by Kara Isaac
“Thank you, Lucas. And thank you to all your listeners for having me this evening.” The voice, the poise, it all came back when it mattered. They hadn’t paid big bucks for Hollywood’s best voice coach for nothing.
“Just before we start, I have a quick update for the sports fans listening. The Olympic Committee has announced that Chicago will be making a bid to host the 2032 Summer Olympics.”
Hardly breaking sports news, but then Rachel guessed there rarely was any this late at night unless it was coming from the West Coast.
“What are your favorite Olympic sports, Doc?” The man was clearly trying to avoid taking a call.
“Pole vault in summer, bobsledding in winter.” At least he’d picked the only sports question she could actually answer. Even she liked the Olympics.
“Lucas,” Ethan’s voice cut in. “Stop stalling. Your first caller is Megan. Line one.”
“Interesting choices, Doc.” Lucas didn’t even miss a beat. The people listening would have no idea he had Ethan barking instructions off air. “Would love to talk to you more about that, but my producer has told me we need to take some calls. Are you there, Megan?”
“Hi, um, hi!” The flustered but very excited voice of a woman who sounded in her thirties shot down the line. “Oh Dr. Donna, I am such a fan.”
“Why thank you, Megan.” Rachel wedged the phone against her shoulder and ran her fingers through her damp hair, securing it in a bun on top of her head.
“So, I know that you say if he doesn’t have a job, he’s not a keeper, but . . .” Oh brother, the but. The struggling artist/actor/super-talented-but-still-to-catch-a-break sponger boyfriend who every woman thinks is the exception. “. . . gifted, and he’s promised it would just be for six months, and I could support us both—”
“Run.” Lucas’s voice cut over Megan’s self-justification.
“Excuse me?” Megan sounded shocked.
“Megan, you don’t need Dr. Donna for this one. I’m telling you as your average American male, ditch this loser. Now. Tonight. Get off my phone line and throw him off your couch, or out of your bed or wherever he is.”
“But . . .” The poor woman sounded as if Lucas had struck her.
Time for Dr. Donna to intervene. “Megan, I know it can’t have been easy calling in tonight. So first of all I just want to acknowledge that.” Call-in rule number one: you always catch more flies with honey. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
Rachel stretched out her legs, pressing her feet against the arm of the couch. Whoops, dropped the cookie. “When you think about the man that you want to spend the rest of your life with, what kind of characteristics come to mind?”
“Well . . .” A hesitation. “Someone who loves me and would make a good father and treats me well. Same thing any woman wants, I guess.”
“Now you alone can answer this question, and I need you to do it honestly. I don’t know your boyfriend and I don’t care about him, I care about you. So even best-case scenario, if you pay the rent and buy the groceries and he ‘finds himself,’ do you think he is going to be the husband, the father, you want, that you deserve?”
Silence. Then a whimper. Ethan would be loving this. People’s hearts breaking on air was great radio. “But what if he’s my last chance?” The last two words came out a strangled sob.
Inevitably, this was what it came down to. Women of a certain age, giving up and settling for some subpar guy because they’d bought into the lie that it was better to suck it up and live with a dysfunctional relationship than be alone.
“What if he’s not?” She modulated her voice carefully. It was in moments like these, when she was walking a finely tuned emotional tightrope, that she was liable to let Dr. Donna slip. “What if that guy who will make you happier than you can even imagine is out there? But he’s never going to have a chance as long as you’re with a guy who isn’t right.”
She was such a fraud. The Duchess of Cambridge had had three children since she last went on a date. And those dates had been purely for research. At least her aunt, having done a full lap of the marriage continuum, could say this stuff with some integrity.
The minutes slipped away as Rachel focused on call after call, broken up by the occasional sports update from a still-reluctant Lucas.
“Time for one more call, Doc?” Lucas’s voice cut over a soft-drink commercial. Rachel glanced at the clock. Almost eleven, so nearly midnight in Wisconsin. She was on the right side of a time difference for once.
