Rainbow Rowell - Landline

“Georgie, please.”

She folded her arms and looked miserable. She didn’t want him to say he was sorry. That would take them right back into the heart of their sorry situation.

“Georgie,” he said. “I love you. I love you more than I hate everything else. We’ll make our own enough—will you marry me?”

Georgie stopped, in the middle of fastening a bra behind her back, and turned to face herself in the dressing room mirror.

Oh . . .

Christmas.

On one knee.

Looking straight through her.

“We’ll make our own enough,” he’d said.

Last night on the telephone, Georgie had asked Neal if love was enough.

And fifteen years ago, he’d answered her.

Was that . . . could it just be a coincidence?

Or did it mean . . .

That it had already happened.

That this—all of this, the phone calls, the fighting, the four-hour conversations—had already happened. For Neal. Fifteen years ago.

What if Georgie wasn’t disrupting the timeline with these phone calls—what if this was the timeline? What if it had been the timeline all along?

“We’ll make our own enough,” Neal had said that day at her door.

Georgie remembered him saying it, remembered that it sounded nice—but all she was focused on at the time was the ring in his hand.

Could it be that Neal was referring to a conversation he’d thought she was a part of?

“What if it isn’t enough?” Georgie asked him last night.

“We’ll make our own enough,” he promised her in 1998. “Will you marry me?”

“Oh.”

Georgie gaped at herself in the mirror. “Oh my God,” she gasped.

“It can’t be that bad,” Heather said from outside the fitting room. “You’re not even forty.”

“No, I . . .” Georgie walked out of the mauve cubicle, pulling her mother’s pug sweatshirt down over her head. “I need to go home now.”

“I thought Neal was calling you at our house.”

“Right, I need to go there. Now.”

The attendant met them just outside the room. “Did any of those work out?”

“This one’s fine,” Georgie said. She reached under her shirt and snapped the tags off the bra, handing them to the salesperson. “I’ll take this one.” She started walking toward the cash register.

Neal had never told Georgie why he changed his mind—why he forgave her, why he came back to California and proposed. And Georgie had never asked. She hadn’t wanted to give him an opportunity to reconsider. . . .

But maybe this was why. Maybe she was why. Now.

“I’m sorry,” the salesperson said. “I can’t let you wear that out. Store policy.”

Georgie stared at her. She was a thin, white woman, a little younger than Georgie, with taupe-colored lipstick. She’d kept trying to come into the dressing room with Georgie to make sure the bras were fitting correctly. “But I’m buying it,” Georgie said.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. Store policy.”

“Fine,” Georgie said, “I need to go—I’ll just take it off and do all this some other day.”

“But you already removed the tags. You have to purchase it.”

“Right.” Georgie nodded. “Fine.”

She reached up behind her to unclasp the bra, then after a few seconds of maneuvering, pulled it out one of her sleeves and dropped it on the counter.

“Ring it up twice,” Heather said. “She’ll take two.”

The salesperson went to get another bra.

“You are such a badass,” Heather said, grinning at her. “Have I mentioned that I want to be you when I grow up?”

“I don’t have time for this. We need to leave. Now.”

“But we were going to the Apple Store. Georgie, please. I want an iPad, I’ve already named it.”

“You can order it online. We need to leave.”

“Seriously? You’re really buying me an iPad? Can I also order a pony?”

When Neal left California that Christmas, he and Georgie were as good as broken up, and when he came back, he wanted to marry her. And in between, in between . . .

Maybe this. Maybe her.

Maybe this week, these phone calls—everything—had already happened. Somehow, sometime . . .

And Georgie just had to make sure that it happened again.

“Georgie? Hey.”

Heather shoved the bag of bras into Georgie’s chest. Georgie caught them.

“Sorry to interrupt your aneurysm,” Heather said, “but you said that time was of the essence here.”

“Right,” Georgie said, “right.” She followed Heather to the car, then handed her the key fob. “You drive.”

“Why?” Heather asked.

“I need to think.”

Georgie climbed into the passenger seat and tapped her dead phone against her chin. She didn’t even bother plugging it in.

Georgie set the yellow rotary phone in front of her on the bed and stared at it. She resisted the urge to check the dial tone, just in case Neal called at that exact second.

This changed everything.

Didn’t it?

If Neal had already proposed to her in the past, then Georgie must have already convinced him in the future. It didn’t matter what happened now. What she said. Whether he called her back.

Whatever Georgie did next had already happened. She was walking in her own footsteps—there was nothing she could mess up.

She leaned close to the phone and lifted the receiver to her ear, slamming it down again as soon as she heard a dial tone.

Is that what this whole week was about, preserving the status quo? Maybe she should be grateful for that. . . .

But Georgie had thought—she’d hoped—that this wrinkle in time was offering her a shot at something better.

God, what good is a magic phone, anyway? It isn’t a time machine.

Georgie couldn’t change the past—she could only talk at it. If Georgie had a proper time machine, maybe she could actually fix her marriage. She could go back to the moment that everything started to go bad, and change course.

Except . . .

There hadn’t really been a moment like that.

Things didn’t go bad between Georgie and Neal. Things were always bad—and always good. Their marriage was like a set of scales constantly balancing itself. And then, at some point, when neither of them was paying attention, they’d tipped so far over into bad, they’d settled there. Now only an enormous amount of good would shift them back. An impossible amount of good.

The good that was left between them didn’t carry enough weight. . . .

The kisses that still felt like kisses. The notes Neal stuck to the refrigerator when Georgie got home late. (A sleepy cartoon tortoise with a word bubble telling her there were leftover enchiladas on the bottom shelf.) Shared glances when one of the girls said something silly. The way Neal still put his arm around her when they all went to the movies. (He was probably just more comfortable that way.)

So much of what was still good between them was through Alice and Noomi—but Alice and Noomi were so solidly between them.

Georgie was pretty sure that having kids was the worst thing you could do to a marriage. Sure, you could survive it. You could survive a giant boulder falling on your head—that didn’t mean it was good for you.

Kids took a fathomless amount of time and energy. . . . And they took it first. They had right of first refusal on everything you had to offer.

At the end of the day—after work, after trying to spend some sort of meaningful time with Alice and Noomi—Georgie was usually too tired to make things right with Neal before they fell asleep. So things stayed wrong. And the girls just kept giving them something else to talk about, something else to focus on. . . .

Something else to love.

When Georgie and Neal were smiling at each other, it was almost always over Alice and Noomi’s heads.

And Georgie wasn’t sure she’d risk changing that . . . even if she could.

Having kids sent a tornado through your marriage, then made you happy for the devastation. Even if you could rebuild everything just the way it was before, you’d never want to.

If Georgie could talk to herself in the past, before the scales tipped, what would she say? What could she say?

Love him.

Love him more.

Would that make a difference?

When Georgie was eight months pregnant with Alice, she and Neal still hadn’t settled on a day care.

Georgie thought maybe they should get a nanny. They could almost afford one. She and Seth had just started working on their third show, a CBS sitcom about four mismatched roommates who hung out in a coffee shop. Neal called it Store-Brand Friends.

Neal was working in pharmaceutical research then. He’d thought about graduate school for a while but didn’t know what he wanted to study, so he got a job in a lab. Then he got another job in another lab. He hated it, but at least he worked better hours than Georgie. Neal was done every day by five—and home making dinner by six.

There was a nice day care they were considering on the studio lot. They went and visited, and Georgie put their name on the waiting list.