Sick Day

by Morgan Parker

  “Four words?” He chuckles. “Which ones?”

  “’I’m leaving you.’”

  “I think that’s three words,” he corrects me, and all traces of chuckling are dead.

  “Only if you think the contraction of ‘I’ and ‘am’ reduces it to three, Gordon. So technically, it’s still four words.” I give him a fraction of a heartbeat to say something else. When he doesn’t, I remind him to meet me at the Art Institute at noon. “With the Tesla.”

  “Hey, Cam?” he adds, but the tone teeters on begging. “Tell me you’re not going to fuck her once she tells you that she’s leaving you.”

  “Oh, those four words aren’t for me. They’re for Matt.”

  I hang up before he can realize just how serious I am. Time check—7:47.

  I’m left with twenty-eight minutes to reach the Ogilvie Transportation Center, so I have to sprint the one and a half miles. Just to be safe.

  } i {

  Two Months Ago

  Chapter 10

  The 363 train left downtown Chicago at 7:35 PM. I had attempted to convince Hope to stay out a little longer and grab some drinks or even come see the condo I purchased at a steep discount in 2012, using a good chunk of the Harris severance that I invested and increased seven-fold in less than a few months. But she had insisted on going home.

  “Alone,” she added as I joined her on the train.

  “No way.” She knew—of course she knew—that I would never let her off that easily.

  She rolled her eyes and slid into a forward facing bench, crossing her arms and staring out the green-tinted window. Within minutes, the train started moving, so the awkwardness didn’t last long.

  “Do you miss Miami?” I asked as the train emerged from the station and sailed along the tracks into the casual early-evening daylight.

  “Isn’t Riley, your wife, going to wonder where you are? You haven’t checked your Blackberry the entire time we’ve been out.”

  “Neither have you.” I shifted a little closer to her despite the snootiness in her last comment, but she shook her head at me and returned to staring out the window like that might make me disappear. I played it safe, kept the tone soft and playful. “What is it, Hope?”

  “I don’t know where you think this is headed,” she told the window, “but it’s not going there.”

  “We can’t be friends?”

  “You’re clearly incapable of friendship, Cameron.”

  “How so?” It had been intended as a joke, but her response insulted me a little. Now I was curious.

  “And I don’t trust you. I don’t trust any married man who jumps on a train with me in an attempt to ruin my happy home.”

  I let up a bit with my persistence, just in case her mention of a “happy home” had an iota of truth to it. “Riley’s not home tonight. So she doesn’t care if I’m on a train heading into Winnetka or scuba diving with Gordon in the Turks and Caicos like we did last spring. It’s nice there, have you ever been? You’d look really good on those beaches, the sand on your thighs…”

  She smiled at my inability to stay focused on a single topic at a time. “Matt won’t be happy if he comes home and finds you in the house.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t need to see your bedroom, so I’m fine with sticking to the kitchen like a regular guest. Remember what happened in your kitchen in Miami—”

  “Matt still hates you after what happened.” She pulled her attention away from the window so she could look at me.

  I allowed an understanding nod. “I can’t really blame him.”

  Hope showed me her serious eyes. “So you’re not walking home with me.”

  “We’ll see,” I said, showing her my serious eyes, too.

  } i {

  Chapter 11

  At the Winnetka station, we disembarked together, but I stayed on the platform and watched Hope walk away while the train bell clamored off the retaining walls, and the big beast rumbled onward. Once she reached the stairs leading up to street level, Hope stepped aside to let the other late commuters pass, and then turned to me as I stood alone, purposely hunching my shoulders and kicking at invisible pebbles like a lost child.

  “Goob!” she called out. And then, when I didn’t respond, “Cameron!”

  I raised my attention to her. When she waved me over, I launched into an elaborate and dramatic sprint, something straight out of Forrest Gump, projecting my arms out to the side like airplane wings as I got closer to her, then scooping her up off the ground and twirling her around. She didn’t fight me or try to wiggle out of my deathly squeeze. In fact, I even heard a giggle escape before she forced a fake disgusted grunt.

  “Let. Me. Go.”

  “Never,” I announced, but ended up releasing her anyway. It was getting a little awkward. Even at her featherweight one hundred and twenty pounds, she started to feel a little heavy to my lazy arms after a couple of twirls. “Change your mind about fucking me in the kitchen?”

  “Hardy har har,” she said, glaring at me. “Like I said, you’re incapable of this friendship thing.”

  “Who says that anymore?” I asked, ignoring her friendship statement. “Even my dead grandmother doesn’t say ‘hardy har har.’”

  We reached street level, and she pointed past the main intersection. “There’s still a Barney’s across the street. We can have coffee like two friends while we wait for the next train, which is in half an hour.”

  “It’ll start getting dark by then,” I said, forcing a frown and shaking my head. “I can’t let you walk home by yourself in the dark.”

  Shaking her head, she assured me she would be fine. “I live less than two blocks away; I’ve done it alone before. A lot.” A pause. “You still like Barney’s?”

  “Only every day when I’m not running into my soul mate at Panera.”