“Sounds good.”
“Great, see you on the other side.” He was gone as quick as he came, leaving her to the twangs of a used car salesman.
“And we’re back, and we’ve got time for one more caller. Are you there, Jill?”
“Hi there.” The woman’s voice was hesitant. “I, um . . . I’ve never done this before.”
“That’s great!” Lucas was the master at calming first-time nerves. “We’re honored that you’ve chosen us for your radio debut. What’s on your mind?”
A deep breath. “Well, I seem to have gotten myself into a bit of a situation.” Another pause. Dead air on radio was never good. Rachel could imagine what kind of gestures Ethan would be making at Lucas right now.
“You and all the rest of us, honey.” Rachel pulled out her most mothering Dr. Donna voice. “People and pickles are mighty good at finding each other.” Man, she could use another cookie. She wandered over to the bench and ran her eyes over the remaining pucks of chocolate goodness, taste buds anticipating one disintegrating into crumbs of buttery bliss.
“I, um. Well, you see, Iseemtohavetwolives.” Jill’s words came out on top of each other, like a highway pileup. “I don’t know how it happened. I love my husband. I really do. But I travel for work and two years ago I met someone in Ohio, and he’s just amazing too. But now he wants me to move to be with him, and I can’t, obviously. But I can’t not be with him.”
“So you want us to find you a way to have your cake and eat it too.” Lucas wasn’t exactly rude, but his tone was far from his usual charming one.
“I uh . . .” Jill’s voice had the edge of someone realizing maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. The cookie would have to wait. They had a couple of seconds before she hung up.
“Well, that is definitely a tight corner you’ve painted yourself into.” Rachel tried to buy them both some time to re-gather their thoughts. Dr. Donna. Channel Dr. Donna. “Okay, the good news is you know what you need to do. The bad news is that you’re going to break a couple of hearts doing it, including your own.”
A muffled sob. “I . . . I—”
“Honey, there ain’t no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. You can’t undo what you’ve done. But both of these men deserve better than this, and it’s time for you to do the decent thing and let one of them go. Being the old-fashioned gal that I am, I vote you do your best to mend a few of the vows you’ve broken.” She had a long enough list of sins as it was; she wasn’t going to add breaking up marriages to it.
“But . . . but . . .”
“But what? Oh I know, maybe we should petition for the great state of Wisconsin to legalize bigamy. Then you could be one happy Big Love family.” Lucas’s sarcastic suggestion snapped across the line.
What? Rachel was confused. Were they doing good cop, bad cop? The last time she’d been on his show, there had been a word he used to let her know he was about to pull that. She couldn’t even remember what it was, but she was sure he hadn’t used it.
“I don’t know how to choose. I love them both.” Jill’s voice had taken on the beginnings of a petulant whine.
“No you don’t. You love yourself.” Lucas spat the words out like bullets.
Whoa. They had to wrap this call up and fast. This was not good cop, bad cop; there was something else going on. Lucas sounded like he was about to reach down the line and strangle the woman.
Rachel scrambled for something, anything. “Jill, we’re o
ut of time, so what we’re going to do is take you off air so you and I can talk further.”
She had no idea what was going on in the studio, but she and Ethan were obviously on the same wavelength, as the show’s theme music swelled over the end of her sentence.
• • •
LUCAS GRANT flicked off his microphone for the final time that evening, leaned back in his chair, and gulped down the last of his stone-cold instant coffee. Gah. He slammed the mug down on his desk.
“Dude! What was that about?” Ethan propped his heels up on the console opposite, tilting back to extract a beer from the small fridge in the corner of the cramped studio.
“What was what about?” Lucas eyed the clock above Ethan’s head. Midnight and six. Usually he enjoyed debriefing, but he was still really hacked off with Ethan over his little stunt and he had to be up in six hours. The truck needed service and the guy at the shop had said if he got it to him by seven, he’d do his best to turn it around same day.
