Sorry.
The word reverberated. She had fifteen years of knowledge of this man and all his laughing ways. She’d spent the last year of their relationship slowly coming to understand his terrible secrets and all his skillful deceits. But now, from the sheets of this hospital bed, he was looking straight at her—no wavering gaze, no scoffing, no verbal overinsistence. He was still woozy from the effects of the sedative, which made it all the more sincere.
What she saw was real regret. Open acknowledgment. Acceptance.
She reached for his hand. “I’m so sorry too.”
Sorry that she’d dragged Cole from family gathering to family gathering, overwhelming him with relatives, thinking that by spending as much time as possible amid the close network of the Pitalia clan, he himself would somehow feel more comfortable among them. She was sorry that Cole had a feckless mother and a bastard of an absent father. Sorry that he couldn’t confess to her the real demons that haunted his days.
His fingers slipped around hers in a sensation so familiar it was as if the years together had dug grooves in their skin. “You were right all along. I just…fought it. I was an asshole.”
Not always, she remembered. There was a time when everything had seemed to be going swimmingly. Her mother was thrilled that Dhara had finally brought a man home to meet them. The parties began, every weekend, and she’d watched with amusement as the news spread through the family, and everyone vied to be the first to have them over.
But then a letter from Memphis had flummoxed him. It had come from his father. The father he’d met only one terrible, terrible time.
She glanced down at their entwined fingers and thought: I shouldn’t be doing this. I am getting married in less than three months.
I’m just comforting him, she told herself.
Long before she and Cole had become lovers, they had always been the best of friends.
Dhara found Kelly in the corner of the waiting room, a tattered copy of Popular Mechanics by her side. Kelly twisted a thin plait in her hair, watching an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants on the teeny ceiling TV.
“Hey, Kelly.”
Kelly leaped up. “Any news?”
“He’s stable and resting.” Dhara had prepared her little speech. “We’re going to need to do some tests over the next few days. I have to call his mother, she’s next of kin.”
“Don’t bother,” she said, stretching her arms over her head to pull the kinks out of her back. “I put myself down as his sister.”
Dhara gave her an arch look. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”
“What do you think his mother is going to do,” Kelly said, “when you tell her Cole is in the ICU?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
Dhara had met Cole’s mother once, on a quick trip she and Cole had made out to Portland just when things were getting serious between them. His mother had welcomed her by offering weed she’d cured in her own barn. Dhara found herself working in the kitchen with Cole’s mother’s bushy-browed, pot-bellied, ex-logger boyfriend, while Cole fixed fences, weeded the field, hung a door that had been rusted out, and put new screens in the bedroom windows. All while his mother lolled in the kitchen like a hippie ex-debutante. When Dhara finally left, she confessed to Cole that she hadn’t realized until then how thoroughly he’d raised himself.
“I have to call her anyway. It’s the rule.” Dhara suddenly realized what she hadn’t fully registered when she’d first seen Kelly in the waiting room. Kelly was wearing a pair of baggy sweats, an oversize T-shirt, and pink fluffy slippers. “Kelly, why are you in your pajamas?”
“I put these on as soon as I got home from work. Cole was there, and he had made some dinner and said he wasn’t feeling well, but I thought it was just some virus going around.”
Dhara blinked at her, trying to process, waiting for Kelly to explain why Cole was at her apartment after work on a Tuesday when he wasn’t feeling well, while Kelly was comfortable enough to be in pajamas. Dhara’s mind was unwilling to make the logical leap to what absolutely could not be. Because Kelly, of all her friends, had been the most insistent that Dhara belonged with Cole.
“No, no, no!” Kelly shook her head, suddenly understanding the implication. “It’s not what you think.”
“You’re not sleeping with my ex-boyfriend?”
“Of course not! That’s the second time this week I’ve been accused of that.”
“Excuse me?”
“He is—was—just living with me.”
Dhara dropped into a waiting room chair, too gobsmacked to think.
