Ghosted: A Novel

There he was: Reuben. Right there at a table in the BFI café, talking to his new girlfriend, whose face was just out of sight. The brown-husked remains of a coffee next to his hand, all about him the simmer of self-possession and new masculinity.

I remembered the shy, skinny boy I’d found quaking outside a Mexican restaurant all those years ago, his hair gelled and his neck sheathed in cheap aftershave. The crushed and trembling quality of his voice when he’d asked me out a few hours later. Now look at him! Broader, stronger, quite the Californian hero with his tapered fashion shorts, his sunglasses, his deliberately careless hair. I couldn’t help but smile.

“Hello,” I said, arriving at their table.

“Oh!” Reuben said, and for a second I saw the young man I married. The man I thought I’d be with forever, because a permanent life with him in that sunny, cheerful city was all I thought I’d ever need.

“Hey! You must be Sarah.” Kaia stood up.

“Hello,” I said, and held out my hand. “It’s very nice to meet you.” Kaia was slim and clear-eyed. The soft imprint of old acne scarring on her jawline faded into smooth cheeks; dark hair trailed smoothly down her back.

She ignored my extended hand and kissed me on the cheek, clasping my shoulders and smiling warmly, and I knew in that moment that she would hold the balance of power today. She was complete, this woman, and I was not. “It’s great we made this meeting work,” she said. “I’ve been looking forward to putting a face to your name for a long time now.”

Kaia was quite some woman if she hadn’t put a face to my name through Google Images. I was not quite some woman, and had googled her as soon as I knew her surname, but Kaia, of course, had no online footprint. Too bloody pure.

She sat down, smiling as I found a space for my bag under the table and took off the cardigan that was forcing out beads of sweat across my forehead. She was the sort of woman I’d sometimes see meditating on the beach at sunset, I thought, as I freed my arms. Good and grounded, with salt on her skin and wind blowing through her hair.

“So . . . ,” Reuben said, sitting down too. “So here we are, hey?” He took a breath, then closed his mouth, realizing he didn’t know what to say.

Kaia glanced at him and her face softened. That’s my look, I thought childishly. I’d look at him just like that when he lost his way, and he’d feel okay.

“I’ve heard so much about you, Sarah,” she said, turning back to me. She was wearing a long dress with a bold ikat pattern and an assortment of silver bracelets, and she was somehow more elegant than anyone else here. “And I know there’s a lot more to you than your outfit”—was she reading my mind?—“but I have to say that’s a beautiful skirt you’re wearing.”

I smoothed it down. It was one of my nicer ones, actually, but I felt rather self-conscious in it today. Like it was a casual Friday and I’d tried too hard.

“Thank you,” I said. I tried and failed to think of something to say that proved there was more to me than that.

Kaia got out her wallet. “I’m going to go get us some drinks. What would you like?”

“Oh, that’s kind.” I checked my watch and was disappointed to see that it wasn’t yet midday. Reluctantly, I ordered a lime and soda.

She slid out of her seat and Reuben got up too. “I’ll help!”

“I’ve got this,” Kaia said. “You two go ahead and catch up.”

But Reuben insisted and I found myself alone at the table.

This is it, I thought, wiping my forehead with a napkin. This is my future. Running a business with my ex-husband who’s now dating a yogi. One of the really nice ones. I watched them walk to the bar. Reuben slipped an arm around her waist and then turned guiltily to check I hadn’t seen.

This is my future.

He had come into the office six weeks after we split up, ostensibly on the verge of an anxiety attack. “You okay?” I’d asked him, watching over my computer as he crashed around in one of the props cupboards.

He spun round, eyes wild. “I’ve met someone,” he blurted, cowering in the doorway of the cupboard.

A large bag of red noses fell off the shelf behind him and he picked it up, hugging it to his chest. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I did not plan this.”

He came toward me like a bomb-disposal technician approaching a device, his face frantically searching mine. A little trail of noses was falling on the floor alongside him, but he didn’t notice.

“I feel so bad to be telling you this so soon after our breakup,” he’d said. “Do you need to sit down?”

I pointed out that I already was.

It had stunned me how little I’d felt. It was odd, certainly, but I found myself more curious than jealous. Reuben was dating! My Roo! “Are you sure you want to know?” he kept asking.

I’d managed only to ascertain that Kaia worked part time in a juice bar in Glendale, that she was a yoga teacher and trainee naturopath, and that Reuben was totally gone.

I watched her order drinks. She wasn’t beautiful, in an obvious, western sense, which in a way made it worse. She just glowed, in a slow-cooked, wholesome way. And she was good, I sensed. Kind and Good, in sharp contrast to my Manic and Dark. Reuben pressed down the tip of her nose and laughed. He used to do that with me.

This would have been much easier, I thought churlishly, if Eddie and I had worked out. Even if Reuben got down on one knee and proposed to Kaia, right here in the bar, I’d have cheered and clapped and probably offered to organize their bloody wedding.

If Eddie had called.

My stomach pitted miserably and I checked my phone, as if that would help anything.

Then I froze.

Was that . . . Was it . . . ?

