Final Destination III (2 page)

I took in a large gulp of air and reopened my eyes, forcing the memory to the back of my head. The first thing I did was call my mother. She was happy to hear from me and told me that she was eating dinner. I encouraged her to eat everything and order an extra dessert.

“Honey, you sound tired,” she said.

“I didn’t sleep well last night, and I have a lot going on at work.” I wasn’t going to get her involved with my love life and make her worry.

“Well, don’t stay too late at work. You’re young and beautiful and must live life to the fullest. Remember, tomorrow is not promised to anyone.”

Ah. My mother’s words of wisdom. I missed her so much.

“’Night, Mom. I love you. See you on Friday.”

“I love you too. From here to the moon. Good night.”

CLICK.

After hanging up the phone, I forced myself to review Catherine’s “To Do” list. I still needed to finish color-coding her files—something I dreaded doing—and set a meeting with Frederick Allyn of Allen & Allyn. Not familiar with Allen & Allyn, I googled the name. It was a large Park Avenue law firm that prided itself on winning hard-to-win cases. I wondered what the meeting was about as I dialed the number.

I easily got through to Mr. Allyn’s office. Most people in high places worked past six. His assistant said he had a cancellation at four tomorrow and could see Ms. St. Clair.

I spent the next three hours color-coding the files. The tedious busywork at least kept my mind off Ari. Nine o’clock rolled around. I was exhausted and bleary-eyed. Grabbing my messenger bag and skateboard, I moped over to the elevators. To my surprise, when I stepped inside the first one that opened, Ike Abrams was there.

“Ah, Ms. Greene, working late, I see.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied nervously.

He winked at me “I have my eye on you. I think you have potential to move up in this company.”

A big smile spread across my face. His words were the first ray of sunshine in this dismal, dismal day. “Thank you.”

The elevator doors slid open. Ike let me exit first. “Good night, Ms. Greene. Be careful on that board of yours.”

I smiled again. “I will. Good night.”

After Ike departed the building, I peered through the revolving glass doors for any sign of Ari. There was none. I’m sure he was home tucking his son into bed. I should have felt relieved, but instead there was an emptiness deep in the pit of my stomach.

I was not looking forward to skateboarding home. I was tired. Depressed. And hungry. But only for him. At least, there would be far fewer pedestrians, cars, and taxis to weave around at this hour than at rush hour. After stopping at Mr. Costanzo’s pizza joint for a quick slice of pizza that I barely ate, I made it to my brownstone. Carrying my skateboard under my arm, I trudged up the three steep flights of stairs to my apartment. Having easy access to both the front door and the door to my apartment, I was grateful that for once my keys felt sorry for me.

Once inside my apartment, I immediately fed Jo-Jo and then played my messages. I longed to hear a message from Ari.
Nada.
He had, for sure, read my book of sayings on the train.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder
. Damn him! He was taunting me. The only message on the machine was one from Dr. Chernoff, asking me to call him as soon as possible to discuss my mother’s situation. I sighed. I just didn’t need more doom and gloom.

As I slugged to the bathroom to take a shower, the phone rang. My spirits perked up. It had to be him!
Don’t go there!
a voice in my head shouted. I froze. The phone continued to ring until my message machine picked up the call.

“Sarah,” the voice sobbed.

Oh my God! It was Lauren. I ran to the phone, praying to get there before the message machine cut her off.

I grabbed the receiver. “Lauren, what’s going on?”

“I caught Taylor fucking Muffy Malone.” She could barely get the words out.

Muffy Malone was her best friend from her swanky Upper East Side private girls’ school.

“I don’t want to live anymore.”

My heart skipped a beat. This was not the first time Taylor had cheated on her. And this was not the first time my manic depressive friend had an extreme reaction. The first time she caught him, she starved herself for a month and almost had to be institutionalized. The second time, she slit her wrist. Panic gripped me. I pleaded, “Lauren, don’t do anything crazy! I’ll be right there!”

Oh, shit! Grabbing my messenger bag and Lauren’s spare set of keys that I kept in an envelope behind the Josephine Baker portrait, I dashed out the door to my apartment and down the three flights of stairs. Once outside, I hailed a cab.  Luck was on my side. One pulled up immediately.

“Fifty Seventh Street between Park and Lex.”

The cab raced off. I held my breath.

