Love at First

by Kate Clayborn

  If he’d said it in any other way, in any other tone of voice, Nora might’ve figured something else—that Will’s mom wanted to shield him from his dad’s sickness, whatever it had been. But she could tell that’s not what it had been, or at least that’s not what it had been to Will.

  “Did she ask you first? I mean . . . if you wanted to go?”

  Everything about him was a silhouette, but she could still see him shake his head.

  “She didn’t tell me where we were going. A couple days after we got home, I kept not being able to find some of my stuff—my favorite T-shirt, a ball cap I wore a lot. Eventually I realized they were out in the car, in a suitcase she’d packed. She’d forgotten to bring it back in.”

  Nora had really never been much one for name-calling. Nonna had always told her that calling someone a bad name was a symptom of a small mind and an even smaller imagination. When someone was rude to Nonna she would say things like, Well, he seemed to be having a bad day! or She must have misplaced her manners this morning!

  But right at this moment, Nora felt like she had the smallest mind, the most minuscule imagination. The only available capability of both was to come up with names for Will Sterling’s mother.

  “What a—” she began, but at the last, loyal second her long years of Nonna training took over, and she recalibrated. “What about your dad?”

  “I don’t know if my dad knew. We never talked about it.”

  My parents, they were kind of like yours, he’d said, but for all her desperation to believe it, to bond over it, now she thought that wasn’t so true. Nora’s parents, they’d talked constantly. Months before her first summer here, they’d talked to her about independence and resilience and trying new things; they’d talked to her about how she was “practically” a teenager, about how her dad had gone to summer camps far from home, about how Nora needed to learn to let go of the rigid routines she seemed to cling to. Sometimes Nora thought that all her parents knew how to do was talk.

  She’d probably been pretty wrong, to get annoyed with them for that. All families were messy, but Will’s . . . Will’s really did sound like a Dickens novel, or worse.

  “When my mother died,” Will said, his voice rough, cautious, and she knew he was about to confess another painful part of this story. “I sent a copy of her obituary here. But he didn’t . . . I never heard from him. I don’t really know why I did it.”

  I do, thought Nora, and it felt like her heart broke into a million pieces, thinking of Will, a kid himself, without both of his parents. Reaching out to the person who’d been, apparently, the only family he had, and getting nothing in return.

  “Nora,” he said quietly, and she swallowed again, knowing already they’d gone too far with this conversation. She could feel the way it’d led them right back to what they’d been trying to avoid, all through this temporary, allergy-prompted truce.

  “Yeah?” she whispered, knowing already what he was about to say.

  “I haven’t changed my mind. About the apartment.”

  She nodded, wondering if he was watching her silhouette, too.

  “I believe everything you say about this place. Everything you showed me.”

  She meant to nod again, to stay propped up. But there was a stinging pressure in her head—behind her nose, behind her eyes—and she started sinking, by degrees, back into her pillows. It’s your sinuses, she lied to herself. You probably need more medicine.

  “But I can’t be here,” he said, and she closed her eyes against a wave of something so potent, so recognizable, something no medicine could fix. Grief, again. For Nonna. For this place, and the way it would inevitably be different now. For Will.

  “This is a place where a lot of things changed for me,” he continued. “And not for the better.”

  It was hard to hear it. To hear that her experience of this place—the exact opposite of his, really—wasn’t anything sacred, or anything universal. It was hard to face that something she loved so much, something she’d tried to preserve so much, could be something so painful to someone else. She felt small and naive. She felt chastened.

  “Right, of course,” she said. “I get it.”

  He cleared his throat, and the mattress shifted again, because—yeah. His confession—it had been the end of something. It was right for him to leave. It was right for them to move on from this, to call off this feud. When he stood, he stayed by the bed, and she regretted letting herself lie down again. Whatever he said next, it would probably feel like instructions. Maybe that’s what he’d do. Drink water, take your pill every four hours, watch your fever. Doctor-patient, and nothing else between them at all.

