I'd Give Anything Read online

  Dedication

  For my friend

  Dawn Manley,

  who gives me joy and infinite kindness and Twizzlers

  and who helps put all the pieces together

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Marisa de los Santos

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  June 30, 1997

  You know those times when the person you are and the person you want to be are exactly—down to your smallest fingernail moon and flimsiest eyelash and your left knee and the part in your hair—the same person? (That fingernail moon is actually called a lunula, by the way, a fact I just learned but that I’m sure I’ll still remember years from now when I’m wherever I am reading this journal because how could anyone forget a word like that, so pale and curved like a shell on a beach?)

  Tonight was one of those times, and it’s interesting because it could have easily turned out to be an ordinary night (although, for us, even ordinary is kind of great). We go to the quarry a lot. We sit under pretty skies a lot, not just at the quarry but other places, too. The champagne was new, a first, but I can’t swear that it was the champagne that actually tipped things from ordinary to everything-in-the-right-place, all-of-us-exactly-who-we-want-to-be splendid. I love the word “splendid.”

  It was dark. Serious dark. Just an edge of moon, like a little silver smile tipped sideways; the sky sugared with stars. The woods on the far bank weren’t really woods but just a big black ruffle, and the woods on our side clanged with peepers or bugs or I don’t know what else, not deafeningly like in real summer, but in that edge-of-spring way. In a more minor, sleepier key.

  We were all there: Kirsten, CJ, Gray, me. The fantastic four. The forever four.

  And Trev, too, a little ways away, sitting with his back against a pine tree, smoking, just a moving pinprick of orange and an outline I’d know anywhere. I hate it when he smokes because I really need him to live forever and not get cancer, but if I ever told him to stop, I’d sound like our mom, which is obviously the worst, most traitorous thing I could do. Tonight, though, I didn’t even want to. Trev just being there, his long, slow exhales, the smell of cigarette in the crisp air mixing with the other smells—dirt, pine needles, the metal smell of water—was comforting. Like Trevor was God, watching over us.

  We sat on the ground, and even though I forgot and left the blanket back in the car, I swear the dirt under us wasn’t hard at all. Gray leaning against a rock, me leaning against Gray, my back, his chest, long, scrawny me, and dense, strong, wide Gray. We passed around the bottle Trev stole from our mom’s wine collection (and if I know Trevor, he’d tried to snag the most expensive one just to spite her), and divided among five, it didn’t go far, but oh my God, champagne. Gold and silver at the same time, sharp and ice-cold and burning. Kirsten said to sip, but I said, “Screw that,” and gulped and felt the sizzle light a path from my throat to my feet.

  No wonder people drink champagne at celebrations. And here we were, my friends and I, with nothing to celebrate except for everything.

  We talked the way we do: blizzards of words, everyone laughing and interrupting, followed by small silences, like soap bubbles floating. CJ told one of his long, random, fact-packed stories, which started with how some kids stole his shorts out of his gym locker (again) and tacked them up on the science bulletin board (again), and ended—by some CJ logic—in a mini-lecture about water-resistant lotus plant leaves, and it was the easiest thing in the world to be the way we were: just voices, gleams of teeth, eyes, Kirsten’s white sweatshirt, her weird caw of a laugh cracking the overhanging quiet. And, it hit me so hard how, oh my God, I love these people, and all at once, I realized we had to do something to honor the, I don’t know, completeness of everything. The everything of everything, as if two hours could contain every single good, pure, fun, gorgeous thing the world had to offer.

  I gave the back of Gray’s hand a hard kiss and disentangled and stood up.

  “Okay, we’re jumping!” I said.

  “Hell, no,” drawled Kirsten.

  “Hell, yes,” I said. “It’s already been decided.”

  “Not by me,” said Kirsten.

  “Not by me, either,” I said. “I’m just the messenger. It’s been decided.”

  Gray laughed, and, oh, but my boy’s laugh is better than champagne. It’s like a cross between a guitar strum and hot toast with butter and honey. “Too cold,” he said.