When we got to my destination, I jumped out of the cab.

“I’ll pay you double the next time I see you,” I told the shocked cab driver and ran off.

I sprinted up to Lauren’s building. The doorman recognized me. I composed myself and said, “Apartment 15C. Lauren’s expecting me.”

With a smile, the uniformed man buzzed her apartment. There was no answer. My already fast heartbeat accelerated.

“I bet she’s listening to her iPod with her earphones and can’t hear the intercom.”

The doorman chuckled. “Just like my thirteen-year-old daughter.” He gave me access to Lauren’s apartment. I breathed a sigh of relief and hurried to the elevator.

Thankfully, I was the sole person on the elevator and got to the fifteenth floor quickly. My heart was racing as I ran down the long hallway to Lauren’s corner apartment. I prayed that she hadn’t slit her wrist again! And that I wasn’t too late.

When I tore into her apartment, Lauren was in the living room, sitting on her white shag carpet in a pool of vomit. A half-drunk bottle of white wine was next to her along with an empty container of aspirin. Her normally glorious hair was matted to her head, and tears were streaming down her vomit-coated face. She was sobbing uncontrollably.

Panic charged through me as I ran to her side. “Oh God, Lauren, what have you done?”

“I can’t live without Taylor,” she sobbed.

“Fuck him!” I barked at her. “He’s a total creep! You deserve better.”

Lauren clutched her stomach and upchucked again. Her eyes rolled back in head.

“Lauren, we have to get you to a hospital!”

“No!” she shrieked. “My parents will institutionalize me! Go away!” She began to convulse and sweat profusely.

Oh, God! What was I going to do? Lauren would never forgive me if she ended up in a mental institution. And there was this to consider—if Lauren’s attempted suicide got out to the press, she and her family would never live it down.
Think, Sarah, think!

The answer came to me quickly. Ari. I pulled out my wallet from my messenger bag and fumbled through it for the hundred dollar bill with his cell phone number scribbled on it. He told me to call him if I ever had an emergency. This was an emergency.

I found my cell phone and punched in the number. His phone rang and rang.
Pick up, Ari. Please pick up.
And then a voice. Cold and stinging.

“Sarah.”

“Ari, I need your help. I’m with Lauren. She’s overdosed on wine and aspirin.” I was speaking a mile a minute.

His tone took on urgency. “Where are you?”

I gave him Lauren’s address and apartment number.

“I’ll be right there. In the meantime, see if she has any Gatorade. If not, make her drink water.” CLICK.

I hurried to Lauren’s refrigerator, and miraculously, among all the Diet Cokes, I found a single bottle of Gatorade.

“Drink this!” I urged Lauren when I returned to her side. She was still shaking and sweating buckets. I put the bottle to her lips, and to my relief, she slowly sipped the contents down. I prayed that Ari would get here soon. In the meantime, I managed to get Lauren cleaned up and into a fresh set of clothes. I noticed, for the first time, that she wasn’t wearing her five-carat engagement ring.

The intercom buzzed ten minutes later. Ari! Pretending I was Lauren, I told the doorman to send him up. He fell for my impersonation.

The doorbell rang. I ran to open it. I was not prepared for my reaction when I met him face to face. I thought my knees would buckle as my blood rushed to my head. He held me in his gaze for a brief moment—oh, those beautiful but unreadable gemstone eyes—and then sprinted past me to Lauren. Shaking, she had begun to hallucinate.

“Fuck!” he said. “We need to get her to hospital right away.”

I bit my lip.

“Get me a blanket. And grab the bottle of wine and aspirin. They’ll need to analyze how much she consumed.” Without a word, I did exactly what he said.

He scooped Lauren up in his arms, and I followed him out the door. The silence we shared in the elevator was tense. We avoided eye contact. I could not begin to imagine what was going on his head. As for me, there was a sick, sinking feeling that deepened as the elevator descended.

The doorman gave us a strange look as we skirted past him. “Too much partying,” I told him. “She’ll be okay.”
I only prayed.

Ari’s Bentley was parked right outside the building. He loaded Lauren, who was now in a semi-conscious state, into the backseat and wrapped the blanket around her. A vision of him carrying his blanketed unconscious toddler son Ben into the hospital flashed in my head. I wondered if he was reliving that painful memory as I gazed at his solemn face.