  She punched me in the shoulder. “Cameron! Stop that, or I won’t stick around! And then you’ll have to wait alone for the train.”

  For being so close to Chicago, Winnetka felt like its own little village in the middle of some laid-back corner of the country. Despite the time of day, there were couples walking the cozy and somewhat trendy downtown streets. At Barney’s—my favorite boutique espresso bar since Hope had introduced me to the place three years ago—there were couples sitting out front at the bistro tables. It surprised me just how popular this high-caffeine joint could be at this time of night.

  Inside, I ordered a biscotti and my usual non-fat double-shot cappuccino. I didn’t hear what Hope ordered; I just paid for it. We sat inside at a table in the back corner, where people wouldn’t waste time bothering us. I imagined this being the same table where Olivia had waited for Oliver, then remembered she had taken a table on the back patio.

  “Why not out back?” I wondered.

  “This is a compromise, right here,” she explained, poking at the table. “You need to smile more often, Cameron.”

  “Remember three years ago?” I asked, testing the waters again. “I think I smiled a lot back then.”

  She stirred her drink—either a latté like she used to prefer, or a cappuccino (they looked the same to me in these take-out cups)—even though she hadn’t added anything to it that would require stirring. “No, let’s not do this,” she said with a bit of a sigh.

  “That Friday night when you showed up,” I started, glancing up at her to see how she would respond. When she simply stared back, I continued. “I wasn’t expecting you. Not that Friday night or any other night come to think of it. I thought it was over between us. That I was forgotten.”

  Her attention lowered to her drink again. Her cheeks looked heavy to me, confirming my assumption that this was the last thing she wanted to talk about tonight.

  “I never stopped thinking about you,” I promised. I sipped my hot drink, hoping the liquid would burn some common sense back into me. But it didn’t—it hurt my mouth, but that was about all it achieved. “Every day since and every day before that visit, I thought about you.”r />
  When Hope returned her attention, her eyebrows tightened, and she shook her head at me. I imagined this was the same look she gave her accounting clients when they had some serious tax issues that even David Copperfield couldn’t fix or make disappear.

  I tried to mirror her serious-as-fuck expression. “I don’t have to go back to your place, Hope. I can walk to the train station all by myself. In fact, I don’t have to see you ever again…but the reality remains that I’ll never stop thinking about you. About us.”

  “You broke me,” she answered quickly, and the words crushed me. “You seem to forget that, Cameron. We had a promise. A promise.” Her voice cracked a little, reminding me of earlier when we were talking about Our Story at the beach. This time, she didn’t get up and walk away. She simply took a deep breath to regain her strength. It worked. Now there was strength, hard and merciless, tightening every muscle in her face. “I came for you. I called, I wrote, I tried everything. Do you know what I thought? All those years, I thought I did something. I thought I—”

  “And then, when you had me, you pushed me away,” I said, my voice a little louder than I had intended. A few of the people seated around us cast curious glances our way. I remembered Gordon’s eyes on me, the heat of rejection on my skin after a night of loving her, all of her and just her. I leaned forward on the small table and whispered, “I gave all of myself to you, Hope. You did nothing wrong, it was all so right, but then I watched you walk away without looking back. What was I supposed to do?”

  “I wanted you to fight for me,” she said, her scowl stern enough that there was no misunderstanding as to which one of us dominated this conversation. “You said you’d fight for the rest of your life, that you’d always fight for me. For our love.” The bulging vein on her neck suggested anger. “But you didn’t.”

  I felt the temperature rising on my cheeks, suddenly wishing I hadn’t agreed to this “friendly” coffee thing. “I gave you exactly what you asked for. You’re welcome for that, by the way. You’re welcome for the sacrifices I made, every last one while you lived that perfect life that you chose for yourself.”

  She shook her head at me, as if she were disgusted with what I had just said. The reality was that she probably recognized just how wrong she was here. Miami was not all that long ago. I doubted that she had forgotten it already.

  We sipped on our respective drinks, letting our tempers cool. I could hear a ringing in my ears—a sound only Hope could trigger in me—and I recognized that the chatter around us had died down considerably.

  I was the first to speak, leaning even closer to her while whispering the words, “I loved you more than I have ever loved anything or anyone else in my life, Hope. It’s irreplaceable.”

  “Then why was I crushed more? Because when I found you playing house with Riley…” She couldn’t finish, and looked away instead.

  “We were a month from getting married,” I reminded her with a hiss.

  “But you made a promise to me.”

  I sat back, ready to give up.

  Although she wasn’t crying, she wiped at her eyes. She still looked good for spending so much time in that suit, and I didn’t want to be the one to break that image of perfection. “Forget it, Cameron. This never gets us anywhere.”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t care if the people across the street could hear me. “It always brings us right back to this. To this moment where you keep pushing me away.”

  “I’m as good as married,” she said, faking a laugh. “You are married.” She threw her hands up. “You’re too late. I pushed you away, you walked away, and then we had these years, these wasted years between us. And now you’re just too fucking late because after Labor Day, I’m moving to San Francisco. Happy?”