A speech bubble. A little gray speech bubble, which meant Eddie—real, living, breathing Eddie, somewhere in the world—was typing a reply to my messages. I sat perfectly still, watching the bubble, and the South Bank faded to zero.

“It’s so lovely to be in London,” Kaia said, arriving back with my drink. No! Go away! “I’d forgotten how much I love this city.” I glanced down. The bubble was still there. He was still writing. I tingled. Terror, delight. Terror, delight. I made myself smile at Kaia. She was wearing one of those rings that sits halfway up your finger. I’d bought one, years ago, and it had fallen down a public toilet on El Matador Beach.

“You know London, then?” I made myself ask.

The speech bubble was still there.

“I came here a couple of times on assignments,” she replied. “I was a journalist, in another life.”

She shuddered lightly and I waited, hoping she’d continue. I had literally nothing to say.

(This! This was one of those moments I’d talked about with Mrs. Rushby. Total loss of self. Of manners, sociability, control.)

Speech bubble: still there.

“But I realized I wasn’t really enjoying my life.” She paused, remembering the time when she didn’t really enjoy her life. “So I drilled down to what I cared about, and that was nutrition, being outdoors, keeping my body peaceful and strong. I jumped out of the fast lane and did my yoga teacher training. It was one of the best things I ever did.”

“Oh, great!” I said. “Namaste to that!”

Kaia took Reuben’s hand underneath the table. “But then I suffered a major trauma two years ago and that’s when the more profound change happened . . .”

Speech bubble: still there.

“And I realized, when I began to emerge from it all, that it wasn’t enough to be true to myself and my needs. I had to look wider; I had to help others. Give freely of myself, if that doesn’t sound too pious.”

Her cheeks brightened. “Oh, my God, I sound totally pious,” she laughed, and I remembered that this was no easier for her than it was for me.

Reuben looked at her as if the mother of Christ sat on the bench next to him. “I don’t think you sounded pious at all,” he said. “Does she, Sarah?”

I put my phone down for a moment and stared at him. Was he seriously asking me to make his new girlfriend feel better about herself?

“So, long story short, I signed up as an associate at the Children’s Hospital,” she said hurriedly. She wanted to stop talking about herself now. “One of the fund-raisers. I do at least a day a week for them, often more. And that’s me, really.”

“I have a lot of time for the CHLA fund-raisers,” I said, glad to at last have common ground. “Wonderful people, and very good friends of our charity. I guess that’s how you two met, then?”

Kaia looked at Reuben, who nodded uncertainly. It’s fine, I wanted to tell him. I’m jealous of your girlfriend, yes, but only because she seems to have got her act together. Not because I still want you, darling boy.

The awful thing about this, I thought, picking up my phone again (speech bubble: still there), was that I had probably fallen more profoundly for Eddie—whom I’d known seven days—than I had Reuben, to whom I’d been married seventeen years. It was me who should be feeling guilty, not Roo.

I turned my phone facedown on the table while I waited for Eddie’s message to arrive, and a terrified euphoria blew over me. The wait was over. In a matter of minutes I’d know.

Reuben clearly had no idea what to add to this exchange, in spite of years in a job that had taught him to communicate in near-impossible circumstances. After a few unconvincing coughs he started talking about the fact that you couldn’t taste chlorine in the tap water over here, or some other such nonsense.

My phone vibrated and I snatched at it. At last. At last.

But it was a text message from Dad.

Darling, if you haven’t left for Gloucestershire yet, don’t. Your grandfather’s been sacked by his brand-new carers. We’ve given up and are taking him down to ours to care for him ourselves. We’ll put him in Hannah’s old room. Please don’t cancel your trip down to see us. We love you (and need you . . .). But if you could delay until tomorrow, we’d be very grateful. DAD x

I went straight back to my Messenger, oblivious to Reuben, Kaia, everyone.

There was no message. Eddie was still online but the speech bubble had disappeared.

I felt my face collapse. My heart.

I made myself look at Kaia, who was talking to me. “I saw two of your Clowndoctors in an oncology ward a couple of years ago,” she was saying. This couldn’t be happening. Where is the message? “There was this little boy and he was so sick and sad and pissed about his chemo program and he shut down when your guys showed up. Just turned his face to the wall and pretended they weren’t there.”

“I explained that that often happens,” Reuben said proudly. “It’s why they work in pairs.”

“So clever!” Kaia beamed. “They work with each other so the child can decide whether or not to join in. Right?”

“Right,” Reuben said. “That way, the kids are in charge.”

Oh, my God. Who was this tedious double act, and where was my message?

“So he turned away and your clowns started doing all these improvisations together, and he couldn’t resist them. I mean, they had me in stitches! By the time they left the ward, he was laughing nonstop.”

Grudgingly, I nodded. I’d seen it often enough.

Desperate for something—anything—to concentrate on that wasn’t Eddie, I launched into a tale about the first time I’d seen Reuben working with kids after he’d trained as a Clowndoctor. Kaia watched me as I rambled on, her little brown chin resting on her little brown hand, the other holding Reuben’s. I stopped eventually and looked at my phone, already picturing the physical shape of his reply, the length of the message, the gray oblong that held it.

But it was not there. It was not there, and Eddie was offline again.