“No, no, not like that!” Kelly swiveled on a heel, pacing in a small circle. “You must know what I mean. He was just staying with me. As a friend.”
“As a friend.”
“Yes! I mean, it’s not like I have a love life or anything, or that I’d be able to keep a secret that big from you or Marta or Wendy. Geez.”
Dhara sat stunned and relieved, but wary too, because this didn’t make sense. “Maybe you can tell me why he’s staying at your apartment when he has a place four times the size on Maiden Lane?”
“I can.” Kelly bounced to the edge of the seat, her hands working in her lap. “But it would mean I’d have to break a promise to him.”
Dhara gave her a look that she hoped spoke volumes, because right now all kinds of weird thoughts were flying through her head.
Kelly shifted her weight, apparently uncertain. “Would it help his health, if I told you the truth?”
Ethics were a bitch. “No,” Dhara admitted. “I have a pretty good idea what’s happening with him.”
Kelly sucked in a swift breath. “Is it serious?”
“It could be.” Dhara rolled her shoulders, only now realizing how drained she was from all the drama. “I’m not even sure I’m right. I just think…Call it instinct.”
Kelly’s face spasmed, tight with uncertainty. Dhara watched her, knowing that Kelly would spill soon enough if she just waited her out in expectant silence.
Kelly closed her eyes and sank back into the chair. “All right, then. He’s going to kill me. Mostly because you’re not going to like hearing this.” She sighed. “About three weeks ago, Cole was evicted from his apartment.”
Dhara started.
“He couldn’t make the payments because he’d been fired from his job, just a few months after you two broke up.”
Dhara absorbed the information with a sick feeling growing in her stomach and a terrible rush of lightheadedness. Shifting her weight on the seat, she planted her elbows on her knees and sank her face into her hands, forcing herself to breathe steadily, breathe steadily…
Evicted. Unemployed. She scraped her fingers against her scalp. She thought she’d been doing the right thing. She thought she’d been removing one of the pressures that threatened to tip him over the edge. She thought that after she’d left him he would pull back, maybe realize how he was ruining his life, maybe ask for help to get better. And now she sat in a hospital waiting room, realizing that her decision to leave Cole may have been the very thing that sent him reeling.
“Dhara?” Kelly slid a hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
No. She felt as if she were going to be sick all over this hideous, battered blue carpet. What kind of doctor was she—what kind of woman was she—to leave him?
“How long,” Dhara said, forcing herself upright in the hopes of calming her stomach, “has he been staying with you?”
“About three weeks, except he was away last weekend, and then he came to get his stuff today because he’s moving out.”
“Have you noticed anything unusual?”
“Like what?”
“Anything. Eating habits, sleeping habits. Has he been sick?”
“Yeah, come to think of it, he’d been sick a couple of times.” Kelly wrinkled her nose. “He didn’t always tell me though. I could tell by the smelly towels.”
“Vomiting?”
“Yeah. He didn’t
seem interested in food, though he’d eat it if I put it in front of him. I didn’t have much opportunity though. He kept weird hours.”
“How weird?”
“He wouldn’t come home until after two or three in the morning almost every night, and so he’d be asleep when I left. If he weren’t filling my whole living room with his stuff, I would have hardly known he was there. Are you looking for symptoms or something?”
“Sort of.” Dhara rubbed her face and sighed. The time for keeping secrets was long over. “There is something I haven’t told you, Kelly. I haven’t told any of the girls. It’s about me, and Cole, and his situation.”
“Let me guess. The reason you two didn’t marry is because Cole can’t handle your family.”
“Partly.”
“Raised by that mother?” Kelly said. “Screwed up by that father? It’s a wonder Cole can manage a relationship at all.”
“Listen, like you, I’m breaking a promise by telling you this.”
“For goodness sake, Dhara, what are you talking about?”
Dhara took a deep breath, then took Kelly’s hand and spoke the words she never wanted to speak aloud. The truth she hadn’t been absolutely sure of, until today.
