Cold Feet

by Amy FitzHenry

  “What’s that, Emma?” she responded warily.

  “Well, there are a couple things. One, what are you doing here? Two, do you realize what time it is? And three, how in the world did you find me?”

  Caro laughed crisply. “Yes, I am aware of the time. I took a five A.M. flight to get here at this hour. I’ve been on a plane for six hours and traveling for eight. What would you have me do? Check into a hotel for a few hours?” It had been so long since I’d seen her that even watching words come out of her mouth was a singularly fascinating activity. I’d forgotten how she spoke, how she talked with her hands far more than I guessed she realized, and her expression when she was both irritated and defensive.

  “No, of course not. Okay, how did you know I was here?”

  “Hunter contacted me.” My mouth dropped open in surprise. I couldn’t have been more stunned than if she’d said the producers of The Voice had called, offering her a ticket to the blind auditions.

  “My fake dad called you?” I didn’t mean it to sound snarky but as soon as it came out of my mouth I knew she would take it that way. That was the problem with us. There are people out there who naturally get each other, whose interactions flow easily and fluidly. My mother and I are not those people. We communicate clumsily, through stops and starts, passing the hurt and offended baton back and forth as we go.

  “Yes, Emma, he did. I spoke with him and then with Olivia, who gave me the address where you were most likely staying. But before we discuss any of that, I need some coffee.”

  I stared at her blankly. She talked to Liv? How much did she know? Who else had she spoken to—Sam? This thought crossed my mind painfully and I willed it away, reminding myself that he wasn’t in my life anymore. It didn’t matter who talked to him, on my behalf or not. Wordlessly, I pulled my jacket on over Dusty’s sweatpants and T-shirt, and we headed out.

  “How was the flight?” I asked, after several minutes of silence. We were settled inside a cozy French café down the street from Dusty’s apartment. I’d been there before, when it was bustling to the point of discomfort, but as we’d just missed the morning rush, we had the place practically to ourselves. There were a few old-timers who actually looked French examining their wrinkly, foreign-looking newspapers, and a girl in her twenties with wild hair and a short skirt at the counter trying to order a Frappuccino, much to the barista’s disgust. Ah, the walk of shame. I felt a fierce stab of missing Liv, remembering our game of counting walks of shame over Sunday brunch in law school.

  “The flight? Well, I didn’t relish waking up at the crack of dawn to catch it, or paying hundreds of dollars to change my ticket. Not to mention telling my boss that I had to skip a congressional hearing. But I really had no choice.” Caro paused for a second to take a sip of her cappuccino and allow the guilt to sink in properly. “I received a call that my child was running all over San Francisco, comparing freckles with men and living with two strange boys while her fiancé waited in purgatory. Really, Emma, were such dramatics necessary?” I felt the heat rising to my cheeks and felt myself losing it, but I gave myself a stern talking-to. This was not the time to be weak. I was not the one who should be embarrassed, I reminded myself.

  “The only reason I was ‘running around comparing freckles with men,’ as you put it, is because for the past twenty-nine years, I have been lied to about who my father is and where I come from.” I sat back and crossed my arms pointedly.

  Caro scoffed at this. “You’ve been watching too much reality TV, Emma. You know exactly where you come from. And as for Hunter, what difference did it make what I said his name was? He never had any impact on your life before, why should he now?” Her eyes remained focused as she said this, the picture of reason and detachment. It was the same neutral, self-assured face she made while testifying before Congress about the results of the latest tobacco study, which infuriated me further. How dare she keep her cool right now?

  “What difference did it make? Do you hear yourself?” I tried to keep my tone firm but low, as I was pretty sure the Frenchmen wouldn’t appreciate a screaming match in their pleasant patisserie.

  “You’re getting caught up in the semantics.”

