by Cate Holahan
Despite everything my father did, I can only vaguely recall her crying once. I don’t remember what for. Probably he’d hit her. She’d done her best to send me upstairs when she’d sensed an argument would get ugly, but it was hard for her to correctly gauge it all the time. He’d come home drunk a lot, looking for a fight or a fuck—neither of which she’d ever wanted to give him. Either he was going to get violent or go looking elsewhere. How could she always guess right?
As I rinse, I try to understand why I’d become so depressed after my dad left. I should have been grateful. Maybe kids always want both parents around—even when one is a terror. Or maybe I had more good memories back then. I only have one now: a time when I’d stayed home sick from school and he’d lounged on the couch with me all day watching movies. He’d even let me rent an R-rated teen flick all the older kids had been chatting about six months earlier because of some nudity and the suggestion of sex. My mom had barred me from watching it, but Dad had said that she was being overprotective “about nothing.” I’d gone back to junior high the following day as the coolest eighth grader ever.
After I shower, I head into the kitchen for cereal, only to remember that I forgot to buy any at the store the night before. Christine’s presence had distracted me from my mental grocery list. I return upstairs to my phone and send her a text. “Nothing in the pantry. Breakfast?”
Her reply appears almost instantaneously. “Meet you @ Crow on a Roof. Nine.”
I head back to my room. As I climb the stairs, my stomach protests waiting three hours to eat, grumbling and groaning louder than any creaky floorboard. I have a feeling it will make me pay for this later. Already, I am more queasy than usual. By the time I reconstitute my office setup—sitting on the mattress with my computer in my lap and phone by my side—my lower abdomen is in full revolt. Each of my unfertilized eggs seems to have grown limbs and is throwing a tantrum, kicking and clawing at my muscles and vital organs. I run to the toilet with my hand over my mouth. Fish, cured in stomach acids, burns in my throat and my belly. When I see porcelain, I’m not sure which end belongs over the bowl.
When everything is out, I wipe down the bathroom surfaces with bleach left beneath the sink, pausing every few seconds to catch my breath. The smell of so much chlorine turns my stomach, but it’s preferable to the stench of sick. The bleach will also disinfect the room on the off chance that the hormones aren’t responsible for my illness. A spritz of standard bleach obliterates nearly everything: E. coli, salmonella, viruses. It will even unravel DNA. The only thing it can’t destroy is blood.
When I finish, I shower for a second time, brush my teeth, and head back to my room. Feeling clean helps, but a heavy metal drummer still plays in my head, thumping on the bass and slamming his sticks into the hi-hat to maintain the ringing between my ears. I stumble over to the bed, weak-kneed, and curl up in fetal position on the mattress. Sleep doesn’t ask my permission.
*
The phone’s vibration startles me awake. I swat blindly around the mattress, trying to find the handset without opening my eyes. Around the third slap, I remember my breakfast date with Christine and add vision to the search. Chris is good about giving me a five-minute grace period. The waiter is probably telling her that he needs the table.
The phone lies beneath a pillow. “Chris?” My voice sounds skinned.
“Liza, are you on your—Wait, are you okay?”
“Alcohol and fertility drugs don’t mix.”
“Say no more. I’ll grab you an egg sandwich to go.”
You choose your friends, not your family. Christine is the best sister an only child could ever want. She arrives twenty minutes later with a white paper bag from the restaurant, coffee, and a bottle of aspirin. Love and appreciation overwhelm me so that all I can do in return is offer a sniffling hug.
She pats my back. “What are best friends for?”
My gratitude gives way to guilt as I watch her set up breakfast on the dining table, grabbing plates and glasses from kitchen cupboards as if she owns the place. If Chris had disappeared, I’d be wallpapering Montauk with posters and pestering the police daily. David is doing the same for his friend. I’ve been selfish to expect him to snap out of it and start paying me attention after only a month.
I sit at the place that Chris has set for me. A fried egg sandwich with a thick medallion of ham between two croissants rests in the center of a plate surrounded by a glass of water, two aspirins, and a large black coffee.
I swallow the pills first and drink the water. Chris nods her approval and then indicates the Starbucks cup with the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich in her hand. “I always go with coffee first. If your stomach isn’t ready to hold anything down, you’d rather find out with liquids.”
I pull the paper cup beneath my nose and inhale the steam. The familiar scent calms the throbbing in my skull. The drummer is not playing so much anymore as he is feathering the snare, creating internal white noise.
Chris settles into the chair across from me, her back toward the kitchen. It’s the seat she always took growing up. Me on the right, her across, my mom at the head. Even when he lived with us, my father rarely ate dinner with the family.
I tentatively sip the black coffee. A warm, calming sensation spreads through my gut as the liquid goes down. “This is exactly what I needed. Thank you.”
“Love you.” Chris blows me an air kiss. “Besides, you’d do it for me. In fact, you have done it for me, many times. How many nights did you stay over after the divorce?”
The answer intensifies my shame about David. I spent four days at Christine’s house helping her pack George and the nanny’s things into boxes. I’d had Chris and Emma over for dinner at least one day a week afterward. Yet I’d wanted David to get over his friend’s likely death in a month.
