Parallel

by O'Roark, Elizabeth

  He pulls himself up and over the side of the boat in a single fluid move. We lean toward each other, and when he kisses me, I forget we’re on a boat, in the middle of a lake. All I know is him, warm and sweet and whole beside me. The past few months have been hard, for both of us, but I know in this moment we will be fine. There is something about the two of us that seems to survive all things. Tragedy strikes and we wobble like bowling pins but return to our places, upright and beside each other.

  “Thank you for swimming out to get me,” I whisper.

  His words are low and warm against my ear, his voice serious and perhaps a little sad. “I’ll never just let you float away,” he replies.

  * * *

  When I wake, Jeff is asleep, draped heavily around my back like a blanket, and for the first time in all the years I’ve known him, the feel of him against me brings with it a deep swell of panic. While I refuse to feel guilty about dreams I have no control over, the fact that I can’t stand my fiancé touching me afterward? Yes, I can and should feel guilty about that.

  I quietly extricate myself, as my head starts to throb, and go to the living room. It’s still dark out, and in the dim light the room feels sort of foreign to me. Nothing has changed, yet it just isn’t mine somehow. I look around the room and try to remember why I chose this stuff—the staid furniture, heavy wood, dark colors. But then, I guess I didn’t really choose any of it. I just didn’t argue against it.

  A traitorous voice in my head asks, for the first time, if that’s how Jeff and I ended up together too. It’s a ridiculous question, of course, because Jeff and I were bound to end up together eventually—our parents were best friends and he was our rock after my father died. But at the same time, it seems like part of a pattern: my life consists entirely of things that occurred by default or were chosen by someone else first.

  I lie on the couch but remain awake until it’s light out, wanting only to be rid of this unsettled feeling, this sudden discontentment with everything. Jeff emerges from the bedroom just as I’m rising and regards me through half-lidded eyes, scratching his stomach.

  “You having another headache?” he asks.

  I am, actually. I’ve gotten so accustomed to them I barely noticed. “Yeah, they’re pretty much a constant at this point.”

  He wraps his arms around my waist and I lay my head against his chest. His skin is clammy. Wiry chest hairs poke at my cheek.

  “What’s going on, babe?” he asks. “Is it the wedding?”

  I can’t tell him the truth. I can’t. “Maybe. It’s been a stressful couple of weeks.”

  “Not having second thoughts, are you?” he asks, laughing. Of course he would laugh. Because it’s unthinkable. We are not the kind of people who have second thoughts. But we also aren’t the kind of people who fantasize about others. And now, it appears, I am.

  5

  QUINN

  On Monday, it is Caroline who drives me out to the inn to finalize wedding plans, since Jeff was busy and I was nervous about driving alone, given what happened the other day. Caroline is able to take off work without a ration of shit since she’s her own boss, and not for the first time, I wonder what my life might be like if I hadn’t left school to take care of my dad. Would I have a job I love? Would I be able to set my own hours? If he hadn’t gotten sick, if my mother hadn’t fallen apart so completely…but what’s done is done. You can’t change the past.

  “I love Trevor,” she says, “but his ideas for your bachelorette party leave much to be desired.”

  “Such as?”

  “Prostitutes, Quinn. I’m not joking. He wants me to bring in prostitutes.”

  “Oh my God. To strip?”

  “No. You hire strippers to strip.”

  I give a choked laugh. “So for sex? How would that even work? Is he thinking I’d just, like…go into the bathroom with one of them?”

  “He said ‘guys do it, so why shouldn’t she? I want her to see what she’s missing.’”

  I sigh. “He seems to be under the impression that just because I’m not all ‘do me, Jeff, right now,’ that we’re missing something.”

  I expect her to laugh but she’s oddly quiet. “But you’re like that sometimes, right?”

  I slant a glance at her. “Et tu, Brute? Please don’t join the last-minute chorus of people telling me I’m making a mistake. I mean, you’ve had years to tell me this, so mere weeks before my wedding is just…rude.”

