Save Me (14 page)

“There’s no telling,” Annie says. A couple of women jog past. They are students, quite obviously—young, beautiful, long dark hair in high ponytails, gazelles—the kind of women that, had I seen them just days ago, would have made me seethe, thinking of Bridget. Now it just makes my heart ache. I feel like I have a boulder lodged in my chest.

“I wonder, I don’t know…” I say. “Did they think he was just this great guy from work? Did they know about me? Did they just meet him? I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
Did they think she hit the proverbial jackpot? A doctor! A good-looking, funny doctor!
I feel tears spring from my eyes. I stop and moan up at the sky.

Annie stops walking. She cocks her head, her eyebrows knitted together, her lips pushed out in a pitying pout.

“Ugh.” I turn away. “Stop looking at me like that!
Please!
”

“I’m sorry,” she says, glancing at a couple of walkers as they pass. They’re older women, wearing loose T-shirts and comfortable sneakers. One is telling the other about a recipe—
You don’t have to make the crust from scratch, I used store-bought,
I hear her say. On a normal day, Annie and I would joke after they passed about how that will be us someday.

“It’s all so bizarre, Annie,” I say. “I mean, this morning, when he got up, he stared into the pantry and asked whether he could have a bowl of ‘my’ cereal, everything in the house being mine now, or whatever. Yesterday, I watched him bring his suitcase into the house, like he’d been away on a trip.” I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I start walking again. “What would you do?”

“Probably the same as you,” she says. There is no ire in her voice, none of the bitterness I’ve heard so much of lately.

“Really?” I take a deep breath. “Okay.”

“It’s a crazy situation,” she says.

“I’m worried about him,” I say. “I feel like I need to take care of him, like he’s sick.”

She nods. “I think I understand.”

“I think I do, too,” I say, and then I stop and throw my hands up. “Actually, I have no idea. I don’t have
any
idea. It’s all a nightmare. A fucking mess.” I close my eyes and press my fingers to the bridge of my nose. “It’s all just very, very sad.”

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Yeah.” I run my hands through my hair. People whiz past us. Two dogs bark, straining at each other as their owners pull them along.

L
ucy thinks that I’ve lost my mind. She’s been on a photo shoot in L.A. all week, and because I didn’t want to catch her up over email, I wait and call her one night after work, while I’m grocery shopping.

“Why on earth would you let him stay with you?” she yells through the receiver, her voice as piercing as the noise that I can hear in the background. “I’m sorry, Daph, it’s awful what happened to her. But this is dangerous. For both of you.”

“But what else am I going to do?” I say. “Imagine if it were Bobby.”

“Please,
Bobby
…” I’ve noticed how there’s always sarcasm in my sister’s voice when her boyfriend’s name comes up. “The very fact that you say that you think it’s okay proves how
not okay
it is. You can’t live together and pretend like nothing happened. He’s not going to get over his mistress dying like he’s getting over the flu, Daphne.”

“Thanks for that heartfelt insight, Luce.”

“Daphne, I know that you still love him—you can’t just turn that off in an instant. And I know that what’s happened to him is a terrible, tragic thing that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. But the bottom line is that this is a really bad idea.”

“Okay,” I mutter. I am walking down the cereal aisle. A part of me knows that my sister is right. Here’s evidence: When I arrived here tonight, I stood for several minutes next to the automatic door trying to decide whether to get a basket or a cart. Am I buying groceries for two again? And now, here I am, in the cereal aisle, my hand on a box of Owen’s favorite brand.
Don’t overthink it
, I hear my mother say. I throw the box in the cart, where there are tuna steaks, the chicken sausages we grill and eat with couscous and sautéed peppers and onions, tortilla chips, Owen’s favorite salsa.

“It has to be agonizing, Daphne, the two of you in that house together, after everything. It’s not good for you.”

“I’m fine,” I say. “And where else is he going to go?”

“A hotel?” she says. “They have those down there, I assume?”

“Lucy, it’s still his house, too, legally. And it’s honestly not a big deal. It’s fine,” I say again.

“Really?” she says. “It’s fine? So, what, you have dinner together and sort the mail and wash each other’s breakfast dishes and do his laundry like nothing happened? Like everything’s ‘fine’? Is that how it is?”

I feel my cheeks redden. The truth is that the past several days have been a strange sort of flashback, though I don’t dare admit that. On Sunday night, I was sitting in the living room, watching
The Big Chill
on cable. I was trying to relax—pretty unsuccessfully, given that I was mostly straining to listen for any clues as to what Owen might be doing upstairs. He eventually came down, and when he went to the kitchen to get himself something to drink, I went to the liquor cabinet and found the bottle of scotch and poured us each a glass. He watched me do this and didn’t stop me. He sat on the couch and waited for me to sit next to him, and then we sat there silently for a long time, drinking. Owen is the one who taught me to like scotch. We had “tutorials,” starting out first with just a splash in a glass of ice, then a glass with water, and then a half-inch neat. I got out the good bottle, the
specia
l-o
ccasion
stuff.

