Overnight Sensation

by Sarina Bowen

  “Yes?” She adjusts her massage chair and leans back into its robotic embrace.

  “Why does the temp have a Katt phone and photos on her desk? She looks awfully cozy in my chair.”

  Rebecca’s eyes fly open. “I hired her permanently.”

  “Oh,” I say softly as all my hope drains away.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s not the only job in the organization, Heidi Jo. There are other possibilities…”

  “I understand,” I say. Because I really do. Becca is running a business, and that’s hard. I know because I’m running one myself. But it’s occurring to me that I might soon leave the Bruisers with nothing—no job. No boyfriend. I put my whole heart into everything I do.

  Sometimes the universe just doesn’t care, though. You can make a wish list as long as you like. And come away with nothing.

  I want to bawl, I really do. But not in front of Rebecca.

  She reaches over and squeezes my hand. “I know you’re hurting. Have a little patience. Just a little, okay?”

  “I am not a naturally patient person,” I admit.

  “None of us are!” Rebecca admits cheerfully. “But sometimes patience is all we’ve got.”

  Now there’s a lesson I never wanted to learn. Thanks, Dad.

  36

  Jason

  “Did she return your text?” Leo Trevi asks me. He has to shout, because the stadium is echoing with music.

  “No!” I yell back. We’re suited up and standing on the blue line, facing the other team. The lights are down, and spotlights crisscross the surface of the ice.

  “Did you leave her a voice message?” Silas asks from my other side.

  “Did you do a really good grovel?” someone else wants to know.

  The game is supposed to start in less than a minute, so at least I know when my friends’ scolding will end. “Why are we still standing here, anyway?” The starting lineups have just been announced. Now is the moment when the lights should come up for the national anthem.

  But they don’t. It’s the weirdest thing.

  “Hey—look,” Leo says. “Somebody had a warmup cocktail.” He lifts his chin toward the red carpet that’s been rolled out onto the ice. I follow its path to the end, where there’s an aging pop star in a leopard-patterned jacket holding a microphone.

  The hockey franchise asks someone new to sing the anthem at each game. Various has-been singers show up for this honor. It’s never Rihanna or Bono. That’s not in the budget.

  And this guy isn’t doing so well. He’s supported on one arm by that prick who runs the Ice Girls crew, and on the other arm by Jimbo. But it’s not enough. As I watch, he doubles over and collapses onto a heap on the red carpet.

  “Now what?” Silas asks. “We could be standing here all night, right? It’s in the league rules that the national anthem must be sung.”

  Maybe he’s right, because there’s a frantic commotion on the sidelines. The pop star is scooped up and carried off by Jimbo and another guy from logistics. And now the officials are involved, their black-and-white uniforms converging in a huddle to discuss what to do.

  “We could do this singalong style,” Trevi suggests. “Who has a karaoke app on his phone?”

  “My muscles are gonna tighten up from standing too long,” Silas complains.

  But now the referee is holding up the microphone, and they’re escorting someone down the chute toward the red carpet.

  “Please rise for the national anthem,” the announcer says again as the lights finally come up.

  I blink. And then I blink again. Because it’s Heidi who is stepping out onto the red carpet. She’s wearing a Brooklyn jacket over her tiny Ice Girls’ skirt, and she’s frowning as she whispers with the official. He says something I can’t hear and then points at the microphone.

  Heidi’s reply—if I’m not mistaken—is: “Do I have to do everything around here?” She takes the microphone and walks further onto the carpet.

  In spite of everything that happened today, I smile. With Heidi, it’s impossible not to. Singing the anthem to twenty thousand people would terrify most people. But not Heidi. She lifts the microphone, as well as her perfect chin.

  “Oh say can you seeeeee…” rings out a clear voice. Chills run through my body immediately, and a glance around the stadium fills me with uncharacteristic awe. “By the dawn’s early light…” sings the incredible girl on the carpet. Twenty thousand people lean forward, hands on their hearts. Heidi sings the anthem in tune. It’s not Rihanna, but it’s competent.