  Even though it was a little chilly for a June night, I said, “It’s summer!”

  “Too dark, too,” said Kirsten, shuddering. “How do we know for sure that the water’s even down there? Maybe someone moved it. Maybe it’s full of sharks.”

  “You never know! CJ,” I said, pointing at him, “you jump with me.”

  “It’s not like I’m terrified or anything,” said CJ, scooting backward away from me. “It’s not like I have a primal fear of dark water. Or of jumping into the void. I mean it’s the same water as always, right?”

  “Of course it’s not,” I scoffed. “The whole point is that it’s different! The whole point is jumping into the void.”

  “You,” said Gray, shaking his head and reaching for me. “Come back and sit with me, crazy Zinny.”

  But I was already taking off my clothes, stripping down to my bra and underwear.

  “It’ll be magnificent, dumbasses,” I told them. I love the word “magnificent.”

  I walked to the edge, to the same spot we’d all jumped from—even, once and only once, CJ, under duress and holding his nose, his eyes squeezed shut—in the daylight. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and held out my arms, the cool air making all the hair on them rise. Standing there, I could feel not only the air, but also the stars in the sky, the entire Milky Way swirling on my skin and blazing down my spine and fizzing like champagne through my veins.

  I tossed back my head and sang, “O, holy night, the stars were brightly shining,” even though I can’t really sing and it was nowhere near Christmas.

  The bugs went still. They actually did.

  And then I heard Trevor say, “Wait, Zin,” and there he was, my brother, grinning like a devil in his boxers and his T-shirt, in his splendor and magnificence. And we locked our hands together, Trev and I, and we jumped.

  Chapter Two

  Ginny

  Here’s what I learned on that Thursday afternoon in the produce section of Devonshire Market: sometimes, your hands can be wiser than you are; sometimes, they can sit there on the ends of your arms just like always, and comprehend truths that your mind hasn’t yet comprehended. Truths like: Ginny Beale, life as you know it just ended.

  I don’t recommend it: having life as you know it end in Devonshire Market. Particularly not in Devonshire Market on a busy autumn afternoon when you’re wearing a brand-new cream-colored Patagonia fleece and holding two tomatoes, one in each hand. The tomatoes were heirlooms, the left one a piebald purple and jade, the right one striped like a palm-size watermelon, both prizefighter-battered and
lumpily picturesque in a way that screamed eight dollars a pound. And if life as you know it must end like this—Devonshire Market, fleece, heirlooms—be sure you’re not engaged in conversation (the conversation, the one that ends life as you know it) with a man dangling an actual woven, double-handled marketing basket from the crook of his arm like Little Red Riding Hood.

  That’s what everyone called it (and by “everyone” I mean, of course, we who possessed the willingness to buy tomatoes priced at eight dollars a pound): Devonshire Market, no the, and if that sounds vaguely British to you (“at university,” “in hospital”), I’m pretty sure it was meant to. The market was not located in a town named Devonshire; there was no town named that within a thousand-mile radius, possibly within ten thousand, possibly within the entire New World. Instead, the market was, as Jeb, the son of the owner once told me, named after clotted cream, the kind that comes in a jar.

  The man was Dirk Holofcener-Sharf, the husband of my husband Harris’s coworker and my sort-of friend Elise Holofcener-Sharf. Dirk had a long, melancholy face like an old-time crooner, wore white bucks without socks, and was either brilliant or a social maladroit, depending on who you asked, reputations that seemed to derive mainly from the socklessness, but also from the fact that Dirk wrote film reviews for the local paper and displayed a marked unwillingness—or an inability, depending on who you asked—to make small talk.

  To me, Dirk just seemed shy. On the rare occasions when I’d seen him at cocktail or dinner parties, he was always aslant, propped up against something—a wall, a tree, a piece of furniture—his face telegraphing a naked, if unlikely, combination of boredom and trepidation, a “how did I get here and when can I leave?” look. Unlikely to some people, I guess I mean, but not to me. I recognized that expression, having scrupulously kept it off my own face on similar occasions for most of two decades. Every time I saw Dirk like that, I would wish he and I could give each other a sign, a secret code word deposited directly into each other’s mind, maybe, a glimpse of matching cryptic tattoos, or our two hands lifted, colored light beams visible only to us shooting from our palms to meet across the party, anything to say, “We come from the same planet, and one day, we will go back.”

