Waiting to Surface: A Novel - Softcover

Listfield, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416537856 ISBN 13: 9781416537854

Publisher: Atria Books, 2008

Synopsis

Based on the author’s own experiences a “heartrending” (People) and haunting story about a magazine editor and mother whose life is changed by a phone call revealing that her husband has vanished without a trace.

On a steamy August morning, Sarah Larkin drops her six-year-old daughter, Eliza, off at camp and heads to her office, where she works as an editor of a women’s magazine. She is sitting at her desk testing a $450 face cream when the phone rings.

Detective Ronald Brook tells Sarah that her husband has vanished. A keening sound escapes from Sarah’s throat as the detective lays out the few facts he knows.

A noted sculptor, Todd Larkin went swimming at midnight off the coast of Florida and hasn’t returned. He was staying with a woman. He was drinking. He left behind his keys, wallet, cell phone, and his return airline ticket. They also found two drawings and pieces of a sculpture. But there is no trace of him or his body. The coast guard has been scouring the shoreline, but no one has seen a thing.

Has Todd run off to start a new life or is he dead? Could it have been an accident, suicide, or homicide? As Sarah grapples with the mystery of his disappearance, she is forced to confront the hopes and disappointments of her marriage. And through it all, she must also help her young daughter deal with the crisis while meeting the demands of the high-powered magazine world.

“A gripping story” (Parade) about coming to terms with loss, learning to live in a world without answers, and discovering the ability to treasure love once again, Waiting to Surface is a story that will stay with you long after you turn the last page.

About this title

About the Author:

Emily Listfield is the former editor in chief of Fitness magazine and author of seven novels, including the New York Times Notable It Was Gonna Be Like Paris and Waiting to Surface. Her writing has appeared everywhere from the New York Times Styles section to Harper’s Bazaar. She is currently Chief Content Officer of Kaplow PR, where she helps brands like Skype, Shiseido, and Laura Mercier refine their voice, storytelling, and strategy. She lives in New York City with her daughter. Visit her website at EmilyListfield.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

One

It is possible, after all, for someone to vanish off the face of the earth.

Sarah Larkin took the hand of her six-year-old daughter, Eliza, as they waited for the traffic light to change on the corner of Fourteenth Street and First Avenue. At 8:00 a.m., the air was already thick and tufted with smog, the streets littered with the detritus of a summer that boasted record levels of heat and rain. Eliza's hand was cool and dry, her long fingers not quite closing around her mother's, primed to slither free as soon as possible. Sarah noticed that she had removed the Band-Aid from her right forefinger where a splinter had grown infected. She had a habit of denying illness, cuts, anxious to erase any evidence of vulnerability. All summer, Sarah had watched her closely, subtly poking for soft spots or internal bleeding. It had been three months since she and Todd had separated, three months since they had sat Eliza down at the dining room table early one afternoon, her blond head tilted to the floor as they spoke slowly, carefully, words they had meant to rehearse but couldn't quite bring themselves to. The weight of knowing that they were about to change their daughter's life, and their helplessness to stop it, caused them both to pause, look at each other, look away, start again. "Daddy and I have something to tell you," Sarah finally said. "You know that we both love you very much." Eliza arched, instantly suspicious. All through the spring she had listened to the yelling, the door-slamming, hiding in her room while she hummed softly to herself as if the repetitive nursery tunes could drum out the sounds of disintegration. "Daddy is going to move into his studio," Sarah continued. Before she could go any further, Eliza ducked to the floor and covered her head with her hands, protecting herself from incoming news. "We are still a family, we will always be a family," Sarah said.

Todd and Sarah sat in silence while Eliza crouched at their feet. They hadn't planned this conversation, they hadn't planned any of it. They had been pushing and pulling, picking over their ten-year marriage for months when, after a particularly bitter argument, Todd stormed off to his studio twelve blocks away -- and never quite managed to return. The first day apart stretched into a second and then a third until what had started out as a spontaneous act came to seem inevitable. Neither had truly wanted to end it, but they had been at an impasse for so long that their tolerance of each other was worn away; everything had become an irritant. Nevertheless, beneath it all -- the fights about his drinking and lack of financial responsibility, her excessive expectations and constant nagging -- each still hoped that the other would give way, give in, that they would somehow find a way back to each other. They were still tied by the sticky net of habit and remorse. They had not figured out how to do this yet.

Eventually they coaxed Eliza up off the floor, and the three of them played a game of Parcheesi, clinging to the vestiges of familiarity, though it was as if they were suspended in space, with no ground beneath them. Sarah left Todd and Eliza alone as they were setting up another game, giving them time to knit back together in whatever way they might find, while she wandered the fifth floor of Bergdorf 's aimlessly, wondering when she could go home, what home would be now. That night Sarah placed a photograph in Eliza's room of Todd holding her in the hospital a few hours after she was born, his head bent to hers, their eyes closed, a smile, beatific and peaceful, curling his lips. It looked, even now, like the simplest kind of joy. She wondered, as she dusted it and placed it carefully amid the origami Todd used to make with Eliza every morning as they ate breakfast, how it happens, how you go from that instant to this, unable to alter course even as you saw it unfold before you unwanted, the small incremental steps of marital crime and then the larger ones, the zigzag rents of a failing union when physical attraction outlasts common sense.