  I finished my capp in one final sip, then stood. I felt her stare on me, but I refused to look at her. There were a few other guys at Barney’s, watching me to see what I would do. Did they think this was a domestic issue? I wondered and chuckled in my head. But they minded their own business.

  I stepped away from the table without saying goodbye to the woman I have loved from the moment I met her, nearly twenty years ago at a neighborhood park.

  I walked out to the street, oblivious to everything around me. I knew my way to the train station. Even though I was excessively early, I figured the time alone could help me calm down and figure out how such a great night had gone south so quickly. How had I gone from memorizing each word to wishing I hadn’t seen her at Panera Bread?

  Then I heard, “Cameron!”

  It was just like yesterday, except this time her voice wore a layer of heartache.

  I kept walking. Obviously in my moment of childishness, I didn’t realize that Hope knew how to walk, too. Or run. Because that was what she did—she ran to catch up to me, her heels betraying any attempt at sneaking up on me that she may have entertained.

  “Cameron,” she repeated, her voice firm. “You never listen to me. Never.”

  “I’ve listened to your silence for all of these years, Hope. Look what listening has done for me.” I stopped at the intersection because the signal said so. “All you do is keep pushing me away. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just let go of you?”

  I turned to face her just as a silver Bentley GT rolled to a stop beside us.

  “Shit,” she whispered, and, despite her dry eyes, I saw enough emotion in them to know that she suffered from the same tear in her heart as I did. Our conversation had ended, I saw that, too. “That’s Matt.”

  I smiled and waved at the tinted driver’s side window, swallowing that lump of disappointment and burying it deep down like I had for all of these years.

  It rolled open. Matt looked pissed. “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  “Relax, Matt,” I said, amazed at how someone like Hope could run her fingers through that kind of salt and paper coif, no matter how clean cut he might be. “We were on the same train tonight, it’s all good.”

  He didn’t like my bullshit excuse and signaled Hope to the passenger side. She walked away without a word, without even looking back. Déjà vu, anyone?

  “You should know something, Matt,” I said as she climbed into that expensive car, my insides burning and wishing I could step on his douchebag excuse for a face.

  “What’s that, dickhead?”

  “You might want to change the sheets when you get home.”

  I was prepared for him to jump out of the car and chase me, but he was old—probably his mid-forties was my guess—and I figured I’d tire that old geriatric fuck out long before he could ever reach me. Instead, he rolled the window up and drove off at a casual speed. Not even a “fuck you” or middle finger salute; he just drove off.

  “That sucked,” I said, then realized I had missed my opportunity to cross the street.

  Karma.

  } i {

  Chapter 12

  Back at the condo, I kicked my shoes into the closet, aware of the classical music and the savory odors of dinner. I headed straight to the Bat Cave, passing Riley at the dining table, noticing she had set a place for me—a tasty chicken entrée, a salad, and a glass of wine. That bullshit lie I had given Hope about Riley being away was just that—bullshit. If she had known Riley was waiting for me, she never would have agreed to our date in the first place.

  “It’s the Ontario cab you like,” Riley said, her voice soft and unassuming. Her long fingers with their dark polish raised the wine glass to her red lips, and she looked beautiful doing it.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Inside the Bat Cave, I closed the sliding French doors and kept the lights off, dropping into Topsy. It got dark in here, despite the glass panes in the doors. It was a deafening darkness that truly allowed you to escape the world of real life. I watched the door, though, waiting for Riley’s shadow to appear because I knew she would worry. I rarely bypassed dinner—and never the Reif Estates cabernet—unless I was having one of those days. When her shadow finally appeared
, it hovered there for a beat before she knocked.

  I didn’t respond, so she asked if I was okay.

  “Just need a bit of time,” I answered, working hard to keep the expression of self-pity out of my voice.

  This wasn’t fair to Riley. She knew. Three years ago, she had allowed me to bury this bullshit under a heap of denial. She knew, and it wasn’t fair to do this to her.

  She knew it now, too. It would kill her. Three years ago, it nearly killed her. But this time it was killing her more. These past three years of trying, of reaching for something that would forever remain just beyond her fingertips, and tonight it had slipped even further away.

  “Are you going to eat your dinner?” she asked.

  I remained silent. After a bit of time, her shadow dimmed, the classical music disappeared, and all I had left was the darkness and blinding silence.

  Time to deal with some demons.

  } i {

  Chapter 13

  Even though I could’ve used that sick day that Raj had arranged to clear my head, I didn’t call in sick at work the next day. I also didn’t shave or iron my shirt. I walked with the downtown crowd to the office building and, as much as I would love to say I didn’t even bother looking for Hope among the lobby herd, the only happiness I enjoyed that morning was the very prospect of seeing her.

  I had scripted exactly what I would say to her, how I would apologize for unsuccessfully confronting Matt, and beg for another evening, another chance before she moved away for good. But I didn’t see her, so the mental script was unnecessary. I felt like I had lost her again, that these next two months would turn into the same dust as the rest of my time without her.

  Before boarding the elevator, I retrieved my phone, scrolled through my contacts to Newman’s line, but I hung up before pressing CALL. I had a plan. I needed to stick to it. Today wasn’t the day. I pocketed the phone and boarded the next elevator.