  “I’m not,” she argues. “You know I think Jeff’s great. And to be fair, I have asked you about this before. Right before you moved in with him.”

  I broke up with Jeff to move back to D.C., but when he followed me here—showing up on my doorstep with this impassioned speech straight out of a romance—it felt like fate, like the kind of thing I was supposed to give into. I was torn at the time, but it’s all kind of romantic, in hindsight. “I thought you just wanted to make sure I’d thought it through. I didn’t think you were trying to dissuade me.”

  “I wasn’t, necessarily. I just didn’t…I wasn’t sure he made you happy.”

  “Of course he does,” I reply, shocked she’d even think it. Jeff might not be the most exciting guy, but that’s fine with me. What matters far more is that he is cute and kind, reliable and steadfast. While Caroline and Trevor sit around bemoaning men who forget to call, who change plans without warning or hook up with the blond at the gym, I’ve found someone who remembers every anniversary and doesn’t even seem to realize other women exist. “Where is this coming from? The other day you guys are telling me it’s not too late to change my mind and now this?”

  She gives me an apologetic smile before she looks back at the road. “I know you love him, and I know he’s a good guy, but when was the last time you were happy with him?”

  My head jerks back. “I’m happy now! And if I don’t seem happy that’s not his fault. It’s just who I am.”

  Her eyes flicker to me once more and she frowns. But it’s not who you were, her look says.

  I turn up the radio and change the subject, because I cannot think about this right now. There are times in your life when you just have to focus, get through something and leave all the considering and mulling over behind. And despite the dreams about Nick, this is that time. I’m getting married in a matter of weeks. It’d be too late to change my mind if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.

  I really don’t.

  * * *

  We sit in the inn’s small restaurant with my mother, going over the guest list. The din of their lunchtime service grates, though it probably has more to do with how on edge I’ve felt ever since we got to town, just like I was the last time. It’s driving me crazy, this feeling. As if I’m supposed to know something I don’t.

  “Jeff’s friends from college,” my mother says, “do we keep them all together or split them up? And do you know yet if his friend Tim is bringing the baby?” She clicks her pen, poised for an answer I can’t provide. It’s easily the tenth question she’s asked about Jeff and his friends about which I have no clue.

  I groan. “I should have made Jeff come for this.”

  “Well,” my mother says with a fond smile, “he had to work.”

  “So did I,” I reply.

  She pats my arm. “When push comes to shove, you need someone who puts work first.”

  Of course, she would say this. She’s spent her entire life on a farm, where work has to come first, where it begins early and ends late and doesn’t offer four weeks of paid vacation. And perhaps that’s why the transition to D.C. has been so hard on Jeff—because he was raised to believe that putting your nose to the grindstone is the path to success, and it hasn’t panned out for him here. No matter how hard he works, there is always someone craftier or cannier taking his clients, stealing his thunder.

  My mother puts the guest list aside, apparently tired of asking me questions I can’t answer. “Let’s walk outside and look at the space again,” she says. “I think we need a feel for how
it will all be laid out, and you barely saw it the last time.”

  I feel a twitch, a tremor, in my chest, even as I agree. I realize the little white house in the distance didn’t cause what happened the other day, much like stepping on a crack will not actually break your mother’s back, but…it happened. And I don’t want it to happen again.

  Outdoors it is stifling, and painfully bright, the very air tinged a harsh gold, making things seem ominous in some way I can’t name. But my mother and Caroline are oblivious to it, so I push myself forward, alongside them. They’re talking about valets and overflow parking, but I can’t seem to follow the conversation.

  We pass the edge of the inn. The lake is spread before us, so deep blue it appears bottomless. I inhale and then force my gaze up to the right, to the white house I wish wasn’t there.

  I cannot look away.

