Cold Feet

by Amy FitzHenry

  “Carrick!” Liv exclaimed, although I wasn’t sure whether it was a reaction to his statement or the fact that he’d earned the rest of us each twenty-six points. “No one could ever be disappointed in Emma.”

  “No, I know what he means. And it’s very possible he’s right. I only wish I knew one way or the other.” I handed my cards to Dusty, who was gathering them up for a new round. He looked thoughtful, like he had something to say, but stayed quiet.

  “Maybe he’s in jail,” Carrick suggested, looking up to meet my eyes. He stretched back, his arms in the air behind him. We were around the coffee table, Dusty and me on the couch and Liv and Carrick in armchairs opposite us. When no one responded, he looked defensive. “It’s possible, right? It could explain why he’s fallen off the map.”

  I remembered a TV movie I’d once seen, where a girl found out that her normal, suburban father was a serial killer, and shuddered. The girl in the movie went crazy, tormented by the fact that she was related to someone so horrible, and overwhelmed by the anguish of seeing her father locked up in an orange jumpsuit. That would definitely be worse than not finding him, I decided. Fortunately, I reminded myself, there would be arrest records and court documents if that were the case. (Was it possible I punned more when drunk?)

  When someone went to prison, they did the opposite of fall off the map. Maybe when it came to Hunter, no news was good news.

  Dusty passed the stiff blue and white cards around our small circle. I glanced at Liv and Carrick over my cards. They weren’t listening at all, engaged in a fake fight about him beating her in the last round, which would surely lead to an obnoxious makeup. I turned to Dusty. “What were you going to say before?”

  “How could you tell?” He smiled. “It was nothing. It’s not my place.”

  “Are you kidding? After you argued local politics with the birther?”

  “Okay, but stop me if this falls into the category of unsolicited advice.” I nodded encouragingly so he would go on. “I’m not saying you’re necessarily the same, but when I was sixteen and looking for my dad, I realized after I found him that I was really looking for something else.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Answers about who I was? A role model? I’m not sure. It was only after I met with him that I realized whatever I was trying to find, he wasn’t it.” Dusty turned to look straight at me. This close, I could see his eyes better, hazel with flecks of green.

  “Emma, I know I might not know you very well, but in the short time since we’ve met, I’ve found you to be completely amazing. If you don’t find Hunter Moon, then it’s his loss, not yours.” I was abruptly aware of the silence in the room. Liv and Carrick were gone. I had no idea where, probably upstairs to his room to transition to strip poker. Part of me was jealous of Liv. Not because I wanted to be with Carrick, of course, but because of the fun she was having. I wanted to feel good about something, I thought, my booze-addled brain pushing all rational thoughts to the side. I was sick of being sad all the time.

  I turned my body to face Dusty’s, inching closer on the couch. He looked incredibly nervous, which I took as a compliment. Slowly and tentatively, he put his arms around me. As his nervousness eased, he held me tighter and tighter. I sank into his embrace, allowing myself to lie down slightly, to fall into the soft couch. I was aware that I was allowing my drunkenness to make decisions for me, knowing that my sober self would have sat up, said good night, and gone to bed. Still, I let him hug me. I tightened my arms around his neck. I closed my eyes, just for a minute, letting the pleasantness of the moment wash over me.

  CHAPTER 17

  “It’s time to get up,” Liv called, reaching under my thin veil of sleep.

  “What time is it?” I asked, disoriented. Painfully vivid dreams of Sam had been rolling through my subconscious on a loop all night. Sam. For a few seconds, I let myself think about how sometimes I would wake up to a note from Sam that said how pretty I looked when I was sleeping. I quickly dismissed the thought and reddened as the memories of the night before trickled back, particularly memories of Dusty and my intimate hug.

  I had woken up halfway through the night alone on the couch, covered with a blanket, and crept back to bed, surprised to find Liv sleeping peacefully. I guessed nothing had happened with Carrick. Whereas I must have fallen asleep in Dusty’s arms, and then he covered me with a blanket. How incredibly embarrassing.

