Save Me (6 page)

“Yeah,” she says.

“Any good?” I ask, turning the book over to read the back cover.

An uh-huh is all she offers. I flip the book down on to my chest. She’s separating her eyelashes with a straight pin, a horrendous habit that she’s had since some friend taught her in college.

“Jesus, Lucy, you still do that? Surely you’ve discovered a better way.”

“Nope, still the best,” she says, holding up the pin.

“As a medical professional, I have to advise you that it’s probably not wise to put the sharp edge of a straight pin within millimeters of your pupil.”

She continues with her other eye, wiggling her brows at me as she does. “Make you nervous?”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I’m so glad that we can revert right back to our teenaged selves after a few hours of being in each other’s company,” she says.

“Agreed.” I cross my arms over my face. No matter how often I lance a boil or diagnose chlamydia, I draw the line at watching my sister hold a stickpin to her eye.

“Let’s go out tonight,” she says.

“Go out?” I say through my folded arms. “Go out where?”

Lucy shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. Anywhere.”

“I’m pretty sure that the only real bar in town is still that disgusting sports bar where the waitresses have to wear those ridiculous uniforms.” I was dragged there with high school friends once, during our first winter break in college, because somebody we graduated with waitressed there and was willing to serve us nineteen-year-olds.

“You mean Fourth Quarter?” Lucy says. “The imitation Hooters?”

“That’s the one.”

I pull into the parking lot of the bar, where a plastic sign next to the front entrance is advertising a St. Patrick’s Day special. Corned beef and cabbage and Guinness for two, $12.99.
And a side of gastroenteritis
, I think to myself, crossing under the sign and into the bar.

Inside, it smells like onions and beer, with a faint back note of whatever watery antiseptic cleanser they use to hose down the place. A morose twenty-something is at the hostess stand, dressed in a tight referee’s jersey and black shiny short-shorts. “Hi, welcome to Fourth Quarter,” she says, not even trying to smile.

“Do you ever have to use those things?” Lucy asks her, pointing to the referee’s whistle on a lanyard around the girl’s neck.

She shrugs. “No. Sometimes I want to, just to see what would happen.” She tugs at the hem of her shorts. Poor thing.

“You should,” Lucy says.

You
would, I think.

“We’re just going to the bar,” Lucy tells her.

“Okay. It’s buy-one, get-one shots tonight,” she says, hopping up on the stool behind her podium.

Lucy looks at me, raising her eyebrows.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say.

The light in the bar is too bright, casting a harsh topaz glow over the room. There are television screens everywhere, and the cacophony of sounds—blowing whistles, sportscasters screaming, motors roaring, music—doesn’t appear to faze anyone else, but I feel instantly overwhelmed. I slide on to a stool and manage to politely grin at the bartender as he sets a cardboard Bud Light coaster in front of me. Lucy takes the liberty of ordering both of us a vodka soda.

I feel blindsided. How on earth did I land here? Last week, I had a husband, a home, and the shared (I thought) dream of starting our family, and now I’m drinking away my sorrows in a shitty sports bar behind a Best Buy? I pull out my phone and put it on the bar, if for no other reason than because Lucy is already typing away at hers.

I notice on one of the televisions that the Boston Bruins are playing tonight. Owen is surely watching. I wonder where. He preferred to watch games at home, where he could yell at the television in private.

“So here we are,” Lucy says, turning to me. “A Friday night in Manassas. And I wonder why I ever moved away.”

“Do you think you’ll stay in the city forever?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Lucy says, spinning her phone on the top of the bar with one hand. “Probably.”

She reaches over my arm to grab my phone. “Do you have any pictures of him here?”

I nod. We determined on the drive over that the last time that Lucy saw Owen was last summer at Mom’s birthday party. She and Bobby had missed Christmas, opting instead for four days in Turks and Caicos. I remember one of the photos that she emailed afterward—the two of them holding up margarita glasses with a couple they met at their resort’s pool bar. The couple had a boat. They went snorkeling.