He opened the front passenger car door for me and then hopped into the driver’s seat. The car peeled off the curb. More silence.

The car raced up Park Avenue. Finally, Ari broke the ice, but kept his eyes focused on the road. “I’m taking her to Lenox Hill Hospital. We’re almost there.”

I told him about my concern about the negative publicity this incident might generate for Lauren and her family and the possibility that Lauren’s parents might send her away to some rehab clinic.

“Don’t worry, Saarah.”

I melted hearing him say my name.

“We’re going to use a private backdoor entrance and check her in under a different name. No one except you and me will know about this incident. I’ve already taken care of everything.”

I glanced back at Lauren. She was resting peacefully. Hope coursed through me. Ari had that effect on me. In his presence, I believed everything was possible. Everything would be okay. Even better than just okay. This godly man was a healer. Oh, how I loved him! But he wasn’t meant to be mine. I fought back the tears that threatened to leak out of my eyes.

In no time, we reached the private entrance of Lenox Hill Hospital. An emergency team was already there waiting for us with a gurney. The paramedics quickly unloaded Lauren onto the stretcher, took her vitals, and hooked her up to a moveable IV. She looked so frail. So vulnerable. So helpless.

As they rushed her through the entrance, the dam that was holding back my tears collapsed. A river poured down my cheeks, and I began to sob.

“Oh, Ari, I’m so scared. What if she dies?”

Ari blanketed me in his strong manly arms. I buried my tear-soaked face into his soft cotton tee as he caressed my tangled tresses.

“Shhh, ” he whispered in my ear. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

He let me weep in that position for a long time. I don’t know how long I’d been there when he said, “Come on. Let’s find out how she’s doing.”

I let him take my hand in his and lead me up to the fifth floor. The Benjamin M. Golden Pavilion. The wing was named after his father. My guess was that this is where he was treated for cancer and that the Golden family had donated the wing in his memory. It resembled the lobby of a luxury hotel, filled with expensive Persian rugs, plush leather couches and armchairs, and expensive works of art on the walls. Ari sat down on one of the couches while I, deliberately distancing myself from him, sat across the way in an armchair. My sobbing had subsided, but I was still very anxious.

Ari glared at me, his blue eyes fierce. I knew what was coming and braced myself.

“Saarah, why did you stand me up?” His lips thinned into an angry line, awaiting my response.

My heart pounded, and I fidgeted with my fingers.
Because your psycho ex-wife is my psycho boss!
is what I wanted to scream out, but revealing this would just open a Pandora’s box with dire consequences for everyone.

I had to work late?
While that was a good excuse (although not exactly true), I could only keep that up for the rest of the workweek and would have to come up with another one to avoid seeing him over the weekend.

My mind raced. Finally, I knew what to say. “I’m seeing someone else,” I mumbled. While I appeared calm on the outside, inside I was aching. Falling apart.

Ari’s eyes grew steely. He said nothing, but his expression begged for information.

“It’s someone at work. We’ve been seeing each other for a while, but decided to cool it for a bit. You know, to see if we really wanted to be a couple.”

Ari listened silently and intensely, not blinking an eye.

“I’ve missed him so much.” Oh God, was this hard!

Ari’s eyes narrowed. “So, I see, Saarah. I’ve been a Band-Aid.”

I felt sick-to-my-stomach terrible. “He told me today he wants me back.”

Silence.

“I’m going to move in with him.”

Silence.

“Ari, I hope you understand.”

“I understand.” His voice was devoid of emotion.

I forced a half-smile that said thanks. Inside, my heart was bleeding tears. After tonight, I would never see my gorgeous stranger on a train—or his son Ben—again.

I might have burst into real tears once more had not a doctor walked up to us. I jumped up from my chair, my heart hammering.

The doctor lifted his horn-rim glasses on top of his balding head and wiped sweat from his brow. Oh, God. Wasn’t this what they did on TV shows when the doctor was going to break the bad news that the patient had died?

“Ms. Greene… Mr. Golden…”

My heart beat so hard against my chest I thought it would leap out. Ari squeezed my ice-cold hand, a kind gesture I didn’t deserve.

“I have good news for you. Ms. Hoffmeier will be fine. Fortunately, she did not ingest enough aspirin to cause any permanent liver or kidney damage. We’re going to keep her here a couple of days for observation.”