  As I let the steaming hot water of the shower run over me, the events of the day before settled over me in an unhappy haze that felt completely misplaced for this time of day. These kinds of gloomy feelings should be accompanied by a glass of wine after work, or lying in bed at night questioning the day’s decisions. The morning was for bagels, optimism, and baseless cheer. I attempted to reach for some faith that things were going to turn out okay. But what exactly did that mean? That I would forgive Sam? Was there something to be gained by trying to see his side, or at least listening to what he had to say? I thought of the twelve ignored calls from the day before and the unread texts and e-mails.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t think about how often he’d been in contact without also remembering why. There was no seeing his side, I reminded myself. He’d cheated on me and never took responsibility for it. His side didn’t deserve consideration. It wasn’t my fault that the truth came out a week before our wedding. I wasn’t the one who’d cheated. Let him be the one to worry about how everything was going to work out for once. As I started to spin, I reminded myself to focus on Hunter, the slightly more emotionally manageable hurdle. The Sam problems receded ever so slightly into the background. I was finally able to take a deep breath. Despite the disappointment of the day before, I couldn’t give up now. I needed a plan.

  I’ll wash my hair, I decided grandly, for starters. I scrubbed my favorite shampoo into my scalp and began to relax. I took a deep breath and let the water pour over my closed eyes. Attempting to condition my frizzy mane was a slightly less calming process. As I pounded the almost empty conditioner bottle in an attempt to squeeze out a couple more ounces, Liv, who was in and out of the bathroom getting dressed, realized what I was doing and shouted at me over the water.

  “Use mine, Em. It’s full. Don’t cut corners when it comes to conditioning. Didn’t your mother ever teach you anything?” I knew she was teasing me, but, still stuck somewhat in my funk, I couldn’t help but take her literally. No, she didn’t. Caro and I were barely on speaking terms by the time I was old enough for hair maintenance to be an issue. If I ever had questions about blow-outs or leg shaving, I went to Liv, who in turn asked her mom and reported back. No wonder I was mystified when Val handed me the lipstick blotter or whatever the fuck it was.

  For the millionth time I wondered what was wrong with me. Why didn’t Caro have any interest in her own daughter? And if it was all her problem and not mine, if she really was the one woman in history who didn’t care about her offspring, then how was I to explain Hunter’s similar behavior? It had to be me. It was the only logical conclusion.

  I sighed heavily, my melancholy deepening. In truth, I knew the real reason for my bad mood. I knew why I was so sensitive and feeling so raw that morning. It was because, the night before, I’d dreamed of Sam and our first date. I reached for the memory with both hands, allowing all my other gauzy dreams from the night before, which were still hanging at the shadowy edges of my subconscious, to slip away.

  Four years earlier, one week to the day since we’d met, I met Sam at the Venice Beach bar he’d suggested, exactly eight minutes late. I remembered the intense feelings from the softball field, but I wasn’t sure if they would stick. The second I saw him, however, I knew my feelings were not fleeting.

  When I walked in, he texted me immediately, so I knew he’d been watching the door waiting for my arrival. I’m sitting at the bar, in case you forgot what I looked like. I looked up from the text, straight into his smiling blue
eyes, reflecting the last light of day, unusually bright in the magic hour. He was so cute, with his wry half grin. I knew immediately that I wanted to kiss him, and that I probably wasn’t going to want to stop.

  It had been about six months since my last breakup, with Jared, a hot but angry classmate I met in my Wrongful Conviction Death Penalty clinic. We had a passionate, explosive relationship my last year of law school, as we partied, studied, and celebrated our final months of idealistic utopia, but I knew it was over the night his parents took us out to dinner and he spent the entire meal arguing with his father, a federal judge, over minimum-sentencing requirements. It wasn’t only because his entire vigilante belief system was so clearly born from rebellion that it became trite, but also that he would fight with his father while the man treated us to a meal at Saison. That was just plain rude. I broke up with him a few weeks before graduation, citing distance, as he was moving to Brooklyn to become a public defender and I was heading to Los Angeles to bill hours, and for once, he didn’t fight me on it.

