“A metal rod in his femur and delicate hand surgery still to come? Eighty years old? Three flights of stairs?”
Jeez, all right. Gerald really went in for the facts. Pretty good thing he hadn’t been in the room for Dr. Terano’s visit.
“Correct. But I didn’t say that. I only—”
“You brought up the third floor.”
Gerald was a pretty good listener; that was the thing, even if Will had spent the first ten minutes of this conversation telling a very disorganized version of the events of the last two days. Jonah’s fall. Nora’s rushed return from San Diego and their seeming reconciliation. This morning’s meeting, and Nora’s insistence afterward that she would “take it from here.” He’d tried to stick to the plan he made: suggested that they call Benny, or Mr. and Mrs. Salas, offered to drive Nora back to her place. But she’d wanted none of it. Wanted none of him.
“I’ll call you,” she’d said, cool and remote, and it’d sounded like San Diego all over again.
“Yes, but only because—”
“The problem is obvious. She’s very protective of her neighbors, whom you’ve said are basically her family. There’s been a lot of change in her building, and most of it has been your doing.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it, Gerald,” he said. “But also, that’s a little unfair. Her grandmother died, and so did my uncle. Now this, with Jonah. None of that’s my doing.”
“Hmm.” This was the noise Gerald made whenever Will introduced a new complexity to a case. Possible undiagnosed diabetes. A secondary infection that complicated the pharmaceutical plan.
Will felt liked he’d scored the most worthless point.
“I admit, I shouldn’t have mentioned the third-floor thing. At that moment.”
He’d figured that out even before he’d gotten on the elevator to leave, realizing what that tug of memory had been when he’d seen Nora turn pale and sick-looking at the mention of the building’s accessibility. That’s what he’d probably looked like, that day in the backyard when Mrs. Salas had found his parents’ photograph.
I’m rattled, he remembered telling her.
“But things had been going well before that. I was taking care of her. I took care of things for her neighbors, before she got there. I was only trying to—”
“You’re making her sound like a patient,” Gerald said, and Will straightened, defensive.
“You’re one to talk. You got Sally back—with my help, by the way—by planning nonroutine dates and not telling her anything about her table manners.”
There was a pause, and Will looked up to find Gerald rocking back slightly on his heels. Should he not have mentioned he knew about the elbows on the table thing, or . . . ?
“Actually,” Gerald finally said, “I got Sally back because last night I told her how much I loved her. I told her that the two and a half years I’ve spent without her have been the most colorless of my life. I made her a list of all the ways I’d failed her during our marriage, along with a list of all the ways I wanted to do better. I intended to read it out to her, but frankly I found myself too emotional.”
Will stared at Gerald in dumbfounded shock. He felt right on the verge of a recurrence of static brain. His expression must’ve shown it, because Gerald clarified.
“What I mean is, I cried.”
“I got that, Gerald.”
“Have you told this woman you love her?”
“No.”
“But you do?”
“It’s complicated.” No, it’s not, said his heart.
“Let’s say,” he corrected, “it is complicated for me to be in love.”
“I’ll need the history on this.”
Will shook his head, tucked his fingers under his glasses and rubbed, certain that Gerald was again rocking back on his heels in disapproval at this disgusting display. Two nights ago Will sat across from Gerald’s probably-not-really-ex-wife-anymore and passed on an opportunity to tell her the whole entire thing, and part of the reason why was that the man standing in front of him had been in the next room.
Frankly I found myself too emotional, Gerald had said, and all of a sudden, out in this hot parking lot with his heart half broken, Will thought Gerald Abraham might have the best bedside manner he’d ever seen, because the next thing he knew he was saying it all, everything about his parents that he hated to say. That they were selfish, immature, like they’d never grown out of their teenaged selves. He told him the worst of it: not just his mother trying to leave him with Donny, but also the many months after that. Will like a servant in his own house, trying to stay out of the way while they clung to each other in desperation. Holding his mother up in the funeral home while she wailed for a God he’d never known she believed in to take her, too. Nearly a whole year where she couldn’t bear to look at him, where despite his desperate protests, she took up all sorts of rash, reckless behaviors—smoking, drinking heavily, probably worse things he didn’t even know about.
“I almost felt relieved when she died,” Will said. “For her. It’s all she wanted, really. To go back to my dad. I know that makes me sound terrible.”
In the silence that followed Will felt half relieved, half sick to have said it. He stared down at the pavement some more, thinking about how Gerald was really on to something with the no eye contact thing.
Finally, the man cleared his throat. “Let me express my sympathy,” he said. “For the loss of your childhood.”
Will blinked up at him. No one had ever put it like that before. “Thank you.”
Oh no. Was he going to cry?
Gerald kindly pretended not to notice. “I gather you are afraid of turning out this way yourself. With whomever you become involved with.”
“Not whomever,” he said. “With her. I’ve only ever felt this way about her.”
For a long time, Gerald didn’t say anything, and Will supposed that was fair enough. There was really no solving this one, when it came down to it.
But then he said, “You know, my own father and I are very similar. He was also a doctor. Sally used to say that I only ever learned to love someone the way my father loved me. Discipline, improvement, opportunity. That’s the way he showed me he cared.”