  My mom and Caroline politely disagree about table placement and if we need one bar or two, and my eyes are locked, unmoving, on that house, seeing it in my head, though it’s at least a quarter mile away—a wide deck, a dock with a tiny boat bobbing alongside it. I see Nick there too, younger than he was in London. That dream I had last night…it took place there. I’m certain of it. Images sharpen in my mind, and I begin to shiver, hugging myself for warmth.

  “Goodness, Quinn, what’s wrong with you? It’s almost ninety degrees,” my mother says, but her voice is distant, tinny, and then there are no sounds at all.

  * * *

  I land on the floor, hard, my legs tangled in sheets and butt naked aside from them.

  I have a single moment in which I am utterly blank. Unsure of the month or the year, or why I’m in this room with high, arched windows, winter sunlight illuminating dust motes in the air. And then a face appears over the side of the bed. Blue eyes flecked with gold, broad shoulders, the flash of a smile.

  “I’m trying not to laugh,” Nick says.

  I grin. “This is very sexy, isn’t it, the way I’m all splayed out on the floor?”

  There’s a gleam in his eye that wasn’t there moments before. “Honestly? Yeah. A little.”

  He reaches one long, perfectly formed arm out to hoist me into bed. I land on top of him, smiling as I take in his face. God, I love him so much it hurts.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Reilly,” he says, nuzzling my neck.

  I breathe him in. “Good morning, Dr. Reilly.”

  Outside, Paris waits, but neither of us care. We are drunk on the novelty of this, waking up married. I’ve been a bit drunk, truthfully, on the novelty of having found him at all. Two Americans who chose London at the same time. If I hadn’t gone to the hospital for a migraine days after arriving, if Nick’s rotation hadn’t gotten messed up, so that he was in neurology rather than peds that week—I can’t even imagine. There is obviously something greater at play with us, something more than mere fate. But whatever it is, even if we can never explain it, it’s something good.

  “We’ll need to call home and tell our parents today,” he says. We’ve avoided this, knowing it would meet with nothing but objections on both sides. I’d like to keep avoiding it, personally.

  “They’re going to think we’re crazy.”

  He pushes my hair behind my ear. “It is a little crazy. But they’ll get it once they see us together. We’ll go back to the States over break, charm everyone, and they’ll be fine.”

  I sigh. “I’m not sure my mother will be as easily won over as you think. But then, I wasn’t easily won over either, and look at me now.”

  “I am looking at you now,” he says. He flips me so I’m flat on my back and then looms over me, his gaze on my mouth. “And it looks like you need to be won over a little more.”

  I pull him down, waiting for the delicious weight of him settling against me, but before it happens, there is this din in my head, sudden and loud.

  The dull throb of a migraine, and a voice—shrill, unrelenting as an alarm. I’d give anything to silence it.

  “Quinn!” a woman’s voice cries, the pitch rising. My head feels as if it’s splitting open from the inside, as if it will cleave into two perfect halves like a watermelon. I groan and push at my temples as I force my eyes open. I’m standing in the grass, beside a lake, being shaken by this panicked woman and Nick…is gone.

  The memories flood my brain: the quick wedding in London, Nick and I unable to stop smiling through the whole thing, fully aware it was insane to marry someone you’d known so briefly. The honeymoon itself, spent mostly naked in our hotel room. The dread I felt at the thought of calling my mother.

  My mother. It comes to me with a startled gasp—she’s the woman standing here, shaking me. My eyes open and fill with tears. Nick is not my husband. He’s not anything. How can he possibly not exist when I remember him in such detail? When I feel so much for him?

  “You just completely went blank there, like you were asleep standing up!” my mother cries. “You looked like a corpse! We’re going to the hospital.”

  The pain is unbearable, a pendulum of it swinging through my brain, bruising me a little more with each rotation. Before I can argue that a trip to the hospital is unnecessary, I drop to my knees and throw up in the grass.

  * * *

  I know it’s different this time, that it’s serious. After the longest, most arduous car ride of my life, Caroline and I arrive back in the same emergency room I sat in last week. This time I’m taken straight to neurology, where a nurse says she’s going to give me something for the pain that will put me to sleep for a while. Will I even wake up from this? I wonder, as the needle goes into my arm. Do I really care if I don’t?

