Save Me (12 page)

“Oh, I see,” he says. “Like I said, it’s totally last minute.”

“No, it’s…it’s fine.” I backtrack.
Can I go on a date? This isn’t a date, though—just dinner, some music.
“I probably won’t even get any calls, and if I do, they usually don’t require more than a few minutes.”
I wonder if he knows that I’m married?
I inhale sharply, taking a big breath of air into my lungs. “You know what?” I say. “Sure! That sounds fun.” I force myself to smile as I speak and hope that it injects at least a little enthusiasm into my voice.

“Okay, good,” he says. “How about we meet at Geer Street. Seven o’clock?”

“Seven o’clock!” I repeat.
It will be good for me
, I tell myself.
He is nice. He is handsome. And he’s not Owen.
“Seven o’clock sounds great.”

T
his may not be a date but it’s the perfect night for one. The sun is just setting, the sky is turning a velvety deep blue, and the trellis above the restaurant’s patio is strewn with glittering string lights. We sit at a quiet table in the corner, away from the crowds crammed into the long, communal tables in the center of the room, and the candle set between us flickers from the gentle, early spring breeze. At the coffee shop across the street, a jazz trio is playing, the music just loud enough for us to hear it over the laughter and easy conversation coming from the tables around us.

The last time that Owen and I came here was last fall, right before it got too cold to sit outside. It was a Sunday night and we sat on the other side of the patio and I had a Reuben. That’s about all I remember. I was blissfully oblivious to the way that my life was about to break open.
Blissfully.

Andrew sits with his forearm on the table, comfortably slumped to one side. He drinks the same beer that Owen often ordered. His hair is still damp from his shower, but as expected, he is dressed better than Durham requires him to be. He wears a starched shirt, the sort of jeans that do not look like they came from the Gap, and loafers without socks, a Southern boy trademark that Owen rolled his eyes at in the same way that he rolled his eyes at grown men in superhero T-shirts.

We order—he lets me go first—and then I watch the waitress as she hurries off, her walk a sort of bounce-bounce like she’s on a tether.

“So remind me, how long have you been back in Durham?” I ask. I take a big swig of my wine. I should slow down. When I was getting ready earlier, I guzzled a glass in record time, trying to quell my nerves.
This isn’t a date,
I remind myself.
You have nothing to prove.

“I’ve been here for about three months.”

“And how has it been?” I wince as soon as the words are out of my mouth.
How has it been since you came home to tend to your ailing father? Idiot!

“It’s been pretty great, actually,” he says fortunately. “You know, I come back fairly often. With all of my travel for work, it’s easy to hop down for a few days if I’m already on the East Coast, but I haven’t been able to spend any extended time here since before I left for college. Do you like it here?” he asks.

“I do,” I say, leaving it at that. Earlier, when I was driving home, I noticed a For Sale sign in front of another farmhouse down the road from ours. I thought about how I always assumed I’d stay here forever. Now I could choose to go anywhere, do anything. I wonder when (if?) the concept won’t seem so terrifying. “So you must travel constantly for work?” I ask.

“I’ve definitely logged some airline miles.” He starts to tell me about his company, which started off with two small hotels—one in the Bay Area, the other in Oregon—and is now comprised of half a dozen properties in North America. Each is a restoration of some sort: an old zipper factory, a former post office, a dilapidated Woolworth’s. He starts telling me about his latest prospect—the first outside of the U.S., a renovated seamstresses’ workshop in Vancouver—and how he dreams about expanding outside of North America, with locations in Spain, South Africa, Ireland. It’s hard not to feel his enthusiasm, and before long, I am swept up in his wanderlust and thinking that Durham is indeed a very small place and that there are thousands upon thousands of people in the world and thousands and thousands of them get their hearts broken every day. The thought, distressing as it is, gives me comfort.

After we finish dinner—I resort to eating my fish tacos with a fork so as not to humiliate myself—he excuses himself to use the restroom. I sip my wine and gaze around the patio. My eyes land on a large group that I noticed while we were eating. There’s a young couple sitting at the end of the table—he’s bearded, wearing a plaid shirt, and she’s wearing the kind of sweetly patterned sundress that I know from pictures that my mother wore when she and my dad were first dating. But what really draws me to them is the chubby toddler she’s bouncing on her lap. His chin is shiny from drool and she holds a piece of her fried chicken out for him to try. He yanks the drumstick from her hand, wields it like a pint-sized caveman, and they all laugh, watching him.

