“Are you smoking again?” I said.
“As if that’s important!” She choked some more. “L.A.? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“You know, I could use a little support here.”
“I’m the one who needs support. You’re leaving me alone with the mommies!”
“You’ll come visit me,” I said.
I prayed she would. I prayed anyone would visit me. Emmie rarely left Manhattan anymore, except to go to her house in Nantucket, and so the possibility of getting her to travel to the West Coast was slim. It had been twenty-four hours since I’d called Declan and sang, “Yes, yes, yes!” in a gleeful voice, but since that time, I’d been plagued by nagging thoughts—I would have no girlfriends, I would have no job, I didn’t even know how to drive.
I reminded myself that most of the time I communicated with my friends by phone or e-mail, and that wouldn’t change. I had no real job in Manhattan that would make it hard to leave. I could continue working on my designs in L.A., and I could always look for freelance or temp jobs there. And Dec promised to teach me how to drive, although this thought irrationally terrified me. I was fine in the back of a cab, but operating an enormous vehicle (they all seemed enormous to me) was conceptually like manning an F-16 fighter jet.
“I guess I do like L.A.,” Margaux said, “and I’m supposed to take a deposition there in six months or so. But hey, you’ll probably be back by then anyway.”
“Excuse me?” I said. “Could you be less helpful?”
“I’m sorry, Kyr, but you know…”
“No, I don’t know.”
“It’s just that you barely know the guy, and you’re moving across the country. It’s like when you had only known Steven for so long and then you were with him every second of the day.”
“Declan is not like Steven.”
“Of course not.” She coughed again. “I’m sorry. I’m just being a bitch because I don’t want you to go. I can’t believe you’re leaving New York.”
I looked out my window, at the cabs rumbling down 95th. I thought of Central Park and Emmie’s salons. I thought of my spot in the Bryant Park Library where I liked to sketch. I thought of lunches with the girls in Gramercy Park and bottles of wine at 92, my favorite neighborhood place. I could barely believe I was leaving, either. But I knew Declan was different than my ex, Steven. I knew, somewhere deep inside, that Declan was the man. He was it. And so, if I had to spend my life in L.A. to be with him, if I had to leave New York, I would do it.
I took Emmie out to dinner to tell her I was moving. In the past, she’d always had a sprightly walk, a lively air about her, even as her back became slightly stooped and the wrinkles set into her face with more determination. Now, she walked slowly and cautiously, leaning hard on her cane, and it took us forever to walk the few blocks to the restaurant. Each plodding step seemed a trial for her, but she refused a cab.
“I’m not going to take a taxi around my own neighborhood,” she said proudly.
I asked Emmie about the woman we had hired to help her around the house since the accident.
“She wears ponchos,” Emmie said derisively.
Other than that, she didn’t talk much on the way to dinner. It was too hard for her to concentrate on her footing and to converse at the same time. The silence was torturous. I became increasingly nervous about delivering my news. With each slow, painful step, I felt more and more like I was abandoning her, although she would probably hate that thought. Emmie hated pity.
Finally we reached the restaurant and tucked ourselves into a booth, Emmie’s leg raised to the side and propped on a folded towel by the proprietor. We ordered a bottle of champagne, Emmie’s perpetual favorite.
In my early adulthood, I used to say I hated champagne, refused to drink it, but really it was just a way of establishing my independence. I needn’t have worried. Emmie and I are so very different. She is strong and cheerful to a fault, while I am more moody. Emmie has spent the last few decades free from entanglements with the opposite sex, and yet aside from the few years before Declan, I moved from one man to another.
I wondered, as I sat across from her, watching her readjust her leg and take a sip of champagne, what my mother would have thought about me moving to L.A. Would she have been supportive? Maybe disapproving and telling me it was my life to ruin? It was a futile exercise, this trying to imagine my parents in the present. I had no groundwork for envisioning myself as an adult in their world. They were forever frozen in their thirties, and when I thought of me with them, I was still eight years old.
“I’m moving in with Declan,” I blurted out.
Emmie raised the champagne flute to her mouth again, as if she’d heard nothing surprising. Her sapphire ring glittered navy blue with the movement.
“Will you have enough room in that place of yours?” she said.
“I’m moving to L.A.”
Emmie put her glass down. “Why?”
“He needs to be there for his acting.” And then, because that wasn’t enough, “I’m in love with him.”
She took a deep breath. She put a hand to her chest, as if something had caught there.
“Are you all right?” I started to stand from the table.
“Of course, sit down,” she said, irritated. She moved her glass away. She signaled the waiter and asked for another towel to put under her leg. “My, how I hate getting old. It’s making me sentimental.”
“Oh, come on,” I said in a kidding tone, hoping to lighten the mood. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Everyone is leaving me,” she said. Her voice was small. In fact, her whole body had seemed tiny since the accident.
“Emmie.” I reached over to touch her hand.
She pulled it away and shook her head. “I don’t want sympathy. I’m just stating a fact. I’ve run around my whole life with too many people to see and too many things to do, and now there’s barely anything left. Britton is gone, your parents, most of my writers…now you.”
“I’m not gone in that sense, and hey, you still have the agency.”
“Kyra, dear, they keep me on because I helped build that place. They can’t oust me unceremoniously, and I won’t leave. But don’t think they aren’t hoping I’ll die quietly in the middle of the night.”
“It’s not true.”
“It is,” she said definitively. She tried not to seem upset by this, but I knew better. The agency had been Emmie’s life.
Emmie lifted the bottle out of the bucket, spraying water over the table.
“Let me do it.” I took the bottle.
I expected her to protest, to say that she could do it herself, but instead she let me take it from her.
“You know what?” I said. “Maybe I won’t go. I don’t need to move.” I was in agony at that moment. I wanted desperately to be with Declan every day, but how could I leave Emmie?
When she heard my words, she pushed herself up and sat straighter. She threw her shoulders back, as if throwing off her earlier words and thoughts.
She lifted her glass. “Kyra,” she said, “you’ve got to follow love if you can find it. I won’t have it any other way. Now, from what I recall, Los Angeles is a cesspool, but if you must live there, it might as well be with an Irishman who loves you. I want you to tell him something, though. If he doesn’t take care of you, if he wounds you in any way, I will find ways to grievously injure him. Agreed?”
It