  By the time my first date with Sam rolled around, I was single, happy, and ready to date someone different. A nonlawyer, preferably a nonangry person in general, who would get along with the general public, his parents, and, especially, me. Within minutes, I knew I had found exactly what I was looking for.

  As we sat down with our beers, at a table outside, facing the ocean, Sam’s dancing eyes and relaxed tone put me instantly at ease, as he had on the softball field. Whereas Jared was always gearing for a confrontation, whether it was about the library’s appalling study carrel reservation policies or the rich assholes gentrifying Oakland, it was immediately clear to me that Sam tended to live and let live. I forced myself to stop comparing them and to enjoy what was right in front of me. This resolution was easy to keep, and thoughts of my ex easily floated away.

  For the rest of the night, we didn’t stop staring at each other. After dinner at Oscar’s, a nearby Mexican restaurant, where Sam’s friendly demeanor got us seated in minutes, he walked me home and, without hesitation, I invited him in.

  We started kissing the second I handed him his glass of wine. I felt like a vixen as I untied my dress and climbed on top of him on the couch, straddling him while continuing to kiss him urgently. He clearly didn’t know what to make of me, but wasn’t about to look a slutty gift horse in the mouth, so he carried me into the bedroom. We did it, as Lionel Richie would say, all night long. It was the sex of a single person who hasn’t gotten any in months and has met someone she can’t keep her hands off. It was perfect.

  But, of course, given that I possess two X chromosomes, I panicked in the morning. As I lay in bed, listening to Sam’s steady sleeping noises—he even slept like a content person—I reasoned with myself. Sex on the first date: Obviously this was a huge mistake. I would never hear from him again. Fine. The good news, I reasoned, was that there were a lot of cute guys in L.A. I’d met a great one in about five minutes. There had to be more! Plus, it gave me a good excuse to quit the softball team. I was terrible.

  As I brainstormed what to do with my Sunday nights going forward, I noticed that the sleeping noises had ceased. Damn it, he’s awake, I realized frantically. I should have spent the last twenty minutes trying to make myself look presentable, rather than pondering whether taking up knitting is too Goop for me.

  “Good morning,” Sam said sleepily. “Get over here.” With that he pulled me from my side of the bed to his, wrapping his arms and legs around me until I was in a lovely body lock. As we hugged and kissed with both the comfort level of two people who have been dating for months and also the excitement of our first morning together, he casually asked, “Have you ever been to the Getty Villa?”

  The dream started there, a replica of the morning after our first date. There was a hazy sequence of us at Patrick’s Roadhouse in Santa Monica, where Sam laughed as I assigned personalities to our breakfast items, defending the charge that his frittata thought it was superior to my omelet, and listening to me wax poetic about the relationship between my jam and butter. For the record, they had a falling-out because toast was two-timing them. Somehow, Sam thought this geeky rant was funny.

  Then, in that fuzzy, dreamlike way, we were at the Getty, no travel time required. In real life, the Getty Villa is a towering museum on the northern cliffs of the Pacific Palisades. The villa itself is a work of art, a palatial white mansion framed by a series of huge white columns, full of Green and Roman antiquities. In the dream, it was even more incredible. The building was hundreds of stories high, practically in the clouds.

  As Dream Sam and I walked over to look at a beautiful painting of the San Francisco skyline, with the Coit Tower in focus and the rest of the drawing foggy and nebulous, I looked down and realized it was actually a window. I turned to him anxiously. Why was he showing me this? I wondered. He looked back and shrugged, saying, “I only slept with her once,” and pushed me out the window. The last thing I remembered was falling, plummeting down toward a rushing Coit Tower.

  Without warning, the water stopped abruptly. I looked down and saw that Liv had reached her hand around the curtain and cranked it off. We really had to talk about boundaries.