  “The semantics of my own father’s name? You’re unbelievable. I can’t believe you would try and twist this into my problem. You’ve been in Washington too long if you’re going to try to spin this one. My whole life you’ve been doing this, dismissing me, acting like I’m this irritating, ridiculous person. Let me fill you in on something. It isn’t overdramatic to care about who your father is.” Caroline was silent, stirring the contents of her white porcelain cup with the tiny silver spoon they’d provided. I kept going, though. I was on a roll. “Also, you don’t know the first thing about what happened between Sam and me, or what he’s doing innocently waiting for me. It’s over. And it’s not because of Hunter or this trip, or anything like that. He cheated on me.” My words broke on this last sentence, shattering the strength I was trying desperately to convey.

  “Okay, Emma,” Caro said more softly now, putting up both hands as if in surrender. “You’re right. I don’t know what happened with Sam. All I know is what happened with Hunter. And with Mike.” She took a pause and sipped her cappuccino, appearing to need a break after saying his name. I felt a shifting in my stomach, or maybe my heart. Either way it hurt. “I’m ready and willing to tell you everything.”

  She sighed again and looked through her purse, pulling out several pieces of paper, folded together, reluctant to continue but determined to finish. “I know I haven’t been the best mother, so I am going to take this opportunity to do something for you, something I know you need. I got you a plane ticket,” she said carefully, placing the folded paper on the smooth black table. “Back to Los Angeles. This afternoon. I’m willing to offer you a compromise. If you come with me on this flight, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about your father. The whole story. What happened and why it happened. What happened with Hunter, what happened with Mike, everything. Trust me, there is nothing I want to do less than talk about this, but you have a right to know.” She paused. “But if you don’t come with me this afternoon, there are no promises, no guarantees. I can see what you’re doing in San Francisco right now, I can see the mistakes you’re making, even if you can’t. We may not be close, Emma, but I know you. I know you’re shutting down and shutting everyone out, and it isn’t right. What’s more, I’m certain you’ll regret it. You have to go home and face everything. Face Sam. Call off the wedding if you like, but don’t do it like this.

  “If you come back to Los Angeles today, I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Otherwise, I will choose to maintain my privacy. But first, you have to get on the plane.” She took a moment to let this sink in. She may have had a point about my ignoring reality and shutting people out—Dr. Majdi was probably nodding knowingly somewhere in Downtown L.A.—but she had been absent from my life for years. How could she really know what was best for me?

  My disbelief must have showed, because she went on. “I know this is extreme, and maybe a bit silly, but I feel I have very little choice. I know I don’t have any sway with you. You won’t take my advice. If I say you should go back to L.A. because it’s the right thing to do, you won’t do it. All I have to convince you with is the truth. It’s the trip for the story, no negotiations.”

  In one smooth motion, she picked up her cappuccino and finished it. “I’m sure you need some time to settle your affairs and hopefully to pack, so I’m going to go. I hope to see you at the airport in a few hours.” Pushing the flight information toward me on the table and tapping it lightly, Caro turned and walked away, leaving me stunned into silence, still clutching my mostly foam latte.

  Once, when I was about seven years old, I was at home alone, watching cartoons on a scratchy orange couch, the kind quite popular in the eighties, a decade full of uncomfortable furniture, when an advertisement for a retail mo
rtgage lender came on and started screaming at me: Don’t lose your home because your mortgage is too high! Don’t end up out on the street because of out-of-control interest rates! I sat glued to my seat, Lucky Charms sliding down my milky spoon, mesmerized by the television and certain that it was vital to remember every word. I tried furiously to memorize what I was seeing on the screen. It all sounded terrifyingly foreign, and I was sure that if I didn’t pay very careful attention, whatever they were warning would certainly occur.

  At the time, we were staying with one of Caro’s friends from grad school, a very nice man named Danny, who lived in a basement apartment in Dupont Circle. Knowing what I do now about the neighborhood and cutoff jean shorts, I’m pretty sure he was gay. All I knew then was that Danny was my mom’s friend, he had an extra bedroom, and he was kind. Danny didn’t make me feel like he was counting down the minutes until his favor quota was up and we would get out of his apartment like so many others, and when he teased my mom or called me a chatterbox, it made me giggle. When he wasn’t making us laugh or cooking amazing meals involving spices I’d never heard of, Danny was playing Simon & Garfunkel morning, noon, and night. I fell asleep at night under a blanket of safety, lulled by the smell of cumin and the melody of “Bleecker Street.”