  “I’d appreciate if you don’t tell anyone else,” he said, which might as well have been instructions. “About Donny. It doesn’t do any good for them to know.”

  “I wouldn’t,” she said. “I won’t.”

  Embarrassingly, she hadn’t even really been thinking about her neighbors, about what she’d say to them. But of course she’d have to find some way to explain, and she would be a model patient; she would do exactly what the doctor ordered. She’d deal with her own feelings about Donny—and what she’d learned about him—privately.

  “I meant what I said before, back at the start of this. I don’t mean to cause you any trouble. Or anyone who lives here. I’m a responsible person. I’m a practical person.”

  The way he said it—she got the sense that he really needed to believe it. Like he had some reason to doubt it, even though for the whole time she’d known him, he’d always seemed like both. That hot bowl had been real practical, for example. Drinking water, that was something responsible people were always into.

  Her face heated with memories—welcome-wagon schemes and flower crowns and poetry scrolls, emails to reporters and crying over kittens and drooling on this poor, beleaguered man. She felt like the most irresponsible, impractical person alive.

  “I know that,” she said. “And I’m sorry about . . . everything. All the food, and the poetry. I’ll stop. And I’ll—I’ll get that article canceled, I promise.”

  He was quiet for a long time, and then he said, his voice soft again, “So far as sabotage goes, it was all pretty clever, Nora. I might even miss it.”

  She had to bite her lip to keep from another irresponsible bout of tears. Maybe that decongestant gave her PMS. That was definitely it, she decided (impractically).

  He moved then, came around to her side of the bed and lifted her water glass. “I’ll go get you some more before I go. You should take another dose of medicine, too. But better if you do it with breakfast.”

  “No, that’s okay,” she said, too quickly, finally finding the energy to halfway sit up. “You don’t have to do anything else. I’m going to get up for the day. Early riser, and all that.”

  He set down the water glass, a clink of finality. “You’re sure?”

  “Definitely sure. I feel loads better.” False, she thought. Now you feel worse. Differently worse.

  “All right. I’ll . . .” He paused, seemed to rethink whatever he was going to say. “I’ll see you,” he finished, exactly like his first golden-hour goodbye.

  He turned to go, and she held herself still, waiting. She definitely wasn’t going to get up, not yet. Four a.m. could honestly go fuck itself. She was done with it. She was going to lie back down as soon as she heard her front door shut behind him and sleep for as long as she could.

  But he didn’t go.

  Instead, he turned back around and held out his hand.

  She blinked at it, then up at him. Did he . . . want to shake her hand, to end this? Like a professional goodbye, or maybe some kind of weird gentleman’s agreement that would remind her not to get any more ideas about wrecking his rental property? Honestly, after everything they’d talked about, it felt insulting enough that she almost wanted to take a pass.

  Instead, to get it over with, she put her hand in his.

  But it wasn’t a handshake he wanted.
>
  As soon as they touched, he tilted his palm; he pressed his against hers, wrapping his warm, strong fingers around the edge of her hand, the same as he had that night in Donny’s apartment, to keep her from falling. She knew he could hear her sharp intake of breath but hoped he couldn’t hear the way her heart thudded in response to his touch, his nearness. Even through her still-stuffy nose, she could tell that he smelled like sleep and her sheets and something else, something clean and spicy, and without thinking, she tipped her face up to get closer to it.

  He leaned down, and set his lips against her forehead. Soft, sweet, and somehow sad.

  A goodbye.

  Still, the best medicine she’d ever had, for the seconds he stayed there. She felt—rather than heard—him murmur something against her skin, but before she could ask what he’d said, he straightened, loosening his hold on her hand.

  This time, when he turned to go, he didn’t change his mind.

  Chapter 10

  Two weeks and two days since he’d seen her.

  Not that he was counting.

  But he was counting.

