The Breakup Doctor

by Phoebe Fox

  Except this time. I couldn’t even focus on it, instead seeing in my head a movie replay of me, soaking wet and covered in mud, lurking outside Kendall’s apartment like a peeping Tom.

  By the time Gwyneth Paltrow was flatlining in the ER, the wine was alarmingly low in the bottle and I was slumped back against my tattered floral sofa. John Hannah loved her so much, even though they’d just met. He held her hand while she died and he promised to make her happy. He wouldn’t leave her, even when she was dead. But Kendall left me. And I was alive.

  On some level I knew I was becoming maudlin, but my eyes prickled.

  All my fault. I drove men away.

  “I shouldn’t have made him read my column,” I said, aloud, forcing my suddenly fat tongue to make words.

  Sasha didn’t even need to ask where my mind had gone.

  “You didn’t make him, Brookie.” She stared at me, hard, with an expression that made me feel worse, even though it was nothing but kind.

  “Yeah.” I leaned my head back onto the sofa seat and stared at the ceiling. “But he prob’ly felt like he had to. Then I nagged him for his opinion.”

  “You didn’t nag him. You asked what he thought.”

  I refilled my empty wineglass just before Sasha reached over and plucked the bottle away.

  “We were moving too fast. He got scared.” I made an expansive gesture with my arm that would have ruined the carpet with my sloshing wine, if I had had any carpet. I reached behind me for the ancient yellowed sofa arm cover and tossed it carelessly over the spreading purple puddle on the bare concrete.

  “Please!” she scoffed. “You were together four months. You were dating. You were exclusive. Big deal—that’s normal. It’s not like you ran to get pregnant or engaged or shack up or something.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed weakly, my voice thin.

  She stood up and walked toward the kitchen, removing the bottle from my reach. Her steadiness on her feet made me wonder if I’d had the lion’s share of the wine.

  For the millionth time I wished I had told Sasha earlier about Kendall’s asking me to move in. But until I’d made up my mind I hadn’t wanted to show her my uncertainty. Now I was trapped into pretending things had been casual and light, and unable to explore with my best friend my biggest fear about why he spooked and bugged out.

  Sasha was back all of a sudden, standing there with her long thin legs right in front where I still sat on the floor. “Maybe he has herpes.”

  “What?” I peered up at her. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “No, listen,” she said, perching on the sofa and leaning toward me as she warmed to her topic. “I bet he was too much of a puss to tell you, and then he had an outbreak and instead of having the guts to come clean, he just ran.”

  Not that I found this theory viable for a second, but the grin spreading over my face felt too good for me to dismiss it. “Yeah! Or...syphilis, maybe. If he was cheating on me, he could have gotten syphilis and been too afraid to tell me.”

  “Yes!” She gently removed the wineglass from my fingers and set it on the floor at the end of the sofa, out of reach. “Or gonorrhea. I heard you can get brain damage from gonorrhea.”

  I laughed at the rapacious expression on her face, and then we fell silent, contentedly contemplating Kendall with gonorrhea-induced brain damage.

  “I want to go over there, Brook,” Sasha said finally. “I can find out what the hell is going on.”

  “No!” I barked. It came out more harshly than I intended.

  “Shh-shh, honey. It’s not like I’m going to go key his car or rototill his lawn. Not till you give me the go-ahead, anyway. I’m just going to take a look. He’ll never even know I’m there.”

  Been there, done that.

  “That is now how you handle this kind of thing,” I said, enunciating carefully; then at Sasha’s perplexed expression I realized what I’d said and giggled. “Not. That is not how you handle it.”

  “That’s not how you handle it. That’s exactly how I handle it.”

  I realized with a flare of shame that for all my superiority, I’d acted no saner than Sasha, and my giggles dried up.

  “Brookie, are you okay?” Sasha asked. She looked concerned. Both of her.

  “Fine. I’m fine.” But I didn’t feel fine. I felt sad. Lonely, ashamed, and sad.