“You’re my sister from another mister. I’d do anything for you,” she says. Despite her jokey tone, I know she means it. Chris and I have looked out for each other our whole lives. “How are you feeling?”
“Physically or mentally?”
“Both.”
“Physically? Much better thanks to you. I don’t know what I would do without you.” I reach out and squeeze her hand. She smiles at me to accept the compliment and then rolls her eyes at my sappiness.
“And mentally?”
“I feel sick with myself. I’ve been giving David a lot of grief about still wallowing over Nick and not boarding the baby train. But if David cares about Nick half as much as I adore you, then he’s within his rights to crawl into a hole for a year. It’s not fair to him.”
Chris tucks her hair behind her ears rather than join me in admonishing myself.
I sigh. “It’s also not very respectful of Nick. I haven’t mourned him at all.”
She leans her forearms on the table and looks up at me from beneath a wrinkled brow. “And Nick would have shed a tear over you? Come on. He was cute and charming and very driven . . .” Her honey eyes get a bit soupy at the thought of her once crush. She shakes her head to pull herself out of the daydream. “But we both know he wasn’t that nice, especially not to you. He always treated you like the girl David had settled for.”
“Well, I took away his clubbing buddy.”
Chris grimaces. “Most people grow up and get over that. Nick used to call you ‘Little Miss Mistake’ and say that you were too troubled to have real friends so you made up people to keep you company.”
Though I never heard Nick say such things, I can imagine him doing it behind my back, whispering it to one of those milquetoast girls he always brought on group dates that looked like she’d been pulled straight from a Robert Palmer video. I have a harder time picturing him insulting me with Christine in earshot. “When did he say that?”
She sips her coffee, hiding her face behind the mug. “When we went on that date.”
I burst out laughing. The reaction is involuntary and not at all rational. Nothing is particularly amusing about my beautiful maid of honor
and David’s handsome best man trying each other on for size. Yet I find it absurd. “You’re kidding. You never went on a date with him.”
“I did. A little less than two months ago. I told you about it.”
“You did not.”
“I did. You don’t remember.”
I give Chris my best Really? look. There is no way that I would forget my closest friend going on an official date with my husband’s law partner. She must have glossed it over, acting like she ran into him and they had one of their usual stilted conversations. “Well, give me details.”
She scans the table and groans. “Ugh. I need a drink for this story. Where’s the bottle we didn’t get to?”
Part of me feels that I should tell her that drinking before noon is a sign of alcoholism. But I have zero moral authority to warn her when I was the one who couldn’t hold her liquor the prior night. “There’s a Riesling in the fridge.”
She heads into the kitchen. “It was at the start of the summer, actually.” The fridge door opens, hiding Chris’s face. “I’d put Emma on a plane to see George a few days earlier and was feeling a bit lonely. So, because the universe tends to steel-boot kick people who are feeling sorry for themselves, I ended up bumping into Nick in the city.”
The fridge shuts. Sunlight from the screened back door glints on the green bottle in her hand. Glass clinks as she looks through a cabinet above the dishwasher for a wine glass.
“You’re leaving me in suspense,” I say.
“You’re the last person who can complain about that,” she quips, removing a stemless wine glass from the cabinet. “Anyway, Nick was looking GQ as always, so we started talking. Then he asked me what I was doing later . . .”
I try to catch Chris’s eye as she says this. I can picture her asking Nick on a date, but not the other way around. After her divorce, she’d asked me to set them up. David had insisted that he wouldn’t go for her.
Chris returns to the table with the white wine in her right hand and the rims of two glasses pinched between the fingers of her left. The mere suggestion of alcohol turns my stomach. “I’m never drinking again.” I take a massive bite of my sandwich for emphasis.
She shakes her head at me and twists off the cap. “So anyway, Nick takes me to this speakeasy-type place in Brooklyn, one of those bars without an officially marked entrance. I forget the name of it. I do remember lots of gold-framed mirrors and red leather booths.”
“Stalling.”
“Okay. Let me get a drink in me.” She pours a taste and takes it like a vodka shot, tilting the glass back until it has disappeared. “Okay. So I’m in Marie Antoinette’s bedroom, hanging on handsome Nick’s bicep, wondering whether it’s bad form to sleep with him on the first date given that we’ve known each other socially for years, and I realize that every single person in the place is gay.”
“He took you to a gay bar?”
“Well, it could have been a hipster bar,” Chris concedes, pouring herself a real portion. “Or maybe it was a straight bar most of the time and we stumbled in on gay night. So anyway, he acts like the whole thing is completely natural and takes me to a booth. We order drinks.” She takes a Pavlovian sip of her wine. “He spends the whole night basically bitching about you in hopes that I would relay the message, which I never did because fuck him, right?”
I’d known Nick wasn’t a fan of mine. But the act of taking out my best friend for the sole purpose of trashing me is something out of a mean-high-school-girls movie. “What did he say?”
Chris grimaces. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I want to know.”
“Typical complaining from an insensitive man.” She rolls her eyes to show she doesn’t take any stock in the forthcoming criticism. “The hormones had made you all emotional and clingy, and David couldn’t do the things he needed to because you might fall apart.”
