Save Me (16 page)

A
nnie is ignoring me. She made me vow to come to our book club meeting this month, and as I stand with a couple of women from her neighborhood, twenty minutes into a mind-numbing conversation about breastfeeding, I am shooting dirty looks at her that she is pretending not to see. Our book club (which, like much of my social life, is really Annie’s) is a lovely mix of women from several corners of her life—they are other mothers, med school people she met at UNC, women who grew up with Jack or married people who did—and every time I attend one of their monthly meetings, which is probably quarterly, there are usually at least two or three women whom I enjoy chatting with, and I always end up telling myself on the drive home that I ought to make an effort to go more often.

I told Annie why I didn’t want to come. It’s my first social outing in Durham since everything happened and I have zero desire to spend the evening answering questions about my sad and sordid personal life. My biggest fear is that I’ll feel marked—as if what Owen did to me is somehow contagious—but I mustered the courage to risk becoming “that poor woman” because I know I need to get out more. Being around Andrew has revealed, in full relief, just how quiet I’ve let my life become, and while a book club, of all things, is not exactly jumping out of an airplane, it’s a step in the right direction.

That said, now that I am forehead-deep in a dissertation on nursing, I’m not sure that this is actually better than being at home, even if home means tiptoeing around Owen. I spot a plate of some sort of bruschetta-type thing on our host’s kitchen table and make my exit, telling the two women, neither of whom hears me, that I’m starved.

“This looks delicious,” I say to the person next to me, who is wiggling out of a windbreaker. When she turns to face me, we both startle—it’s the woman from the farmers’ market. I’ll admit, she has the sort of aesthetic that I admire most in other women, in that she is wearing a button-down shirt that could have come from the boys’ department with jeans and five-and-dime flip-flops, and she somehow looks more refined than any other woman in the room.

“Hey,” I say. “We met—”

“The farmers’ market,” she says. I notice the way her eyes graze over me, assessing. “With Andrew.” She doesn’t say
Andy
this time.

“Yes,” I say, trying to maneuver the messy piece of bruschetta I’ve just picked up. “Don’t mind me,” I joke, doing my best to be friendly.

“I brought those,” she says.

Of course you did.
“They look delicious.”

“They are but I can’t take any credit, I just followed my friend’s recipe. Lots of garlic, just warning you.” She grabs a cocktail napkin off of the table for me as I take a bite. She seems more relaxed than when I met her that morning. Maybe she’s just one of those women who’s different around men, like my sister.

“I am unapologetic about my love for garlic,” I say, wiping my mouth with the napkin. “And I’m going to need this recipe. I’m Daphne, by the way.”

“I remember,” she says. “I’m Anson.”

“Anson?”

“Yep,” she says. “Named after my father.”

“I bet you’re tired of explaining that,” I say. “But I like it.”

“Thanks,” she says. “I have a four-year-old. Her name is Jane.”

“Ah,” I say, laughing.
So she has a family?
“That’s refreshing, actually.”

“Do you have kids?” she asks.

“No, no, I don’t,” I say, skipping past it. Since I arrived here tonight, I’ve managed to deflect every personal question lobbed at me with vague answers and white lies. “But it’s amazing what people name their children these days.”

“Tell me about it.” She laughs. “There’s a child in my daughter’s preschool class named Moniker.”

“Moniker?”
I cringe.

“You got it,” she says. “I guess her parents thought they were being clever.”

I raise my eyebrows. “They were being something.”

“So what’s your connection to this crowd?” she says, tucking her hair behind her ears.

“Annie Ridley,” I say, pointing across the room to the couch where Annie’s sitting with Nancy, her next-door neighbor who’s one of those exasperating women who can’t take a bite of food without lamenting about how fat it’s making her.

“Oh, right, I knew that,” she says. “Y’all are close?”

“We are,” I say. “We work together.”

“Have you seen much of Andrew?” she says, peering down at me.

Ah, okay, so now that she’s been friendly for a few minutes, she’s ready to go in for the kill.
“Actually, I had dinner with him last night,” I say, happy to have some material. She tries to hide it but the look on her face is like I’ve just smacked her. “You two know each other well?”

She rears back a little bit, laughing as she does. “Yes.”

I can tell when she says it what it’s code for: They have a history. I wonder how recent.