“He is good-looking, that’s for sure,” she says, studying the picture of Owen. He’s in profile, laughing at something, I can’t remember what. He was driving when I took the picture. We were running errands for the house. Or grocery shopping. Maybe taking Blue to the Eno River for a hike? It was something regular and easy and dull, which is a shame. Our time off together was rare, and when we had it, we filled it with the to-dos of our home life—renovation-related errands, shopping. I should have worked harder to make that time count. Did he know her yet, when I took that picture? His smile in the photo is real. You can’t question it: He looks happy.

I take a sip of my drink. I’m a firm believer in a glass of wine at the end of the day, but I don’t think I’ve had a vodka drink in ten years.

“And a pediatric oncologist.” She shakes her head, sneering, as if it’s him in the flesh and not his picture that she’s looking at.

The bartender, who’s short and barrel-chested and has a face like a French bulldog, walks over to check on us.

“We’re fine,” I say, before he has a chance to ask.

“Okay,” he says. “No problem.” He sticks his hand under the bar and then it emerges holding a sad wooden bowl of wasabi peas. It’s like I’ve time-traveled back to the late nineties. I was two years into med school at UVA and too focused on classes to give any serious thought to relationships, but I’d briefly dated a guy named Derek, a former college hockey player, who was planning to do orthopedics. We watched the Stanley Cup finals in a bar like this one. I wonder what happened with him. Why things never went further with us. When we first met, I was wary. The orthopedics guys, especially the former athletes, weren’t exactly viewed as boyfriend material, and while Derek was a little wild—far more like the kind of guy that Lucy dated than I ever had—he was cordial and sweet, a gentle giant.

I wonder, had Owen and I never had that childhood history, whether we ever would have noticed each other in that sandwich shop that day. I always thought we were fated. I loved when people asked how we met. “Well, we kind of met twice,” I’d start, smiling at Owen as I said it.

“So do you guys live here?” the bartender says. “Haven’t seen you before, I don’t think.”

I clear my throat and look to Lucy, who clearly doesn’t look like she lives in suburban Virginia or frequents this bar. I don’t want to be a jerk, but I’m not interested in making an effort. Plus, chatting people up is much more my sister’s game.

“We grew up here,” Lucy says. “Just back in town for a visit.”

“Ah,” he says. “Well, welcome home.”

“Thanks,” we say in unison.

“Sisters?” he says.

“Yes,” she says.

“So what’s the occasion? Anything special or just visiting to visit?”

“Just visiting to visit,” I say, before Lucy can offer my sad story. I pick up the stirrer off the cocktail napkin that I plucked from the stack on the edge of the bar and stab it into my drink to break up the ice.

“Can I get you another one of those?” the bartender asks.

I tilt my glass to get a better look at its contents. It’s nearly empty.

“Yes, she’ll have another, please,” Lucy says.

“No, really, I don’t need it,” I protest.

“I’ll drive,” Lucy interrupts. “Or we can take a cab. Please get her another.”

The bartender grins, baring the wide gap in his teeth. “You sure?” he says, pointing at me.

I shrug and shake my head at Lucy. “I guess.”

An hour later, the bartender has taken a shine to Lucy, as have the two gentlemen on the other side of her. They are dressed in enough Nascar gear to be mistaken for members of a pit crew, burly, unshaven, maybe in their mid-fifties, and they’re stopping in town on a drive down the coast to a race in Darlington, South Carolina.

Hank, the one next to Lucy, has been married for thirty-five years and has two daughters and four grandchildren. Joe, his buddy, has been married for thirty-four and has six children (“Old-school Catholic!” he shouts at me, by way of explanation).

Lucy is telling them the story about how our parents took us on an introductory trip to D.C. right before we moved to Virginia.
Our mother said she was taking us for a walk on the National Mall, and we get there, and I’m all, Where are the stores? Where is the mall?

Ha, ha, ha.
I think. Hank and Joe snicker. The story’s always funnier to Lucy than it is to anyone else. My concentration keeps swerving in and out of the conversation, catching a phrase here and there. Lucy took the liberty of telling our new friends my story. I didn’t have to add a word as she rattled off the details, and I was fine with that—
I
didn’t want to. Hank and Joe gave me the standard, chin-in-their-chests condolences that you’d expect from men of their generation: “Sorry to hear that.” “That’s really too bad.” Lucy was on a roll, her indictments of Owen flying from her mouth like parade streamers.
Such an asshole. Deceived her. Cheated right after Christmas and they’d just moved into their new house.
The two men just shook their heads and stared into their bottles. “Just awful.” “Terrible.” “So sorry.”

