The Breakup Doctor

by Phoebe Fox

“Uh-huh. A ‘friend.’” In case I missed her implication, she underscored it with a heavy tone of irony.

  “Stop it, Sasha. That’s not helpful.”

  “Did you call him?”

  “Of course I did. It kept going to voicemail. He turns the ringer off if he’s with anyone really important.”

  “Like you?”

  I battled an urge to hang up on my best friend—the old-fashioned way, with a slam of the phone down onto something hard and unforgiving.

  “Sasha, it’s fine. Please don’t worry.” But she was right—I should have tried calling him already this morning. “Listen,” I said, keeping my tone deliberately casual, “was this something important? Can I call you back in a minute?”

  Sasha knew me too well. “Call me right back, whether you reach him or not. I mean it—immediately.” She clicked off and I dialed Kendall’s cell.

  Voicemail. I waited through his outgoing message and then said, “Kendall, please call me as soon as you wake up.” That was all. Simpler was better.

  Despite my reassurances to Sasha, I actually was starting to get worried. Not that he was up to anything illicit—just that maybe I should seriously consider that something might have happened to him. Was I in his phone yet as his ICE? We’d never talked about it. Like a lot of things.

  I didn’t want to overreact. I forced myself to calmly pour my coffee and stir in sugar and milk, then coolly booted up my laptop and pulled up the numbers for the three hospitals between Fort Myers and Naples. A quick check, just to make sure, wasn’t alarmist. Just cautious. Concerned.

  Not one of them had a record of a Kendall Pulver being admitted, and I let myself take in a full breath. At least he wasn’t hurt. He was fine. He’d be home any minute.

  As if I’d summoned him, I heard a rattling at the front door, and I shot down the steps to open it wide.

  Sasha stood there looking grim. She had to have left a Smokey and the Bandit-style caravan of cop cars piled up willy-nilly along the sides of every secondary road in her wake between here and her house. “You didn’t call me back.”

  “Dammit, Sasha! I keep thinking you’re Kendall.”

  “Seriously, you have to stop saying that. It gives me the willies.”

  I let go of the doorknob and turned to walk up the stairs. Sasha followed me up to the living room, hammering me with questions: “What time was he supposed to come home? When was the last call you had from him? Could you hear anything in the background? Did he sound different—funny? Who was he with? Did you call the hospitals?”

  I answered only her last one. “Yes, I did. You want some coffee?” I shuffled back toward the kitchen.

  “Why are you acting like this? How can you be so calm?”

  I turned around with a clean mug in my hand to see her standing planted in the kitchen entrance, hands on hips, fixing me with an exasperated stare.

  “Because,” I said, in the unruffled, overenunciated tone you use with children, “he’s not checked into any of the hospitals; ergo, he is fine. He’ll be home when he gets home, and getting all stirred up about it isn’t going to bring him back a second sooner. There’s no sense being dramatic.”

  She continued staring at me for a few silent moments. Then she shook her head, threw up her hands, and walked out of the room.

  “Sash?” I stopped midway through filling her cup. “Sasha? Where are you going?”

  I found her in the master bathroom, wrist-deep in Kendall’s vanity drawers, pulling out the contents and lining them up on the counter.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Teeth whitener—I knew it—spare glasses...ew, nose hair clippers... Ha!” She held up a strip of condoms.

  I snatched them out of her hand. “They’re ours.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Have you counted them?”

  “No, I haven’t counted them, freak show, but trust me—these are not exhibit A.”

  She yanked them back and gave me an arch look before throwing them into the drawer. “Trust me—always count the condoms.”

  “Sasha. Stop it. I mean it.”

  She paused in rifling the drawer and turned to face me, leaning against the marble countertop. “Okay, look,” she said. “I’m not saying this is what happened. But being realistic for a moment, I do think you have to admit at least the possibility that he might be screwing around.”

  I braced myself in the doorway, curling my fingers tight around the frame, feeling my nails nearly dig crescents into the wood.