  Suddenly her face came into 3-D focus, and she was right in front of me. “Come on, honey. Let’s get you into bed.”

  Then I was sitting on my bed, and my legs were cold. I looked down and saw Sasha yanking my jeans over my ankles. My eyes closed, then blinked back open when I felt something hard being pressed into my fingers. A cup. Oh—a cup of water, I realized when I sloshed a little onto my legs, raising goose bumps.

  “Take them,” Sasha said, and I realized she was pushing some little tablets into my other hand. Our old hangover-prevention formula: a vitamin B complex, two aspirin, and a full glass of water before going to sleep.

  I smiled—“Good Sasha”—then there was a soft pillow under my head, and I was warm again. I felt something squishy on my forehead—Sasha’s lips were really soft.

  “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  “Yes, you will. Because you love me.”

  “That’s true, my little lush.”

  “You love me, and you are the only one.” My words were fuzzy, and my eyes felt hot and wet. I blinked fast, but tears spilled over the corners and ran down my temples into my ears.

  The bed sank a little, and warm hands wiped the moisture away. “Kendall Pulver is a douche.”

  I sniffled and nodded. “A douche with gonorrhea.”

  “That’s right.” She smoothed my hair off my face in gentle, soothing motions, and my eyes fluttered closed.

  nineteen

  I woke up with the kind of pounding dehydration headache that only red wine inflicts upon you. I lay as still as possible, knowing that as soon as I moved it would become excruciating and nothing would help but time.

  It was early—the sun wasn’t even up—and I felt as if I’d hardly rested at all in the fitful sleep of intoxication. What time had I gotten to bed? I peered blearily over at the clock, but the nightstand wasn’t there.

  As I sat up, disoriented, three awful things slammed into my head: the throbbing pain of a hangover; the realization that I was lying on my sofa, not in my bed; and the stark, sudden rush of memory that today was the day of my radio interview. I bolted into the bedroom—trying to hold my throbbing brains in with my hands—to find my clock: 5:33. I was supposed to be at the studio at six thirty.

  How had I completely forgotten? In the middle of everything else it had utterly slipped my mind. I stumbled into my bathroom and frantically started brushing my teeth, wincing at the clamorous car-wash noises it made inside my head. What the hell had I been thinking, drinking almost a liter of wine on my own? I knew better than that—especially right after a breakup. That could have been bad. Thank god Sasha had put me safely to bed last night. Particularly in the state of mind I’d been in.

  Except...I hadn’t woken up in bed. I’d woken up on the sofa. The toothbrush stalled against my molars. If I’d had enough wine to wander out of the bedroom and into the living room without remembering it, god knew what else I might have done.

  Like call my ex in a drunken stupor, and say embarrassing, un-take-backable things. I stepped away from the counter, the toothbrush still dangling from my mouth, and looked around the bedroom for my cell phone. Please, no. Don’t let me have done it.

  No phone. My heart somewhere down around my bare feet, I strode back into the living room. Nothing. Entertaining visions of me compulsively dialing Kendall all night, leaving God knew what messages until the phone dropped from my unconscious fingers, I clambered carefully to my knees and peered under the sofa—a mistake, I realized as my brain tried to escape i
n angry throbs out of my forehead. But it wasn’t there, and it wasn’t on the kitchen counter, or in my purse. I felt a little panicky—what had I done?—until I headed back into my bathroom to spit out the toothpaste I was about to gag on and from the corner of my eye saw a yellow Post-It note on the toilet lid: Phone inside left black ankle boot in closet. Just in case. ;-)

  Sasha. I let out a long breath. Thank God. I retrieved the phone from where she’d hidden it and gratefully checked the call log—unchanged since I’d last used it. On many a post-breakup night I’d ruthlessly confiscated her phone, and I could have kissed Sasha for doing the same for me. It was too early to call her, so I texted a quick note of gratitude and hurried into the shower to get ready for my interview.

  “Breakup Doctor?”

