Her teasing challenge makes the foolishly masculine part of me perk up, the part that wants to preen and strut, like a peacock spreading its feathers to attract a mate. I’m not going to make it to the Olympics either, but I can at least pick up some speed and I can skate backwards and come to one of those showy, ice-spraying stops. For her, I will.
“As you like.”
Chapter 8
Starla
An hour and three cups of hot chocolate later, Lowry is making a last few loops around the perimeter of the makeshift rink. He’s fast and graceful, and I feel guilty for having held him back, but only a little. It’s fun to watch him now, but I’m glad I tried. He probably knew I’d be glad I tried.
When I haven’t been warming my hands around a cup of cocoa, I’ve offered him high fives and fist bumps, cheered his fancy hockey stops that send particles of shaved ice spraying into the air. He’s not the best skater out there, but he’s not far behind. And despite there being people with better moves, more speed, I can’t take my eyes off him. It’s not as though I can see his body through the many layers he has on; it’s a competence porn thing. He’s good at this, as he’s good at so many other things. And while I can sometimes be jealous of the ease with which people walk the earth, I’m not jealous of Lowry. I enjoy him.
Soon enough there’s an announcement that it’s closing time and all skaters need to exit the rink. I meet him at the gate in the boards that line the ice and somewhat overcome by—I don’t know, I guess this is joy I’m feeling? Secondhand elation from the way he’s been zipping around? Something comes over me and I hug him, arms thrown about his neck, bodies pressed together from chest to pelvis and wow, that’s a terrible idea. Truly, truly terrible. I don’t want to let go.
But anxiety brain is watching out for me—after a split second of contact, it starts hissing that this is weird and I should stop. When I’ve stepped back, red-faced from embarrassment and not the cocoa or the cold, he’s standing there with his mouth open. Whatever he’s got to say, I don’t want to hear it.
“Get your skates off, I’ll grab you a hot chocolate before they close.”
And then I promptly run away because that’s what grown women do.
By the time I’m back, he’s packed up his skates—because of course he has his own skates—and is thumbing through his phone.
“Everything okay?”
The furrow between his brows smooths out a bit but doesn’t go away entirely because it never does. “Everything’s fine, just Maeve checking in. She’s glad you got me outside.”
Telling his ex-wife about me? He did say they were friends still so I guess it’s not surprising. But still, I’m not sure whether to feel self-conscious or pleased. “Did you tell her this was your idea?”
“Course.”
His lopsided smile kills me, and I can barely stand how much I like this man, how good he makes me feel. I hand him his cocoa and he takes a sip. He’s cute, and offers me a one-sided cheers since I think if I have any more I will explode. Or be awake all night from the caffeine, which may be piddly if you’ve had one cup, but I’ve had three. So.
Lowry stands, slings his skate bag over his shoulder. “I know you’re perfectly capable of walking home by yourself and that you do it all the time, but do me a favor and allow me to walk you back to your building?”
Now it’s my turn to half smile.
“Next time we meet up, are you going to ask me to text when I get home?”
He grimaces and it occurs to me that it’s probably because he would have liked to ask me for that and didn’t. I don’t know quite what to make of that. It’s that same feeling of knowing I’m not supposed to like him being overly protective, but I do. While I still don’t think he would be okay with the extent I wished that were true, I don’t want to discourage him. I’ll take these bits and pieces and make what use of them I can. Before he backpedals, I volunteer, “I could do that. Next time. And I wouldn’t mind company on the walk.”
There. That wasn’t so bad. Very mature. And I’ve had about enough of acting my age.
It’s snowing, pretty flakes drifting from the sky and Beacon Hill with its gas streetlamps and picturesque purple-windowed town houses as the background. It’s like we’re in a snow globe and it’s so pretty I can’t stand it.
I’m pretty sure my mother loved the snow, maybe because they didn’t get much of it in Southern Italy where she was born. I am very sure my father was completely smitten with her. It’s in every picture of the two of them; he’s almost never looking at the camera because he’s looking at her.