Eliza let go of her mother's hand on the northeast corner of Fourteenth Street and stepped around a broken beer bottle, her toes with their chipped pink glittery nail polish hanging over her blue jelly sandals.

"Daddy said he'd send me seashells," she said, her voice tinged with accusation and neediness, one of the new sounds of the summer. She did not look her mother in the eye.

"They'll come," Sarah said. She wondered if Eliza could sense the doubt lurking beneath the reassurance. Todd had gone to Florida eleven days earlier to help an old college friend in the final stages of remodeling his house. He had only told Sarah of the trip two nights before he left, and though her first response was resentment -- at his freedom, at his willingness to leave his daughter at such a crucial juncture -- she had twisted the information around until she saw its potential. Perhaps the absence, the tangible miles between them, would make him appreciate all that he was in danger of losing: his family, the very life they had until recently taken for granted. Perhaps, she thought, it would make him decide, finally, to change. She still couldn't believe that love, at least for a child, wouldn't win out in the end. "He'll be back on Monday," she told Eliza. "That's just three days away."

Sarah pulled open the heavy door of the Y where Eliza was attending day camp. They waited for the elevator and stood crammed in with other parents and children as it lurched unsteadily to the third floor, where the halls were lined with the garish primary colors of rainy-day art projects. As soon as the doors opened, Eliza ran out, her long legs, knobby and thin, splaying like broken wings. She had Todd's body, all lankiness and limbs. Sarah watched her enter room 303 without looking back. She had never been a clinging child. Like her father, she was stoic, independent, stubborn. Eliza would wander out of playgrounds, out of sight; she would follow any stranger, certain she could fend for herself. They had to watch her carefully. Today, she was crackling with anticipation for the outing to Coney Island. Todd had taken her there last summer, and she still savored the memory of the crammed and swirling kiddie park, its dragon roller coaster and teacup whirligig. He had also taken her on a ride called Dante's Inferno, which had given her nightmares for a month, though she now flatly denied any such thing.

Eliza scanned the room and spotted her best friend, Jane. The two huddled in the corner, whispering the multitude of secrets that had accumulated overnight, their eyes wide with complicity and delight.

"Comparing notes on lingerie, no doubt." Sarah turned to see Lucy, Jane's mother and one of Sarah's oldest friends, leaning against the wall. "I did, by the way, tell Jane that the new rule is panties have to stay on during play dates." Sarah rolled her eyes. "Don't set the bar too high."

For months, the girls had been sneaking into any available bathroom to show each other their underwear. Last week, Sarah had heard them in Eliza's bedroom. "Move your leg, I can't see," Jane had said.

"Do you have time to go out for coffee?" Lucy asked.

"I can't. I have a story meeting at nine." Sarah looked over at Lucy in her day-off outfit of Sevens jeans, Juicy T-shirt, and Pumas. "I want your deal," she said, thinking of the three-day workweek she had negotiated at the PR firm she had helped found five years ago, but more than that, her marriage, stable, predictable, without sparks but without melodrama, her general contract to have an easier, if less vaunted life.

Lucy smiled, ignoring the wistful edge in her friend's voice. The two made tentative plans to take the kids swimming the following day and headed out. Sarah hailed a taxi and sat back as it crawled slowly uptown in spurts and pauses past tenements to the midtown crush of people wading into office buildings, Starbucks in hand.

Even at this hour, the city seemed covered in mildew. She played with the ashtray on the car door, flipping it up and down. Whenever Eliza went on day trips at school or camp, Sarah pulsed with a low-level maternal anxiety until she knew her daughter had returned, safe, unharmed. She pictured the rickety rides, the clusters of aimless restless teenagers looking for amusement, for action, for anything to distract them from the bleakness of their lives, the beach littered with glass, the ocean that Eliza did not know how to navigate and yet had absolutely no fear of. She imagined Eliza separated from the group, lost, vulnerable.

The cab inched through Times Square, its lights blinking like an all-night club after the guests had gone, and pulled up in front of the gray steel canopy of the new Compton Media Holdings building. Sarah walked through the heavy glass doors and stepped carefully down the sloped marble entrance, a design that had quickly become hated by editors who, on rainy days, had to navigate its treacherously slick surface in spindly heels. She swiped her ID card through the turnstile and waited by the bank of elevators in a cluster of long-legged women. At five feet five, curvy but slim (at least by normal standards), Sarah -- despite her Prada mules, white Chaiken skirt, and wavy shoulder-length hair carefully streaked to the exact blond as Eliza's -- still felt as if she were trying a little too hard to pass as one of them. When she had first started at Compton Media one year ago, the unabashed way the other women scanned her up and down, then promptly dismissed her, had been terrifying.Years of working at home as a freelance journalist had left her with a closet stocked almost entirely from the Gap save for a few rather low-cut dresses -- cleavage was one of her better assets -- to wear to openings. She had rushed out that first weekend and bought an entire wardrobe, trying to accomplish in forty-eight hours what other women had spent years accumulating but without the bone-deep knowledge of how to put it together that came readily to just a few -- all, it seemed, located in this b...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1416537856
• ISBN 13: 9781416537854
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336