“Can I get anyone a drink?” I asked, pulling my purse out of my bag. “Wine?” I looked at my watch. “It’s quarter past twelve. Perfectly respectable.”

I wrapped my hands around my torso as I waited at the bar, although whether it was to comfort myself or hold myself together I didn’t know.

Twenty minutes later, by which point my solo glass of wine had begun to offer a faint numb, Kaia excused herself and went off to the toilet. I watched her slender legs move under her skirt and tried to imagine Kaia coming to pick Reuben up after work so they could go for dinner, or maybe an evening hike in Griffith Park. Kaia coming to our Christmas party or our summer barbecue; having lunch with Reuben’s sweet, nervous parents at their house in Pasadena. Because all of that would be happening. (A much better choice, I imagined Roo’s mum saying. She had never quite trusted that I wouldn’t eventually return to England with her son.)

“She’s lovely,” I told Reuben.

“Thank you.” He turned gratefully toward me. “Thank you for being so friendly. It means a lot.”

“We needed each other,” I said, after a pause, surprising us both. “And now we don’t. You’ve met a nice girl and I’m happy for you, Roo. I mean it.”

“Yeah,” he said, and I could hear the joy deep in his heart. It was like Reuben had taken one of those long, slow breaths you had to do at the beginning of a yoga class, but he’d never gone back to his normal rhythm.

“Hey,” Reuben began. He looked uncomfortable. “Hey, look, Sarah, I . . . I have to say, your e-mails yesterday were kind of out of character. You sounded . . . not very businesslike. And you sent those documents to our trustees without talking to any of us. Not to mention agreeing with a child that you’d send some of our clowns to her sister without even calling the hospital in question. I was at a loss.”

Kaia was weaving her way back to our table. “I know,” I said. “I had a bad day. It won’t happen again.”

He watched me. “Are you okay?”

“Fine. Just tired.”

He nodded slowly. “Well, shout if you need me. We make mistakes when we don’t follow protocol.”

“I know. Hey, look, we need to talk about the hospice pitch.”

“Sure,” Reuben said. “Now?”

“We can’t talk about it with Kaia here.”

Reuben frowned. “Oh, she won’t mind.”

“I do. This is business, Roo.”

“No,” Reuben said gently. “No, it’s charity. Not business. And Kaia gets it. She’s a friend, not a foe, Sarah.”

I made myself smile. He was right. Everyone except me was right these days.

•   •   •

Reuben and Kaia left forty minutes later. Reuben insisted on making a plan for our hospice pitch, in spite of what I’d said. And I’d gone along with it, because how could I not? Kaia had at least offered to go and sit outside while we talked. (“No, no!” Reuben said. “There’s nothing secret about this.”)

Kaia kissed me, and then gave me a hug. “So great to meet you,” she said. “So great.”

And I said ditto, because there really was nothing about this woman that wasn’t nice.

•   •   •

After they’d left, I turned my phone off and my laptop on, and I worked. People came and went; tuna salads and chips with wobbling pyramids of mayonnaise; wine glasses smudged with workday lipstick and pints of hoppy ale. Outside, the sun was covered with gray sheets. Rain fell, wind blew, the sun returned. The South Bank steamed; umbrellas were shaken.

It was on day five of our affair that I’d looked at Eddie David and thought, I would spend the rest of my life with you. I would commit to it, right now, and know I wouldn’t regret it.

The boiling weather had finally broken and a storm was rampaging across the countryside, flashing and bellowing, hammering on the roof of Eddie’s barn. We were lying on his bed under a skylight, which he said he used mostly for stargazing and weather watching. Lying top to toe, Eddie massaging my foot absentmindedly as he stared up at the wild sky.

“I wonder what Lucy the sheep thinks of all this,” he said. I laughed, imagining Lucy standing under a tree, baaing disconsolately.

“The storms we get in LA are crazy,” I said. “Like Armageddon.”

After a pause he said, “How do you feel about going back there?”

“Uncertain.”

“Why?”

I propped my head up so I could see him properly. “Why do you think?”

Pleased, he tucked my foot under his head and said, “Well, you see, that’s the thing. I’m not sure I’m willing to let you go back.”

And I smiled back at him, and thought, If you told me to stay, if you told me we could start a life together here, I’d stay. Even though I’ve known you only a few days, even though I swore I’d never come back. For you, I’d stay.

•   •   •

It was nearly four by the time I packed up to leave. I switched my phone on, although by now I had no expectations. But there was a text message, from a number I didn’t know.

stay away from eddie, it said.

No punctuation, no greeting, no capitals. Just, stay away.

I sat back down. Read it a few more times. It had been sent at exactly three o’clock.

After a few minutes I decided to call Jo.

“Come to mine,” she said immediately. “Come straight to mine, babe. Rudi’s at his granddad’s. I’m going to give you a glass of wine and then we’re going to call this person, this freak, and find out what’s going on. Okay?”

The rain had closed in again. It raged at the Thames like a gray tantrum, pelting, hammering, screaming, just like the storm Eddie and I had watched from his bed. I waited for a few minutes before giving up and walking out, coatless, in the direction of Waterloo.