so happy, we’ll neutralize it.”

He was happy then. During their engagement. She’d never seen him so happy.

As soon as Georgie said yes, as soon as the ring was on her finger—it stopped at the second knuckle of her ring finger, so he slipped it onto her pinkie—Neal jumped up and hugged her. He was smiling so big, his dimples reached theretofore unknown depths.

He held her by the base of her spine and the back of her neck, and kissed her face all over. “Marry me,” he kept saying. “Marry me, Georgie.”

She kept saying yes.

The memory was fuzzy in her head now, which seemed impossible—how could she have let any of those details go? At some point, her brain must have taken the whole scene for granted. She and Neal were so fundamentally married now, it didn’t seem important how they got there.

She remembered that he was happy. She remembered the way he cupped the back of her head and said, “From this moment onward. From every moment onward.”

God—had Neal really said that? Had she really only half-understood her own proposal?

Georgie dug back into the Save Box in earnest. . . .

Her college diploma.

Some stupid chart she’d torn out of Spy magazine.

The last Stop the Sun strip. The one where Neal’s dapper little hedgehog went to heaven.

Ah—there. Polaroids.

Georgie’s mom was the last person on earth to give up her Polaroid camera; she’d always lacked the follow-through to get 35-millimeter film developed.

There were three snapshots in the box from the day Neal proposed—all three taken inside the house, in front of the Christmas tree. Georgie was wearing a baggy T-shirt from her high school improv group that said NOW, GO!—and she looked like she’d spent the whole week crying. (Because she had.) Neal was wearing rumpled flannel and had been driving through the night. But still, they both looked so young and fresh. Skinny Georgie. Chubby Neal.

Only one of the pictures was in focus: Georgie rolling her eyes and holding her hand up to show the too-small ring, and Neal grinning. This might be the only photo ever taken of Neal grinning. This might be the only time he’d ever grinned. When he smiled big like that, his ears stuck out at the top and the bottom, like wrong-facing parentheses.

After these photos were taken, Georgie’s mom had forced pancakes on Neal, and he’d admitted that he’d gone the last two nights without sleep. “I pulled over for a few hours in Nevada, I think.” Georgie dragged him to her room and pushed him onto the bed, taking off his shoes and his belt, and unbuttoning his jeans, so she could rub his h*ps and his stomach and the small of his back. She burrowed with him under her comforter.

“Marry me,” he kept saying.

“I will,” she kept answering.

“I think I can live without you,” he said, like it was something he’d spent twenty-seven hours thinking about, “but it won’t be any kind of life.”

Georgie laid the Polaroids out on the floor. Three moments in motion. There he was—there he was happy and hopeful. Her Neal. The right one.

“Georgie!” her mom shouted. “Come on!”

She laid the photos out on the floor and waited for them to go black.

CHAPTER 28

Her mom opened the bedroom door without knocking and walked in. “I was coming,” Georgie said.

“Too late,” her mom replied. “We’re driving Heather out to Dr. Wisner’s now.”

Georgie always forgot that Heather had a different last name. They all had different last names. Her mom was Lyons, Heather was Wisner, Georgie was McCool. Georgie’d wanted to be Grafton, but Neal wouldn’t let her. “You don’t come into this world with a name like Georgie McCool and throw it away on the first pretty face.”

“You’re not that pretty.”

“Georgie McCool. Are you kidding me—you’re a Bond girl. You can’t change your name.”

“But I’m going to be your wife.”

“I know. And I don’t need you to change anything.”

“Have you talked to the girls today?” her mom asked.

“Not yet,” Georgie said. “I talked to them yesterday.”

Had she talked to the girls yesterday? Yes. Alice. Something about Star Wars. No . . . that was a voice mail.

Had she talked to them the day before?

“You should just come along with us,” her mom said, “for the ride. The fresh air will do you good.”

“I better stay,” Georgie said. “Neal might call.”