  “No, actually, I don’t think I do have to admit that possibility. Not everyone’s relationship is a soap opera.” I could hear the frost in my tone.

  Sasha held up a hand. “All I’m saying is—”

  “No. Stop saying it, because you’re wrong, and I won’t forgive you for saying it once you realize you’re wrong.”

  “Yes, you would.”

  “Okay, I would, but seriously, Sasha, stop. That’s not possible, okay?”

  “Honey... I’m sorry—it’s always possible. Men are men... You never thought Michael would—”

  I slammed a hand against the doorframe so hard it made both of us jump. “That is so cynical. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe part of the reason you can’t keep a relationship going is that shitty attitude?”

  I’d gone too far, and I knew it even before I saw the look of hurt flash across Sasha’s face.

  I slapped a hand to my mouth and pulled it down across my lips as if I could wipe the words away, trying to calm myself down. “I’m sorry. That’s just fear talking, and... I’m sorry, Sash—I really, really didn’t mean that.”

  She nodded, even though I could see my comment still stung. Still, she didn’t make any move to walk out.

  There were a lot of times I thought I didn’t deserve Sasha.

  I reached over and squeezed her hand. She didn’t return the pressure, but she didn’t yank away. I pulled her with me out of the bathroom and over to the bed I still hadn’t made, drawing her down to sit beside me, then took a couple of calming breaths.

  “Okay, could Kendall be seeing someone else? Well, I suppose so, in that people are only human and they are capable of doing anything, given the right circumstances. But do I think he is? No. I don’t.”

  Sasha looked like she’d swallowed a bee and it was buzzing to get out.

  “Go ahead—it’s okay,” I said. “What?”

  “Well...so would it hurt, then, just to take a quick look around the condo?”

  I mulled that over for a second, and no sooner had I nodded my head than Sasha was up and off in a puff of dust like Road Runner. I stood to watch as she tossed the bedroom with a practiced efficiency: underneath the bed, underneath the mattress, in dresser drawers and beneath them, even knocking on the bottoms, presumably to see if they were hollow (“This isn’t a Russian spy novel, Sash,” I protested, but she was in the zone), and along every square inch of closet, including the pockets of each and every pair of pants, jeans, and shorts he owned. She was really alarmingly thorough, and I was beginning to think that maybe my dearest friend’s issues ran just a little deeper than I had suspected.

  Finally she leaned back against the bed (from where she had been sitting on the floor peering into all of his shoes) and gave a frustrated sigh. “Well. You may be right,” she admitted.

  My knees felt suddenly loose, and I sank back down onto the bed. I blinked fast, feeling helpless. The seed of doubt she’d planted was starting to send up ugly shoots. I didn’t want to, but I was traveling back to last summer...when my fiancé told me over the phone as I drove down Gladiolus that he was sorry, but he just couldn’t go through with our wedding.

  After I’d calmly said goodbye and hung up, I’d found myself continuing on to the bakery where we were supposed to meet for our cake tasting. I knew even as I made the drive that it was crazy to go now—
alone—but all I could think was that we’d had an appointment. I couldn’t break it.

  Michael was scared, I’d told myself as I forced my throat to swallow tender bites of expensive cake that might as well have been sponge. He needed some space. Some time. Everything would be fine.

  But the space Michael needed turned out to be halfway across the country, and the time he needed was...forever. I ate the cake, along with seven thousand dollars in deposits—the money I still owed my parents—sold my wedding dress and cashed in our honeymoon tickets to Hawaii, and put that money down on the first house I found inside my price range, determined to move on and not get stuck in regrets for what might have been.

  But that was the past. It was not now. Kendall wasn’t Michael. I pushed away the panicky feeling that was threatening to engulf me and made myself focus on Sasha.

  “See?” I said, my tone hollow even to me. “There’s no one else.”

  Sasha levered herself up onto the bed beside me. “Well, if it were me, the next step would be the paper trail. Cell phone bills, credit card statements, that kind of thing. That’d tell you if there’s some other woman.”