“What, like work?”
She shrugs. “Nick said at one point that he brought in all the big-money clients, so maybe he thought David wasn’t pulling his fair share because he was busy taking care of you.”
If Nick had said such things to Christine, he’d undoubtedly been saying them to David daily. Was it any wonder now, with Nick’s voice ringing in his head, that all David wanted to do was work? That he didn’t want me to continue treatments? Nick had probably convinced him that a baby was bad for business.
The drummer in my head starts a new rhythm, something ferocious and tribal like an ancient hula. I drop my forehead into my hands and try to soften the beat. Angry tears spill from the corners of my eyes.
“Hey, don’t get upset. Nick was being an ass. I mean, David’s his best friend, right? He couldn’t shoulder the load for a few months?”
Chris comes around the table and crouches beside my chair. She drapes an arm around my shoulder. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No. I’m glad you did.” I sniff and wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “And I know it’s horrible to say, but I’m glad Nick’s gone.”
Chapter 7
I tell my mom that Jake and I are having a long-overdue date night. She doesn’t believe me. Doubt restrains her smile as she stands in the doorway to the clapboard Cape Cod where I grew up, trying to make direct eye contact after asking how parenthood is treating “you two.”
“It’ll be good to have time together,” I say, pushing Vicky’s stroller past her waiting hug. On my shoulder hangs a massive bag stuffed with backup onesies, bottles, and bags of frozen breast milk. I drop it on her plaid couch and then remove the milk pouches as my mother takes her granddaughter from the stroller.
“Hello, Vicky-boo. Are you ready to spend the night with Nana? Huh, baby? Spend the night with Nana?”
I carry the milk through the small dining room into the adjacent kitchen. The floor is black-and-white-checked linoleum, a design so old that it’s become fashionable again. My mother has also held onto the retro-chic fridge of my childhood, an ancient white box with an attached freezer a little bigger than a beach bag. I lay my baby’s food atop a pack of chicken breasts encased in snow-covered plastic.
“I’m leaving you with forty ounces,” I shout as I reenter the living room.
“You look nice. Where are you going?” Though she calls out the question between coos at her granddaughter, I recognize when my mother is fishing. She’s searching for clues as to why I asked her last minute to watch Vicky, why I nearly begged that she reschedule her girls’ dinner with the neighbor. My urgency would make sense if, say, Jake scored concert tickets.
“You can’t defrost the milk in the microwave. It needs to be put in a hot water bath for five minutes, until it reaches room temperature. Microwaving kills all the good nutrients.”
“Please, Beth. I know how to heat up breast milk.” Again, she tries to make me look at her. “Is anything wrong?”
The little girl inside me wants to bury my face on her tiny shoulder and unload my entire burden. My better self strangles her. I take Vicky from my mom’s arms and kiss her forehead. She smiles, or at least gives me an infant’s best approximation of one. Her sapphire eyes glitter. Though Vicky’s irises are darker than her dad’s, her lids have his downturned shape. If we end things tonight, will I ever be able to look at her and not see him?
“Mommy will be back tomorrow,” I whisper. “I love you more than life.”
A hand lands on my upper arm. The lines on my mom’s brow deepen. “Beth, is everything all right?”
I hand her my baby. “I’m sorry. I’m in a hurry. Zipcar charges by the hour.”
She searches my face for something more. I gesture to the bag and start detailing everything inside, an attempt to overload her mother-radar. It’s not working. I can tell by her erect posture. The way she looks at me rather than at the bag from which I frantically pull out bottles, needlessly explaining how to ensure nipples don’t mold.
As I’m heading out the door, she tries one last time. “Are you sure nothing is wrong?”
I
throw up my hands. “I’m a new mom.”
She gives me a wistful smile, as though that explains everything.
*
It’s 6:20 when I enter. For the next half hour, I wait, huddled on our living room couch like a crouching tiger, ready to pounce the moment Jake walks through the door. He calls at seven sharp. I hold my breath as I answer my cell and shut my eyes tight, praying that he’ll tell me he’s on his way.
“Um . . . Beth.”
Coward. I want to unleash the word with an onslaught of expletives. I want to scream that I know he’s about to lie, that he’s not working late, that his girlfriend is pissed off because he was affectionate toward me and that she probably gave him an ultimatum about seeing her tonight. I want to reveal that I know everything. I am not a fool. I am not hormonal. I am not crazy.
“Why aren’t you here?”
“It’s work. I’m so sorry, hon. This upcoming case is taking so much time, and every time I think I have a handle on it, something new shows up in discovery that changes my whole strategy.”
“My mother is watching Vicky.”
“I know, babe. But there’s no way I’m going to be able to make it home at a reasonable hour. I’ll be stuck here all night.”
“You said we could talk. Why can’t you work late tomorrow?”
“Because I can’t,” he snaps. “What do you want me to do, huh? I’m needed here. My job pays our bills.” Anger is the best cover for guilt. It’s an outward feeling that pushes people away, puts others on the defensive, prevents them from demanding apologies.
“You promised.”