  And it’s so fucking brave.

  I can feel Leo watching me, wondering what my problem is. There’s no denying it. Heidi is incredibly special. She’s probably the coolest person I’ve ever met. And if I’m honest with myself, I love her.

  But when I close my eyes tonight, I’m going to see her go down in front of that taxi again. That fear will never leave me alone. Every day is a day when your coach can pull you aside and say, “Come here, son. Sit down. There’s been an accident.”

  I know it. And I can’t unknow it. I’m like a burned-out lightbulb in the middle of the row. I can’t be lit up anymore when I’ve already seen the darkness.

  Heidi doesn’t deserve that. She needs someone who can love her without reservation. She wouldn’t even want a guy who’s as dark inside as I am right now.

  She nails the high note and then finishes the song to applause and also to catcalls. And she doesn’t glance my way as she exits the red carpet.

  When I walk into my bedroom four hours later, I know immediately—all of Heidi’s things are gone. The place looks utterly sterile. I open a dresser drawer, even though I already know her lingerie has disappeared. I wander into the bathroom, and it looks completely lifeless without fifty-seven different beauty products on the counter.

  It’s all gone. Everything is right back to the way it was last summer. Empty and quiet.

  Except those goddamn flowers. When I walk into the living room they’re still centered on the coffee table looking way too bright and cheerful.

  Just in case I wasn’t convincingly crazy yet, I seal the deal by lifting a foot and kicking the arrangement—and its glass vase—right off the coffee table, where it shatters on the wood floor.

  A Delilah Spark tune abruptly cuts off in Silas’s room. His door opens a second later. I hear him pace toward me and then stop, just taking in the scene. “So we’re not being robbed?”

  Slowly, I shake my head. Getting robbed would be less awful than I feel right now.

  “Do we have a broom?” He disappears into the hall closet and emerges a moment later to hand me a broom and a dustpan.

  I start sweeping up the mess.

  Silas appears a second time with a roll of paper towels, a garbage bag, and two beers. Then he watches me clean up the mess, one wet stem at a time. I’m wiping up water and tiny bits of broken glass by the time he says, “Want to talk about it?”

  I turn and give him an evil look over my shoulder. “What good would that do?”

  He takes a swig of beer and studies me. “See, there are some problems that talking about won’t help. Sometimes you’re in love with the wrong girl, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” He takes another drink. “Your thing is different, though. You could have everything, man. You really could.”

  I pick up another bit of glass and throw it in the bag. Silas is wrong. Nobody can have everything. They only think they can. And I’m like the guy who already knows the awful truth.

  So I don’t spoil it for him. I just clean up my shit and then drink my beer.

  “She’s staying at Bayer’s, still,” Silas says as we wait in the charter terminal at LaGuardia a couple days later.

  “Awesome. Thank you for checking.” I’m incredibly relieved to hear it. We’re leaving town again, and I was awake in the night wondering if Heidi had finally rented some shithole in a bad neighborhood. I texted her at four a.m. to ask if she was okay, just because I had
a bad feeling.

  There was no reply. She’s avoiding me. Smart girl. I made a few overtures to apologize to her. I left her a voicemail saying how sorry I was that I flipped out at her. And how sorry I was that she’d left.

  I didn’t beg her to come back, though. We both know I’m not in a good place. That means I owe her one more giant apology. I’m sorry that I asked her to be with me when I clearly wasn’t ready. That’s something I want to say in person.

  And here I am at the damned airport.

  “So you don’t have to worry about her this week, okay?” Silas adds. “And—bonus—you can turn in a shopping list, and she’ll deliver before we touch down on Wednesday.” Silas rubs his chin. “I expect we’ll get billed for her time, though. No more free stocking of the peanut butter, dude.”

  “Shit!” I say suddenly.

  My roommate’s eyes widen. “Dare I ask what the problem is? You didn’t forget your sandwich, did you?”