  I put a hand on her leg to try to soften my words. “Sash...that’s kind of crazy. And it’s also a big breach of trust.”

  She lifted an eyebrow and made an exaggerated show of checking her watch. “Huh. Well, here it is close to nine a.m., and there’s still no sign of him. No call, no show...no explanation. From a guy you’ve spent every single night with since the day you met him.” I thought I heard a little resentment bleed into her tone, but she kept talking. “The man you expected home last night, like always. Who, if he’s not dead or in a coma—and, Brook, you’re the one who taught me this: they’re never dead or in a coma—has now broken a big, fat, foundational trust with you.”

  I thought for a moment, then shook my head. “I can’t. It just isn’t right. And I know he isn’t seeing someone else,” I tacked on, but even to my own ears it was starting to sound less forceful. Maybe I should tell her about our argument. But what would that accomplish? He still hadn’t come home last night, and Sasha would only take that as further corroboration of her theories.

  “Okay,” she said, unfazed. “Then your other choice is to call his best friend—who’s that tall guy he’s always golfing with? Richie? Randy?”

  Sasha was being a little bit disingenuous. She’d met Ricky after work at a happy hour with us once. She found out he was single and Googled him that night to pull up his address, voter registration, and the satellite image of his house, until I headed that potential landslide off at the pass. Having her potentially go Glenn Close on Kendall’s best buddy was just a little too close to home.

  “Ricky,” was all I said.

  “Right. Call Ricky and ask if he’s heard from him. If anyone knows where he is, it’ll be his closest friend.” She looked thoughtful. “On the other hand, you run the risk of looking like a psycho to the guy. And he’ll tell Kendall you called, which, if everything is actually okay and this is just a misunderstanding, might make Kendall also think you’re a psycho.”

  I looked at her in amazement. I’d had no idea she was this self-aware.

  I gave a sigh from the bottom of my soul. I was exhausted—adrenaline had left me feeling like a deflated balloon, and my defenses were down. I was pretty much out of other choices at this point anyway, so I found myself nodding and reaching for the cordless phone on Kendall’s bedside table. Ricky was speed-dial number one.

  I looked up at Sasha when I heard Ricky’s recorded voice. “Voicemail.”

  “Don’t leave a message.” She plucked the phone out of my hand and disconnected, and then we sat there, both staring at the thing lying on the bed like a loaded weapon. I picked it up and dialed Kendall’s cell one more time. I got his voicemail again and hung up.

  “How many rings?” Sasha asked.

  “What?”

  She nodded toward the phone. “His voicemail. How many rings till it went into voicemail?”

  “It didn’t ring. Why?”

  She frowned. “Huh. Well...that could go either way. Three or four would mean he just didn’t answer. One or two means he looked, then declined—that would be bad.”

  I thought about the calls I’d made to Kendall last night and this morning. About the ringing and ringing until it finally slid into voicemail.

  “And none means it’s off, right?” I asked slowly.

  I saw understanding creep over her face, and Sasha’s eyes held a sympathy I didn’t want to acknowledge. “At least that tells you he’s okay, honey,” she offered in a bright-side voice that made me feel pathetic.

  I looked at her, a dark feeling growing in my chest. “It means he’s turned it off.”

  fourteen

  Over the years the Breakup Doctor has devised an informal handbook of breakup etiquette, based on information culled from hundreds of stories.

  If he “needs some space,” give it to him. It’s usually code for “I want to see other people,” and trying to cling to the relationship is only going to make you seem even less appealing.

  “I’m confused” means “I don’t want to dump you and be the bad guy, so I am hoping you will give up and break up with me and save me from having to do the deed.”

  If things are “moving too fast” for him and he wants to slow it down, bring them to a full stop yourself. A man who’s crazy about you isn’t going to risk letting you go, no matter how fast things are going.

  “I lost your number” means “I lost interest.” Move on.

