On the drive out to the cabin, Jeff and Miranda barely spoke. It was the first time she’d been to Minnesota. They had planned the trip during a happier time, when the suggestion of meeting his family had sounded like a promise.
The air conditioner in the rental car was barely working. Miranda stared out the window. An hour earlier, the view had been scenic: all those lakes and trees. Now everything looked the same. The blouse she had ironed so carefully was stuck to her back.
“How much longer?” Miranda asked.
Jeff shot her an irritated look. She was a modern dancer, and for the past two years she had been dragging him to Berkeley to the ballet.
They didn’t speak again until they got to the top of the long driveway leading up to the cabin.
Back at home, her cat was alone in her apartment. Miranda had given a key to the neighbor across the hall, who was supposed to check on him once a day and make sure he had enough food and water.
About halfway through the plane ride, though, Miranda had become convinced that she’d given the neighbor the wrong key. Jeff had been leafing through the SkyMall catalog, and without looking up, he said, “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure it’s fine.”
When we break up, Miranda thought, I am always going to remember this moment. She lifted the little white window shade and looked out at the sky and the clouds. She had always thought that she and Jeff were a good match, but now she couldn’t stand a thing about him. She lowered the shade again.
“Could you please stop playing with that?” Jeff said.
Miranda ignored him. She leaned back and closed her eyes.
They were going to be in Minnesota for two weeks. Jeff had wanted to bring his son, but his ex-wife’s parents were celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary that summer and they were taking the entire family on a cruise.
“Well, la-di-da,” Miranda had said, but she kept her tone light. She’d been raised by a single mother and had never even been on a boat.
“Maybe next time,” Jeff said, but she could tell that he was disappointed, too.
She was tired of being the kooky girlfriend in the baby-doll T-shirts and the batik-print wraparound skirts, tiptoeing around her apartment in her bare feet as she watered the plants. Jeff’s son was almost thirteen now, and she’d begun to feel that her presence embarrassed him.
Jeff’s ex-wife worked for a brokerage firm in San Francisco, and she was the type of woman who wouldn’t walk around the corner to the dry cleaner’s without running a comb through her hair and putting on a fresh coat of lipstick.
So Miranda had seen this trip as a chance to reinvent herself. Jeff hadn’t even priced the plane tickets, and she was already planning to buy herself a cute pair of shorts and let Jeff teach them both how to fish. She wasn’t squeamish, which she thought might score some points.
She lay in bed at night, happily imagining herself on the side of one of those 10,000 lakes she’d heard so much about, baiting a hook or gutting a fish. Someday, she thought, she’d iron his uniforms or pack his lunch, or whatever a person did when she was the stepmother of a boy who went to private school. Miranda didn’t know. She didn’t know, but she could learn.
Then Jeff’s ex had mentioned the anniversary cruise and the whole thing had fallen apart.
On her birthday, Jeff brought her a box of imported chocolates and an orchid plant. They had been talking for a few months about moving in together, but then they never did. He leaned against her kitchen counter. Did she know that the orchid was the state flower of Minnesota?
Miranda couldn’t have said why, but this made her angry. Of course she didn’t know that.
“This orchid?” she said, pointing at the waxy stem. The flowers were ugly, she thought—like fat purple tongues.
“No, of course not,” he said. “Only if it’s a pink and white lady’s slipper.”
They fought. Jeff called and pushed back their dinner reservation, but Miranda was still acting cold to him when they arrived at the restaurant. She pushed up the collar of her jacket and didn’t look at him. She wished she had just refused to go out.
At the table, she ordered a fragrant bowl of soup, and when she didn’t wait long enough and burned her tongue, Jeff raised his eyebrows and said, “You’re always so impatient.” After the meal, when the waiter brought out a tiny plate and sang to her, she just looked at Jeff until he had to blow out the candle and take a bite of the cake himself so that the man could walk away from the table.
They had planned to go to a movie, but Jeff took her home early instead. After he left, she went across the hall to her neighbor’s apartment and rang the doorbell. The next time Jeff came over, Miranda saw him looking around the kitchen for the missing orchid, but he didn’t say a word about it.
A year earlier, on her birthday, he’d taken her to see Swan Lake, and he’d held her hand during the last two acts. She had loved it so much that they’d driven back the following weekend and seen it again. When the final curtain closed, he turned over her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist, and Miranda couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so happy.
These two trips were the first they’d taken since her accident, and she was finally feeling better again. A little sore, still bruised, but walking on her own again. The night in Willow Glen, she’d been holding his arm, though he was the one who’d been drinking. They’d stopped for sushi and Sapporo; she often drank a sip of his beer, but that night, she’d stuck to water. She was already tired.
This was the neighborhood where they met, at a dinner with mutual friends, when they were both in their early twenties. They had flirted a little at dinner, but Jeff was involved in an on-again, off-again relationship that hadn’t totally fizzled out yet, and Miranda had saved all her tips for two years to buy a plane ticket to Europe; she still had the idea that she might not get on the return flight. They both spent a few years after that fantasizing about the way Jeff leaned over and kissed her cheek as they said goodbye, his hand on her upper arm, where it might have led.
So now every time they passed the restaurant where they had first been introduced Miranda paused with a mixture of gratitude and nostalgia and regret, because who knew what would have happened if Jeff hadn’t met his ex-wife and gotten married and divorced, if Miranda hadn’t gone to Italy and met a forty-year-old expat who was also from California and decided that coincidence equaled destiny?
She stopped, but Jeff continued on without her, crossing the street, and she had to run to catch up, calling out, but it was crowded and loud and he couldn’t hear her.
Miranda caught her ankle and fell in the crosswalk, unable at first to get up, thinking as the seconds ticked by that the light would turn green and the cars at her side would start driving.
“Are you all right?” someone asked, leaning toward her, and she managed to say yes. She dragged herself up and continued toward the other side of the street. The pain was so intense that with each step she was certain she couldn’t take another, but she was terrified of collapsing in the street and being hit by a car.
She made it to the other side. There was a bench farther ahead, but she had to sit down on the sidewalk. She was fighting back waves of nausea. People walked around her. A stranger bent down and said something, but the pain was so strong that she couldn’t answer; what she wanted to say was that she knew it would pass, if they would just give her a moment.
It was a dark blue flood, and she could hear music, loud music. Something classical. She felt so relaxed here under the water. When she opened her eyes again, though, she was lying on her back on the sidewalk, and she couldn’t hear anything: her vision had narrowed in until all she could see was Jeff’s face. He was frantic, calling and calling her name.
And before she regained her hearing, before she understood what had happened, before the ambulance and the hospital and the x-rays and bandages, her first thought was that everything would be all right because Jeff was there.
They reached the top of the driveway leading up to cabin where Jeff’s parents were staying. It was surrounded by pine trees. The lake was farther in the distance, out of sight, but Miranda knew that it wasn’t more than a few hundred feet away.
He stopped the car and turned off the engine. He walked around to the passenger side of the car and opened her door.
The air outside was hot and humid. Jeff leaned toward her, but he was only swatting a mosquito that had landed on his leg.
He grimaced and wiped his hand exaggeratedly on his shirt.
Miranda laughed.
He said, “All right, pretty lady, let’s go inside and see what happens.”