  I did. Rising from my chair, I squint at the terminal coffee shop. They have bagels, but no regular bread. “What are the odds that they have strawberry jam?”

  “Not good,” Silas says. “You can find a deli near the rink and order a sandwich on your phone. Or ask the new girl to help you.”

  I glance over at Rebecca’s new assistant, who’s poking at her Katt phone and bopping to a song in her earbuds. I don’t even want to try to explain to her what I need. Nobody ever understands on the first try.

  Everything is shittastic. It just is.

  Doctor Mulvey is the team psychiatrist. We all have to meet with him once every six weeks or so. It’s routine. Or, rather, it’s supposed to be. After I threw my tantrum on the sidewalk, my appointment got mysteriously moved up.

  We’re 30,000 feet over the Midwest, heading to our game in Arizona. And Dr. Mulvey and I are together in the little office at the back of the jet, drinking shitty coffee.

  “Look on the bright side,” he says with a smile. “You won’t have to take time out of your week for this now.”

  I give him a weak smile. I like Dr. Mulvey. Everyone does. It’s just that none of us look forward to these appointments. Talking about yourself is the worst. And it’s not like I can lie. Doc has all our files, so he knows my whole life story.

  “Tell me about this meeting you’re having on Tuesday.”

  Ugh. “You probably know as much as I do about it,” I say. “There’s a girl who got a transplant liver, and another one who got…” I was doing pretty well delivering this message until the last part. “Eyes,” I say as my throat closes up. And for a second, I feel nauseated again. But I take another gulp of shitty coffee and swallow hard.

  Dr. Mulvey misses nothing. “So you’re really looking forward to this meeting, then?”

  I actually laugh, but it sounds a little manic.

  “Lots of people struggle with the idea of organ donation. There’s an uncanniness to it. I could read you some excerpts from Freud.”

  “That’s okay,” I say quickly. “I just have to get through it.”

  “True,” he agrees. “Although it might help you to know that ‘eye transplant’ is a misnomer.”

  I blink. “It is?”

  “Yep.” He nods. “The cornea is currently the only part of the eye that can be transplanted. It’s a very small bit of the inner eye. Not the part you see when you look at someone’s face.”

  “Oh,” I say slowly. Well, fuck. “It would have been pretty helpful if someone explained that to me before.”

  He watches me with a kind of quiet patience they must teach at shrink school. “I can only imagine how gruesome your dreams have been lately.”

  “Jesus. Get out of my head.”

  “Okay,” he agrees. “That’s the same thing I’d ask of you, though. What would have happened if you told someone how troubled you felt? Maybe a friend—or your soon to be ex-girlfriend—could have talked you through it.”

  My stomach drops, because I can actually picture Heidi sitting on the sofa with me, googling eye transplants and explaining about corneas. Not that I gave her the chance.

  “You can get through this meeting,” Dr. Mulvey promises. “And while I don’t expect you’ll enjoy it, you might actually feel better afterwards.”

  “You mean… Like maybe there was a purpose to her death? I don’t think my mind works that way. ‘Everything happens for a reason’ sounds like bullshit to me.”

  The doctor smiles again. “Preach. But there’s a middle place between believing that your girlfriend’s death was fated and feeling torn up about it all the time.”

  “I’m not,” I say automatically. “Not all the time,” I add, because Dr. Mulvey has a finely tuned bullshit sensor.

  “Really? Yet you’re not ready to be with another girl who loves you?”

  Christ. The man doesn’t hold back. “It didn’t quite get that far with Heidi.”

  “Didn’t it?” He leans back in his chair. “How convenient. If she’s not The One, then you don’t have to do the difficult work of forgiving yourself.”

  “You are in a mood. Jesus.”

  He grins evilly. “I like you, Jason. You’ve been sitting across from me for a year, telling me how great everything is. The whole team likes you, too, because you’re upbeat a lot of the time. You’re a fun guy. Always quick with a joke.”

  “I am,” I agree, hoping that counts for something.