  If he says, “You need someone who can give you everything you deserve,” he means he very much enjoys taking you out and having no-strings-attached sex, but he does not think of you as girlfriend material and never will. Get out quick.

  “I just don’t know if I still want to marry you” means...exactly that. That’s one of the hardest ones, and there’s nothing you can do but put it behind you and move past it.

  “We’re getting you out of this place,” Sasha said, springing back to her feet after the briefest of consoling moments. “Toss out your toothbrush and whatever else you keep here, so he can see all of it in the trash, and let’s go. Do you want to put Visine in his Gatorade before we leave? It’ll give him wicked shits.”

  “What? No!” It was instantly clear to me that in her present state of mind, I should probably get Sasha out of Kendall’s house as quickly as possible, before she could wreak any damage. Despite the suffocating feeling in my chest, I drew on every reserve of rationality I had, and invoked my Wise Therapist demeanor.

  “Okay, hang on. We still don’t know for a fact what’s going on here.”

  “Brook—”

  I held up a hand to stop her. “We don’t. Okay, he’s not dead or in a coma. But any number of other things could have happened.”

  “All of which involve him being a tool who hasn’t bothered to call you and never showed up when he was expected.”

  “True,” I conceded reluctantly. “But not necessarily a deal breaker yet, right? In a healthy relationship you talk about things, Sash, establish your rules and expectations.”

  Sasha narrowed her eyes. “You’re the one who taught me to get out fast, as soon as you see the signs things are falling apart. Hello? This one’s in neon.”

  She was right. I was the queen of cut-and-run as soon as I saw the writing on the wall. No sense dragging things out and humiliating yourself. But this time I couldn’t, for some reason. Maybe the problem wasn’t that I kept picking immature men who were afraid of commitment. Maybe the problem was me.

  “Look, nothing’s going to be accomplished by sitting here waiting to see what’s going on,” I said decisively. “Clearly Kendall and I are going to have to have a talk. Why don’t you and I go get some breakfast while the dust settles?”

  The last thing I wanted was to go make chit-chat ove
r eggs Benedict, or fend off Sasha’s apocalypse predictions for my relationship. But I needed to get her out of Kendall’s house. I needed to get out myself, or I was going to sit here tied up in knots until he walked in the door, and I’d be in no frame of mind to have a calm, mature discussion.

  As I talked, I stood up, hoping that I could shepherd Sasha out the door if I moved in that direction myself.

  “What happened to your foot?” Sasha said, noticing my bandage for the first time.

  I was grateful for the chance to keep my mind occupied with embroidered stories about my injury and the hospital visit while I went into the bathroom and brushed my hair and swiped on some blush and lip gloss. Then I quickly threw on shorts and a T-shirt from the closet, slid into some sandals, grabbed my purse, and headed for the bedroom door.

  Sasha wasn’t following me, though. When I checked over my shoulder she was still sitting pensively on Kendall’s bed.

  “Brook, I don’t think heading out for croissants like nothing’s happened is healthy for you right now.”

  “Come on—I’m starving. I’ll follow you in my own car so you don’t have to bring me all the way back.”

  “Don’t you think you should at least—”

  “I’m fine.” My tone was thin and brittle.

  “Brookie—”

  “Sash...please.” My voice cracked a little, and that got Sasha moving.

  I turned to pull the door shut behind me around as she headed down the curving sidewalk toward the parking lot. I took a long look back up the stairs, into Kendall’s condo, not sure how soon I’d get back, or what would be waiting for me when I did.

  Breakfast was an exhausting affair. Morning Glory was packed, reminding me why I hardly ever went out to brunch from Christmas through Memorial Day. We gave our names to the harried hostess and helped ourselves to coffee from the cart the owners wheeled outside to attempt to placate the hordes of tourists and snowbirds who spilled out onto the sidewalk.

  Keeping Sasha off a topic she wanted to discuss was like juggling cats. Cats carrying chain saws. Which were on fire. I used the crush of people as an excuse to keep us away from any subjects but superficial ones for the nearly thirty minutes we waited.