I turn away, twisting in my seat for a moment to see if Andrew’s on his way back to the table. There’s a couple just behind us. I try not to stare. She has dark, wavy hair that tumbles down her back, and he is clearly mesmerized by her, leaning almost into his plate to get closer. They are deep in conversation, obviously in love, or lust, or some combination of the two. I feel the telltale ache in my chest that is with me so often lately.
Were Owen and Bridget ever bold enough to go out in public together—maybe driving to some out-of-the-way place where they wouldn’t be discovered—and did he look at her like that? Did he reach across the table and take her hand, the way that I’m witnessing
the man next to me do it now, and slowly caress it with his thumb, staring at her with that sort of adoration?

Andrew returns and sits. “This is a fun place,” he says.

“Yes,” I say, plastering a smile on my face. “Yes, it is.”

Andrew pays, insisting on it, and then we walk up the street to Motorco, the music hall where we’re seeing a band that he described over dinner as nuevo-bluegrass, whatever that means. He doesn’t know the dirty little secret about me and concerts, of course. Precisely, that I can’t stand them. I know how it makes me sound. Dull, unfun, like someone who would wrinkle her nose at an ice cream cone. Who doesn’t like a concert?

It’s not that I don’t like music. I do—a lot, actually. My hang-up with concerts are the stumbling, sweaty crowds, the fact that I can never see the stage because I’m not tall enough, and how I always get restless after a few songs and wish that there was something to look at besides the armpits of the people around me.

The show has already started. Andrew points me toward a wall of gymnasium-style bleachers on the side of the stage, and I squeeze my way through the crowd of T-shirts and denim and climb to where there is half an empty row. I watch the people below us in front of the stage; they are singing along, moving their bodies to the beat of the music in ways that suggest they can anticipate every boom and pop of the drums, every riff, every bass line. The band is clearly popular.

Andrew offers to go to the bar and I watch the band, a quartet of young guys I think are related in some way. Before long, I am bobbing my head along to the music. And when the song ends and the crowd erupts into applause, the woman next to me hopping up to stand and shout, I clap along, raising my arms up almost over my head.
Maybe this whole night is a lesson,
I think.
I shouldn’t be so quick to assume that it’s impossible for me to have a good time now. There is still plenty for me to look forward to.

Before the next song begins, I dig into my purse to quickly check my phone for any work-related hotline calls. My stomach drops. I have six missed calls, all from within the past half hour, but they’re not from the office—they’re from Owen. No voicemails. I search the crowd to see if Andrew’s on his way back and find him making his way up the side of the bleachers, taking care not to spill the pints he’s carrying. I could say that I got a message from a patient. It would be so easy to step outside for a moment and find out what Owen wants.

Andrew is squeezing himself down our row.
Excuse me! Sorry! Excuse me!
We lock eyes and he smiles at me. He passes a woman who might be young enough to be a student, wearing a short top and an armful of bracelets, and I notice how she looks him over in an approving way. I wonder again why he’s single. I wonder why Owen called.
Just ignore it,
I think.
Just let yourself have the good time you deserve.

He goes to hand me my drink, but to take it, I have to shove my phone clumsily into my bag.

“That was an effort.” He laughs.

“What? Oh,” I say, realizing that he was talking about going to the bar. “Yes. Thank you very much.”

I take a sip of the drink and angle myself just the tiniest bit toward Andrew.
Forget Owen. Forget him,
I think.
Remember what he did to you.
I think of Bridget, the two of them in bed—I can’t help it, but my mind so often goes to the physical first, some reptilian impulse kicking in. I think of their bodies, sweaty and twisting, I think of them holding hands, sweet, tender, the most evident physical expression of emotional love. I think of that couple at the restaurant and how Owen must have looked at Bridget like that. I think of how he lied to me, about working late or needing to go into the office when he was possibly with her. The deception wasn’t random or impulsive. He planned it and let his actions follow the outline, forgetting me a little bit more with each passing day.
He said in the email that they had a relationship
, I remind myself. I force myself to think through the details, one after the other, building a case for why I ought to sit right here and enjoy myself.
Don’t think about him.

I glance at Andrew, who’s watching the band. His eyes meet mine and he grins. “They’re good, right?” he says, nodding toward the stage.

“Yes,” I say.
They
are
good,
I tell myself.
Stop thinking.