  He shakes his head. “Because you’re so fatalistic. The man who’s met death can often laugh at a joke. You live in the moment, because you expect to be in pain again at any second.”

  “Harsh.” But, shit, that sounds more accurate than I wish it did.

  “It’s not,” he insists. “There are worse coping mechanisms.”

  “Then are we done here?” He seems to have me all figured out already.

  “Not a chance. Tell me why you broke up with your girlfriend on Hudson Street after she almost fell in front of a taxi.”

  “Because…” I try not to sound defensive, but the guy is starting to piss me off. “It wasn’t serious with her.”

  “No? She doesn’t love you?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Because you don’t love her? Or you don’t think you could?”

  Of course I could. If I were somebody else. “I wasn’t feeling like a very good boyfriend, and I didn’t see the point of dragging it out.”

  “Why did you think you weren’t a good boyfriend? Did you cheat?”

  “No way! And don’t be dense on purpose.” My anger is as bright as the sun. “I was in a funk, and nobody likes that.”

  “So you took that decision out of her hands.”

  “Yep! I guess I am a shitty boyfriend. See?”

  I wouldn’t think shrinks are supposed to roll their eyes at their patients. But Dr. Mulvey does it anyway. “Nice try, son. Your coping mechanism is to keep everything light and easy.”

  “Exactly,” I agree.

  “It’s a smart strategy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s smart as long as you don’t mind being lonely. How’s that working for you this week?”

  “Not bad,” I lie.

  He smiles. “Heidi was staying with you. Where is she now?”

  “In Bayer’s apartment. He went home to his dad’s.”

  “So you’re keeping tabs on her, making sure she’s okay. Do lots of guys who break up from unserious relationships do that?”

  “I dunno,” I say. “They should, maybe.”

  He nods. “You’re right. You’re a good man, Jason Castro. Ask anyone. But I only wish you were a little nicer to yourself. It’s really sad that you lost someone. But you could stop blaming yourself.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know? Maybe because you were a thousand miles away when she got into a car with a drunk driver who killed her?”

  “If I had come home that weekend when I was supposed to, she wouldn’t have been in that car.”

  He shakes his he
ad. “She could have called a friend. She could have called a taxi. She made a terrible, regrettable choice. She paid the price. And you’re still paying interest on it.”

  I don’t say anything, because I’ve heard this sermon before.

  “Lucky for you,” the doctor adds, “you’ll probably live another sixty or seventy years. You’ve got time. I hope, though, that the right girl comes along when you’re finally ready to set down this burden—and not beforehand. Timing is everything. Hockey players know that even better than me.”

  “Yessir,” I agree, glancing at my watch. Maybe he’ll move on to torturing someone else now.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asks.

  I shake my head quickly. “Not unless you know where I can find a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich between touchdown and warmups.”

  The shrink looks thoughtful. “Tell you what. I’ll go find you one myself.”

  “Really?” Now that’s full service.

  “Sure. If you can explain why it matters.”

  “Oh.” I chuckle. But then I open my mouth and nothing comes out. How can I explain something so obvious? “Do you give all the guys a hard time about their superstitions? I hear Leo has a lucky jock strap.”

  “Nah. I’m used to athletes and their superstitions. But yours is the only one I know that’s a talisman from beyond the great divide.”

  Oh Christ. “It’s…a reminder to live up to my full potential. My career has been on an upward trajectory since I started eating that sandwich before games.”

  “Here’s the thing,” the shrink says, sitting back in his chair. “Nobody’s career goes only in one direction. Ask your friend Bayer about that. And then ask yourself why you think you don’t deserve a living, breathing girlfriend, but you can’t live without a sandwich from a dead girl.”

  “Um…” Does he really expect an answer? “Okay. Will do.”

  “Good.”

  A beat of silence passes. “So… Are you really going to find it for me?”

  Mulvey puts his head in his hands. “Sure, kid. I’ll get it somewhere after I check in to the hotel.”