  He stared down at the stack of call sheets where he’d been scribbling notes all day, half-formed words about patients he’d seen over the course of his shift. The fragments, they were part of the job, or at least they were part of the way he’d always done it: nothing that’d make sense to anyone else, but that made perfect sense to him when he finally sat down to do notes in between rushes or at the end of his shift. Sometimes he’d write things like pudding cup, and that would remind him that the woman in treatment three who’d fainted in the middle of her daughter’s piano recital had taken a bite of her orderly offered chocolate pudding right before she mentioned to Will that her jaw bothered her, only a little, really, but it was the jaw pain that made him put in the orders for an MI workup, and once he saw the words pudding cup he could somehow remember it all for the patient note.

  Tonight, though—sitting in one of the uncomfortable chairs at a messy workstation right in the center of the ED—he was struggling with his own scribbled clues, frustrated with the way his brain was slow to jog and to focus, to remember what a phrase like sock history/hamster??? meant, especially when for two weeks and two days his mind had teemed with all sorts of useless fragments, memories he didn’t want or need, things that made him think of Donny and his mom and, most of all, of Nora.

  Of Nora and what he’d done to her, the morning he’d last seen her.

  You think I’d take your kid?, he could hear Donny saying, each time the memories would come back to him. It was clear like day, Donny’s voice, no matter when Will heard it. Clear like the afternoon sky when he’d stood beneath Donny’s balcony for the first time. He’s probably turned out like you, he’d hear, and then the real hits would come.

  Rash.

  Reckless.

  Selfish.

  Will had hated Donny for saying those things about his mother, and by extension, about him. But he couldn’t deny the effect they’d had on him; he couldn’t deny that he’d heard something true in them. Everything about his life that felt chaotic to him—his moods, his temper, his intensity over his baseball games and his frivolous crushes—he’d ended it, after that day. In his house, he was half ghost, half manager. He ducked in and out of rooms, bringing things to his mom and dad, disappearing again when he’d done whatever service was required of him. He’d use the phone he’d brought into his room to make the calls his mother couldn’t bear to. He wrote checks from his bed, his biology textbook a lap desk, the imitation of his father’s signature practically a work of art. He studied. He cleaned. He counted pills. He planned burials: first, his father’s, long expected, and ten and a half months later, his mother’s—not expected but still somehow not shocking—when an aneurysm took her in her sleep. He got loans. He got into college, then medical school, then residency. He focused.

  I’m a responsible person. I’m a practical person.

  His own words now, the ones he’d used to win with Nora, to stop the feud over the apartment. He’d meant them, of course he had. They were the same words he repeated to himself, every day for years until he’d believed them, until he’d become them: Will who works late, Will who stays even-tempered, Will who puts everyone else at ease.

  But once it was all over—once she’d quietly agreed, once she’d promised to keep his confidence, once she’d apologized—he’d felt heavy with guilt, because he hadn’t told her the full truth. He hadn’t told her what else he’d heard that day—her laugh and her voice, high above. He hadn’t told her about his heart, that the way she made it beat felt like the last relic of who he’d been before everything changed.

  He hadn’t told her that it wasn’t only the memory of Donny he was afraid of.

  It was the memory of her back then, and it was the reality of her now.

  It was the way she made him feel. Rash, reckless, selfish. Like the most intense version of himself.

  And it was that version who’d struggled to go—who’d bent back over her bed, who’d taken one last chance to touch her. Who’d kissed her. Soft skin, soft hair. Everything about her smelled good. He’d said I’m sorry, right against her skin, but he knew he was being a coward. He knew she wouldn’t hear him, and then he’d gone.

  Two weeks and two days ago.

  “Dr. Sterling.”

  “Yeah,” he said, irritated, and then he looked up to see who else but Gerald goddamn Abraham looking down at him, standing at the workstation with his white coat and his permanent look of judgment.

  He suppressed a heavy sigh.

  “Yes,” Will corrected.

  “Dr. Viswanath started his shift an hour and a half ago. You’re meant to be off.” If Will was meant to be off, then so was Abraham. But he supposed it wasn’t worth it to point it out.

  “I’m doing notes.”