  I looked up from the hard plastic chair where I’d been waiting when I heard the machine-gun voice, recognizing it as belonging to the woman who’d called me to set up the interview. The door to the reception area from the inner sanctum seemed to be excreting her head. In person, the girl looked roughly twelve years old, with blond hair parted in the middle and pushed behind her ears, and big owl glasses. She was chomping a piece of gum as if it had personally offended her and she was punishing it.

  “That’s me. Brook Ogden.” I’d been moving slower than usual this morning, trying to nurture my screaming head, and I’d had to break some speed limits to get to the station by six thirty. Now it was three minutes to seven, and I’d been getting progressively more nervous.

  I stood and held out a hand. The girl looked down at it perplexedly, then placed limp, perfunctory fingers in mine and sort of vibrated them.

  “Come on back. Kelly’s waiting.”

  I sprinted behind her to keep up as she charged back through a maze of hallways lined with pictures that blurred as we sped by. Then she came to an abrupt halt outside a door with an “on-air” light above it, just like in the movies. She held up a finger.

  “Are we going to—”

  She brandished the finger more sternly at me and I fell silent. After a moment the light went off, the girl opened the door, and her whole personality metamorphosed.

  “Hey, Kelly! She’s finally here. I prepped her, and we’re all ready for you,” she chirped, ushering me into the studio.

  The brunette perched on a stool behind an incomprehensible bank of lit switches nodded in our direction but didn’t get up. “Great. How ya doing? Kelly Garrett.”

  “Brook—”

  “Get her cupped, Meg.” Kelly was listening to something with one earphone held to her head, fiddling with the buttons at her fingertips. “Sorry,” she said toward me. “Gotta throw to traffic.”

  Meg hustled me over to the only other seat—another stool—and handed me a set of headphones big and chunky as 1985. I slipped them over my ears, and listened to her muffled voice saying, “This one if you have a hairball or something—don’t cough into the mike,” as she pointed to one of a trio of buttons in front of me. “Don’t touch anything else, an inch from the mike is best, and lose the necklace—I could hear it rattling all the way down the hall.” She turned back to Kelly, who had apparently finished “throwing to traffic” and was setting her headphones on the desk. “All set, Kel! Have a great interview!” Meg stretched her face into a smile that looked like a workout and let herself back out the heavy soundproofed door as I released the clasp on my beaded necklace and dropped it into my purse.

  “Sorry about all this,” Kelly said, reaching a hand over the low counter separating us. She had the shiniest sable hair I had ever seen, pretty coffee-colored eyes that squinted with her whole-face smile, and a good firm handshake. “Radio’s generally nuts. I’m Kelly Garrett, and you’re Brook, right?”

  “That’s right. Brook Ogden.”

  Kelly nodded. “Got it right here,” she said, tapping a monitor in front of her. “Nothing to this—I’ll ask a few softball questions; then we’ll take a couple of calls, okay? Don’t be nervous.”

  I exhaled my first full breath in the last half hour, my mouth arid as dryer lint. “Does it show?”

  “Remember, no one can see you, and all you have to do is be yourself. This is great stuff, your column—the listeners are gonna eat it up, okay?” She nodded into a corner. “Bottled water over there. Crack it open before we go live.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hold tight.” Kelly picked up her headphones and slid them on almost as soon as she started talking into the mike.

  While she started a live testimonial about a local weight-loss center, I used the reprieve to fetch a water and quickly review all of Sasha’s coaching.

  As I took my deep breaths—“imagine you’re breathing right from your uterus,” she’d suggested—I pictured Sasha sitting in front of me, a look of support and rapt attention on her face. I wondered if she had told my mother about my radio interview, and if Mom would be listening too—and then choked the thought off when I felt my pulse start to pound in my ears again.

  “All right, ladies, you’re going to love my next guest—and you guys too!” On air, Kelly’s voice was smooth and rich as a truffle. “If you read the paper, you probably already know her—Brook Ogden, a licensed mental health counselor, better known as the Breakup Doctor, is here to answer your rejection questions.” I sent her silent gratitude for getting my job title right. “Brook, thanks for coming on the show today.” She gave me a wink and I smiled in response despite my leaping heartbeat.