“We went to school together from kindergarten on up,” she says. “I actually grew up around the corner from Jack. We did a lot of frog catching in the creek behind his house in the summers, a lot of kick-the-can in my front yard. My husband and I just moved back to the area. He teaches—he got a job at UNC. He was at Stanford.”

“Oh, that’s right. You were in California, too,” I say, as if I’d forgotten.
She has a husband.

“Yes, we were, but I rarely saw Andrew, with the way he’s always running around.” The way she says it feels like a warning.

“He’s a lovely guy,” I say, refusing to play along. “It’s awful about his dad.”

“He has a wonderful family,” she says.

“You know them?”

“Well, you
knooow
,” she says, drawing out the last syllable. “Andrew and I were high school sweethearts. And then we dated off and on in college during summer breaks. We reconnected, in the way that you do, and after college we drifted apart. I met my husband just after graduation and Andrew met some girl and moved to…where was it?”

New Orleans,
I think.

“New Orleans,” she says. “I guess we grew out of each other.”

I can tell by the way that she’s looking me over that that might not be the case, at least on her end.

“So…are you? Is it serious between you two?” she asks. “I’m sorry, is that too forward?” She puts her hand on my arm. Annie has lamented several times over the years—when her mother-in-law comes to the office unannounced, say, or when we’re sitting in a restaurant and run into one of Jack’s soccer pals—that Durham is too small. I feel this now.

“Andrew and me? Oh, I don’t know,” I say, leaving it at that.

“Really?” she says, cocking her head in a perplexed way that makes me wonder what he’s told her.

“Really,” I say. When we smile at each other, it’s obvious how forced it is on both our parts—our grins are rubbery, threatening to snap.

“I wonder how long Andrew will stick around,” she says, picking a piece of tomato off the top of one of the bruschetta and popping it into her mouth. “I saw Lorraine, his mother, yesterday and she mentioned that Andrew’s dad will be released from his rehab center soon.”

“Oh, really?” I say, doing my best to seem indifferent to the way that she’s obviously trying to provoke me.

“I’m sure Andrew will be heading back to California any day now,” she says.

I smile at her and look away.
I wonder why he didn’t say anything last night.
The host is starting to gather the group in the family room for the discussion portion of the evening.

“I guess we should go sit,” I say, catching Annie’s eye so that she’ll save me a spot next to her.

“Yes, we should,” she says. She smiles at me, but it’s one of those disingenuous Southern girl
bless-your-heart
smiles that is really telling you to go to hell. “It’s
so
nice to see you again.”

Several hours later, I wake up in the middle of the night and the room is spinning. I stumble to the bathroom, nauseous and sweating, and vomit into the toilet.
Food poisoning
, I think, remembering Anson and her bruschetta, the spinach dip I indulged in later, the brownie, the wine. After the retching subsides, I sit back against the wall, taking deep breaths, but as soon as I think it’s over, it starts up again. My stomach convulses, my eyes water, my throat is raw.
Oh God, what did I eat?

I am lying with my cheek against the cool tile floor when there’s a gentle tap on the door. “Daph?” Owen’s voice is scratchy. I woke him.

“I’m sick.”

“You okay?”

I nudge the door open a crack with my foot and he steps in. He’s wearing boxers and a gray Sox T-shirt. He never sleeps in a shirt, and it stings to know that he must have put it on before he came in here like I’m a stranger, somebody who hasn’t seen him bare-chested hundreds of times.

He puts his hand on my shoulder. The room begins to rock. “Oh God, Owen. I’m going to throw up again.” I crawl toward the toilet. “Get out.”

He takes a step back as bitter yellow bile comes up, since there’s nothing left in my stomach—and then he kneels behind me and rubs the space between my shoulder blades while my head hangs over the bowl. I realize, feeling his hand warm on my back, that it’s the first time since everything happened that he’s tried to touch me.

“What did you eat?” he says, once it’s stopped.

“I can’t even think about it.” I pull a piece of toilet paper from the wall dispenser and wipe my nose. “Owen, go back to bed. I’ll be fine.”

He gets up but a few seconds later I hear the water running, and then he brings me a glass. I take it from him and place it on the floor next to me.

He sits beside me.

“Go to bed,” I say again.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I wasn’t really sleeping anyway.”

The moonlight pours in from the window above us. Blue is just outside the threshold, watching us.