It occurred to me, sitting there, that if an objective observer had somehow taken an aerial shot of our living room on Sunday and one six months ago, he or she would have seen the exact same picture—my laptop beside me, Blue nestled in the space between the coffee table and the sofa, Owen on the other end of the couch. This recent one is slightly more somber but honestly, not all that different.

Lucy’s voice jolts me from my thoughts. “You need to sleep with that other guy.”

“Lucy, please.” I’ve actually hardly thought about Andrew since I saw him that day at the farmers’ market with the clingy nameless blonde. I don’t exactly crave more drama in my life.

“I’m serious, Daphne.”

“Your job has really infiltrated every part of your brain, hasn’t it?” I snap.

“Screw you,” she says. “And I’m serious. You need to do something to take your mind off Owen because I can see you falling right back into it and completely forgetting the fact that he had an affair, which, let me remind you, led him to question whether he still wanted to be married to you. Just a few weeks ago, he was moving out. I’m sorry that that girl’s dead but he’s a psychopath, Daphne, or at least selfish to the point of disease—a textbook narcissist. It is not your job to take care of him.”

I lean against the shopping cart and put my head in my hands.
I will not cry in the grocery store.
“He doesn’t have anyone else, Lucy.”

“That’s his own damn fault. Listen, I’m not stupid, Daphne. I know that the reason why you aren’t dealing with any of the logistical stuff like putting the house on the market—or at least moving him out, for God’s sake—is because you’re not ready to let him go. But given what he did to you? Well, it’s just not good. Not good at all.”

“Yes, but…” I know she’s right.

“Where is he now?”

“In Texas, at her funeral. He left this morning.”

“Where are you?”

“Food shopping.”

“Mm,” she says, purely passive aggressive.

I look at the contents of my cart. It is deplorable—as pitiful as the lovelorn single-girl groceries I’ve been buying the past few weeks (container of hummus, container of ice cream, wine, a nostalgic box of Double Stuf Oreos, the comfort food of my teenaged years).

“What are you going to do?” she says. “Nurse him back into loving you?”

I stand up straight and push the cart away like it’s infected. “You’re right,” I say. “Okay, okay. You’re absolutely right.”

Twenty minutes later, I am on my way to Nana’s, a restaurant where I’m meeting Andrew for a drink. When I called him from the grocery store parking lot, he happened to be on his way out.
And I happen to need a diversion
, I told myself as I put the keys in the ignition.
I deserve this.

Even if the circumstances were different and there was no Owen, it was a horrible workday by anyone’s measure, my worst day in a long time. My first patient stormed out of the office when I suggested that her constant stomach trouble might not in fact be a gluten intolerance but an intolerance to her shitty diet, which she proudly said consists mainly of Lean Cuisine, energy bars, and diet soda. Oh, and her self-reported two glasses of wine each night, which, according to the never-fail formula that I learned in medical school, means that she’s drinking double that.

Carol is on vacation, so I was working with Diana, the new nurse in the office who has the impressive ability to ask thousands of questions in a given hour. She is young, new at this, and obviously only trying to do a good job—and she is—but every time we had a break between patients, she hovered around me, asking deep-thought let’s-connect questions.
Why did you get into medicine? Do you think that the way we provide care is fair given that so many people can’t afford it?
It’s not that I’m opposed to her questions, it’s just that I don’t have any time for them when I’m strapped into my workday. I was about to say as much to her as we walked into an exam room, where our next patient promptly vomited at my feet. Ten minutes later, the results of her urine test confirmed that she has not gained ten pounds over the last two months because she’d been overzealous with the snacks but because she is pregnant with her fourth child. She is forty-eight and an exec at McKinney, the ad agency in town. When I told her the news, she burst into tears, and they were not happy ones.
You have no idea how fortunate you are
, I thought as I walked across the room to get her a tissue.

I’m pulling into the parking lot of the restaurant when it occurs to me that this is the intersection where Bridget had her accident. After I get out of the car, I scan the street, as if I might somehow gain some insight from the scene of regular people in regular cars crisscrossing past this everyday four-way stop. I feel a wave of anxiety wash over me.
Why am I nervous? Is it the circumstances of the past few weeks officially catching up with me?
I pull open the heavy wooden door and step into the restaurant.
It’s just Andrew,
I tell myself, taking a deep breath.
Nice, successful, blond-barnacle-attracting Andrew.