  “Thanks, Kelly. My pleasure.” My voice was close and intimate in my headphones, as if I were murmuring seductively into my own ear. It was disconcerting, but Kelly nodded encouragingly and I told myself to relax.

  “Judging from the reader response on the Tropic Times Web site, and what I’ve been hearing around town, you’ve hit some kind of nerve with your column. Why do you think that is?”

  “Well, um...everyone’s gone through a breakup at some point or another. Often a nasty one.”

  She chuckled. “You sound like a woman who’s been dumped.”

  For a moment I thought this was some kind of sick setup. My eyes shot to Kelly’s face, but she was still smiling at me, calmly waiting for my response as if this were just a pleasant conversation. Calm down, Brook. Cowgirl up.

  I cleared my throat, remembering to reach for the cough button just in time, and said, “Oh, sure. Like most of us, I’ve been down that road...” I gave an awkward chuckle.

  She laughed. “Amen, sister.”

  She asked a few questions about my background as a therapist, and my one-on-one Breakup Doctor services. Kelly was right, I realized as we got going—there really was nothing to this if I just treated it like any other friendly chat.

  But when she invited listeners to call in with any questions, suddenly I froze up again, wondering if Kendall could be listening, if he might phone the station, if I’d lose my just-discovered on-air cool and reveal myself as a complete sham of a Breakup Doctor.

  I tried to concentrate on breathing from my uterus.

  Of course he wouldn’t call in. Kendall wouldn’t even have the station tuned in—KXAR didn’t have any financial programming.

  The lines lit up almost at once, and Kelly clicked a button and said, “Good morning, caller—you’re on the air with the Breakup Doctor.”

  “Oh...” I heard a woman’s throat clearing. “Um. Do I have to say my name?”

  Kelly shot me a glance, and I stared dumbly back for a moment before I realized she was waiting for an answer from me. I shook my head.

  “Up to you, friend,” Kelly said smoothly into her mike. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Okay, well. Um, it’s my...my boyfriend. Ex. Or whatever.” The woman’s voice shook and it hit me that she was more nervous than I was.

  My own anxiety was forgotten. I leaned forward and keyed my mike. “Sometimes those labels are a real bitch, aren’t they?” As soo
n as the words were out of my mouth I felt heat flood my face. Could you say bitch on air?

  Apparently so: Kelly simply looked amused, and my caller let out a chuckle that told me I’d managed to relax her at least a little.

  “You’re not kidding,” the woman said. “Anyway...we broke up a while ago—like, months. And I should be over it now. I should be fine.” Her voice wobbled. “But I’m not. We were in the same bowling league, and we have a lot of the same friends, and every time I see him it...it just kills me still.”

  I closed my eyes, the raw pain in the woman’s voice touching a chord of empathy in me.

  “So my question is...what’s wrong with me?”

  My eyes flew back open, my own situation spiraling away into its separate compartment while my focus was pulled squarely onto her.

  “There is nothing wrong with you. Not one thing,” I said forcefully. “How long were you with this man?”

  “Not that long. Just a year and a half.”

  I shook my head. “Look...caller—”

  “Mindy,” she said softly. “My name’s Mindy.”

  “Look, Mindy, a year and a half is plenty long enough to care about someone—deeply. And it sounds to me like maybe the breakup wasn’t your idea, and it was pretty hard on you.”

  “Yeah. It was.” Mindy’s voice was almost a whisper.

  “And you still see this guy in social situations, without ever having had a chance to get over him first? Who wouldn’t have a hard time with that?”

  I noticed I had Kelly’s full attention now—she was looking at me, nodding.

  “I don’t know,” Mindy said shakily.

  “No one with a heart, who’d given it to that person, that’s who. So go a little easy on yourself for having a tough time with this. It’s totally normal.”

  “It is? Really?”