Love Her Madly Page 29
I laughed, and raised my own hand in salute, pressing it against the window.
One of the feds turned around to look at me. I searched his face for some indication of how things were going, but his expression was impossible to read. One of the men must have spoken, because Cyn looked at him and frowned. She turned her face back toward me and smiled again, only this time the smile was underscored with sadness. I knew it was good-bye.
Good-bye, Glo, she mouthed.
“Bye, Cyn,” I said aloud, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me. “Good luck.”
She lifted her hand as high as she could and presented me two fingers, a peace sign, just as one of the suits rose and moved toward the window. I blew her a kiss, trying not to tear up as the blinds slowly closed. I knew, somehow, that it was the last time I would ever see her.
Raj was waiting for me on a bench outside.
“You saw her?” he asked, rising as I approached.
“Through the glass. They were interviewing her, so I didn’t get to visit.”
“Oh.”
We began walking north, slowly, like an old-timey couple out for a promenade.
“That was it. I’m not going back.”
“Really?”
“Really. I’ve done what she asked. She knows it. I meant what I said in the theater. She’s dangerous. I want her to have a good life, but I don’t want her in mine.”
“You’ll probably never see her again,” he said, reaching for my hand.
“It’s okay.” We walked for a while, in peaceful silence. “You know what I got from this, and you did, too?”
He looked at me quizzically. “I dunno. Night terrors?”
“No. We got a better ending. She’s not dead or missing or lost. Presumably, she’ll go on to be a normal person out there, living her life with her family. Just like us.”
He nodded, thoughtfully, but I knew there was a rebuttal coming.
“And that makes these past couple weeks worthwhile to you? You could have been shot.” He pressed his hand against his chest dramatically. “This man right here could have been shot.”
“Worthwhile, no. Worth something, yes.”
He shook his head and pulled me toward him as a spring rain, thin and vaporous, began to fall. He wrapped his arms around me, holding me tight. “Well then, best of luck to her.”
“Yes, best of luck.”
I thought of our magnanimity that evening outside the hospital eight months later, when we were on an airplane, flying down to Florida to surprise Raj’s parents with the news of my pregnancy. I was flipping through the cheesy in-flight catalog, amusing myself with pictures of Victorian canopied dog beds, when one image caused me to choke on my ginger ale.
Available for the price of $24.99 was a rainbow-colored polyurethane pinwheel, featured in a tidy suburban lawn. Sharing the scene was a tiny girl with curly reddish hair, one arm reaching out toward a kitten.
Glorianna.
I sucked in air and placed my hands on the photo to frame the image as Cyn had showed it to me on her phone. It was unmistakable. I imagined her taking the photo on her flight in from wherever it was she had come from, tucking it away just in case she needed added leverage to get me on her side. It had worked, flawlessly. She knew me so damned well.
I flashed back to her face the last time I saw her in the hospital, shooting me that peace sign. Only now did I realize, perhaps it wasn’t a peace sign after all. Her eyes had been saying something else, and at thirty-five thousand feet, her true message hit me like a shock wave. Twice, Glo. Twice she had thrown herself on the grenade for me. Two times I would walk away intact, with my true love at my side. Those slender fingers were a reminder to me of a much larger truth: I may have been a sucker, but I was undoubtedly the lucky one.
Something flipped in my head, and I started to laugh. Tears rolled down my cheeks, and I began to hiccup uncontrollably. It was several minutes before I could even catch my breath to explain to Raj what was so hilarious. At first, his face went flush and his jaw tightened in that old familiar way. But he watched, side-eyed, as I ripped the picture out and folded it carefully so that it fit into the picture window of my wallet. When I was done, I heard him snort.
I looked up and met his laughing eyes.
“Do you want to see my daughter?” I asked, holding it up.
“She’s beautiful,” he said, his composure breaking in tandem with mine.
“I named her after you,” I managed, before losing it completely. I pressed the photo facedown against my tray table, and together we shook with laughter, delirious and attracting stares.
“Wait, wait. Let me see her again,” he said breathlessly.
I presented it anew, my face glowing with motherly pride. “Here she is!”
“So precious,” he said. “Congratulations.”
At that moment in the air, we truly understood that we would never, ever get any answers. We would never find the real truth about who Cyn became, or who she ever was. And we realized there was only one real response.
If you can’t laugh, you cry.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph by Chris Vongsawat
Elizabeth Lee lives in New York City. Love Her Madly is her first novel.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by M. Elizabeth Lee
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Interior design by Kyoko Watanabe
Cover design by Chin-Yee Lai
Cover photography © Radostina Dicheva/Arcangel (beach); © Lynn James/Getty Images (shoe)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lee, M. Elizabeth, author.
Title: Love her madly : a novel / M. Elizabeth Lee.
Description: New York : Atria Books, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003646 (print) | LCCN 2016015406 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501112157 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501112164 (Ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Female friendship—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | GSAFD: Psychological fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3612.E2254 L68 2016 (print) | LCC PS3612.E2254 (ebook) | DDC
813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016003646
ISBN 978-1-5011-1215-7
ISBN 978-1-5011-1216-4 (ebook)