Nana’s is fine dining, a Durham institution. Like so many restaurants around here, it is unassuming, humble, and outstanding. There is a Subway sandwich shop behind it, a sketchy check-cashing place around the corner, a furniture liquidator across the street. The bar serves as a weeknight spot for a crowd of locals who look like money—mostly older professionals and residents of Hope Valley, the nearby country club neighborhood where Jack and Andrew grew up.

He is at the bar, in the corner. I watch the bartender slide his drink toward him.

“Hey!” he says when our eyes meet. He stands and pulls out the empty stool next to him for me to sit. “Good timing. That worked out well.”

“Yes,” I say, sitting down and running my hands over my skirt. “Meant to be, I guess.” The small bar is quiet—too quiet. I feel like everyone in the room is listening to me.

“It’s good to see you again,” Andrew says. He has no idea, poor guy. No idea at all what the time bridging our night out to today has consisted of for me.
Do I tell him what’s happening?
I want a drink.

I nod toward his glass, which is filled with a tawny liquid and has an artful sliver of orange peel christening the top. It looks like something I’m in the mood for. “What are you drinking?”

“A Sazerac.”

“Okay,” I say to the bartender, who is standing a polite distance from us, not wanting to interrupt but at the ready to take my order. “I’ll have one of those.”

“So how was your day?” he asks.

I tell Andrew about the patients from hell and then we chat politely about the restaurant, each of us leaning carefully—not too close—over the paper menu in front of us. I want to have a good time. I
need
to have a good time. But something about this feels like too big a risk. I should be at home, where it’s safe.
And lonely
, I think. I need to stop wallowing.

I grab my glass off of the bar, take my first sip of my drink, and it burns. The next sip—I barely breathe between them—is more palatable.

“I’ve never had one of these before,” I say.

“It’s good, right? The official cocktail of New Orleans,” he says.

“I love it there.” There was a blurry spring break trip during my senior year of college, and I always wanted to go back and see it for real. We always said we would.

“I’ve spent some time there,” he says.

“Oh, yeah?”

“I actually lived there for a few months.”

“Just a few months?” I raise an eyebrow and smile. I hate how I’m faking it. I think of Owen in some hotel room in Texas, hanging up his funeral suit.

He smiles back, oblivious. “I was following an old girlfriend. It wasn’t the healthiest relationship.”

“Ah.”

“I suppose we all have them.”

The words hang in the air. Does he realize what he’s just said to me? I slug a sip of my drink.

“You don’t agree?” he asks.

“No, I do,” I say.
Has Jack told him? Is this his way of trying to suss out some answers?

His elbow knocks mine and I realize that I’ve been sitting here slumped against the bar like some old-timer in a smoky pub. I think of the song that my mother used to sing at dinner—
Daphne Mitchell, strong and able, get your elbows off the table.

“Tell me more about her,” I say.

“Isn’t that breaking some dating rule?” he says. “Talking about former relationships?” His word choices may as well be tacked on the wall behind him and lined in neon:
Dating. Former.

“Is this a date?”

“I don’t know,” he says, leaning in like it’s good gossip.

I’m
married
, I think.
What am I doing?

“New Orleans,” I say, pointing at him with my pinky as I tip my glass to my mouth.

“Her name was Simone.”

I roll my eyes. “Really?”

“Yep.”

“How did you meet her?”

“In a bar, of all places. When I lived in L.A. after college. She was on vacation.”

“Long distance?”

He shrugs. “I was twenty-four. She was exotic to me. I had no real job. New Orleans sounded fun.”

“Was it?”

“Yes, actually,” he says. “It was. I don’t regret it.”

“Whose fault was it?”

“Well it’s always both people’s, isn’t it?” he says.

Seriously?
I feel like my stool should drop into a hole in the floor. Someone should hit a drum cymbal.
Ta-dum-dum.

“That’s debatable.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. I look into his eyes, trying to decipher whether he knows. I should just ask him but I’m not sure that I want the answer. And I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to think about anything at all. His eyes are deep brown, like chocolate. The opposite of Owen’s.

“Did it take you a long time to get over her?” I ask, not giving him a chance to elaborate.

“It took longer to get over New Orleans.”

“So then you moved to San Francisco.”

“No, first Sydney, then San Francisco.”

“Sydney?”

He nods once.

“Another girl?”
Do I care? It actually doesn’t matter what he says. This is about
fun
, not so much about talking.
I hear Lucy’s voice in my head.
Go have fun. Fun! Is this fun?

“It wasn’t a girl,” he laughs. “It was a job. Just for six months.”

“A six-month job?”

“A friend from here set it up, actually. His father works with a big hotel chain there, they needed extra help with the lead-up to the Summer Olympics.”

“That must have been an experience.”

“Yeah. It’s actually what got me interested in the hotel business.”

“Simone must have become a quickly fading memory, what with all of the blondes. It’s like a country full of Barbie dolls, yes?”