He didn’t know how Donna did it. One a.m. in Atlanta, and no doubt she had to get up in a few hours for another full day on the PR circuit. The woman was a machine.
“. . . people won’t call if they don’t feel safe.”
“I have a sports show, Ethan. I’m not Dr. Phil. I don’t want people calling to feel safe. I want them calling to talk about touchdowns and Davis’s terrible defensive call last weekend.” Lucas had long since mastered one of the survival skills of radio, the ability to track a conversation, so that even if he tuned out for a couple of seconds, the caller never knew.
“Look, I hate to break it to you again, but remember those great ratings you enjoy? The ones that dictate your paycheck. A decent chunk of those is because whether you like it or not, you have a lot of female listeners. If you want to break into the big time one day you need to keep them, and having Dr. Donna on for a couple of hours does that.”
“Well, I don’t want to keep this one. She was a lying, cheating piece of work. ‘I don’t know how it happened. I just woke up one day and found myself sleeping with two men.’ ” His falsetto imitation of Jill’s voice was poor at best. “Seriously? How stupid do people think we are? You don’t just wake up one morning and find yourself with lives in two states. She chose to flirt with that guy. Then she chose to sleep with him. Then she chose to do it again and again and again. Meanwhile, her poor schmuck of a husband . . .” His voice trailed off. It made him sick just thinking about it.
“I’m just glad we had Donna. She saved your butt big time, man, even if you don’t care to admit it.”
Okay, maybe he could’ve been a little less aggressive. Or maybe he let loose because he knew Donna could salvage any situation. Heck, the night she catapulted to national stardom, she’d talked a woman off a ninth-story window ledge, live on the air. It certainly hadn’t hurt his career, either. Though he was pretty sure he’d aged about ten years from the stress.
“Tomorrow night it’s all men. Got it? I don’t care if it’s discriminatory. No women calling me for advice or to ask about my love life. Just men talking about sports.”
Ethan just swigged his beer with an eye roll like Lucas was the one being unreasonable. He was right, though. He did owe Donna. At the least for not giving her the sign he was about to go ballistic on that selfish, entitled brat. To be fair, by the time he knew he was, he already had.
Lucas shoved his chair back, wrenching his beaten brown leather jacket off the hook on the wall as he stood. “Sports with Lucas. That’s the name of this show, Ethan. It may not be imaginative, but it’s what I signed up for. I will talk about feelings all you want as long as they come attached to a game result.”
- 3 -
Torrential rain hit a few minutes before Rachel’s cab reached her North Nevada Avenue destination. The driver muttered obscenities as he crouched forward, nose almost against the windshield.
The white building leapt out in front of them, its entrance obscured by flailing construction signs buffeted by the wind.
“Thanks.” Rachel flung the driver a twenty, racing against the hail of raindrops to the front doors. She was late. She hated being late.
“Hey, Loretta.” The rain had won their race. She finger-combed her sodden hair, water trickling through her fingers, and pulled it into a ponytail.
“Hey, honey.” The voluptuous nurse looked up from her notes. “He’s in the activities room.”
“Thanks. Any change?” The same question she’d been asking for ten years. Even though she knew the answer before she walked in the door. A question Loretta had long since stopped answering.
Her feet cut through the plush carpet. Paintings dotted the pale yellow hallway. No amount of decorating could hide what this place was. The truth was that for most of the people living within its confines, atmosphere was irrelevant. The colors, the artwork, the cheerful staff in the immaculate uniforms were all for the families. They helped assuage their guilt as visits dropped from daily, to weekly, to monthly. From hours to minutes.
Passing through the double doors, Rachel paused. Not to locate her father—he’d be in the same spot he was every week. In his bed, facing the garden, a seat placed beside him, ready for her arrival.
God, please don’t let there be anyone. She wasn’t sure why she still shot prayers up to someone she’d stopped believing in a long time ago. Maybe it was because a small part of her thought that if He did exist, He at least owed her a favor or two.
