by Sue Miller
“It’s over, Rube,” she said in the dark. He was still.
In the morning, she worked on her own stuff. Then she had some student scenes to critique and a grant application she’d been putting off finishing for days.
Around one, she walked Reuben for the second time that day. When she came back, she went to the kitchen and got some takeout soup from Whole Foods from the refrigerator. While it heated, she played the message from Sam again. She thought about what to do.
Actually, she talked aloud about what to do. Like many people who live alone, she often talked to herself. And almost as often, she pretended to be talking to Reuben—speaking to him about what she was doing in the moment, or about the characters she was writing, or about her life. Her voice now was subdued and meditative. “I’m going to have to manage this, Rube.” She stirred the soup, set the wooden spoon down on the counter. “I’m going to make him be my friend. My pal.” She scratched behind the dog’s ears as he stood next to her, looking up into her eyes. “I can do that, don’t you think? I have lots of friends. Guy friends. Why not Sam?”
There were many reasons why not, but Billy ignored them. She called the number he had left, and he picked up after two rings, his voice neutral but somehow exciting to her. She ignored this, too. She suggested, instead of dinner or a drink, that they go for a walk with Reuben on Monday afternoon, at the Arboretum. “I never get to go there because I don’t have a car.”
“Well then,” he said, “I’m happy to accommodate you.”
She saw the squirrel just before Reuben did, and she knew, even as he took off, that it would be bad. Why hadn’t she just let go of the leash? She didn’t. She gripped the plastic handle even tighter—what a fucking idiot!—and braced herself.
Reuben weighed almost as much as she did. When he hit the end of the extendable line, he was up to full speed. She felt herself yanked forward, she felt herself falling. Here she must have let go of the handle, because as the ground leaped up to meet her, she could see Reuben across the field disappearing into the woods. Her arms were in front of her, her hands scraping the ground, but still she landed hard on her belly, and her chin whacked something. She cried out, she was crying out, even before the impact.
And then lying there, no dignity left at all, she started truly crying, it hurt so much. Sam was by her side almost instantly, crouched next to her. “God, Billy,” he said. He was stroking her back. After a few moments, when she’d calmed down a little, he helped her to a sitting position. She turned her face away from him. She could taste blood, she could feel it in her mouth and leaking down her chin. Her tongue touched the inside of her upper lip. It was already swelling. Her wrist hurt in an ominous and ridiculously painful way. “Damn it!” she said.
Sam was wiping at her face with something—his scarf, his expensive, probably-cashmere-it-felt-so-soft scarf. “Okay. Okay,” he said soothingly, as if to a child, and she realized she was making little grunts of pain.
She made herself stop. She rested her face against the scarf, against his hand holding the scarf. He was sitting down next to her on the ground now, she saw. Her own legs were straight out in front of her, the knees of her jeans smeared with black earth, her hands resting on her thighs, filthy. One of them held the other one, the broken one. Was it broken?
“You’ll get all dirty,” she said to Sam after a moment. It was hard for her fat lip to say the word.
“I’m not worried about that,” he said.
They sat together, not talking. He had his arm around her. “Oh!” she said after a minute. “I’m just so depressed about this.”
He laughed. She looked up at him—even sitting down he was so much taller than she was—and suddenly she was laughing, too. “God,” she said, resting her head against his jacket, his shoulder.
She saw Reuben emerge from the woods, prancing sideways, trying to avoid the handle of the leash as it kept retracting toward him, as if it wanted to wrap itself around his legs, as if it were alive. “There he is, that criminal,” she said. “I’m going to sue him.” She started to stand.
“Here, let me help you up.” Sam reached for her arm.
“Careful, careful, careful, careful!” she cried, turning her body away from him. “I think my wrist might be broken.”
She held it out, supporting her hand. It was swelling, turning red. She couldn’t believe how much it hurt.
He bent over her, taking her other elbow, and helped her as she gracelessly rose to one knee and then heaved herself all the way up. When she was upright, he began to brush off the front of her coat, the knees of her jeans. She stood, letting him, holding the scarf against her mouth.
Reuben had come close by now and was watching them dubiously. “It’s all your fault,” she said to him. She pronounced it fawt. “You asshole.”
“Think he gets that?” Sam asked. “Think he’s experiencing remorse?”
“Oh, it’s all right if he’s not,” she said. “I have enough for both of us.” The plastic handle to the leash was dancing and jumping on the grass. “Could you grab that, Sam?” she asked. “I don’t want him taking off again.”
Sam picked up the handle, and Reuben turned his sober gaze on him.
“Will you be able to walk?” Sam asked.
“Yes. It’s just my face and my hand. My wrist, I mean. My knees hurt, but they’re fine.”
“I think we should head back, then, and find an ER, or your doctor. Someone to look at your hand, at least. Maybe your lip.”
“My lip is that bad?” But she could feel it was. Her tongue went there again. In the middle of the swelling, there was an open slice. The impact of her chin hitting the ground must have shoved her lower teeth into her upper lip, hard. Yes, her jaw felt achy.
