Another Side of the Heart by C. H. Lazarovich

Author:C. H. Lazarovich [Lazarovich, C. H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Womens Fiction, Contemporary Fiction
Publisher: AIA Publishing
Published: 2023-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

20

I look around. A game of paddleball is happening. Several frisbee players. A couple of kites soaring high, one that looks to be a colorful parrot.

It’s the week leading up to Fourth of July, and, like every year, tourists swarm the island for the national day. The beach is no different, with barely a foot of sand between me and the large groups next to me. Men, women, children, sitting in circles, some under umbrellas, others stretched out on blankets.

“He can’t stop talking to me about his work,” a woman in a white bikini says to another woman in a one-piece suit with animal designs. The two sit less than five or six feet from my chair. The woman’s voice elevates. “But at the same time, I’m just as busy as he is. Running the kids to swim and baseball.”

It sounds as if the woman in the one-piece suit is offering words of empathy, though I can’t hear all she says.

The woman in the white bikini continues: “I mean I told him, ‘You’re coming at me and you’re just disregarding our relationship.’ I told him this wasn’t a threat. But I mean, I’m just as busy as he is, and I’m not going to apologize for the way I feel.” After unleashing this tirade, she appears satisfied and lies back in her beach chair, shutting her eyes.

Last year at this time, Lily had recently turned twenty-one. She and three roommates from college stayed at our cottage, the same friends she visited in the Hamptons before the accident, barely a month later. One night, the four of them gussied up—short skirts, strapless tops, high-heeled sandals—and went to dinner at Shell, a swanky spot on the east end of the island that later turns into a nightclub. Mark had stayed home in our Manhattan apartment, exhausted, after being part of a team that’d performed a sixteen-hour surgery separating conjoined twin girls from Sri Lanka.

I awoke when Lily and the girls rolled in around two-thirty in the morning, tipsy, teasing each other, jabbing on and on about Instagram. Starved, they heated Bagel Bites, mini hot dogs, and soft pretzels in the microwave while gushing about guys they’d met. I stood in the kitchen listening; they barely realized I was in the room.

Lily had met a young guy named Jake. They exchanged Snapchats, and for the next week, they ‘talked’ every day.

“What’s he like?” I asked one day.

She smiled broadly, tilted her chin, eyes brightened, and said, “He’s cute. I’ll show you a picture of him on Instagram.” She saw him a couple of days later when they went to dinner at the Lazy Gull. For some reason—we either forgot or something interrupted us—I never saw a picture of him on Instagram or met him, until her funeral.

Most of that day remains a blur. But I remember Jake coming to the funeral parlor, alone, dressed in a navy suit, brown shoes. I didn’t know who he was when he approached Mark and me. Light hair, high cheekbones, muscular, but thin.

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