“This is fun,” he says, nudging me with his elbow.

“It is,” I say, nudging him back. I nibble at the inside of my lip and then lean into him. “I’m having a really great time.”

I turn back to the stage. I watch the bass player, humble and earnest, the jerky, hyperjauntiness of the fiddle player, the rhythmic hopping and flapping of the crowd in front of them. And then I start tapping my foot. I make it move, and it feels silly, like it’s on a mechanical lever, but I don’t stop.
Let it go
, I tell myself.
Let him go.

After the show, Andrew walks me to my car. I’m nervous, cringing at the thought of an awkward good-bye. We both say the things you say—
had a great time, let’s do it again
—and then he leans in for a hug and I don’t know whether he’s going to kiss me but I turn my head away, just in case, and it’s obvious, what I’m doing, which makes it worse, because how bad would it be for him to kiss me on the cheek? And so, maybe inspired by the comfort of his arms around me, the faintly damp masculine warmth of him, I turn my head back and I kiss him on the cheek quickly, appropriately—not a lingering, passionate embrace, just a gracious, grown-up thanks-for-a-nice-night peck.

I step back.

“It was a really fun night,” he says, grabbing my hand for a moment and then letting it go.

“It was,” I say, running my hand over my hair.

“Let’s do it again,” he says. He means it. I can tell. Is it possible that Jack hasn’t told him anything about me? He didn’t ask me a thing about my personal life during dinner—but then again, I didn’t ask him, either, not wanting to open that avenue of conversation. Bad first-date etiquette—
not that this is a date.

“I’d love to do it again,” I say. I open the door to my car and he holds it for me as I slip inside.

“Get home safe,” he says, closing the door after I’m in.

I nod, waving, and once he’s turned, I watch him walk away. I pull out my phone. No more calls.
Could Owen have sensed that I was out?
I muse.
Could he have seen me?
It’s funny to feel vengeful, but even better, I realize, to feel good about it. I look back out my window but Andrew’s already gone. There is a food truck parked on the corner outside of the music club, and people are milling about, eating pizza and clutching the band T-shirts they’ve just bought.

Let Owen think that I’m moving on.
It’s fine
, I think. Because whether I’m ready to or not, I’m starting to have something to show for it.

I
am halfway up the driveway when I see Owen’s car parked in his old spot. I park and fly inside.
What is he doing here?
I realize that he still owns half of this house, but he
cannot
just show up here like this. He lost that privilege when he did what he did with Bridget.

“Owen!” I scream, letting the door slam behind me. “Owen!”

I cross the threshold into the kitchen and he’s sitting there in the dark, the only light the pendant over the sink that I turned on before I left for the evening. Blue is lying at his feet.

He has his elbows on the table, his open mouth resting against his interlaced fingers. His eyes are red and puffy. His cheeks are streaked from tears. I notice that he’s not wearing his ring.

“Owen, what the hell is going on?” I drop my bag. He looks me over—I’m dressed up for once, in the silk shirt that I bought for a New Year’s party that we went to two years ago, heels, and even makeup. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is thick with mucous. He clears his throat. “I called first.”

“I saw. You called a lot of times. What is it, Owen?”
Dammit, can’t I have one
good night?

He closes his eyes, squinting them shut. He looks physically pained.

“She died,” he says.

I put my hand to my mouth. I’m not sure I’ve heard—
“What are you talking about?”

“Bridget. Bridget’s dead.”

It started three days ago. First they noticed her breathing—she was having more trouble than would be reasonable despite what she’s endured. But Owen thought that something was wrong even before that. He didn’t think that she was progressing as quickly as she should be, regardless of the long inventory of injuries. He talked to her doctors, and after some back-and-forth about the best course of action, they discovered that they needed to do another abdominal surgery and, in the course of doing so, determined that she had more internal bleeding. They addressed it, and she started to progress again. Her breathing tube came out and she started to talk a little bit. She was getting better. “
You could tell, her color
,” Owen says, his voice drifting off. But then she reversed—an unexpected snap. The complications started piling on—they discovered posttraumatic pancreatitis, due to the initial accident. And because of the pancreatitis, the lag time from the accident three weeks ago, and the extent of the damage, she developed ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome. Her lungs were compromised, she was shutting down, her body wasn’t getting enough oxygen. It all started moving faster and faster, in the way that it happens, one thing after another and then another. They reintubated her. She held on for another day. And then, this afternoon, she let go.