“It’s not good,” he said.
They started back down the hill. With every step, every jolt, her wrist hurt. Sam was ahead of her on the path. He was wearing jeans today, as she was. It made him look less formidable. Lankier.
Had she thought he looked formidable in his elegant suit? Apparently so.
She watched his long, loping stride. Reuben moved eagerly alongside him, his new best friend, every enthusiastic step a betrayal of her.
They had to wait in the urgent care wing of her HMO. The intake person, a handsome, fat black woman, smoothly coiffed, bejeweled, thoroughly in charge, thought it might be half an hour. “Take a seat,” she said. “They’ll call your name.”
There were two other people waiting ahead of Billy, one a Hispanic child with his father, looking listless, almost gray, and breathing phlegmily, probably contagiously. Billy settled herself as far away from him as she could, which meant she was very near an old man who sat almost doubled over, rocking rhythmically, as though to soothe some terrible internal pain. Sam sat next to her. They talked in near whispers. She felt compelled to apologize for perhaps the fourth time.
“Don’t be boring, Billy. We’ve been through that. You’d do the same for me.”
“I’m not sure I would. I might try to weasel out, somehow.”
“There is no weaseling in an emergency. You’d do the same.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” They sat. Glumly, Billy said, “This is making me so sad, being here.”
“Because it hurts?”
“Not that. Just … the humanity.” She rolled her eyes.
“Yeah. There’s no escaping that.” After a minute, as if to change the subject, he said, “I talked to Leslie.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. She was the one who gave me your number. Since you hadn’t.”
Ignoring the pointed quality in his voice, she asked, “And was she pleased you were going to call?”
He was silent for a moment, as if considering this. “I think so,” he said at last.
“Why? What did she say?”
“She said that she hoped we’d be friends, anyway.”
“No more?”
“‘Anyway,’ she said.”
“No, I mean, no more ab
out me.”
“Oh. A bit. Yes. She talked about you and Gus.”
“I think I can assure you that Leslie knew almost nothing about me and Gus.”
“But you were together a long time.”
“Not so long. A year, more or less. But we mostly didn’t live together.”
“What she said was that Gus loved you. Wasn’t that true?”
“Gus thought he did.”
“If he thought he did, then he did, surely.”
She said nothing for a long moment. She was suddenly remembering all her reservations about Sam, about getting to know him. She said, “I don’t want to talk about Gus with you, Sam.”
He looked at her, coolly, she thought. “I was just answering the question.”
Billy felt awash in confusion. Finally she said, “You’re right. I asked. But let’s talk about something else now.”
Perhaps he wanted to change the subject, too. Perhaps he saw how badly she needed to be distracted from her throbbing wrist. At any rate, he launched himself into his history with emergency rooms—the story of taking his kids to various hospitals over and over when they were young. He said she was lucky to be in the care of a pro like him—he’d seen it all. There was the time when they’d opened the back of the station wagon too fast, and Mark, the youngest, had tumbled out headfirst onto the pavement. “Concussion. Plus twelve stitches.” Once Charley had chased Jack through a closed sliding glass door. Forty stitches in all. Mark had been showing off for a little girl in his class, jumping from a swing at the high point of its arc, and broke his leg. There were two broken arms, a dislocated shoulder, one fever so terrifyingly high he’d brought whatever child it was that had it into the hospital. And those were only the emergencies. There was lots of ordinary blood and gore, too.
Billy kept him talking, kept asking questions. She liked his voice, she liked not thinking about her own pain. She liked the sense of him as a parent, taking care of other people, having survived it all, being able to joke about it.
Finally her name was called. She went into an exam room and sat on the padded table, the paper crinkling under her. The technician, a short, plump, cheerful young woman wearing a terrible perm and a flowered hospital top, took her temperature and her blood pressure—125 over 82. Billy always wanted to know, even though she had no idea what the numbers meant in terms of her health. “Is that good?” she asked. The technician said it was okay.
After she’d been alone for a few minutes, a very young man in a white jacket came in and greeted her. Dr. Cramer, his name was. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
“I don’t usually look like this,” she said, pointing to her face.
“That’s a very good thing,” he said. He listened to her sad tale while he washed his hands. Then came over to her and, without asking her, flipped back her upper lip in what she thought was kind of a rude way. He looked at it for a minute and said he thought there was nothing much to do about that. Ice, he suggested, though he added that it was probably already too late.
He asked who Sam was. Then his face turned suddenly grave, which made him seem even younger. “Do you feel safe with him?” he said.
Yes, Billy said. She did. It hadn’t occurred to her how it would look—as if she’d been knocked around. They should go after Reuben, she thought. Reuben, who was probably sound asleep in the car out in the parking garage.
