Romance in Color

by Synithia Williams

  “Just trust me.”

  “The point is that I don’t,” Petra said, the words cracking out like a gunshot.

  She did not meet his eyes.

  “I don’t know if this is working out,” she whispered.

  “Petra, don’t say that. You’re under a lot of pressure now.”

  “That’s the point. This whole relationship is too complicated. There was too much wrong with it to begin with. There’s too much wrong with it now.”

  He balled up his fists. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t you think this is worth it? Petra, look at me. Please tell me you think this is worth it.”

  She did not look at him. “I can’t talk to you right now.”

  “Petra.”

  She pushed him to the door. “Oh, and take this,” she said, handing him a pill without looking at him. Her fingers barely skimmed his. “It’s a Benadryl.”

  She shut the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  She didn’t know what was worse, the idea that he hated her, or the fact that she still loved him even while she was incredibly angry.

  And she was angry.

  What was this all about, anyway?

  At work, she plowed through a pile of paperwork and harangued an insurance carrier over the phone. The billing codes were just fine, she argued. She used the same codes all the time. They appeased her like she was a madwoman. They gave her victory. Not that she was wrong. She was right, of course.

  Joanie seemed wary of Petra’s new forcefulness. Perhaps she was somewhat more aggressive than usual. Joanie did not get any reading done during work hours. The drug rep was similarly terrified and gave Petra extra samples.

  Maybe this is what people had when they said they needed a spark to be successful. But her lonely triumphs didn’t make Petra feel better.

  Ian called several times but she ignored him. Or rather, she slammed her smartphone face-down on her desk. (On top of piles of paper. She wasn’t far gone enough to damage her precious toy.) By Thursday, he seemed to have understood that she was not going to pick up and he left her alone for most of the day. She was not afraid that he would show up downstairs at her office or outside her building. She left at the time she always left. She took long runs along the water and did everything that she usually did, except talk to people.

  He didn’t try to see her.

  She couldn’t say if she was disappointed.

  Of course she didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to see his face, the hurt in his deep brown eyes.

  At night, she tossed and turned, consumed with fury and sadness and lust and—was guilt in there, too? Her feelings made no sense. Most of the time, she reminded herself to be livid, incandescent with rage. She tried to hold on to the feeling for as long as she could, afraid that she would forget she was angry. If she didn’t, she might leap right at him and tug his face down to hers.

  It was never going to work out. It had been wrong from the beginning. She had started off stabbing him with needles and they had ended impaling each other’s hearts. And popping allergy pills.

  She wondered if he was sleeping at the office. She supposed he had no choice.

  It was never going to work out.

  Even though he protested that he wanted to stick around and work through this problem, this was Ian. The self-confessed smoother-over. If it caused too much trouble, if it went too deep, then he removed himself. Or was it herself she was describing?

  Eyes burning, she stared at the dark ceiling.

  • • •

  She must have fallen asleep. She picked up the phone, barely awake, and when it turned out to be Sarah, she felt the disappointment that is wasn’t Ian, then relief.

  Not Ian. Sarah.

  Luckily, her friend read nothing into Petra’s silence. “I’m not on call tonight,” she was shouting.

  Evidently, Sarah had been up all night, delivering babies. She was always exuberant after a birth, as if she’d stolen the new mother’s hormones. “I wanted to thank you, really thank you, in case you took all my grumbling and yelling for ungratefulness,” she said. “Can I take you out?”

  Petra closed her eyes. Now, after being up almost through the night, she felt like she could sleep. “I’m not really up to going out tonight,” she muttered.

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Sarah, no offense, and really, this isn’t about you at all. I think I just need to be alone this evening. Also, you’re shouting.”

  “Sorry,” Sarah bellowed cheerily. “I just pulled a little girl out. I never get to deliver babies with my Pronto patients. I love this! The parents named her Tara, which rhymes with Sarah. So far no one’s named a kid after me, but I’m giving myself half a point for this one.”

  “I’m going back to sleep, Sarah.”

  “You do that, you pussy.”

  The morning and afternoon wore on. She stuck more people with needles and yelled at Jane Wu for overusing her bronchodilator. The girl cried and Jane Wu’s mother yelled at Jane, too.

  At the end of the day, Petra went home and went to bed.

  Her apartment doorbell rang. She had not buzzed anyone up. Terrified and half hopeful that it was Ian, Petra checked out the peephole and Helen peered back at her. Behind her was Sarah.

  Petra pulled open the door.

  “If you’re going to turn this into an arena fight, don’t bother,” Petra said, holding up her hands.

  “You have got the ugliest sleepwear I’ve ever seen in my life,” Sarah said, shouldering past her. She was carrying a pillow.

  “We’re having a pity party,” Helen said, “and we’re using your place.”

  Petra looked from Helen to Sarah and back again. They were acting suspiciously normal around each other, as if the last month had been erased.

  “Don’t the girlfriends usually come bearing affirmations and snacks?” she asked.

  “Blah. You don’t like my food. Plus, we knew you’d already be loaded up,” Sarah said. “We didn’t think we’d need more.”

  “Actually, I brought something,” Helen said.

