Cold Feet

by Amy FitzHenry

  But I was right, wasn’t I? He did turn to another girl the second I turned my back, one who happened to be my friend. I was infuriated, all over again. Why was he so weak? Why couldn’t he have just sucked it up and told me how he felt? Or dealt with a couple weeks of weirdness? Why did he have to resort to cheating on me? And now, what, he was blaming me? This was bullshit.

  Sam, unable to read the turn my thoughts had taken, continued. “The day after it happened, I knew it was the last time I would ever put our relationship in jeopardy again. I bought a ticket and came home the next weekend and convinced you to stick with me, remember?”

  “Yes, I remember. You convinced me it could work despite the distance. After you cheated on me. Sam, you didn’t tell me the whole story!” I finally exploded. “Sure, that was a nice thing to do, flying home, and I’m glad you realized I was the person you wanted to be with, but you didn’t tell me that you got there by sleeping with Val!”

  “I know. And for that, in addition to everything else, I am so ashamed.”

  Was he trying to make me feel sorry for him? If so, it wasn’t working.

  “I didn’t think there was any way you would take me back if you knew. I convinced myself that the circumstances, and the fact that I was too drunk to even remember what happened, made it unimportant. I physically could not make myself tell you the one thing that would make me lose you forever. But I was wrong. I should have let you make that choice.”

  I was silent in response, causing him to anxiously add, “How do you feel?”

  How did I feel? Anyone who has ever had her heart broken knows, there is no worse feeling in existence. You can’t get a deep breath without crying; every single thought and memory makes your chest ache with sorrow. It’s like your own insides have turned against you. But it wasn’t only my heart that was broken; my trust and belief in what we had and who we were was smashed as well. It was as if the fragmented pieces of my heart had twisted and coiled into nameless, shapeless objects, rendering them useless, capable only of scratching my insides raw every time I shifted. That’s how I felt.

  “Emma, are you still there?”

  “Yes.” The rage that I felt when we started the conversation had settled into an exhausting sadness. He’d given me his explanation and I didn’t feel one bit better.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said tentatively.

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. But where are you?”

  “I’m in San Francisco, Sam.” I sighed sadly. “I’m looking for my dad.”

  “What?”

  As I explained the story, how we’d gotten here, what we’d found so far, Sam listened quietly.

  “Have you talked to your mom about any of this?” Sam asked as soon as I was finished.

  “Caro? Are you joking?” I responded sharply, my chest instantly compressed. There was something distressing about him bringing up Caro, a person that made the questions about my father, and the fact that I didn’t know him, all the more painful. I recalled the one time I brought Sam home for Christmas. We actually had a pretty nice time. It was nothing like the Christmases spent with his family, long dinners full of drunken toasts and cold walks to get last-minute presents for his countless cousins, but it was much better than expected. We had a cozy Christmas dinner by the fire, Sam and Caro chatting comfortably over a bottle of red wine in the Georgetown apartment she’d inhabited since I left home.

  “Em, I have an idea. Let me come up and look for him with you. You were supposed to fly home tonight, right, but this is more important. If we have to, we can postpone the wedding. I know we can find him. And once we do, everything will be better.” He paused. “It’ll be like the rain shadow. Completely different on the other side.” Wow. Now he really was pulling out all the stops.

  Sam and I had only been dating for a few months when we took an impromptu trip to Palm Springs for the weekend, stumbling on Korakia Pensione, a glorious Mediterranean-inspired bed-and-breakfast, with gorgeous, sparse rooms that had heavy stucco walls, huge beds, and scratchy record players. We spent the entire weekend having sex on the absurdly soft thousand-thread-count sheets, playing cards at the outside wooden tables, and reading the thick novels they provided in stacks around the white stone infinity pool.

  The only time we even left the grounds was one morning to bike to the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, a rickety-looking gondola that rose 8,500 feet, which picked up travelers at the barren desert floor and deposited them in a forest at the top of the San Jacinto Mountains. It would turn out to be the source of one of my most amazing and most terrifying memories ever.

  This was mostly due to my incredible fear of heights, forever preventing my submission to any reality show, but it wasn’t helped by the fact that the tram was designed to spin in circles, like a rooftop hotel on acid, as you ascended the mountain. This design move was actually pretty genius. It meant you could see the view from every angle as you traveled up the edge of the mountain. Unfortunately, this detail was difficult for me to appreciate so near a panic attack.

  To calm me down, Sam rubbed my back—not in circles, thankfully—and quietly explained how it could be so dry on one side of the mountain and so green and lush on the other, why the landscape appeared so different as we approached the peak. In a low voice, he explained the concept of the rain shadow.

  “The rain shadow is created because of the mountains; they block the rain-producing clouds from crossing over,” he explained simply. “Because of this, one side of the mountain is desert, and the other is forest.” He looked straight into my eyes as he explained, holding my gaze.

  I can say without a doubt that was the moment I realized I would love him forever. Not because he was the guy who knew a little bit about everything or because he was sweetly using the same tone you’d use on a mental patient, both of which were true, but because as he explained it, he knew not to point down at the rain shadow. He wasn’t thinking about transmitting an interesting fact or trying to get his point across, he was simply trying to distract me from looking. Rather than focusing on the anecdote, he was thinking about how I felt.