“I’m sorry to come here,” he says. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

I pull out the chair next to his and sit down.

“I know I shouldn’t be here.” He sniffs hard, sucking in air.

“It’s okay,” I say. The refrigerator hums in the background. It’s like a soundtrack, defining the moment.

“What about her family?” I ask. My heart is pounding. I feel like I can’t take a full breath.

“They’re here,” he says. “They’ve all been here, the whole time, since the accident.”

“I don’t know what to say, Owen.” I say it to the top of his head, which is hanging between his shoulders, which are curled over the table.

He shifts in his seat. “Daphne, can I stay here tonight? I know that it’s asking a lot. I just don’t know where else to go. I don’t want to be alone.”

I feel a jolt, a nervy electric current running through my veins. “Of course you can,” I say.

He runs his fingers through his hair and looks down at his lap. “Thank you.”

There is a difference in the way that you think about death once you become a physician. Pre-M.D., I thought about it as the end of a long road—what happens, mostly, at the end of a life, the concluding final chapter. Of course I was aware that people die much earlier from causes that have nothing to do with age—car crashes, wars, disease, freak injuries, swimming pool drownings, the stuff on the evening news. But mostly it was older people. Once I entered medical school and words like “longevity” and “vitals” became part of my daily lexicon, death became a sort of undercurrent. Not in a morbid way but in a realistic one. Death really does happen every day, hundreds of thousands of times, to every sort of person. A long battle with a chronic condition finally, mercifully ends. SIDS. An operating-room mistake. A suicide. Heart attacks, strokes. Murder. A kid passes out on a football field. A woman looks the wrong way before she crosses the street.

I don’t deal with it in an immediate way with my work. Owen does. I am a preventer, a monitor, but he is an
undoer
. The damage, the cancer, is already there. He is a wonderful doctor, working in one of the best hospitals in the world, and some of the patients who come through his office die despite the best efforts known to mankind. He loses people in spite of everything.

But that’s his job.

All four of his grandparents are living. There have been no horrifying stories about childhood friends who died young. He was diagnosed with cancer as a boy and it marked him, it changed who he would become, but it didn’t kill him. The theme that has driven his life is
survival against all odds
. I watch him, so brittle, from across the table. Grinding his teeth, the anxious pulsating pop in the side of his cheek. His eyes are closed, like he can’t bear it. I reach my arm out and grab his hand.

I can’t believe that she’s dead.

I know that this moment—sitting here and noticing the way that my feet hurt, the back-of-my-throat aftertaste of the dark beer that I drank at the concert, the cloying perfume that nags at me because I’m not used to wearing it—I can already tell that this will feel like the threshold, the line between
before
and
after
. Months from now, this will be the moment that sticks.

I let go of his hand and stand up and the chair sliding across the floor behind me, the deep skitter, sounds like a groan. My feet
click-click
a few scant steps across the hardwoods, sounding ridiculous. I slump over him, put my arms around him, and whisper in his ear. “I’m so sorry.” My throat burns.

He cups his hands over my forearm, like he needs to hold on.

“I can’t believe it,” he says. “I just don’t—”

“Shhhh.” I press my cheek to the top of his head. “It’s going to be okay,” I say, sensing the hollowness of the words before they’re even out of my mouth.

I fall asleep sometime after two, and when I wake the next morning, the first thing I do is text Annie.
Call me.

She does, about thirty seconds later, and I lunge to pick up the phone so that the ring doesn’t wake Owen, who’s asleep in the guest room. At least I hope he’s finally sleeping. He sat in the same spot at the kitchen table for hours, eyes closed, head on the table, or slumped back in the chair with his palms pressed together against the bridge of his nose, like he was begging for something. There are so many questions I wanted to ask. What does her family know about him? What’s his role, exactly? Has he been staying at her place, driving her parents to the hospital each day? I couldn’t ask, of course—it’s not the time. I eventually went upstairs to the bathroom, found the sleeping pills that I’ve been using, and left the bottle on the vanity in the guest bathroom.

“
Soooo?
” Annie says, her voice bright, the
soooo
curling over itself.

Of course. She’s wondering about my night out with Andrew. I’d already forgotten.

“Hey,” I say. I hop up from the bed and close the door, which I’d left cracked just in case…I’m not sure. In case he needed me, I suppose.