“Cole is an alcoholic.”
chapter eleven
Walking cross-town was not the quickest route between Kelly’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and the hospital on East Sixty-eighth Street. But Kelly knew the subway would be a crush because of the Yankees–Red Sox game and the Gay Pride parade, so she opted to hoof it. Three blocks later she realized she’d forgotten about the street fair on Ninth as well as the swelling influx of Saturday visitors. Her trek across Manhattan became an obstacle course of pretzel carts, crick-necked tourists, tin-drum bands, and half-naked men wearing strategically placed feathers.
Rushing the last block to the hospital, she glanced at her cell phone and groaned as she dropped it back into her messenger bag. She was a good half hour late to the first real intervention she and the girls had ever attempted.
Kelly hurried through the glass doors, signed in at the desk, and headed straight to the elevator bank. She fussed with the strap of her bag as worries pecked at her. She thought she knew Cole to the bone, but he had been living in her apartment for weeks and she’d never suspected any problem. Dhara had told her that he’d always been high functioning, hiding bottles in the laundry basket and filling his Starbucks thermos with anything but coffee. But as Kelly entered the elevator and stabbed the button for the Cardiac Step-Down floor, a cold drip of fear slipped down her spine. It was one thing to confront Marta about her men issues or Dhara over an arranged marriage. It was another thing to confront a man whose own father denied his paternity, handed him a wad of dirty twenties, and shoved the devastated eighteen-year-old onto the first bus out of Memphis.
Kelly prayed that Dhara remembered to have a professional present. If Cole lashed out… There’d be more than one intervention today.
Kelly located his room and found Cole propped upright in bed, the window shelf beside him laden with flower arrangements and balloons. He looked more like his old self than when she last saw him. Above the neckline of his hospital gown his chest was shiny with sweat.
“Sorry, I’m late.” Kelly mustered a smile for Cole’s sake as she shrugged off her messenger bag. She set it with a clunk by the wall. “Pedestrian traffic slowed me up.”
“Hey, Kelly.” Wendy stood by the bed pulling wax-wrapped sandwiches out of a brown paper bag, turning the sandwiches this way and that, as if to decipher the cryptic markings on the wrappings. “You didn’t pick up your cell when I called for lunch orders so I just bought you an Italian hero with the dressing on the side. That okay?”
“Um…okay.”
Kelly tried to catch Wendy’s eye. They usually didn’t eat during an intervention. Talking around a wad of salami wasn’t conducive to telling a buddy that he was screwing up his life. But Wendy, tossing a sandwich to Marta, missed her silent query. So did Marta, who was swaying by Cole’s bedside to some tinny music coming through the earbud of her iPod.
“I just adore Jamaican accents,” Marta said. “They sound like tropical waves and kettledrums, and they make me think of hot nights and fruity drinks. What was that doctor’s name? Dr. Aghanya? Damn, why are all the good doctors married?”
Kelly looked from Wendy to Marta and back again, unable to read the strange currents in the room. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on?”
“As usual, chica, you’re late to the party.”
“Party.”
“My going-away party.” Cole laughed. The laugh hitched as if caught in his throat. “It’s the driest damn party I’ve ever been to. Something I’d better get used to after today.”
Kelly cocked her head, not understanding. She cast an appeal to her friends, but no one looked her way. Nobody was looking at anyone else, either, just going about his or her business. It was like one of those zombie apocalypse movies, the scene after the blast of a sound-dulling grenade, when everyone wandered in the wreckage and tried to act normal.
“If you’d been here twenty minutes ago, you would have caught the fireworks.” Wendy tossed a wrapped sandwich to the far end of the bed. “Cole was a monster. He got so riled up he called me a jerk.”
“I believe the word I used was asshole.”
Kelly, flummoxed, glanced at the institutional clock clicking above the door. “I’m only a half hour late.”
“Like I couldn’t figure out what you guys were cooking up.” Cole cracked open the soda Wendy handed him, his smirk doing a fair job masking whatever other emotions battled beneath. “So I’m sitting here, waiting for my discharge papers, and suddenly Wendy shows up, and then Marta, and then Dhara comes in with this doctor with a clipboard, and I’m looking at the three Vassar girls and a Rastafarian standing at the end of my bed, and I think—oh shit.”
