Plateaued
“I had a vision of you at age seventy-two.”
“What?”
Cooper and CeCe were sitting in the backyard watching their respective daughters, Lily and Anya, play at the bottom of the sloping hill. They sat in Adirondack chairs while their Aperol spritzes collected sweat on the glass. Aside from the girls’ squealing, no one had spoken in at least a half hour.
CeCe was jolted by his voice.
“I saw you,” Cooper continued, “just as you are now, lying there in that same chair but it was weathered, looking at the girls, but they were actually our grandchildren, running around the backyard. With that exact smile. Your hair was still short but gray—no, silver. Everything was the same except you were seventy-two.”
“Seventy-two feels really specific.”
“It was the number that popped in my head when I saw you.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“How am I gonna age?”
CeCe was significantly younger than Cooper and she wondered sometimes if he realized she would age past thirty. She didn’t say out loud how old he would be when she was seventy-two.
“With grace. Like everything else you do.”
She rolled her eyes. He always got nostalgic for the future when the edible hit.
“Anything else illuminating about your vision?”
“Only everything. I saw what we’ve made here together. Our kids, yours and mine, maybe more, all as one family. I saw what we’ve done in two years and it was—well, forever. Like we’d climbed a cliff and found the plateau to spend the rest of our lives on.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she reached out to squeeze his hand then gazed back out at the girls. They were taking turns between playing the fairy queen, and the baby who would be kidnapped and raised amongst the fae. The girls had been fast friends. But were they sisters? The past two years with Cooper had been wonderful, and she didn’t see a breakup in the offing, but she also never had before. And yet, each time, the ax had fallen. She’d always done a great job of preparing herself. The trick was to break your own heart first, to really live in the imagined reality of the breakup before it happened. But she’d never thought how she’d prepare herself for the opposite.
“I should get you on my insurance policy. You know, just in case something happens. I’ll call my lawyer on Monday.”
CeCe gave him a closed lip smile and sipped her cocktail. She stared at the small wrinkles on her knees and tried to imagine how they would look in forty years. She couldn’t.
She was not the type of person who imagined her life on a plateau. She loved being with Cooper, she loved watching her Anya grow with his Lily, but she’d assumed there would be an end because, well, there always was one. She wasn’t bitter about it. It would be like being bitter about the sun setting every night.
She looked over and tried to picture him at seventy-two. She tried to picture him at any age beyond the one she thought she would ever know him at. What age was that, she asked herself, maybe sixty? She wondered if that made her shallow or just realistic. She’d be forty at that point and his tastes may not age up that far.
She tried again. She squinted hard, screwing up her eyesight to make his skin less smooth, less youthful. Where would it sag? Where would the gray hairs initially appear? What would go first–his eyesight or his hearing? Which habits would he lose, which would he gain, and which would become ingrained deeper than memory? Could her love for him grow into something she couldn’t live without? Could his?
Her breath caught in her chest and wouldn’t release. She hadn’t taken an edible, but this felt like a terrible trip. She turned her face away and tried to calm herself into breathing normally again.
Cooper was speaking to her, but she could not look at him. She could not pull her eyes from the sweating Aperol spritz, the sun lowering onto her head like a roof on fire, the freshly cut lawn whose stinging smell burned her nostrils, the laughing daughters getting louder and louder. They’d linked hands and were spinning in circles as dizzying as her thoughts. The earth tilted on its axis. She gripped the wide arms of her chair so she didn’t fall and roll down the hill into the rest of her life.
What if it all works out?
What if it all works out?
What if it all works out?
Fuck.
What if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works out what if it all works what if what if what if—
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