My stomach contracts and spasms, threatening to lurch. I take a few deep breaths and the feeling passes. “What time is it?” I ask. Owen always wears a watch, even when he sleeps.

“Almost four.”

I wince. I have a full day ahead, including an early morning appointment with Mary Elizabeth.

“Think you’ll make it in?” he says.

“I have to.”

“Are you sure it’s food poisoning? Anything else going around?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” I say. “I’ll text Annie later. I might not be the only one. Really, Owen, you should go to bed.”

He shakes his head. “I’m fine here.”

“It’s just food poisoning. You need to be at work in a few hours.”

“I know,” he says. “I’m fine here.”

We’re both quiet. Blue snores next to us, sniffing and grunting. I try to concentrate on breathing through the nausea, perhaps also because it’s easier than thinking about how awkward this is to be sitting here with him, on the square tiles we laid one weekend last November, both of us wearing earphones and listening to our individual podcasts, not bothering to talk to each other.

“What do you have today?” I ask.

“A twelve-year-old from South Carolina. New patient.”

I wonder what it’s like for him now, tending to people whose lives hang in the balance while he’s mourning someone. “You’ve become a really good doctor, Owen,” I say.

“Thank you,” he says. “You have, too.”

I glance at him. There have been many times over the course of our relationship when I accused him, silently, of not taking my work seriously compared to his own. I never said anything about it—maybe out of pride, maybe even out of competition—but I sensed it in the way that he sometimes talked to me about his work, hammering out detailed explanations of things that I of course understand, and also in the distracted way that he’d act when I recounted stories from my workday, as if the way that I care for patients couldn’t possibly be as interesting, or as important, as what he does.

“Can I get you some crackers or something?” he says.

“I’m fine.”

We sit there, the moonlight spilling over us. As strange as this is, and as rotten as I feel, something about being here together feels good. He leans forward to pat the top of Blue’s head and I watch how her eyelids grow heavy as he starts to scratch behind her ears. There is a question that has been haunting me. I haven’t asked it because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. Maybe it’s the circumstances of our unexpected comfortable silence, or maybe it’s the psychological fog that comes in the middle of the night, and how it can make everything seem surreal, without consequence somehow, but I suddenly want to ask him.

He leans back against the wall.

“What if she were still alive?” I say.

He doesn’t say anything. He shifts his feet on the tile, lining them up side by side.

“What if she were still alive, Owen?” I say again.

He puts his hand over mine on the cold floor and I let it stay there. “She’s not, Daph.” His fingers curl tight around my palm.

“But what if?”

He rests his head against the wall. “She’s not here.”

“And what does that
mean
?”

“It means that she’s not here, Daph,” he says, more forcefully this time.

I turn to look at him. His eyes are closed and his mouth is pinched like he’s the one who’s sick. The taste in the back of my throat is metallic and sharp. I swallow against it.

“That’s all you can tell me?” I say. “Nothing more?”

“I don’t know that what-ifs will get us anywhere,” he says. It is so typically him, so logical and reasonable. He was never one for speculating, and it drove so many of our arguments, how he could never just guess at a thing.

“You should go to bed,” I say after a while.

“You should, too.” He stands and puts his hand out, to help me off of the floor.

“Do you feel better?” he asks, as we step over Blue and into the bedroom.

Do I?

I don’t give him an answer because I don’t have one. I get into bed, my back to him, and listen as he walks down the hall and closes the door, the click of the latch behind him sounding final.

There are things that I remember from my childhood for no apparent reason. For instance, February 27 is Laura Ross’s birthday. Laura Ross and I used to make Swiss Miss hot chocolate—the kind with the tiny, freeze-dried marshmallows—in her kitchen every day after school. Actually, we’d usually just pry the lid off the canister of powdered mix and pick out the marshmallows with our fingers. We’d sit on the counter, licking our fingertips and laughing at the handmade signs that her older sister had taped to the refrigerator, like “97 LBS!!!” in big blue bubble letters. In sixth grade, Laura’s aunt took us to a Donna Summer concert, where we sang “Bad Girls” with such enthusiasm that you would think that we actually knew what the song was about. I haven’t spoken to Laura since seventh grade, when her family moved out of our cul-de-sac and back to Indiana, and I wouldn’t recognize her now if she showed up on my front stoop, but every February 27, I remember: Laura Ross’s birthday.