It was one thing for her to be here, hope long since gone. It was the new patients and their families that wiped her off the emotional map. The result of an ordinary day gone horribly wrong. A basketball game, a quick drive to the store, an unseen puddle on a wooden floor. The faces that leached hope as days, then months, disappeared without their miracle.
She had earned her place here, in this limbo on earth. So, too, had her father. Though most of the people who knew that were long since gone, or didn’t care enough to remember.
Rachel walked behind an elderly patient watching a Frasier rerun and slipped into the wooden chair beside her father. It was all angles and hard edges, like her. When he’d first been relocated here, an orderly had regularly moved a large leather armchair into place for her, until she asked him to stop. It was too comfortable. There could be nothing comforting about these visits. Not after what she’d done.
“Father.” She’d tried to say “Dad” once, but it had jammed in her throat.
He blinked. A slow motion, like a window shade being drawn. The first time it had happened she’d been convinced he was trying to acknowledge her. But the vegetative state was a cruel master, and she’d come to understand that its signs of life meant nothing.
“Latest royalty statement came in. We did good over Christmas.” Of course, “good” was relative. In other people’s worlds, eighty grand was a down payment on a loft, a year off to chase the dream, or college tuition. In hers, it paid for barely nine months at the intersection of Eternal Regrets and Hushed White Corridors.
She stretched her legs out, toes almost grazing the French doors. Chicken legs, he’d always called them. She’d never been so grateful for a fashion trend as she was when models sprung up with jeans tucked into their boots. Even then, the backs were still often so big they slapped into her shapeless calves.
“Latest book released a couple of weeks ago. Max and Donna think it’s one of the best. Lacey, too, not that she’d ever admit it.” A surge of regret traveled through her as she thought of the tense tightrope of professionalism that she and Lacey now traversed. If either of them had made a different decision that night—
“Excuse me.” The words were so quiet she almost missed them. She knew the tone, though not the voice. It belonged to someone who had spent most of her recent days crying, until all she was left with was a hollow whisper.
Her gaze followed scuffed tennis shoes and worn jeans to a large Berkeley sweatshirt, engulfing the small frame it hung on. Brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, blotchy skin, long lashes fr
aming red-rimmed brown eyes. The face of the person who represented both the best and worst moments of Rachel’s life.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but . . .” The woman waved an empty drink bottle around, as if unable to grasp the words to complete the sentence.
Rachel pushed her chair back and turned on shaky legs to see her better. Maybe it was just the angle that had made a stranger look like a ghost from her past. She took in the small scar on the woman’s forehead. The permanent result of a late-night stumble in the library quad after they’d spent hours cramming for an exam.
“Anna?” The question fell out in two jagged syllables.
They’d both gotten B-pluses on that paper. That was the random fact that came to her as she stood staring at her ex best friend.
The woman looked at her, then clutched her drink bottle to her chest as if she needed some kind of barrier between them. “Rachel?”
“Yeah.”
Anna’s gaze darted to her father. “Oh my gosh, is that your . . . I thought he was—” Her mouth slammed shut before she could finish her sentence, but she didn’t need to. Dead. Anna thought her father would have been long gone by now. At least from this building, if not from the planet. If she’d given it any real thought since their friendship fractured.
Rachel glanced at her father. “Yes. This my father, Dan.” His name felt foreign on her tongue, it had been so long since she’d said it. No one who knew he still existed ever asked after him. As if speaking his name would cause her to remember they’d all abandoned him to shrivel and die alone. Anna had met him all of once. If you could even call hauling a drunk, abusive man out of a dim and sleazy bar meeting someone. “What are you doing here?”
Anna’s body seemed to curl in on itself at her blunt question. “My husband—” Anna’s rasping voice faltered for a second, but she caught it. “My husband, Cam, he got transferred here a few days ago.”