  She pulled out a tray of the terrible generic cookies. Petra nodded a couple of times. She considered bursting into tears, but whether it was over the fact that her friends had come together even though things were still tense, or because she cried a lot nowadays, or because the cookies were just that bad, she wasn’t sure. It was probably a combination of the three.

  “I’ll make some cocoa,” she said.

  “No, I’ll make it. You sit down and wallow,” Sarah said.

  Helen had already put on her flannel long underwear. She patted the seat next to her.

  “So, Sarah called you.”

  “Yes. I’m really glad she did. We tried to fill in some blanks together, but I’d rather hear it from you.”

  Petra shook her head. “I feel really stupid,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Petra shied away. “I should have known better. I should know what this is like.”

  “What?” Helen asked.

  “You know, all this love stuff. I should have understood that it wasn’t going to work out. Not with a former patient, not now, not ever.”

  “Why?”

  “I swear, if you ask me another one-syllable question, I’m going to beat you with one of these incredibly hard cookies.”

  Helen sighed. “Never say that you don’t believe in love.”

  “I believe in it just fine. Funny, isn’t it? My dad walked out, my mom’s about to be married for the third time, and I’ve had my heart crushed, but I believe in the emotion. I just don’t know what to do with this thing with—”

  She couldn’t say his name.

  Luckily, Helen didn’t expect her to say it. “Well, what do you want from it, then?” she asked.

  Petra thought for a moment. “I want…” she stuttered. “Well, things to be different from how they are right now. I want love to make me happy.”

  She knew she sounded young and immature. May
be she was. Helen looked at her, but if she thought Petra was being stupid, she didn’t say anything. “It can if you let it. It probably did at some point.”

  Petra lay down. She could not lie and say that Ian had never made her happy. Transcendently, exquisitely, obscenely happy. But life had a way of intruding on it.

  “Are we talking about boys, yet?” Sarah asked, carrying in three mugs.

  “You know, for someone who fucks and leaves, you attach more importance to men than you should,” Helen said.

  “At least I—”

  Sarah sucked a deep breath in through her nose and let it out again.

  “Maybe you should just tell us what happened,” Sarah said in a perfectly normal voice to Petra.

  She picked up a cookie, sniffed it, then put it down again.

  Defiantly, Helen stuffed an entire one in her mouth and couldn’t say anything for a while.

  “He told me he was in love with me,” Petra said. “Then, he kind of showed me that he couldn’t be in a relationship with me. I chose him over my ethics and professionalism. He chose a cat.”

  Except that wasn’t the whole truth, was it? It was that he refused to tell her why he had taken the cat. It was that his ex had been gorgeous and sophisticated and expensive, and Petra’s own life had been circling a cosmic drain. It was that she was scared and angry that she was going to do too much to be with him—get shots, forget transgressions, forget who she was. It was that it was easier to blame her professional troubles on him—on his brown eyes and velvet voice—than it was to blame it on the fact that she hadn’t thought long and hard enough when she’d decided to open a solo practice. Even now, she felt willing to try to be with him, willing to just abandon everything else.

  She tried to explain more, minus the desperation and abandon.

  “So why did Ian accept the cat anyway?”

  “He said Danielle had something on him, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. He told me to trust him. But by that time, I was so jerked around and angry, I just wanted—”

  She stopped. She didn’t even know what she wanted. She wanted to be back together with him, but in the time before the cat had arrived and her landlord had called and Kevin had canceled, and after Ian had said he loved her. She wanted to be back in those brief hours before life had intruded. Or no, she wanted to meet him before she had become his doctor. She wanted to go back to the moment she’d gotten her dad’s money, stuff it in a retirement account, and go to work for Pronto!Docs. She wanted to burn it all down and start the whole thing anew. But that could never happen.

  “I wonder what it was he was protecting. His business, most likely,” Sarah mused. “It’s probably really the only thing that guy really cares about. Maybe there’s something fishy going on there.”

  Petra felt a flare of indignation. “He’s clean. He works hard and he tries to be fair. I’ve seen him in action. Besides, it’s hardly the only thing he cares about. I’ve seen him be wonderful with Kevin. And he’s affectionate with the cat even though he’s allergic to it.”

  And he’s good to me, she thought.

  “That’s true, he does care deeply about things. Maybe too much,” Helen said. “Not to mention, he’s crazy about you.”

  Petra put her hand over her eyes. “Well, he’s got a funny way of showing it.”

  They were quiet.

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” she said. “Let’s talk about something else. My mom is getting married next weekend and I just don’t know what a girl should wear to her mom’s third wedding.”

  She appreciated the effort Sarah and Helen made. It was a strain for them, Petra could see. But she just couldn’t really be honest with them about Ian—or herself. She could barely stand the voice in her own head.

  “So you love him and he loves you,” Helen said, when Sarah went to take a phone call in Petra’s bedroom.

  “That’s your takeaway from all this? Because mine was: next time don’t sleep with your patients, current or ex.”