  So when I saw him, just feet away from me in the produce section, I felt a rush of kindred-spirit spirit, and I paused for a few seconds to observe. Dirk held his phone to his ear with one hand and appraised tomatillos with the other, lifting each one, first to his nose, then to eye level, rotating it gently, fingering the papery husk, placing it either back onto the pile or into his basket. Once, twice, again. It was a ceremony, a dance. Then, as I watched, the dance halted. Dirk’s hand froze, arrested mid-pirouette, his mouth forming words I couldn’t hear. Slowly, Dirk took his phone from his ear, gazed at it mournfully, shook his head, slipped the phone into his jacket pocket, looked up, and saw me.

  And in one white-hot instant, the world went raw and primitive. Dirk changed from a sad-eyed man with a marketing basket to a frightened animal. Flared nostrils; wide, panic-twitchy eyes; stark neck cords; lips pulling back from his teeth. If a creature standing on two legs to begin with could be said to rear, Dirk reared. Dirk was the horse, and I was the rattlesnake, right there in Devonshire Market. And, yes, I am exaggerating, but not nearly as much as you might think.

  I said, “Dirk, are you all right?”

  If he had turned around and run out the door with his basket full of tomatillos and who knew what other unpaid-for items, it would have surprised me less than what he did do, which was to take two halting steps toward me and blurt out, “I’m so sorry about Harris.”

  I said, “Look, can I get you a glass of water or something?”

  Dirk squeezed his eyes shut, took the same hand that had been so gently touching the tomatillos, and used it to slap himself on the forehead, repeatedly.

  “Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Stop that.”

  He stopped and opened his blue eyes, and I waited to see what disconcerting thing Dirk Holofcener-Sharf would do next in the middle of Devonshire Market.

  He sighed. “You don’t know. About Harris.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I do,” I said, because if there was one thing I did know, it was everything about Harris.

  “He was fired, Ginny,” said Dirk.

  The statement was so obviously incorrect, so clearly a product of Dirk’s sudden cardiac event or bout of brain fever or whatever I’d just witnessed, that my heart didn’t so much as flutter.

  “And I should not be the one to tell you this, but since I already blew that, I think you should know: there seems to be some kind of scandal happening.”

  Scandal.

  I smiled at Dirk. “You’re saying that my husband, Harris, was fired from his job because of a scandal?”

  “Yes,” said Dirk, nodding. “I’m sorry you had to find out like this.”

  I laughed. “Dirk, honey, have you met Harris?”

  Dirk blinked. “Well, yeah. You know I have.”

  “So you know that he is the embodiment of everything scandal is not. He’s the opposite of scandal. He is competence, reliability, upstandingness, if that’s a word.”

  “I don’t think it is.”

  “If it weren’t a word before, it just now needed to be invented to describe my husband. To be used in a description of my husband, I guess I mean, since upstandingness is a noun, not an adjective.”

  I wasn’t babbling. On the contrary, my brain was in such a state of imperturbability that I could make fine grammatical distinctions without skipping a beat. Also, in the face of Dirk’s wildly inaccurate information and misplaced sympathy, which, kindred spiritedness notwithstanding, were starting to annoy me, I felt the need to be extra-correct, if correctness is something that can have degrees.

  Dirk’s shoulders drooped. “Okay. I’m sorry I told you he got fired. I just found out and saw you and got flustered.”

  Dirk doubling down on his misinformation doubled my annoyance.

  “Listen. Whatever you think you found out? You didn’t,” I explained, slowly, patiently. “Because I have been married to Harris McCue for sixteen years, and Harris is the opposite of fired. Is, was, will always be.”

  “Okay,” said Dirk, drooping. “Fine. You’re probably right. I’ll see you later.”

