Page 9 of The Deepest Lake
But it isn’t time, yet, for Rose.
She should have come to Guatemala, herself, those very first days after Jules’s texts stopped. She shouldn’t have let Matt lean on his military background so heavily, prioritizing tech over old-fashioned communication. The aggressive approach might have scared away someone who knew something.
They should have shouted less. Demanded less. Talked less—and listened more. But isn’t that what a mother thinks whenever she looks back on her parenting?
So, she has regrets, she thinks, shaking out a pair of pants with a satisfying snap. Everyone does. But not about finally coming here, now.
Rose has slowed her unpacking, realizing there isn’t a place to put most of her clothes. Pushing a nightgown back into a side pocket of her suitcase, she hears a telltale crinkle and pulls out a tissue-wrapped package, sighing.
It’s the last-minute gift that Ulyana gave her when she dropped Rose at the airport. The twins were both kicking and flailing in their car seats, but Ulyana took it all in stride. With O’Hare traffic behind her and spilled Cheerios at her feet, Ulyana reached over the gear shift and pressed a small, soft package into Rose’s hand. You mentioned you wrecked your favorite sports bra in the dryer. Those first weeks after my mom died, just getting dressed each day was hard, but little comforts helped.
Rose knew it was Ulyana’s version of a peace offering, meant to offset Matt’s bossy handling of nearly everything over the last few months. It wasn’t fair that women felt they had to patch over the emotional rough spots men created, but even so, Rose was grateful to her ex’s new wife. She imagined the text she’d send Jules: You won’t believe the thoughtful gift your stepmom just gave me . . .
Rose kept forgetting. Every time she had to remember, the shock returned, barely diminished. Jules was gone.
Gone. Still holding the bra, Rose sits down at the foot of the twin bed. The center of the thin mattress squeaks and sags. There’s one pillow, very small, in an oversized case. At least the accommodations were included, as are breakfasts at the “hotel” and lunches at the writer’s house—but $5,900 for a week?
The truth is, that’s a lot of money after the hundreds of thousands of dollars she and Matt spent together on the search effort—not that she has any future weddings or grandchildren to plan for now. To make things worse, she isn’t scheduling new remodels for the time being, despite her office manager’s warnings that long-term clients are deserting them. But Rose can’t think about design work. Kitchens are gathering spaces, for families. Rose doesn’t have one now. She’ll keep receiving occasional holiday invitations from Matt and Ulyana, and from her sister, Christine, but really she’s just the pitiful outsider looking in.
“Hey, Rose!” Lindsay calls up the ladder, only the platinum spikes of her hair visible through the opening in the loft floor. “You coming down for some wine?”
Rose rubs the tip of her nose and clears her throat. “No, thanks. I can wait for the big party.”
“Suit yourself.”
Downstairs, the group laughs without her. She hears them quizzing Lindsay about her grifter life. She explains, as she did to Rose and Isobel before, that her submitted essay isn’t representative of her normal jobs.
“Then what do you do most of the time, if not beat men at poker?” a girlish voice asks.
“I give them what they want.”
Someone whispers, “Sex?”
“With the big jobs, they never even meet me. I’m the new online girlfriend who suddenly has a car accident, or a son in rehab, or a dog that needs to go to the vet. They just keep paying and paying, getting deeper until they’re too embarrassed to face facts. Sometimes we break up without them even knowing they were conned.”
Rose is glad to listen from afar and not respond. What would she say? How can you trick people like that? How can you lie about things that are so serious?
But Rose is planning to lie, here in Guatemala, to everyone she meets.
“Well, if they’re that dumb,” Isobel says from below.
“On the other hand,” Lindsay says, “at least they know what they want. Even if what they want is a fantasy. I promise you: many of them feel like they’ve gotten a good deal.”
Everyone laughs again, a sound that makes Rose feel even more alone, and suddenly cold.
Fully dressed, she pulls back the thin blanket and gets into the sagging bed, e-reader in her hand, intending to finish the second of the two Eva Marshall memoirs. Jules begged her to read both books—the first that Eva had published when she was only nineteen and the second, Eva’s runaway bestseller, published five years ago, after a string of modestly successful novels. Rose read the first one, Last Gasp, a month ago, when her focus cleared up enough to read anything longer than an email. It wasn’t until this week that she started the second one.
From online summaries, she already knows that In a Delicate State ends sadly, with the death of a child. Her allegiances were torn. She couldn’t read about other people’s tragedies for more than a few pages without spiraling into her own dark and paralyzing thoughts. At the same time, she wanted to know everything about Eva that might tell her something about Jules, or at least why Eva was Jules’s favorite author.
As it happened, In a Delicate State engaged her so quickly it wasn’t a hard read at all—not the happy early chapters, anyway, when Eva Marshall makes the bold decision to have a baby in her early fifties, against the advice of family and doctors.
Reading the first half of the book yesterday, in airports and on the plane, Rose lived through all of Eva’s difficult midlife reproductive questions. She’s never admitted it to anyone, scarcely even to herself, but once Matt remarried and became a father again, Rose realized she regretted that her mothering years ended when they did. She would have given an arm to have another baby. Even now, when she spots famous women in the tabloids, having babies, even twins, at fifty years old, she thinks, Why not me?
Rose knows why: she’s a normal person. Not a Hollywood actress with a millionaire husband or a bestselling memoirist or even just a privileged woman with great health insurance and admirably thick skin.
The sad part of In a Delicate State will come at the end. Rose hasn’t gotten there, yet. She swipes to the next page, reading slowly, knowing this is part of the process: connecting with a book beloved by Jules and facing the universality of grief. By the last page, she might even feel a special kinship with Eva, once she fully understands what the author has suffered and survived—possibly even why she won’t answer a grieving mother’s emails.
Downstairs, the voices continue. One of the younger women shrieks with laughter, about what, Rose has no idea. She can’t read here. She needs to get out of this cabin.