  I loved living there. I loved snuggling on the wool couch on Sunday while Danny and my mom went to the market, making my trundle bed carefully every morning and watering the kitchen plants with their sprawling vines, which composed the entirety of my chores. I remember praying as hard as I could that my mom would marry Danny so we could live there forever.

  On that Sunday morning, however, as I watched the threatening commercial, I didn’t feel happy or safe. I felt panicked, although I wasn’t even old enough to correctly identify the emotion. Was that why we lived with Danny? I wondered. Why we didn’t have a house? Had we done the bad things warned of in the commercial?

  I sat frozen, deep in thought, until I heard the key turn in the door. The second Caro opened it, chatting with Danny and gripping a cloth bag of vegetables, she could see the fear in my eyes.

  “What’s wrong, sweetie?” She quickly handed the bag to Danny and settled next to me on the couch and he headed back to the kitchen, flashing me a sweet smile on his way.

  I told her what I’d seen, slightly nervous about being caught eating cereal in front of the TV, which was discouraged if not verboten, but somehow I understood this was bigger than that. “Mom, did we not pay back our mortgage?” I asked carefully, pronouncing it with the t. “Is that why we live here?”

  “Our what? Oh, our mortgage? Where did you hear that?”

  “On TV. They said if you don’t pay your mor . . . mort-gage, or your in-ter-est, then you don’t get to keep your house. Is that why we don’t have one?” I gripped my small hands into tight balls as I said this, terribly afraid that saying it out loud would make it true. Caro gave me a long look, reaching for the remote to turn off the television with one hand, while she rubbed my back with the other.

  “Emma Moon, you are a smart girl. Too smart for your own good. I don’t want you to worry about those things anymore. We live here because it’s fun and because Danny likes having us here. Right, Danny?” Caro called into the kitchen. He shouted something back in the affirmative, half drowned out by the drumbeats of “Cecilia.”

  “Now, will you please help me with the minestrone? I need an assistant and those zukes aren’t gonna chop themselves.” Caro gave me a kiss on the forehead and got up, leaving me sitting there with a nagging feeling in the back of my head. What she said sounded good, but even in my child’s mind I understood that there was something missing from her response; there was something she wasn’t saying. That she hadn’t quite answered the question.

  Carefully unlocking the door with the spare key I’d grabbed on the way out, I slowly opened the front door to Dusty and Carrick’s apartment.

  “Hey, where have you been? Are you okay?” Dusty asked, walking toward me and taking in my expression. “Who was that at the door?”

  I shook my head.

  “This was too fast, wasn’t it? I freaked you out. I’m sorry.”

  “No, you don’t need to apologize, it’s not your fault. The thing is—” I tried to think of the best way to put it. “We don’t really know each other very well. I don’t even know how you got your scar,” I half joked, trying to make light of the serious words I was saying.

  “I know, Emma. But that’s the point. We’re getting to know each other. That’s how it works when you start a relationship.” He looked nervous as he said this, as if he knew he’d let his hand show. “And I got the scar ‘sledding’ on my bunk bed ladder when I was five. Yes, my twin sister and I had bunk beds, and yes, it was adorable.” I laughed slightly at this. “Look, I know this weekend will be hard for you. Why not go away to Sonoma with me? It’s beautiful there, and the September harvest has the best chardonnay. Or, if you’re not into that, maybe we could go camping in Big Sur.”