  “Come on, girl, you’ve got to be clean by now,” she shouted as she left the bathroom. I got out and closed the door tightly, to trap in the steamy condensed air.

  “Let’s get going.” Liv kept talking from the other side of the door. “It’s already Wednesday. We’re flying out at five, and Hunter’s not going to find himself. I think we should go back to the library, maybe look into that dentist thing. We never found anything on that, right? Also, your phone is buzzing like crazy out here. Either Sam is calling or something embarrassing you did went viral on YouTube.” She paused. “Dang, it’s him. I was hoping for public embarrassment.”

  “Where the hell are you?” Sam demanded into the phone.

  “What are you talking about?” I replied, taken aback by his tone.

  “Well, I know you’re not in Napa. Do you know how I know this? Because I flew there yesterday. And you weren’t there.”

  “You did what?” I stuttered, standing up and starting to pace around the room, grateful Liv had decided to go grab us coffees to give me some privacy.

  “I went to the hotel to find you,” he responded. He paused, waiting for me to explain. I was silent. “To the Calistoga Ranch. When you weren’t there, I practically had to bribe the manager to tell me where you were. She said you checked out before you even checked in.”

  I knew Siri would give us up—well, I guess it wasn’t her fault, she was programmed to respond to questions.

  “So I guess you guys left? I called you repeatedly, probably a million times, and of course you didn’t answer, so I turned around and flew back home. Where are you? Are you in L.A.? What is going on?”

  “Do you seriously think I owe you any kind of explanation right now?”

  “No,” Sam said, calming down slightly. “I’m glad to know you’re safe, though.”

  “I’m safe,” I said flatly.

  “Okay, so I guess you’re not going to tell me where you are. But either way, Emma, you can’t just run away from me. You have to give me a chance to explain.” I considered this. Did I? I remembered the terrible dream from a few nights earlier, watching the train pull away from the station. Did that mean I should leave him, or that I was a fool to push him away? Maybe it stood for the fact that it was over before I even found out about Val. Maybe it was over the second I started having the doubts. The second I started looking for my dad without telling him. Maybe it was over the moment I was born the child of Caroline and Hunter Moon. Maybe I never even had a chance.

  “Please. This is me, Emma.”

  Who was he, though? My boyfriend, my fiancé, the guy who’d cheated on me, the one who scratched my back if I was having trouble sleeping or felt inexplicably itchy, the person with whom I’d watched every e
pisode of The West Wing, the guy who’d kept a horrible secret from me for years, the one I’d kept an important secret from for weeks, the man who knew my faults, my strengths, my favorite ice cream flavor depending on the time of day, and what funny dance moves made me laugh the very hardest. My lover, my friend, my almost life partner. Sam.

  “The night that thing happened with Valerie, I was in a horrible place. We hadn’t talked for a couple weeks. I don’t know if you remember this, but you essentially stopped answering my calls when I got to Charleston. I thought you were going to break up with me.” He paused to let this sink in.

  “But I didn’t,” I added quickly.

  “You’re right. But I was convinced you were going to end it. I was freaking out, mostly because it upset me so much. I started to convince myself that it was over. I thought we were over. I went out with the crew. I got blackout drunk, passed out, and when I woke up, she was there. Waking up the next morning was the worst I’ve ever felt in my life.”

  I considered his words, although hearing the details cut into my heart like a machete. Some of what he was saying was true, truer than I would have liked to admit. I was ignoring his calls when he got to Charleston. I remembered that time distinctly. I even remembered the decision to distance myself. As soon as Sam got to South Carolina, I started to feel insecure about his absence and did the only thing I could to regain some control. I pushed him away. He was right to think that we were on the rocks. The truth is, I was very, very scared. I didn’t think we could make it through the distance or the time apart. I was sure Sam would meet some nubile young assistant or quirky props girl. Someone who knew all about movies, who knew about what was going on in his life, and mostly, who was there. Then I would lose the first guy I really loved, the only one ever who made me feel like I’d found my place in the world.