That was, in all likelihood, an understatement. Sadie’s feelings were like a whack-a-mole game with no mallet: constantly popping up. “I’m sorry,” Anne said inanely.
“Don’t be. It was my choice to stay quiet. Possibly for the first time in my entire life.” Anne heard, rather than saw, the small, rueful smile that spread on Sadie’s face. “I was too frightened to even imagine a world where you might feel the same way I did. You see, you’re the dream I wasn’t brave enough to have.”
Anne would need to take the car to the dealership at some point this week. The air-conditioning clearly wasn’t working.
She swallowed hard, half-focused on the unfolding freeway in front of her.
Sadie cleared her throat. “Anyway, I’m glad we got out of town. I’m not ready to share this with anyone besides you justyet, not until we’ve figured out some things, and God knows that child of mine has a talent for reading me like alphabet magnets.”
Right. It was Sunday, the day typically set aside for Sadie and Hal’s weekly mother-son dinner. But that realization tripped over another, bigger one: What was, for right now, safely contained in Anne’s Audi would not stay there. Their families would have to be dealt with. Probably. At some point.
With a wince of mortification, Anne remembered the knowing looks her daughters had given each other at lunch, the questions they’d asked her. “Claire is going to be so fuckingsmugabout this.”
“Why would Claire be smug? Did you somehow manage to indirectly tell her about us before you informed yourself or me about us? Because that sounds like something you’d do.”
There was anusto tell someone about. “Of course not.”
“Don’t worry, that stone’s staying right inside my glass house. You might be a genius at repression, but I’ve had my own affair with denial. It took three years after we met before I let myself realize what I really felt for you.”
Without warning, an old memory broke through the surface of Anne’s introspection. Second grade, or maybe first. A playground game of knights and princesses. And at some point, pretty little Jenny Cowles had pretended to faint in Anne’s small arms. As Anne swept dark, tight curls off Jenny’s forehead, hot joy had jolted through her. She could remember the exact outlines of that feeling, could resurrect it right here and now. It was sharper and brighter than her recollection of Brooke’s first steps or Claire’s first word.
Anne had held Jenny Cowles over half a century ago.
A tremendous rush of astonishment, humiliation, and grief suddenly choked her. Then thishadbeen there all along. Since she was seven years old, at least. Maybe even before that.
She’d been pushing down these feelings for girls, for women, since early childhood.
“Three years, huh?” she managed, trying to keep the bitterness from her voice. “That long.”
Sadie reached out and put her hand over Anne’s, which rested on the steering wheel. She rubbed gently, then let go, and in that gesture was space for the bitterness Anne wanted to push away.
They drove in silence for a while.
Eventually, Anne said, “Tell me more about your feelings. I’m ready now.” She wasn’t sure about that, but hearing Sadie talk might make it easier for Anne to think more about her own history. “You said it took you three years to realize what you felt. Do you think this was buried somewhere in your subconscious before you figured it out? Are there any memories that—seem different, in retrospect?” She didn’t want to be the only one.
A very long pause. Then Sadie said, “Shit.”
“What?”
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”
“Think of what?” Anne looked over at Sadie, who had the expression of someone who’d been slapped with a giant flounder. “Sadie?What?”
“That time we went to the opera. At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Remember?”
“You mean when I got us center orchestra tickets forTurandotand you nodded off two minutes into the first aria? I remember.”
“In fairness, it was a sauna in thereandI’d been up all hours the previous night wrestling with some absolutely wretched student sonnets. But that isn’t the part I mean. I’m referring to when I met you in the lobby. I remember I’d gotten all dolled up before coming—”
“Right, you were wearing that gorgeous fuchsia wool cape with embroidered roses—”
“And you hadn’t arrived yet. I remember staring at the second hand on my watch, and then something made me look up. Just as though I’d sensed you. I was right.”
Anne remembered that, too. There’d been a strange expression on Sadie’s face, one she’d chalked up to low blood sugar or exhaustion. “Keep talking.”
“It’s the oddest thing. I can picture exactly what you looked like, even without closing my eyes. You had your hair pinned back, showing off your earrings—they were large silver fan palms—but the dress was the showstopper.” Sadie shifted in the passenger seat. “Do you remember the one I mean? French blue, satin, fit and flare. Tom Ford, I think. Sleeveless, no necklace. You were breathtaking. I hadn’t ever seen your naked shoulders before. I couldn’t stop looking at that place where your neck slopes into your shoulder, the way it curved. I wanted to write a poem about that curve more than I’d ever wanted to write a poem about anything. At the time, I assumed I was just responding to aesthetic perfection, but now I’m starting to think poetry wasn’t what I really wanted to do to you.”
“Oh,” Anne said faintly. Dozens of men had called her breathtaking over the years, but she’d never felt lightheaded over it before.