  Except that he wasn’t. In fact, at some point, the screen saver had come on. He nudged the mouse with the edge of his hand. “This computer is broken.”

  Amara, the nurse in the chair beside him, made a noise. He looked over at her, and she stuck the straw of her water bottle into her mouth and raised her eyebrows while she took a big drink. She’d already told him to clear out twice because she said he typed so slow it made her want to murder him.

  Will sighed and stood up. “Fine,” he muttered, patting at the chest pocket of his scrubs, then at the waistband. His favorite pen, check. His badge, check. Amara’s smirk of victory, check.

  “I’ll walk you out,” said Dr. Abraham, and Amara chuckled quietly.

  “I need to stop by the workroom, get changed.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  Will hustled down the hall and into the workroom, changing out of his scrubs as quickly as possible, wanting to get whatever Abraham had in store for him over with. When he walked out, bag over his shoulder and bike helmet under his arm, the man was there waiting, paging through the small leather notebook he always kept in the pocket of his white coat. Probably he never wrote anything like sock history/hamster??? in there.

  They fell into step silently, Will altering his strides to accommodate Dr. Abraham’s. He was going to get a lecture; he could sense it. He knew he’d been off since he’d been back, but surely that was normal after such a long break. Surely he hadn’t done anything to warrant—

  “You gave my wife two kittens.”

  Will almost missed a step. He had done that.

  “My ex-wife,” Dr. Abraham corrected.

  “It wasn’t so much that I gave them to her,” Will said.

  “She’s very taken with them. She’s named them—”

  “Quincy and Francis,” Will finished. “I know.” She’d sent him a few more videos, all received while he’d been at the hospital. He’d saved every single one and thought about sending them to Nora.

  But thought better of it every time.

  “Sally often lobbied for a pet, during the time we were married.”

  Oh, Jesus. What kind of mess
had he stepped into here? A month ago, walking these halls with Abraham, he’d had the sense that there was something different about his boss when he talked about his ex, but back then, Will was still his mostly normal self, and that meant he didn’t get near anyone’s sloppy romantic problems. Unfortunately, Will was currently his mostly abnormal self, with a head full of memories he didn’t want and a heart in his chest that felt like it was made of cracked glass.

  “You didn’t want pets?” Will said, abnormally.

  Abraham cleared his throat. “Sally and I had different ideas about what made for a comfortable home.”

  Even from the brief time Will had spent with Sally, he could tell that what made for a comfortable home was probably only one item on a very long list of things she and Dr. Abraham had different ideas about. The truth was, Will couldn’t imagine how they’d gotten together in the first place. And that was the hell of it, wasn’t it? People did all kinds of wild shit for love, and this was only one of the bad ways it could turn out: getting divorced and then trying to initiate an awkward conversation with a colleague about your ex-wife’s adopted kittens and your disparate household management preferences.

  Rash, reckless, selfish, he thought, with renewed conviction. Enough of counting days, of staring blankly at scribbled notes and computer screens, enough of thinking about Nora’s skin and her smell. He didn’t want mess like this; he never had. Up ahead, the exit doors promised a colorful sunset, and that was a time of day he ought to celebrate, because it didn’t make him think of Nora at all.

  “Would it be odd, do you think,” Abraham said, which is right about when Will realized he hadn’t ever responded. “If I also gave her one?”

  Will stopped in front of the exit doors, turned and blinked down at Abraham, breaking the long-unspoken eye contact rules. “If you . . . gave her a kitten?”

  Abraham smoothed his lapel. “Yes. As a gesture.”

  A gesture of what, Abraham didn’t say, but despite the sock history /hamster??? brain sluggishness, Will had enough of his wits about this to see it for what it was. Gerald Abraham was trying to reconcile with his ex-wife, and wanted Will’s advice. Truly a reckless move. What did Will know about reconciliation? He’d never tried such a thing in his life, because it’d never been necessary. You never needed to have a breakup if you never let things go beyond a night or two, if you only shared those nights with people who also weren’t looking for anything more.