  Chardonnay? Camping? In a flash, the reality of what I was doing rushed toward me like a freight train. This guy didn’t know me at all. I hated chardonnay with a passion, and after a harrowing trip to Joshua Tree in which we’d forgotten to bring water, Sam and I vowed never to go camping again. I felt my chest constrict and the truth wash over me. It wasn’t the overly sweet wine or the fear of dehydration. It wasn’t even Dusty. It was Sam. I still loved Sam. Despite everything, my heart still belonged to him. But it’s too late, said a small desolate voice, it’s too late for you and Sam.

  But it wasn’t too late to make things right with Dusty, to do the right thing.

  “Dusty, I can’t begin a relationship with you. I’m already in a relationship,” I said gently. He looked down, away from my glance. “At least, I was just in one. I’m ending one. But for better or for worse, it has to end properly. I’m sorry, but I have to go back to Los Angeles.”

  CHAPTER 25

  The law of the Attempt is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting laws of them all. Attempt is a concept with which we are all vaguely familiar, but like so many things in life that make logical sense until lawyers get involved, I didn’t fully understand it or its consequences until Professor Gray’s first-year Criminal Law seminar.

  “Attempt is the name you give to a crime when someone takes the steps to commit an illegal act and they are thwarted in some way,” Professor Gray explained eight weeks into the class. “One can be charged with attempted murder, attempted arson, or attempted anything, as long as the defendant did everything in his or her power to commit said crime.” As we learned, the tricky part of the concept is, you really have to have almost done “it”, the illegal act, in order for the charge to stick.

  You can’t be charged with attempted arson for buying the kerosene and driving to your worst enemy’s house with a grudge and a book of matches. You can’t be charged with attempted carjacking because you stand on a street corner with a gun in your pocket. You have to actually light the match and have it blown out by an inconvenient gust of wind, or brandish the gun and instruct the driver to hand over the keys to the Jag before the victim recklessly drives away unharmed, for the law of attempt to truly be satisfied. You have to have done everything in your power to commit the crime. You were going to do it, you took the steps to make it happen, but something intervened and prevented you from getting it done.

  As the plane’s violent turbulence—which, surprisingly, failed to cause me even a moment of fear—smoothed out and the tattooed woman sitting next to me released her grip on the armrest, I considered my crimes. If this was a court of law, I would definitely be found guilty of Attempt to Bang Dusty. I felt undeniably awful about it. Maybe it wasn’t technically cheating, since I’d called off my wedding the day before, but there had to be a relationship law somewhere on the books that I’d violated.

  Because, the truth is, if Caro hadn’t knocked at that particular moment, I
would have gone through with it. Sitting across the aisle from her on the plane, I gave her a silent thank-you for showing up. With everything else in my life shot to hell, Caro walking up to that door felt like the one thing I could be grateful for. I may have been liable for attempt, but I sure was glad I hadn’t committed the crime.

  “I was in love with him, you know,” Caro intoned. I turned, startled by her sudden declaration. She had been silent since we took off. “It wasn’t some cheap affair. I was in love,” she repeated.

  “Who are you talking about?” I asked, knowing the answer full well but wanting to hear her say it.

  “Mike. Your father.” My guess was she’d never said the words aloud before that moment. They certainly didn’t sound practiced.

  “Are you going to tell me the story now? Here?” Across the aisle on a 737? I added silently. Maybe the turbulence had scared her into thinking she better tell me before we crashed and it was too late.

  “That was the deal, right?” Caro said wearily.

  I nodded slowly, afraid to make a sound lest I wake her out of whatever confessional coma she’d been thrown into from the choppy flight. I guess everyone within earshot of row 7 would hear the story along with me.

  “We met in the oddest way,” she started. “While getting our hair cut.” She paused to let this sink in and I did my best to picture the bizarre scene.

  “On the way back from class one day, I stopped to get a trim. I was meeting Hunter for dinner and I wanted to look nice. He hadn’t shown much interest in me since we got married, and I was willing to try anything that might help.” Dear God, I silently pleaded, please don’t let her go into detail about the honeymoon ganja sex. Thankfully, she skimmed over the details. “Hunter was, and is, a wonderful man. I wanted things to work, even though deep down I knew I could never make him happy.