  I got what he meant. Sam thought that finding my father together could be like crossing the rain shadow, starkly different on the other side. It could bring us to a new place in our relationship. Well, I thought, strangled by pain, you could also say that finding out that Sam had cheated on me and lied about it was like crossing the rain shadow. I couldn’t in a thousand years have imagined what it was like over here, or how it could be so different, but once I crossed over, I couldn’t get back.

  “Look, Sam, I can’t do this right now. I have to go,” I said, hanging up on him for the second time that week.

  In an incredibly famous case in 1891, Vosburg v. Putney, one boy lightly kicked the leg of another boy in class, presumably innocently horsing around. His kick shattered the other boy’s bone, due to the fact that it was already nearly, although not visibly, broken.

  The court held that Putney, who’d always seemed like a bit of a bully to me, was responsible for all of Vosburg’s damages, despite the fact that they were inordinately extreme. The injuries may have been improbable, but they were actually suffered by the person the defendant chose to kick; thus, the consequences were entirely his fault. If he was responsible for some of Vosburg’s damages—which undoubtedly he was, as he had blatantly kicked him—he should be responsible for all of them. As the opinion stated, “a defendant takes a plaintiff as he finds him.” In other words, don’t kick the guy with the bad leg, because you’ll probably have to pay for a new one.

  The eggshell plaintiff rule was born.

  Maybe Sam couldn’t have predicted the level of pain his act of betrayal would cause, but he was responsible for it. All of it. He knew what he was getting into. He knew my history. Emotionally, I was an eggshell plaintiff, ready to break the second you tapped the surface.

 
He should have been much more careful.

  CHAPTER 18

  After once again telling Liv that I didn’t want to talk about Sam, we headed back to the library, where it seemed so many good ideas came from the first day. First, we tried to crack the dentist mystery, searching the California Dental Association online membership directory, as many insurance providers’ dentist listings as we could think of, and several find-my-dentist websites. We even called a few local practices in the area to ask if there was any other way to find an errant dentist, but they pretty much only pointed us back to Google.

  This dead end gave us the idea to search other professional membership sites. We perused the State Bar of California—I briefly wondered if he would be proud or horrified to have another lawyer in the family—and the Medical Board of California. Next, we tried the California Vital Records site, an idea that Carrick had mentioned to Liv. If Hunter were married or had a kid (other than me, that is), that information would be in there. We almost jumped out of our chairs when we found a single entry—for Hunter Moon, the father of Tyler and Kyle Moon. I wanted to scream.

  “Seriously, now what?” Liv turned to me, shaking her head in frustration.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Let’s think of it this way. What do people do in life? They get married, they have kids, they have a job, interests, hobbies . . . what else? We have checked any possible database where anyone who did those things would show up.”

  I felt the germ of an idea sprouting. What else did people do? Where did they put their names? Where did they check in? Day in and day out . . .

  “The gym!” I practically shouted. “People go to the gym.”

  “They do,” Liv said emphatically. “Especially in San Francisco. Emma, that’s a great idea. You are totally right. That just might work.” I wasn’t exactly sure what she was referring to, but I let her keep going as something was clearly clicking for her. “When I went to Equinox the other day to try and take that yoga class, they looked me up on their database and instantly knew I was a member in Manhattan, so they must have all the records in the same place. If your dad belongs to any of the locations, and there are loads, we could find him!” Liv got up and started packing her bag, ready to put our newest plan into action.

  “Hold on. What makes you think they’re just going to give us that information? I’m sure there are privacy rules and stuff.”

  “Oh, they’ll give it to us,” she said, mysteriously confident. “Let’s just hope your dad’s the type to overpay for a gym membership.”

  “Excuse me,” Liv said to the buff, blond man at reception who bore a striking resemblance to Westley from The Princess Bride, wearing a name tag that somewhat amusingly read FRANK. The name didn’t exactly fit. “Hi, Frank. I’m a member—I came by yesterday, I don’t know if you remember.”

  “Of course I do,” he said quickly, turning slightly pink. Oh, here we go, a new card-carrying member of the Liv fan club. Now I knew why she was so sure she could get the information out of him. That saucy little minx, God bless her.

  “I was wondering, Frank, could you look up someone for us in that handy computer of yours? We need to find out if he’s a member here,” she said sweetly.

  “I’m not supposed to,” Frank said nervously.

  “Frank, it’s a really long story, but I promise we will never tell a soul, and it would mean more to me than you would ever know. I wouldn’t ask, but it is so very important,” she whispered conspiratorially.

  He looked conflicted, but in the end, Liv’s hotness won the day. As usual. I think her record at this point was four thousand to nil. “Okay. I’ll do it, just this once. You won’t tell anyone?” We shook our heads vehemently. “What’s the name?”

  “First name, Hunter; last name, Moon.” We waited a few precious seconds while he typed, until he started to nod slowly, still looking at the screen.