  “What’s going to happen?” I ask. My words are slurred, my brain sinking somewhere dark and hazy.

  “You’ll be just fine,” she says with a pat on the shoulder. “I’ll make sure Dr. Reilly is there to see you as soon as you wake up.”

  My eyes flutter closed before I can ask if I’ve heard her correctly.

  6

  NICK

  I get to the cafeteria just after Meg does and slide my tray next to hers at the salad bar. She watches me make my salad and turns away. “Just once, I’d like to see you live a little.”

  “In what way?” I ask, loading a second chicken breast on my plate.

  “That,” she says, nodding toward my tray. “You probably burned a thousand calories swimming this morning, but it’s like the world will fall apart if you actually use dressing or cheese, or anything that would make your meal pleasant instead of merely healthy.”

  I shrug. “You see people die every day. Isn’t it enough to be alive without needing everything to be fun on top of it?”

  “I’m not saying everything has to be fun,” she argues. “But the minute you seem to enjoy yourself, it’s like you feel guilty about it or something. It’s okay to have a little fun.”

  “Believe me, if I was in the mood for fun, it would not involve blue cheese dressing.” I grin at her, but she doesn’t smile back. There’s a shadow to her eyes I’ve seen before, a warning sign that she’s unhappy about something.

  I pay and we take our seats, but she remains silent, grim. I pinch the bridge of my nose and brace myself for the relationship talk that appears to be coming. “What’s up?”

  Her eyes are on the table instead of me, her palms pressed against it, trying to rein herself in. “You were talking in your sleep last night.”

  Fuck.

  I’m generally an open book, but there are two recurring dreams I’ve had for years that I’d prefer to keep to myself, for Meg’s sake as much as my own. There’s the one about the girl on the boat, obviously, and a similar one in which I’m dancing outside with that same girl—I know it’s her though I can never quite make out her face—and trying to summon the courage to ask her something. I’ve always wondered if it’s a metaphor for my fear of commitment, although in the dream I want that commitment as much as I want my next breath. But it’s sure as hell nothing I need Meg to hear about. “Yeah?”

&nbs
p; She continues to avoid my eye. “Yeah. And it was like you were talking to someone you were with. You were promising her she’d be fine and then you were…” she swallows. “You were yelling at someone to get away from her.”

  I have no idea what she’s talking about, but it sounds like an accusation, which leaves me feeling both annoyed and guilty at once. I force a laugh. “Maybe I was dreaming about the EMT that kept asking you out.”

  Her lips press tight. “You weren’t dreaming about me.”

  I blow out a breath, suddenly tired. Meg and I have known each other a long time. She knew the deal when I returned from London. She knew my romantic history consisted only of brief, relatively meaningless relationships, and that I couldn’t promise ours would be any different. And things are going well, much better than I thought, but she can’t start scrutinizing what happens in my sleep. “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Because,” she says, “you sounded like you were in love with her. And you’ve never once sounded like that with me.”

  Another accusation. It bothers her that I won’t say it, that I can’t say it. It bothers me too, but I just need to be sure about things and I’m not there yet. “Meg—”

  She holds up her hand. “Don’t. I know you said you just want something casual and you can’t make any promises. What bothers me is that you made it sound like you don’t think you’re capable of more, and obviously you are.”

  “It was just a dream.”

  She nods. I’ve never seen her cry but she’s swallowing hard now, as if she might, and I hate myself in this moment. I want to be better and do better by her. I’ve just got to figure out how.

  * * *

  After our lunch concludes, I get upstairs and a resident briefs me on my next patient as we walk down the hall. “Quinn Stewart. Twenty-eight-year-old female. Fell last week and suffered some memory loss. Today, she appeared to go unconscious for a few minutes, still standing, and she came to with some memory loss and a severe migraine. The pain was so bad they had to sedate her.”