Alcohol is a depressant, for the record. It blunts the functioning of your central nervous system, which impairs you physically and psychologically. There is an initial high after a few drinks, a stimulating effect, but alcohol ultimately blocks your nerve receptors’ abilities to send messages to your brain, so you start to slur, your motor skills loosen, your emotional state destabilizes.

Inhibitions are lost. Men punch each other. Women profess their love to each other. My sister laughs louder. The women across the bar—two of them, both a little puffy around the edges in the way that suggests a lot of nights like this one—sing along unoriginally, embarrassingly, to Prince’s “Kiss.”

I feel myself sinking, emotionally bottoming out. I remind myself of the way that three vodka drinks have affected me physiologically, because somehow, going through the biology takes away the blame for feeling what I’m starting to feel. Tears just behind my eyes. The suspicion that nights like tonight could become more regular now. Owen, on the prickly edges of my mind, beckoning me to think back, what it was like, what we had planned, the memories. The years and years
and years
of memories.

My phone rings. Owen’s face pops up.

Lucy huffs when she sees it. The two men peer, heads bent over the bar, watching me. I want to answer it.

“Let me,” Lucy says, her hand poised to take the phone.

“Lucy, please,” I say, putting my palm over it. I’m about to answer it, I really am, but then it hits me that I’ll have to tell Owen what I’m doing, which is fine, except that I really think that I might cry. I might sob. It will be a slurry, mucousy mess of a thing. The ringing stops and Lucy smiles at me in a satisfied way.
I wonder if everything’s okay with the dog
, I think, watching and waiting for the voicemail alert to chime. It doesn’t.
He’d leave a message if something was wrong
, I tell myself.

“You know, I did that once,” Hank says, pointing at the phone with his chubby finger.

“What?” My heart is pounding.
Why did he call?

Hank looks over at his buddy, who’s nodding in a way that suggests that he knows what Hank’s about to say.

“I cheated on my wife.”

“Hank, no!” Lucy says and slaps her hands on the bar, as if they’re old friends and she knows him well enough for this to be shocking.

“It’s true,” he says, shaking his head at the memory. “Worst thing I ever did.”

“Hmph.” Joe sort of laughs, agreeing with him.

“Why?” I ask. “Tell me.”

“Our kids were little—babies, really. Things had changed, they always do once you get married and start a family. Nobody was sleeping—well, my wife wasn’t sleeping. It’s just around the clock, the stress about money and the worry about the kids, and it’s hard as hell.” He shakes his head.

“I was weak,” he says, raising a finger to make the point. “I could tell you that I was tired, or that things had changed between Ramona and me, and all of that’s true, but I was weak to do what I did. That’s the bottom line. It was a nightmare.”

“But she found out eventually? Or you told her?”

“It was a woman I worked with, just like your, uh…” He puts his palm in the air and wiggles his fingers for a reminder.

“Owen.”

“Right,” he says. “Anyways, she caught me. The woman from work, it had lasted a while, she went a little…she got a little attached. She came by the house one time. Ramona was at her mother’s with the kids, just for an afternoon visit, and she came home as I was standing there in the doorway, telling this other woman that she had to go. She couldn’t be at my house. Well, she just lost it then. And Ramona was walking up and saw the whole thing. It was awful, a big confrontation. Fortunately, the kids were too young to really remember.”

“So what happened?”

“I moved out for a while, but every day, I begged for her forgiveness. I came by the house every night to tuck in the kids. Brought flowers and candies for Ramona. Wrote love letters—I’d never done
that
before. I knew what I’d done. I knew what a mistake it was. The worst thing you can ever do to somebody.”

I remember how Owen said the same thing on the back porch the other night.

“Eventually, she took me back. It took a long time to win her trust. Years, really. I don’t think she said more than a few words to me for the first six months that I was home again, but I deserved the punishment. I
didn’t
deserve her forgiveness. Thank God, she took me back.” He stares into his beer. “Thank God. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”