I don’t have any memories of my mother. Not real ones. I was only two when…when I didn’t have a mother anymore. There are a lot of pictures from when I was a baby, though, and my mind has elaborated on those moments frozen in time. Has made movies out of stills, written novels from a single word scribbled on a scrap of paper.
Anyway, this weather reminds me of her, and one photo in particular, when she was holding me in a snowsuit that was so poufy I looked like a star. She was swinging me around, my little body nearly parallel to the ground. I like to imagine I remember her laugh.
My eyes water and surely it’s the cold breeze that’s kicked up, sending the flakes into delicate cyclones. Whatever it is, it makes me want to run. Skip. Lowry got the opportunity to soar around the rink and now I want a chance to fly.
* * *
Lowry
Starla’s taken off with a whoop that nearly makes me drop my hot chocolate. Truth is, I don’t care for the stuff. It’s too sweet and I’d rather have coffee or a hot toddy. But I wasn’t about to say so when Starla had done something thoughtful. I’m also aware that she can be—has always been—self-conscious about some of the things she enjoys because other people have insinuated or outright stated they were immature. Fuck that. If it’s not hurting anyone, we should all take pleasure wherever we can find it.
Starla has apparently found it whirling like a dervish through the storybook paths of the Common. But she could very well injure herself because it looks beautiful, but is in fact treacherous.
“Starla, careful. It’s icy in some spots. I saw someone slip on my way over.”
Yes, there’s an undercurrent of worry as I watch her skip and spin, but it’s overcome by something more than fondness. Something that has been building, shifting since the day I met her.
When she was my patient, Starla was a serious girl. Big eyes, rarely a smile on her face, especially when I first started seeing her. Most of that, I know, was the monster she’s always carrying on her back, but some of it was something else and it took me a while to crack it.
She came into my office one day when she was fifteen, looking absolutely miserable. Which was worrisome, but honestly, less so than when she looked blank. That flat affect would send ice flooding my veins, because when she was so numb she wasn’t feeling anything at all, that’s when things got the most dangerous. When she was most likely to tell me she’d been thinking about hurting herself or worse. So misery, I’d take. Misery I could work with.
“Some boys at school were being assholes.”
My hackles went up like a hyena’s when someone’s trying to drag away a tasty carcass it’d claimed. Despite having a lot of experience keeping a neutral look on my face, I had struggled to keep my voice level because I wanted to kill those fuckers.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. If this fucking depression hasn’t killed me yet, no way am I going to let some shit-talking pubescent dickheads do it.”
Shite, it was hard to keep from cracking up when she said things like that. But somehow I managed to only let the corners of my mouth turn up instead of full-on cracking up.
“That’s fair, although you know just because something doesn’t kill you doesn’t mean it can’t bother you. Whatever these boys did obviously bothered you.”
And I obviously wanted to rip their faces off.
She shrugged. “Just their normal taunts, which are sucky. But th
e worst part…” She shook her head, not looking at me. “Never mind.”
“Ah, but you know I do. Mind, that is. Come on, let’s have it.”
The look she gave me then made me feel it—the heaviness she always had pressing down on her, as though this seemingly average high school sophomore had the weight of the world on her shoulders. Then she shook her head and pursed her lips slightly.
“I told my father about it.”
“That seems sensible, if it upset you. That’s what he’s there for.”
Her full mouth wrenched to the side, and she looked down at her hands wringing in her lap. “Not really. I mean, he’s already got all this to deal with, so anything on top of that actually seems unreasonable.”
“What do you mean by ‘all this’?”
I was met with one of her trademark withering glares, and she waved a hand in front of her face. “You know, this. Me. I’m… I take up a lot of time. I know he feels bad and that it tires him out. All the doctors, the appointments, me being in and out of the hospital. He’s had to put up with a lot, so on top of all that, I guess normal kid stuff seems like the last straw.”
