Nora Goes Off Script

by Annabel Monaghan

After Jenna’s come for Bernadette and we hear her car pull onto the main road, Leo crosses the kitchen and takes me into his arms. With my body on high alert, I realize that I am badly in need of this hug. The strength of his arms around me and the reassuring smell of him is starting to calm me down. “So where are we right now?” he says into my hair. “I’m terrified,” I admit. “Me too. Can I take you out to the tea house?” It feels like the right idea, to get away from the smell of waffles and stacks of dishes into a space where we can think more clearly. “Sure,” I say, and he takes my hand as we walk barefoot outside.

I need to touch him and I am starting to worry this might be my last chance. I take his hand in mine and I run my fingers over his palm. I’ll do this forever to avoid hearing him say this was a mistake.

“I know why I’m terrified. What are you so nervous about? Don’t you do this all the time?” I’m trying to lighten things up, like we’re just Nora and Leo shooting the breeze, but it falls flat. “You’re a real person.” “Because I drive a Subaru?” I’m not sure when I developed this knack for bringing up the world’s least sexy things at the worst possible times. “Because I know you. I don’t have a lot of experience with that.” “Well, I don’t have a lot of experience at all,” I say. “We don’t have to do this.” He says this, but now his hand is on the inside of my crossed ankle. He’s studying the line he’s drawing up the length of my calf. The feel of his fingers barely touching my skin as they reach the back of my knee makes me catch my breath. “I think we do,” I say, almost in a whisper because I don’t trust my voice. He looks up and kisses me deeply, gripping his hands behind my head, as if I’m a flight risk. As if. I am so dizzy with this kiss that I don’t know when my arms wrap around his neck and my legs find their way around his back. The dress, as it turns out, was a good decision. We are in a frenzy of clothing removal, and when there is nothing between us, everything but my heart rate slows down. He kisses me slowly, and as he starts to make love to me, I know for sure that Leo hasn’t been acting. In his rawest state, with his guard completely down, he is the same person who’s been sitting on my porch—attentive, listening, staying for the whole story. For the first tim...

“I’ve been thinking about that for a long time,” he says. “You only met me two weeks ago.” Leo laughs and kisses my shoulder. “You really aren’t very romantic, are you?” “I might be an overthinker.” “I’ll fix you,” he says, and I turn around to face him. He’s joking, but I love the idea of being on the other side of the fixing equation. I love the idea that he thinks I’m worth the trouble. I love that buried deep in that sentence is a hint of the future tense.

My kids know something’s up, but mercifully they don’t know what. They’re at an age where their first suspicion wouldn’t be sex, but they’re also at an age where they are exquisitely tuned in to subtle changes in their mother. I feel them watching me, and I don’t know if it’s the lightness in my body or the smile on my face while I wash potatoes. I know I’m glowing, and there’s nothing I can do to hide that or make it stop.

While everything’s changed, in that first week my routine isn’t so different. Sunrise, breakfast, kids to school, run, shower, tea house from ten to two. Except instead of writing, I lie in bed with a movie star. There’s a lot of sex, like a ridiculous amount of sex. In my previous life, I would have considered half this amount of sex to be a complete nightmare, but now a day spent in bed feels like a day well spent. It’s possible that I didn’t really understand what sex was before Leo.

world. With Leo, it’s not about either of us. It’s like there’s this third thing we’ve created. We step into that space and the rest of the world is gone. There is no time, no news, no world outside that daybed until three o’clock. Leo likes to run his finger from the bottom of my ear, down my neck, and along my collarbone, and sometimes the rhythm of it puts me to sleep. We get up for food deliveries. Sometimes we run errands. We are at once energized and lazy, supercharged and sleepy. I wonder if other people can feel that we are operating on a different energetic wave, like we hear a separate soundtrack and feel the air on our skin in a more exquisite way. Deep down, I’m fully aware that this is not a sustainable reality, but I cling to it like you do with a really good dream when you’re sure you could never replicate the feeling in real life.

Leo has never set foot in my bedroom. He doesn’t so much as brush his hand against mine when my kids are home. We don’t discuss this, but he seems to understand my instinct to protect them. In the darkest corner of my being, where a tiny piece of me still recognizes reality, I know Leo is temporary. I’m in for a horrible fall, but as long as I can keep that as my problem, not theirs, this is worth it.

He starts coming on my runs, which he says are boring. I like a loop because it forces me to finish. And, frankly, my whole life is a loop; every day I end up right where I began. He likes variety, so we start exploring the back country roads that wind around Laurel Ridge. Some stretches are paved and some are dirt, changing up that sound our feet make as we run. We pass an occasional house with a split-rail fence, but mostly the roads have meadows on both sides, lined with the last of the daffodils. Old cherry trees and dogwoods offer sporadic shade, and if the wind blows at just the right time, we run through a shower of white blossoms that feel like confetti. Sometimes we run so far out that...