“He collapsed,” Marta said, patting Cole’s arm, “like a hostile takeover whose funding cratered.”
Cole made a scoffing noise. “Like I was going to say no to a month in an upstate rehab resort. It has a golf course. Three tennis courts. A French fucking chef. I’m likely to make more business contacts there than I’ve made in the last eight years on Wall Street.”
Kelly shot a glance at Wendy, who’d taken a seat in one of the four chairs aligned around the bed, figuring the only one who could bankroll that kind of rehab facility was a Wainwright.
“You’ll get to meet my uncle Tad,” Wendy said, her voice falsely light. “He cheats in poker, and he’s a lousy loser, but you laugh so much at his stories that you don’t care.”
“You can close your mouth, Kelly.” Cole raised his soda in a self-mocking little toast. “Scrooge needed three ghosts to knock some sense into him; I only needed three Vassar girls.”
Kelly felt like a newly landed fish still trying to swim. She’d come here expecting to see the uglier side of Cole, the part of him that had driven Dhara away, caused him to lose his job, forget his bills, and be evicted from his apartment. The part he’d been so skillfully hiding, for more years than she cared to imagine.
Instead, as she tried to process this change, he abruptly straightened in the bed, by some illusion looking instantly broader, heavier, and more substantive. Dhara had just walked into the room. The air was full of funny little eddies, so strong that Wendy and Marta exchanged a glance, a glance that Kelly intercepted and understood.
“Dr. Aghanya is filling out some paperwork you’ll need for rehab, Cole.” Dhara focused her attention on the chart before her. “But even with that, I’m afraid I can’t delay your discharge much longer.”
Wendy put her sandwich on the paper in her lap. “Do we need to leave?”
“No, not yet. In about a half hour. I can stay for a little while, at least. Celebrate the moment.”
Kelly witnessed Dhara glancing up at Cole slowly, as if her friend knew the act would be painful. Kelly noticed the wary softness in Dhara’s eyes, the unde
niable traces of old affection. She saw, too, how swiftly Dhara turned her attention away, asking Wendy which sandwich was hers, busying herself hanging the chart, sweeping up the sandwich, and retreating to one of the chairs.
Five days he’d been in this hospital. Today he’d agreed to rehab. Dhara was not yet married. For the two of them, Kelly felt a fluttering of hope.
“All right,” Cole announced, trying to break the awkward little silence, “I have a confession.”
“No need, darling.” With one hand Marta made an exaggerated sign of the cross. “You’re completely absolved.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll want to hear this. It’s my dirty secret. I’ve always wanted to be a part of one of your interventions.”
Marta made a little grunt of disbelief. “You probably thought they were girlie pajama parties.”
“Hey, do I not, right now, have four good-looking women surrounding my bed?”
“Oh, you are so misguided.” Marta pulled out her earbud. “Take it from me, Cole. Real interventions are no fun.”
“I’m not complaining.” Cole’s gaze centered, once again, on Dhara, who found sudden interest in the contents of her pita pocket. “It’s not so bad to be surrounded by people who really give a damn.”
A chorus of aw’s rose up, and Wendy and Marta leaned over to fold Cole in a group hug. Kelly watched the swift catch-and-skitter of gazes between Cole and Dhara with keen interest, noticing how quickly Dhara bent her head over her sandwich to hide a soft smile.
Maybe happily ever after really did exist.
“About this girlie pajama party thing,” Cole added as the girls settled back down, “just so you know, I’m always open for that too.”
“Oh, honey,” Marta said. “That’s just asking for another heart attack.”
“No, no, he didn’t have a heart attack,” Dhara said. “Arrhythmia, brought on by withdrawal, a lot less serious.”
Marta shrugged off the explanation. “Just no more hospital visits, okay? These places give me the creeps. No offense, Dhara.”
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