I’m not in the habit of yelling at my patients, or shaking them senseless, but that’s what I’d wanted to do with Starla.
Tell her it wasn’t her responsibility to fret over her father, that he was a grown man with effectively unlimited resources, so if he wanted help, hell, if he wanted anything, he could have it. Except of course a cure for his daughter’s depression. No amount of money was likely to ever “fix” her. It was her father’s job to care for her, and that should include letting her be a regular kid. How awful must it have been for Starla when her father made her feel as though she wasn’t allowed to express normal teenage frustrations because it was too much for him to bear? I had suspected it wasn’t limited to boys at school, but any complaint she might have, any risk she might take.
“I don’t think that’s true, but let’s say for the sake of argument it is. What would be the worst thing that could possibly happen?”
She looked at me with those big, heavy eyes of her, and I swear, I don’t know how she hadn’t been crushed into dust by everything that was weighing on her.
“He could kill himself like my mother did.”
Ah, Christ. I’d known this since before I ever met Starla. But I’d also been told in no uncertain terms that I was never to mention it to Starla because she didn’t know. Her father had never told her when she was smaller, and by the time he thought she could handle it, she was depressed herself and he didn’t want to give her any ideas. I’d lobbied for telling her because knowledge is power, and perhaps knowing her mother also struggled would make her feel not so alone. Perhaps, too, make her more determined to not give in because she might be able to see how people missed her mother even if she couldn’t see how she would be missed. But no, Jameson refused and I’d kept my word.
“You—”
“Aren’t supposed to know about that? Well, I do. Why does everyone think kids are so fucking stupid?”
Anger’s better than blankness, though I resented her father for putting me in this position. This didn’t have to be the way we talked about her mother’s suicide, but there we were, and I’d do the best I could.
“I certainly don’t think you’re stupid. You’re one of the smartest people I know, and that includes grown-ups. And your father doesn’t think you’re stupid. He’s constantly going on about how bright you are”—and how frustrating it was that depression was sapping so much of that from her.
“I can’t speak for everyone else, obviously,” I continued, which got me a well-deserved Nerf ball to the face. “No one thinks you’re stupid. What we do think is that it’s our job to protect you, and you’ve got a hard enough road to hoe already. No one wants to make it any harder, that’s all. Especially since your father has spent so much time making your mother into some sort of fallen angel as far as I can tell. Vittoria was a saint, the prettiest, kindest, most beautiful woman to walk the earth, to hear him tell it. And all of that might be true, but she also suffered from really severe depression, like you. So, you understand that her suicide—”
“Wasn’t my fault? Yeah, whatever.”
Except that she clearly didn’t. Now if only I could Good Will Hunting her into believing it…
I’m not sure I ever succeeded at that. One thing about clever patients is that many of them can fool you, tell you what you want to hear, or hide the things they’re embarrassed about. Starla’s always been fairly good at that, even as a kid. But never mind that. Never mind the past. She’s better now, has her depression under control.
At the moment, Starla’s skipping and spinning down the wide pathways of the Common, graceful in a way she most definitely wasn’t on skates. And more than her grace, it’s her joy I’m loving. She looks happy, carefree, like she can fully breathe.
She heads toward a set of steps that leads up to Beacon Hill, and I think about calling out my caution again, but I doubt it will stop her, and she’s a grown woman. I don’t relish being the overbearing, paternalistic arsehole who makes her feel as though I don’t trust her. If I could look after her in a way that wouldn’t make me a domineering, egotistic bawheid, I’d be only too glad to.
She dances on the stairs, up three and down two—she looks like she could be in one of those old musicals my mum used to love, and she’d scream at us boys to pipe down because she was trying to listen and of course, there wasn’t any OnDemand or TiVo or what have you back then. If you missed it, you were shite out of luck. If Starla were truly on one of those soundstage monstrosities though, she’d probably have an umbrella for this scene.