“So, my mom had lung cancer,” he tells me on a walk. “But they didn’t tell me until the very end. They didn’t want to interrupt my filming, like that matters.” He’s quiet for a while. “I finally saw her the day before she died. Luke had been there for two weeks, which really pissed me off. The last thing she ever said to me was ‘movie stars don’t do hospice.’ ” “What does Luke do?” I ask. “Luke’s a lawyer. I guess lawyers do hospice. Anyway, in three days I found out she was sick, said good-bye, and she died.” “So that’s why you’re here?” I hate the neediness in my voice the second I say it. “You’re why I’m here,” he says. “But before you, this, it felt good to connect to real life—the forest, the sunrise, the schedule. Like a person who knows about that stuff c...

“You’re a chump,” he kids. “I should tell you, I’m not good with money either. I don’t know anything about it.” “Except that you can afford a lot of bananas.” Leo laughs. “So many bananas.” “Well, I’m rich now, so it’s all good,” I say. “You are? All my dreams have come true.” He pulls me in tight. “What a catch.” “I’m serious. The Tea House got me out of debt. When you’ve been in a lot of debt, having no debt feels pretty rich. This isn’t going to be the movie where the heroine has to sell the farm.” “Thank God. I like the farm.”

“I appreciate beauty,” he says. And he smiles a smile I don’t know from the movies. It’s the same one he had when Arthur made it all the way through his script without looking. “What’s this smile?” I ask, tracing his lips. “I’m happy. I’m so happy he left you.”

Penny texts me ten times a day: What’s happening now? How long is he staying? Why aren’t you texting me back????? I reply: I am dangerously happy and generally too naked to text you back.

For two hours every afternoon, we are apart and it’s excruciating. He’s in the auditorium playing director, and I’m backstage babysitting. It’s odd to see all the normal people treating me like a normal person. I am not a normal person. I’m Leo Vance’s girlfriend.

“Mrs. Hamilton,” Savanah asks, “are we practicing the market scene today?” I don’t know, I think. I don’t even know what day it is. It hasn’t even been a week since Leo became my ...

Kate is helping me corral the kids and calls them out in groups to get outfitted for costumes. I let her take over. “I have never seen you like this,” she says. “Like what?” As if I don’t know. “Giddy. Loose. Spacey.” “I am all of those things.” “So like, what’s the plan? He’s staying a couple of weeks and then leaving after the first performance?” “Well, that’s what he said before, but now I don’t know. We don’t talk about it, but he kind of talks like he’s staying. Like there’s more than this.” Her look of concern is hard to ignore. “I’m totally delusional, aren...

Sometimes I leave the kids with Kate so that I can stand at stage left and watch Leo direct. First of all, I just like looking at him. And if I’m lucky I’ll catch his eye and he’ll shoot me a look that makes me shiver. I also like to see Leo doing what he does, trying to teach the kids about acting. He takes the whole thing so seriously.

“This is my dad’s favorite thing to talk about—personal responsibility. If you own up to not being perfect, life gets easier.

wrong. I hope they can’t see on my face how absolutely in love with Leo I am in this moment. I hope that, while I can no longer be saved from myself, they are taking this at face value: We have a nice houseguest who’s helping with the play and sharing his worldview. But I have to admit that the four of us around the kitchen table feels like something much more than that.

Arthur nods at Leo, like with a profound understanding. Something is happening over chicken and rice and green beans. Wisdom is being exchanged. Some might call it parenting. I marvel at the fact that this moment was created by someone besides me. Even when Ben was here, I used to wake up in the middle of the night worrying that every life lesson my kids would ever get would come from me. Do they know how to cross the street? Do they know to run in a zigzag if they’re being chased by a bear? The lessons they’d learn from Ben would be more like cautionary tales: Don’t be an entrepreneur if you don’t want to work at it. Don’t belittle your kids if you want them to love you.

He goes out to the tea house and we text until we both fall asleep. This routine is preposterous really. I barely sleep, and I haven’t written a word since that first kiss. But I don’t want a single thing to change.

Most mornings, we snuggle our way through the sunrise and listen for the creak of the screen door. It’s a Saturday, but Bernadette is not a late sleeper. “Move over,” she commands before she’s all the way outside. She sits next to Leo, and he puts his arm around her. She leans into his chest. I haven’t noticed this before and wonder if it’s the first time. I can’t make my mind compute how long Leo’s been here, but suddenly it feels like he always has been.