A Happy Catastrophe

And—I may have to face the fact that although I got to have a little four-year-long adventure in Brooklyn, I may well belong here in Florida. Best Buds is doing fine without me. Kat was always the one who could keep the business part going, and Ariana is running the Frippery, according to all reports. They are fine.

And . . . there are some advantages to being back at home. It’s definitely warm here, unlike March in New York. And Natalie is being nicer to me, and it’s great to be with my nieces again. Built-in access to children who know the best uses of an auntie. (When they get a little older, I’ll be the one who brings them gum. I know the auntie rules.)

And my parents. They are working their way back to a happy marriage, it seems. I don’t want to say I see sparkles around them, because that would be a lie; I don’t see sparkles at all anymore. But when they’re together, it just feels right again, like something in the world is set back on its rightful perch. My mother is still bloomingly herself, not hiding from my father’s opinion of her or her purchases or her dinner choices, any of it. He’s stopped criticizing her. They have both stopped bickering, and I see them sometimes holding hands.

At night, we three play a cutthroat game of triple solitaire to see who has to get up and do the dishes. My father usually loses—probably because he had a little surgery and can’t move his arms so fast, but my mother says it’s fine, we should let him do the dishes. He has about forty years of dishwashing responsibilities to catch up on.

I could stay here in my old childhood room for a while, and then decide what to do. See what my heart really wants, where it wants to take me next.

Maybe the lesson I got from Blix ends up being that you have to learn to listen to your own dear heart, go where it takes you.

And another thing I now know is that I am not constitutionally able to be with a man who’s aloof. I need someone who loves me day in and day out, who isn’t hauling around a whole sack of reasons for not being with me. I need someone who wants a big, big life with me, who’s not trying to shrink life down to its smallest, most manageable component. I don’t want a life that is so small it could fit in your back pocket.

“I’ll be back,” I say to my parents and to Natalie and the girls.

Then, as I’m just about to go through security, my mother slips me Blix’s book of spells to take with me on the plane.

I look at the book and sigh. “This doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’ve read every one of those spells and all of Blix’s notes, too, and I’m done here.”

Her face looks very, very serious all of a sudden. “Listen to me. Don’t count out magic,” she says. She takes me by the shoulders and stares right into my eyes. “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you right now, but this could be your moment.”

Believe me, it isn’t lost on me that my mother is the one pushing me toward magic, and that I’m the one looking at the book of spells like it’s something that isn’t going to fit in my carry-on bag.

I take it anyway, and I read it again on the plane.

Here’s my unbiased review of the book of spells, delivered at long last: it’s an entertaining read, with some remarkable concoctions, seemingly designed to test one’s determination and patience more than anything else. And Blix’s notes, sprinkled throughout the book? Well, they show a colorful, lovely, joyful, optimistic, and halfway-crazy woman who lived in the real world with all the rest of us, but who perhaps possessed an outsized dose of hope that I simply don’t share. No one does.

End of story.

By the time I get off the plane, tired and full of salty airline pretzels, Coca-Cola, and shortbread cookies, and limping along under the cloud of a big headache, I am tired and sad.

But then I get to the baggage claim area, and to my astonishment, there are Patrick and Fritzie, both of them jumping up and down, being ridiculous. I’d texted him my flight time, but I never thought he’d show up for it. Much less bring Fritzie! She’s doing her straight-up-and-down jumps, like she’s spring-loaded from the ground, and he’s standing right behind her, smiling and imitating her. They look like a matched set of something. Salt and pepper shakers, maybe. Father and daughter.

“We came to meet you!” yells Fritzie. “I was just here today already, because I wanted to fly on an airplane, but then we left, and when we were at home, Patrick said we should come back to get you as a surprise, so you wouldn’t have to take an Uber! We were just going to text you to tell you in case you were about to call Uber yourself! And then I said, ‘Here she is!’”

I hold myself tight when he sweeps me up in a big hug, and rocks me back and forth, and says close into my ear, “Oh my God, she never stops talking for one second.” He’s laughing his deep Patricky chuckle that I haven’t heard in about forever, while Fritzie grasps my hand and pats my arm. It feels like it’s been so very long since I’ve seen these two characters, and at first I can barely handle looking at them. It hurts, like staring at the sun. And then I just want to slow down time and walk around them and look at the myriad ways they aren’t the same people I left behind. She’s got hardly any hair and looks like she’s grown about five inches taller and maybe ten times more sure of herself, and he’s all mushy and clearly has had the bejesus scared out of him, as my mother used to say.

I am so mad at him, even though he keeps smiling and taking my hand and saying funny things. It turns out that Fritzie wasn’t trying to get to Italy to see Tessa, they both tell me, talking a mile a minute. It was me.

Me.

“I was going to Florida! I wanted to go to Florida!” she says while we’re waiting for my bag to come along on the baggage carousel, and then, “Look at me, Marnie, how I’ve learned to do a cartwheel even better than before.” She holds her arms in midair and is about to flip herself over, but Patrick catches her arm and, laughing, tells her maybe not in the baggage claim area. At home. Cartwheels coming up at home.

“Anyway, Marnie, Patrick wanted you back so much, and you know how I knew it? Because he was sad about you and also he was smelling your pillow all the time! Every time I’d go into your room, he would have your pillow over his head—”

I look at him.

“Wait a minute!” says Patrick. “I did not!”

“You did that. You know you did!” She is jumping up and down again. “Anyway, he wasn’t doing anything right to get you to come back home! And so I decided that I would come and tell you myself!”

“But that wasn’t so smart, and you’ll never do anything like that again,” he says.

She smiles at me and takes my hand while he goes off to grab my suitcase. “It was a little bit smart,” she whispers. “Because here you are.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

PATRICK

It’s nearly eleven o’clock at night by the time Patrick’s heart stops beating at metronome speed. She’s here now, back with him, and he’s got a lot of work to do with her. He can tell by the way she looks sort of muted—surprised and muted, both. Like she’s holding back 93 percent of her personality. So unlike her. Did he break her? Maybe he broke her. He vacillates between hope and despair that he has the skills to fix this. Him, and his bad personality.