Nearing the top, she makes a few more jubilant leaps and I’m half expecting her to slide down the metal banister that bisects the steps. But then her foot goes wrong, and she’s not dancing anymore. She’s more flailing than anything else, and then, then…she’s falling.
Chapter 9
Starla
There’s a second that seems to last much longer than that, after my foot slips on a patch of ice I didn’t notice while doing my best Rockette impression. It’s that weightless sensation you get when you take a hill too fast in a car. I’ve heard roller coasters can cause that stomach-dropping-while-the-rest-of-you-floats feeling too, but I wouldn’t know. Never been on one. All too soon, though, that weightlessness is gone and I am meeting the stone stairs, hard.
My hip takes the brunt of it, a teeth-chattering jar that’s so stunning I lose my breath. It doesn’t hurt, not yet, just feels like an impact when flesh and bone meet granite steps. But then my ribs, my elbow, and yeah, the back of my head make contact with the stone also and…ow. Ow. Motherfuck, that hurts.
Everything hurts and to add to the ignominy, there are a ton of people on the Common right now and they all fucking saw that. I curl up onto my side and try to catch my breath and do my best not to cry. Yeah, I’m going to have some bruises, not fun ones, and I feel incredibly foolish after Lowry warned me—
“Starla, love, are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Lowry’s head blocks the light from an overhead streetlamp, the ends of his ginger hair set on fire by the glow. And he looks worried, oh so worried. Which he shouldn’t be. It does warm me some, though. Starla, love? I know it’s a Scottish thing, it doesn’t mean anything, but I’d take a meaningless endearment from Lowry over a sincere one from just about anyone else, so it’ll do.
“I’m more embarrassed than anything else. Really, I’m fine.”
Everything is buzzy, and my head is filled with a rush. My fall must have looked really bad, but I feel surprisingly not terrible. Almost like I could go back to dancing, though this time away from stairs. Or ice. Yeah, not bad at all.
Lowry looks at me like he doesn’t believe a single word that’s come out of my mouth which he’s always been good about not doing. “I don’t think you are fine. I can call an ambulance. Or grab a cab and we can go to MGH. At least let me look you over before
you get up. That was really bad. Did you hit your head?”
Ugh. I have been fussed over and poked and prodded enough for a dozen lifetimes. I know he means well, but I can’t with this right now.
“I’m fine, really. If it will make you feel better, you can do your doctor thing, but after we get back to my apartment. Please, this is already mortifying.”
Spending a lot of your life being “sick” means you always have a lot of people staring at you, examining you, speculating about you. I put up with it because, frankly, it helps keep me alive, but for anything beyond that, my tolerance for being regarded as damaged is bottom-of-the-sea low.
Lowry looks as though he might argue, and I am not having that. I’m a grown woman and I just humiliated myself in front of hundreds of people, not to mention the man I’ve been in love with for as long as I’ve known him. So I push up off the stairs, finding my feet and making damn sure there’s no ice underfoot to send me flying again.
My bones feel out of whack, as though I had my own personal earthquake, which I suppose I did, but otherwise I’m fine. I’ll be sore tomorrow and probably sport some super-attractive bruises for a few weeks, none of which requires medical attention.
I brush myself off with my gloved hands, wincing when I graze the spot I fell hardest on.
Lowry’s still scanning me as though he could actually tell anything of use with his eyes—although how freaking horrifying would it be if he actually had x-ray vision—and he looks so serious, so very intense. To have that attention focused on me is heady, though I’d rather have it focused on me in some other context—not because I’m a foolish girl who didn’t listen to someone I would fucking love to be my daddy, and as a result, I've fallen on the ice. Honestly, who does that?
“Lowry, I am fine. Let’s go, please.”
He clearly doesn’t believe me, so I spread my arms and strike a pose. “See? Fine. Humiliated but fine.”
For Her Own Good Page 10