“You will,” she said. “And it’ll be my fault.”
“Jesus, Georgie. You’re all over the place. I can’t talk to you if you’re going to be like this.”
“Well, I’m going to be like this. I’m going to be worse than this.”
“I’m getting off the phone,” he said.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Then we’re starting over.”
“No!”
“Yes. We’re starting this whole conversation over.” He still wasn’t shouting, but his voice was building like something that was about to blow.
“I don’t want to,” she panted. “It doesn’t work. Everything bad and everything good has already happened.”
“I’m going to hang up now, Georgie. And we’re both going to take some deep breaths. And when I call back, we’re starting over.”
“No.”
He did it then.
Neal hung up.
Georgie tried to take a deep breath—it caught in her throat like a millstone.
She dropped the receiver on the hook and wandered out into the hall, to Heather’s bathroom. Georgie hardly recognized her own face in the mirror. She looked pale and witless, a ghost who’d just seen a ghost. She rinsed her face with cold water and sobbed tearlessly into her hands.
So this was how Georgie talked her husband into proposing to her. By practically begging him not to. By finally freaking the f**k out.
Neal would be freaking out, too, if he was the one with a magic phone. . . .
Neal did have a magic phone, and he didn’t even realize it.
God, why had she said all those horrible things? Georgie looked in the mirror again. At the woman Neal had ended up with.
She’d said them because they were true.
Georgie went back to the bedroom and looked down at the yellow phone.
She picked up the receiver and listened for the dial tone, then dropped it on the floor and climbed into bed.
That noise the phone makes when you leave it off the hook? It stops after a while.
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.