  “Yes, I see one listing for a Hunter Moon,” he said. Liv let out a little chirp, and I grabbed her hand.

  “Thank you, Frank!” Liv said gaily. “Does he live in San Francisco?”

  “Yes, he’s in the Bay Area, but unfortunately I can’t give out any information beyond that.”

  “Why not?” I asked in a strangled voice.

  “Please, Frank,” Liv pleaded.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to—I really can’t. It’s not in the computer. We only have addresses on file at the locations where the members belong.” My mouth dropped and I had a mental image of leaping across the desk, grabbing the computer, and throwing it out the window.

  Luckily, Frank went on before the impulse got the better of me.

  “But I would suggest you try the Marin County Equinox; they might be able to help you.”

  “Marin?” I repeated.

  “Marin,” he confirmed, glancing down once more. “Can I help you with anything else?”

  “No, Frank, but thank you. You have no idea how much I appreciate it.”

  He bowed his head slightly and turned back to his computer. “As you wish.”

  Liv and I immediately jumped in our rental car and made our way up and around the city to the Golden Gate Bridge, hugging the peninsula with its steep hills on our left and the placid azure bay on our right, stretching out to the steely gates of Alcatraz and beyond.

  We chugged past the Marina Green, filled with happy young moms pushing their baby strollers over the well-tended grass and kids of all ages running around wildly, with the strings of kites wrapped tightly around their fists. I wondered why they weren’t in school in September. I figured they all went to those alternative charter schools that took breaks throughout the year. The realization that I had no idea how the school system worked anymore made me feel both old and young, straddling the gap between being a kid and having one. I thought about the blond curly hair I’d assumed our kids—Sam’s and mine—would have. We hadn’t decided anything official, but we knew we both wanted two, and, like every couple, we liked to throw names around. He loved the name Pearl, after his grandmother, which I thought was beautiful, and I liked Henry.

  I’d pictured our family so many times, a serious little boy and fun-loving little girl, both with curly blond mops and a dad who loved to throw them into the air, that it was incredibly painful to realize it might never come to fruition. This potential loss of the life I had imagined with Sam hurt almost more than the loss of Sam himself.

  After we passed through the Presidio, we finally arrived at the dusty entrance of the Golden Gate, slowly inching toward the bridge until we were making our way across, to the North Bay of San Francisco and Marin County, where my third potential father currently resided.

  “We should call this place Dude Island,” Liv said, as we rumbled over the planks of the prettiest suspension bridge in the world.

  I burst out laughing. “What made you think of that?” Dude Island was what a group of our guy friends called their house in law school. Hosting flip cup tournaments and weekly after-parties, they lived their lives like they were still in a fraternity and we, in turn, used their house for similar purposes. At their parties, it was considered a victory if we didn’t lose any of our girlfriends and collectively made it back to the mainland for the night.

  “San Francisco is the real Dude Island,” Liv said pensively, as if her comment had added substantially to string theory.

  “How so?”

  “Well, in law school they called it Dude Island to be funny or whatever, but here on San Francisco, an actual island, is where every important dude in our lives ends up.” Liv smacked the steering wheel for emphasis.

  “Agreed, there are a motley crew of men in residence on this . . . well, technically it’s a peninsula—Dude Peninsula, if you will. But you’re right, STB, my dad . . . Can we count the hot Equinox guy?”

  “Of course Frank counts. It’s the energy, I’m telling you. That’s how it works
. You start to think about something, and when you put that thought out into the universe, that’s when you start to find it. How else do you explain the fact that you’ve never encountered another Hunter Moon in your life, and now, you find three?”

  “Well, I’ve never looked before.”

  “That explains some of it, sure, but there’s more to it. You are ready to find him. You finally realized that, and then asked for it. And now you’re going to get it.”

  “Maybe,” I added, to avoid the possible jinx.

  “Plus, what about Dusty and Carrick? They’re dudes. Add them to the list.”

  “I guess if Frank counts, they count,” I said lightly, looking out the window. If I was going to be perfectly honest with myself, I’d thought about calling Dusty as soon as we left the gym, to tell him about our new lead, although it hadn’t occurred to me to contact Sam. Maybe it was because I simply wanted to talk to someone who had been in my shoes. Or maybe it was because of whatever we’d shared the night before. I shook my head to rid that moment from my memory, still embarrassed by the full-body hug I’d instigated.

  In any case, I’d restrained myself from calling him, if for no other reason than because it was a Wednesday morning and I didn’t want to bother him while he was Gchatting and listening to Spotify like a true young professional.

  Now, though, in a moment of impulsivity, I pulled out my phone. Before I could change my mind, I typed a note to Dusty. Going to see another Hunter, after Liv seduced a gym receptionist for the info . . . Long story. Wish me luck and Happy Wednesday! The final exclamation seemed to give it the casual edge I was looking for, and while I didn’t really consider myself an ellipses person in text, it felt right. Maybe now we could forget my weird behavior from the night before. My phone buzzed. Can’t wait to hear it. Good luck! Let me know if you need a ride to the airport later. I felt a wave of relief wash over me. At least my relationship with one islander was completely normal.