Marlow asks, a while later, when Floss has dozed off in her chair, to see a picture of the boys as children. Orla goes into another room and comes back with a printed one: Frank and Gary on the beach, heads ducked over their buckets. They are off-center in the photo; they only take up the left side. Orla points to the empty sand next to them, studded with toys and half-formed castles, and says, “Right there. That’s where I imagined you.”
It is exactly, for some reason, what Marlow needs to hear.
She wants to offer Orla something, too. So she takes a plastic bag out of her pocket and shows her the letter from Floss she found. Orla takes the envelope. She checks the address and the date. She hands it back. “That’s okay,” she says. “Why don’t you just keep it?”
* * *
Floss is only pretending to be asleep. It’s a bad look, sixty-three and fat and dozing in a chair in an unfamiliar home, but it is not as embarrassing as being awake and ignored for hours on end. Marlow and Orla are asking each other questions Floss knows all the answers to. Like someone who saw the movie already, she is dying to ruin their endings. She knows so much more about both of these women than they will ever know about each other, no matter how long they sit at Orla’s table, matching up their notes. But they don’t want to hear from her, she knows. She knows they both have the same thought, when it comes to her—she never cared about me at all—but that isn’t true. She has fucked up plenty, has hurt people, has built a career on looking like she enjoys being completely self-absorbed. She understands why, whenever she has tried to show these women that she loves them, they have looked at her with suspicion: What is her angle? What is she after? And often, she does have an angle. Often, they are right. When she betrayed Orla, she was selfish and scared, and too dubious of her own strength to believe she could really ruin a life. When she betrayed Marlow, putting her on those pills, she was too dubious of her own strength to believe she could really protect one. It’s possible that her loving Orla and Marlow has, overall, made their lives worse. But it has made her a better person. Not a good one, she knows. Just better.
She forgets that she is asleep and raises one eyebrow high as she listens. Oh, these bitches are editing heavily. Orla skips the part of her story where she stole Marlow from the hospital. Marlow skips the part of hers where she attacked that girl.
Hey, Marlow, Floss imagines yelling. Orla almost aborted you! Oh, and, Orla—Marlow bit someone. Exactly—like a dog!
But then Floss hears Orla showing Marlow another picture, one that must be of Orla and Floss. Marlow says they are beautiful. Orla corrects her: they’re young. Maybe because she’s actually listening, for once, Floss hears exactly the way Orla says it. Like their age explains everything.
So she decides to test the theory—to see if she can be different now that decades have gone by. To see if she can do, in this moment, the best thing for her daughter, which is to just keep her mouth shut. To let both of them believe that the other is as pure and perfect as they’ve imagined. She tries it for five seconds, then ten, then twenty. She keeps on counting.
* * *
Somehow, the afternoon goes by. Orla tells Marlow about Danny.
“Did you love him?” Marlow asks her.
“No,” Orla says. “I was obsessed with him. And I don’t mean it in the way your mother says ‘obsessed,’ if she still throws that word around. I mean it literally, and I’m not using ‘literally’ there, either, the way she does.”
“Danny was a loser,” Floss says simply. “And bald. Be glad you got your hair from your mother’s side.”
After that, they all look into their glasses awkwardly. Orla examines the water in hers and realizes that this may be the problem: water.
As if on cue, Kyle comes home from work and starts to mix drinks. When he hears who the women in his kitchen are, his eyebrows nearly exit his face. But by the time he gets the shaker down, he has taken it all in stride. Five minutes later, Floss fawns over his vodka martini, sounding relieved. Kyle