2019
RACHEL
On the deck, by the river, Rachel is celebrating with a bottle of champagne. Aidan has finally agreed to the terms of the divorce settlement. She got everything she wanted: the river house, the Audi, and the cat, while he keeps the town apartment, the Jeep, and his share portfolio. And Nadja.
Theirs is an old story. Woman, wife, mother reaches middle age, suffering resentment, loneliness, and exhaustion from being everything to everyone, while trying to keep her husband and her career. Man, husband, father can't keep his dick in his pants.
That's her assessment of the situation.
It's a still, humid evening; she's starting to sweat in her rumpled suit. She takes a cube from the ice bucket, rubbing it on the back of her neck until the cube melts away. When she tries to twist her heavy hair into a perky topknot, it immediately uncoils to slither along her spine. It's getting too long. Months have passed since she last bothered to color her roots, where the dark -brown strands are shot with gray. She doesn't need to lose any weight— the stress has taken care of those extra perimenopausal pounds— but a different hairstyle and some new clothes aren't a terrible idea. One of those studded leather jackets, some hippie- style skirts. A tattoo or a piercing. Rites, to speed up passage through the dark tunnel of divorce.
She laughs self- consciously. God, Rachel, is this a celebration or a wake?
Mainly she's relieved the painful yearlong mediation is over and it didn't involve the kids.
Ben and Alexis are twenty -three and twenty- five, respectively— far more civilized about their parents' ugly divorce than she and Aidan have been, and more forgiving than Rachel about Nadja.
The champagne was a gift from her lawyer. Alexis left a voicemail message saying she'd see her in couple of weeks. Apart from that, there was no line in the sand, no real sense of letting go. For company, she settles for an unremarkable sunset, a glass of tepid champagne, and one pissed-off cat called Mo, who has been winding increasingly agitated figure eights around her ankles and needs to be fed.
She glances back at the house. It's too big for her on her own. When she and Aidan built it nine years ago, they envisioned weekends filled with kids, the extended Weidermann family and, in the future, grandchildren. When they separated it was like somebody died. Even Lex and Ben stopped coming.
She accepts that the marriage breakdown is partly her fault, but she can't get past Aidan's confession that Rachel bored him. They were together for twenty-seven years, and they barely spent any time together in the past ten— how could a person be bored by a spouse they rarely saw? That Rachel was tired, distracted, driven (most of the time), and distant (some of the time) she can believe. But boring? It hurt. It changed her self-perception, eroding her self-belief to the point that, when she was laid off from the newspaper six months ago, she felt like a senior on the verge of retirement, not a forty-eight -year- old professional woman who had it all and then suddenly, devastatingly, lost it.
Well, not everything. She looks back at the house.
How hard she fought for it— the biggest prize, a home large enough for a family of eight, with three double guest bedrooms and a master suite, three bathrooms, two living areas, and an expansive deck that steps down to the jetty. She has peace and quiet, freedom, independence, in an idyllic location. Then she thinks of the expensive solar panels and batteries that still aren't paid off; she thinks about the mortgage, eating into what's left of her severance package, her meager freelance income, and dwindling savings, before deciding not to think anymore.
The jetty. Mentally, Rachel adds that to her to-do list. She needs to arrange for it to be shortened by a yard, thanks to old mate next door.
Living on the river full time took some adjustment, not least because of her nearest neighbor: Ray Kelly, batshit crazy, roaming his acreage with a .22 slung over his shoulder like some kind of vigilante hillbilly. He caused her no end of trouble with the council, lodging complaints about anything and everything: the proximity of the septic tank to the boundary, the wattage of the sensor lights, the color of the fence, and the length of the jetty. When a pair of Rachel's underwear blew over on a windy day, he brought it to her attention by impaling them on a pitchfork.
Now the last of the sun's rays are fading; any moment the deck lights Aidan installed will come on. On that she concedes Ray Kelly has a point— they light up the deck like a football stadium.
She throws back the last mouthful of champagne, goes inside, and turns off the main sensor switch. When she settles back in her chair to pour another glass, a houseboat chugs past.
It's after sunset— they're cutting it fine, she thinks.
As the houseboat passes, the lights turn off, and the engine sputters out.
Rachel leans forward in her chair, straining to make out the darkened shape as it drifts toward the bank on the other side of the fence. Every part of her is on high alert.
Is it her? Is she back?