  Just before he turned away, I said, “You know, Dirk, you might want to rethink the marketing basket.”

  It was a cheap, mean-girl shot, but right then, my annoyance at Dirk was so great that not only did I shoot, but his subsequent wince and the hurt in his eyes rolled off me like water droplets off a lotus leaf.

  But then, Dirk said, “Really? Is it weird? It just seemed—practical,” and his tone as he stared down at the basket was so doleful that I felt instantly terrible: cruel and petty and two inches high.

  I sighed. “I’m sorry. It is practical and very environmentally friendly. I absolutely should not have said that.”

  “No,” said Dirk, smiling a heartbreak of a smile at me. “I’m bad at knowing what’s weird. I have a broken weird meter, I think. So thanks.”

  He left then, turned and shuffled out of Produce and toward the shining glass display cases of Cheese, dropping unhappy glances at his basket every few steps.

  I watched until Dirk was out of sight, and only then did I look down and notice my hands. While the rest of me had been busy being cool and unruffled, my hands had been and were still undergoing what I can only describe as a miniature seismic event. I barely recognized them: racked with tremors, rigid as talons, gripping the tomatoes so hard that my nails dug in, and with wonder and horror, as I stared, I watched my right thumbnail pop clean through the fragile flesh, a puncture wound that bled a rivulet of pinkish juice down my hand to stain my new, cream-colored cuff.

  Somehow, I pried my fingers from the bruised fruit, abandoning it and my shopping cart, got myself to my car, and called Harris.

  He answered the phone like this: “Oh.”


  “Oh?”

  “I meant hi. Hi. Hello.”

  I shut my eyes.

  “I just had the oddest conversation with Elise’s husband at the market,” I said.

  Nothing from Harris. Not even breathing. It was as if that one sentence had opened a sinkhole of silence between us, and as it yawned wider, I could almost see life as we knew it tumbling in. Our mailbox. Our flagstone retaining wall. Our rose plants and firepit. The whole set of jadeite dishes Harris’s mother had given us as a wedding gift—milky green plates Frisbeeing into the void. Our books opening, birdlike. Harris’s precious green ceramic egg-shaped grill plummeting like a bomb. And then Avery, Avery, Avery, swan-diving, toes pointed, chestnut ponytail flying.

  Avery? No. Oh no. Hell, no. Never, ever, ever Avery. My hands stopped shaking at the thought. Whatever Harris had done, no matter how scandalous, it would not touch a hair on Avery’s head.

  Then, Harris said—and I know that there can be degrees of empty because his was the emptiest voice I had ever heard—Harris said, “It wasn’t an affair.”

  It was only later that night that I wondered what else they’d known, those canny hands of mine. About the girl, eighteen years old? About the months of emails and texts, thick and furious and all skirting the edge, the very, very thin edge of sordid? Did they know the exact shade of blond? The depth of my husband’s flattered foolishness? The precise angle and rate at which he fell from grace? I wondered if my hands held inside them, even then, as I sat inside the fogging windows of my car in the parking lot of Devonshire Market, the word that Harris and I would never use but that his boss had sicced on Harris just that morning and would again, his boss and probably everyone else we knew, a long, thin, hissing snake of a word: obsession.

  Her name was Cressida Wall, a striking name for anyone, but particularly for a high school senior, although I didn’t know when I heard her name that Cressida Wall was still in high school, since it wasn’t until later in our conversation that Harris coughed up her age. Until that point, he had called her “a woman from work.” I didn’t even immediately absorb how striking a name Cressida Wall was because the noteworthiness of the name paled in comparison to the noteworthiness of Harris’s tone when he spoke it to me for the first time. As we sat in our yard, at one end of the long teak dining table that we’d bought last summer, each ensconced in our own beautiful black-and-white rattan French bistro chair, my forty-five-year-old pharmaceutical company vice president husband said, “I was having a business lunch at the Vedge Table with this woman from work when Dale Pinckney spotted us and misconstrued what he was seeing.” He paused. “Her name is Cressida Wall.”