What would it mean if he called now? That he was still in Nebraska? That all bets were off?

“Bring your phone,” her mom said.

Georgie just shook her head.

Her mom settled down onto the floor next to her. She and Georgie were wearing matching lounge pants. Her mom’s were teal, Georgie’s were pink. Her mom reached over Georgie’s lap and picked up one of the Polaroids—a blurry one of Neal looking at Georgie and Georgie looking off camera.

“God, do you remember that?” her mom sighed. “That boy drove halfway across the country in one day; I don’t think he even stopped for coffee. He’s always been king of the grand gesture, hasn’t he?”

Down on one knee. Waiting outside Seth’s frat house. Inking cherry blossoms across her shoulders.

He always had.

Her mom set down the photo and squeezed Georgie’s velveteen knee, shaking it a little. “It’s going to get better,” her mom said. “It’s just like those commercials say. ‘It gets better.’”

“Are you talking about that campaign for g*y kids?”

“It doesn’t matter what it’s for. It’s true about everything. I know you feel awful now; you’re right in the thick of it. And it’s probably going to get worse—I don’t know how you’re going to work this out with the girls. But time heals all wounds, Georgie, every single one of them. You just have to get through this. Someday you and Neal will both be happier. You just have to survive, and give it time.”

She started kissing Georgie’s face. Georgie tried not to flinch away. (And failed.) Her mom sighed again and stood up. “There’s French toast for you in the kitchen. And plenty of leftover pizza . . .”

Georgie nodded.

Her mom stopped at the door. “Do you think if I give my ‘it gets better’ speech to your sister, she’ll admit she has a girlfriend?”

Georgie almost laughed. “She doesn’t think you know.”

“I didn’t,” her mom said. “Kendrick kept telling me, ever since she wore that suit to Homecoming, but I told him it was perfectly normal for a busty girl to want to de-emphasize her curves. Look at you—you’re not gay.”

“Right . . . ,” Georgie said.

“But if she’s going to hold a girl’s hand on my couch—even a really handsome girl—well, I’m not blind.”

“Alison seems nice.”

“It’s fine with me,” her mom said. “The women in our family have terrible luck with men, anyway.”

“How can you say that? You have Kendrick.”

“Well, now I do.”

Georgie came out to the living room to say good-bye to Heather, then took a shower and put her mom’s clothes back on. She couldn’t believe she’d specifically gone to a lingerie store without buying new underwear.

She thought about going out to the laundry room and digging Neal’s T-shirt out of the trash. . . .

The first time she’d stolen that shirt had been the first weekend she’d stayed at his apartment. Georgie had been wearing the same clothes for two days, and she smelled like sweat and salsa—but she hadn’t wanted to go home to change. Neither of them wanted the weekend to end. So she took a shower at Neal’s apartment, and he gave her a pair of track pants that were too small for her hips, and the Metallica T-shirt, and a pair of striped boxers.

She’d laughed at him. “You want me to wear your underwear?”

“I don’t know.” Neal blushed. “I didn’t know what you’d want.”

It was a Sunday afternoon; Neal’s roommates were at work. Georgie came back from the shower, wearing his T-shirt and the boxers—those were too small, too—and Neal pretended not to notice.

Then he’d laughed and pinned her to his mattress.

It was so rare to make Neal laugh. . . .

Georgie used to tease him about being a waste of dimples. “Your face is like an O. Henry story. The world’s sweetest dimples and the boy who never laughs.”

“I laugh.”

“When? When you’re alone?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Every night when I’m sure everyone is asleep, I sit on my bed and laugh maniacally.”

“You never laugh at me.”

“You want me to laugh at you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m a comedy writer. I want everyone to laugh at me.”

“I guess I’m not much of a laugher.”

“Or maybe you just don’t think I’m funny.”

“You’re very funny, Georgie. Ask anybody.”

She pinched his ribs. “Not funny enough to make you laugh.”