  “I think that’s Sarah’s takeaway. I think that you’re being overly scrupulous and blaming yourself for things that aren’t necessarily wrong or your fault—which is so like a physician. You’re a good doctor, Pete, and you try hard and I think you’re fine, ethically. Maybe I’m biased because of my parents. But Sarah is biased because of her issues, too.”

  “Right. How’s it going between you guys?”

  “How does it seem, Dr. Changes-the-Subject-Unsubtly?” Helen sighed. “Look, I’m not going to pretend that things are perfect, but we know each other and understand each other, and there’s something to be said for that. And I know that part of her is sad that she hurt me, even though the only part she lets me see is her shit-ass judgmental attitude. And part of me—a lot of me—is really sorry that hit one of her hot buttons and disappointed her…and me.”

  “Yeah, fuck you,” Sarah said, coming back in.

  Helen gave her the finger and ate another cookie. “These are terrible,” she said, her mouth full.

  • • •

  Petra escaped to the bathroom. She pretended that she wanted to shower. They were talking about her, she knew it. After she excused herself, she heard Sarah’s voice go low. She peered at them through the crack in the door. Their heads were close together and she heard Sarah hiss the words bastard and balls.

  That was Sarah, always leaving the guesswork out.

  Petra shut the door again and took out her toothbrush. Sarah was probably of the opinion that Ian had cheated with Danielle. Helen was probably convinced of Ian’s love for Petra, but maybe not so much of Petra’s for him.

  She sat on the none-too-clean floor of her bathroom and wished that they all could stop having this conversation. They understood her well, that was the problem and it was the wonderful thing about her friends. She knew them.

  She knew Ian, too.

  She knew, for instance, that he didn’t know anything about American football, even though he pretended to follow the conversations at Stream. She knew he was handy, despite affecting an air of ease and nonchalance, and that he had constructed the bars at Field and Stream himself. He had built a tree house years ago, too, he said, that was almost like a real house. She knew he had not seen his Oregon relatives in nearly ten years, although he still called his aunt every now and then. She was elderly. She liked to play online poker.

  Petra knew the feeling of his arms and his hands. She knew his corded muscles, the scar between his thumb and index finger. He nuzzled her shoulder blades and kissed her neck when he thought she was asleep.

  She knew about his mother. She knew that he had been the one to call the police, to arrange the funeral. His father had left it all to him, even though he was still a boy. He had done the hard things that people had to do in life. He had not simply abandoned anyone, even though he thought he had. He had followed through on everything.

  When she had said that she didn’t trust him, she’d lied, and that was the worst knowledge of all. She didn’t trust herself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Petra went into the office on Saturday morning and sat in her chair, chewing over the numbers. She could move her office. She had many months to prepare. Ian’s real-estate broker had called to introduce herself, and Petra wondered if Ian had made the call before or after their breakup. She was inclined to think after. He was that kind of person.

  Of course, she could figure out easily how much she’d have to spend on the move, how much new prescription pads and appointment cards would cost. But whether she’d lose business by shifting locations, that was hard to tell. There was the fact, too, that if she stayed in the neighborhood, she could end up right next door to Stream or Field. And she did not think she could do that. It was bad enough that she was tensed to run into him at every moment. The thought of him so close by would break her.

  Maybe she should close up shop.

  She glanced at her phone. Past noon. She needed to eat something.

  She treated herself to
an expensive sandwich from the hipster coffee shop across the street. She’d been spending lots of money lately: on a dress for the wedding, new shoes. She felt reckless. A sandwich wouldn’t break her. The shop was full of lazy weekend coffee drinkers, so she wandered outside holding her recycled paper bag. She wasn’t going to return to her office.

  It was dry but brisk this morning. The wind hurried her along to a little park. She sat on an empty bench and looked around. Well, it wasn’t as if people were clamoring to sit outside in this weather, she thought, as the wind blew her hair around. At least she wouldn’t seem sad out here. She would look almost brave.

  Idly, she watched some men and women playing soccer in the park. It looked like a pickup game. Backpacks were being used as goal posts. Bodies scrambled across the turf in grubby mismatched sweats and muddy sneakers. The field was a mess of mud and most of the players sported dark streaks across their torsos. It looked like a detergent commercial. She watched the players without following, almost sightlessly taking in their movement, glad for the break they gave her overworked brain. She wondered how the players managed to keep track of which team they were on. They were indistinguishable, their shouts barely heard above the stiff wind. Then, she saw him. He had broken from the scrum to maneuver the ball toward the goal and she recognized his run, the elastic motion of his limbs, the calm purpose of his head.

  Ian launched himself forward. She clutched her sandwich messily and her heart started pounding. She stared harder to make sure, and then he slipped and fell and her heart leaped into her throat.

  There was an awful pause.

  She was standing. She was ready to run to him.

  He sat up.

  He was shaking his head as a couple of guys stopped by him. He refused their hands, and he got up easily and started walking up the field, right toward her. Had he seen her? She didn’t think he had.

  He was fine, he was fine. More than fine. Apparently, he wasn’t lying on the floor of his apartment, wheezing to death as Snuffy’s dander flew up in a maelstrom around him, nor was he buried in spreadsheets or abusing a belt sander. Or spying on her as she played soccer.