He moved her wrist, and she cried out. He sent her to X-ray. Sam came with her and waited for her to be called, and then waited longer with her for the film. He’d been reading an old Newsweek, and both times they sat together, he reported to her on whatever obsolete article he’d just finished. They talked about what the appropriate punishment for Michael Vick might be. They discussed their recently discovered ability to make new neurons as adults—who knew? Sam talked to her about his middle son, who probably had known—he was doing research on Alzheimer’s disease.
When they got the films from the X-ray guy, they headed back to urgent care with them. By now Billy could feel that her knees were stiffening up. “I’m getting older by the second in here,” she said, shuffling down the corridor.
“We all are,” Sam said. “It’s what hospitals are meant to do to you.”
Nothing was broken, the young man said, showing her the picture of her own intact, shadowy bones lighted from behind. He gave her a splint that closed with Velcro straps and told her to keep her wrist elevated and iced. She asked for and got a prescription for painkillers, and she and Sam sat together in the pharmacy while it was being filled. She asked him why he was free on a Monday, a workday, and he explained the shape of his life to her—that he worked alone now, he made his own hours. That he’d had a partner for years, but they’d split up when the partner got more interested in developing projects on his own. “More speculative stuff. He’s braver than I am. Or more entrepreneurial, I guess you’d say. It was a bit like a divorce, but without the rancor.” He’d taken his jacket off and he was slouched in the waiting room chair. He seemed entirely comfortable.
“‘Rancor,’” she said. She looked at him. “Was there rancor in your divorce?”
He thought for a moment. “Not quite rancor. Something a little more like … disappointment, maybe.”
“Who was disappointed?”
“We were both disappointed, I think.”
“In equal measure, would you say?”
He laughed. “What’s it to you?”
She shrugged. “I’m interested in narrative,” she said. “How it went. How it was. What happened next.”
“Well, I would say yes, in just about equal measure.”
“That’s a good thing,” she said.
He didn’t answer.
“Right?” she asked.
“A better thing is no disappointment.”
“Well, yeah. But do you think that’s possible?”
“Don’t you?” It was in part his glasses, she thought, that made his gaze look so intense when he asked a question.
“No, I don’t,” she said. “I’ve managed to disappoint everybody.”
“And been disappointed?”
She smiled at him. “In about equal measure, I would say.”
They sat looking across at the pharmacy counter, where everyone—five or six people in white jackets—seemed very busy, but no one was being called.
“Who’s ‘everybody’?” he asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“But I do. I’m interested in narrative, too,” he said.
“Well. That’s not part of the walk-in-the-Arboretum deal. That information.”
“But neither is urgent care,” he said.
“Point taken.”
“Point scored.”
Finally her name was called, and she went up and got the pills. She took one immediately, bending over the water fountain in the corridor and then tilting her head back to wash it down. Sam admired her technique, called it birdlike.
By the time they pulled over to park, a half block from her apartment, it was getting dark. Billy was slouched against the window on the passenger side, already feeling more comfortable. “Oh drugs,” she said. “I love them so.”
“They are a blessing,” he answered.
She thought suddenly of his wife, of how much serious pain he must have witnessed and had to help with. And failed to help with, finally. And yet here he was, indulging her, trying to make her feel better too. She had a pang of apologetic shame for her whining. “You’ve been swell today,” she said. “Nearly as good as a drug yourself.”
“That’s almost the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” They were getting out of the car. He opened the door to the backseat and attached Reuben to the leash.
“What was the nicest?” she asked. She felt afloat, detached from her body as she leaned against an elaborate little iron fence circling someone’s front garden. The streetlamps were on. They started to walk, their footsteps seeming loud in the twilight.
“I w
ouldn’t want to be immodest,” he said.
“Oh, be immodest.”
“Nah,” he said.
Inside she hung her coat up and turned on the lamp on her desk and then the one by the couch. She flopped down on the couch. Reuben came and set his immense head in her lap. “Sweet boy,” she said. She leaned over and smelled his fur. “I could kill you. I could kill you, my darling. You are a darling I could gladly kill.” She leaned back, and a wave of sleepiness rolled over her. She felt it as that: a wave.
Sam was in the kitchen, out of sight. She heard things clunking around. This was exactly what she hadn’t wanted, this intimacy, this invasion. “Want tea?” he asked. “Coffee? Wine? What else is here.” He was being nice; she gave him that. She heard a cupboard open. “Cognac?”
“Sam, stop it,” she called. “You’re off duty.”
“I have stopped,” he said. “I’m going to have a cognac.” He appeared in the doorway holding the bottle and a glass. “Want some?”
“I better not,” she said. “I’m already a little tipsy from my drug.”
“What about tea?”
She looked at him. She should tell him no. She should tell him she wanted to sleep. She said, “Tea would be awfully nice.”
He went back into the kitchen. She heard the water running, then the clash of the kettle on the burner. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, he was setting a cup down next to her. The windows were completely dark. Steam wisped off the teacup. “Whoa,” she said. She licked her lips. “I was asleep.”
“I know,” he said. “You were snoring a little.”