“How was it?” Her voice is tinny, clanging. She can hardly contain herself.

I clear my throat. “It was good.”

“That’s it?” she says. “Oh, no. What is it?”

“Nothing, I had a nice time. It’s what happened after.”

“After?
Oh.
” I can hear the foreboding in her voice.

“No, not like that. Andrew is a lovely person. Really. But when I got home, Owen was here.”

“Are you kidding me?” she wails. “I can’t believe the gall—”

“Annie, stop,” I interrupt. “It’s Bridget. She’s dead.”

As I describe what’s happened, I have to keep stopping to collect myself. We both keep saying the only thing you can say in this situation: It’s unbelievable. We both agree that Owen needs someone right now, and I can tell that Annie doesn’t want it to be me but it’s going to have to be. She keeps insisting, her voice consoling, soft, that I
take care of myself, don’t let this overrun me, be very, very careful
. I know that what she wants to do is pluck me right out of this chaos, because she’s right, it’s not mine, but how can I not feel some of what he feels? It’s so awful. After I hang up with her, I tiptoe down the bright hallway, the sun coming in slats through the windows that line one side of the wall. The guest room door is cracked and I peek in, pressing it open ever so slightly with my fingertips. He’s not there. I continue downstairs to the kitchen, but he’s not there, either, and when I look out the window to the driveway, I see that the space on the left that his car always occupied, the one that he parked in last night, is empty. He’s gone.

I’m not sure what to do. I pace the kitchen floor for a minute and then, because I don’t have any other answers, I call my mother.

“Hi, honey!” She is chewing something.

“Hey, Mom. Listen, I need to talk to you. Something happened.”

“What?
Oh!
What happened? What is it?”

I can hear NPR in the background, through the dusty, beaten-up AM/FM radio that my parents have kept on the kitchen counter for decades. My mother, I am certain, is sitting at the table in her floral-printed robe, picking pieces off one of the expensive French pastries that she buys every Friday afternoon for her and Dad to enjoy over the weekend.

She gasps throughout my story. “I can’t imagine what her family must be going through,” she says. “How old was she?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six! My God. A life is just beginning at twenty-six. It’s tragic.”

“It is,” I say. Owen and I met for the second time when I was twenty-six.

“Her whole life was ahead of her.”

“I know.”

And then I begin to bawl. I can’t hold it in any longer. It is all so sad, such a mess.

“Oh, honey,” my mother coos. “It’s going to be okay.”

“I feel so confused,” I say. “I can’t imagine what her family is going through. And I’m worried about Owen. I really am. What am I supposed to do now?”

“I know, honey, I know,” she says. “It’s a terrible situation to be in. I think,” she starts, collecting herself. “I think that the best thing that you can do—the only thing, really—is to take it one day at a time. Follow your instincts. Be there for him but don’t forget to take care of yourself. Put yourself first. You won’t be of any help to him or anyone else if you don’t.”

“You’re right,” I say. I rip a paper towel off the holder next to the sink and wipe my nose. “It’s all too much.”

“I know, honey,” she says. “But do what feels best. Lead with your heart.”

“Okay,” I say, turning her words over in my head. “But what do I
do
?”

“Why don’t you call him and find out where he is?” she says. “So that you won’t worry.”

“I’ll do that,” I say. “I’ll call him right after we get off the phone.”

“The thing is, you need to be there for him,” she says. “As uncomfortable as it is between you two right now, he needs you. You’re all that he has down there.”

“You’re right, Mom. Thank you.”

When I hang up, I feel redeemed. For better or for worse, the validation—maybe permission—is exactly what I hoped to hear from her.

Doing what feels right should be a simple solution
, I think, staring out the kitchen window.

Owen is grieving. I should help him.

But Owen started a relationship outside of our marriage with the person he grieves.

But she is dead
(how is this possible?)
and I should respect her.

And they both deceived me, so I should respect myself.

I open the window. It’s a beautiful day. They all are in April. The breeze is gauzy and sweet. I start to cry again. Nothing is normal anymore. Everything feels fragile and out of balance.
Where is he?

I want him here,
I think, turning and gazing into our family room with its cozy sofa, the soft rug—this house we built, this
home
. And it’s not because I want to take care of him, though I do. It’s not
(admit it!)
because I’m worried about him, though I am. I simply want him home. With me. I pick up the phone and dial his number, but he doesn’t answer. It just rings and rings.