Will swallowed, nodding. He could see, of course, how growing up like that would produce a man like Gerald. But he also thought it sounded pretty nice. All the discipline and improvement and opportunity that Will had in his life, he’d given to himself. It had been hard and lonely and entirely thankless.
“This was a problem in my marriage. To use a relevant example: it isn’t necessary to tell someone you love about a mostly harmless flouting of proper table manners. You can simply let them put their elbows on the table and be quiet about it. You don’t have to love people the way you learned to love at first.”
Will stared. WHAT, the static signal seemed to say.
“I would say the same is true for the woman you’re involved with. It seems to me that the first person who showed her a love that she understood was a person who offered her a lot of stability. A lot of loyalty.”
“Gerald,” Will said. “What the hell?”
He felt like he’d had his whole brain rearranged.
You don’t have to love people the way you learned to love at first.
“I’m not sure why you’re so surprised. Of late I’m very successful in matters of the heart.”
Will stood from the bench, heedless of Gerald’s general discomfort with his height. He paced back and forth in front of it, running his hands through his hair.
“I’ve been trying to . . .” He trailed off, shook his head. “I’ve been trying to keep it so safe with her. To just . . . fix things for her. To put limits on how I am with her. So I wouldn’t—”
“You won’t,” Gerald interrupted. “You are a different person than your parents were people. I feel quite assured of this.”
Will stopped pacing, put his hands on his hips. “I am,” he said, and for the first time, he actually be
lieved it. He thought of Nora in her bathroom, her lit-up eyes every time they put in a new bathroom fixture. The pleasure she took in new things, when she let herself. “And she is, too. I mean, different from how she—”
“Obviously, I’m keeping up,” Gerald deadpanned.
In spite of his shitty night of sleep, Will suddenly felt alive with energy, his head swimming with this revelation, this perspective. He loved Nora, and it wasn’t rash, or reckless, or selfish to feel it. To say it. To live it for the rest of his life, if she’d let him. He was not his parents. He didn’t have to love the way he’d seen love at first.
“Gerald, I absolutely have to go. I’ve got to make a list of my failings, or something.”
“Don’t do that. It is very clear that your problems aren’t mine.”
“Right,” Will said, momentarily deflated. “Right.”
Gerald looked down at his watch. “A bit longer than the ten minutes you requested,” he said.
Will couldn’t help but laugh. “Of course. I’ve kept you too long. I appreciate you—”
Gerald waved a hand in dismissal. “No need,” he said, looking flustered. “I’ll certainly expect to see you back at work to-morrow.”
Will nodded, somehow comforted by this return to Gerald’s particular brand of professional rectitude. “Certainly,” he echoed.
“Very good,” Gerald said, and turned on his heel to head back inside.
But watching him go, Will had an impulse—sudden and sharp, the kind of feeling he’d trained himself to ignore for years and years, the kind of feeling he’d long told himself he ought to avoid. He wondered how many opportunities he’d missed in life like this, all because he was afraid of being rash or reckless or selfish.
Hell, he thought. Why not?
“Gerry,” he called, and waited to get fired.
His boss stilled, and Will held his breath.
But then Gerald turned around, his eyebrows raised. “Yes?”
“I’m sure this isn’t very professional,” he said, pausing to clear his throat. “But I think you might be my best friend.”
There was a long, painful second of silence across the parking lot, during which Will thought he might die of embarrassment, right at the moment he’d finally gotten his life figured out.
And then Gerald Abraham reached up and smoothed his lapel.
“Well, Will,” Gerry answered, moving to tuck his hands into the pockets of his perfectly pressed, pristine white coat, “since we’re out here in the parking lot, I think it is fine for me to say that the feeling is entirely mutual.”
Chapter 19
Nora hadn’t expected the blood.
Inside Jonah’s apartment, she stared down at the dried patch of it, a circle that probably wasn’t any bigger than her hand. Still, it chilled her, seeing it there, bringing to mind the way Jonah had looked this morning, as though he’d taken a terrible beating. She’d wanted to ask Will about that—the darkness of the bruising, the way it’d seemed to take up so much space even though Jonah had sworn he’d only struck the edge of his brow when he’d gone down.
She shook her head, frustrated with herself. It didn’t matter. She should clean this up, pack Jonah’s bag, get moving so she could get back there. She knew Mrs. Salas would want to go with her, could smell the aroma of her baking all throughout the building, and thought she must’ve been making Jonah’s favorites. Benny, too, was planning to head back today; she’d seen him in the hallway on the way up, had ignored the quizzical look he’d given her as she’d insisted on dragging her suitcase up the steps entirely by herself.
Within minutes she was on her knees, scrubbing gently at the stain and blinking back the tears that kept stubbornly pressing behind her eyes. When she thought she’d mostly handled it, she stood, dumping the bucket of water into Jonah’s tub, averting her eyes even when she rinsed her sponge. She stripped off her gloves and looked around. Should she try to tidy up? Make his bed so that when he came back—
She swallowed, flushing with heat.
It’s a third-floor unit, Will had said to the doctor, so plain and so technical, and it had felt like having the wind taken out of her once again, when she wasn’t even recovered from seeing Jonah there, and like that. The worst of it was, she’d spent the next few minutes trying to get her breath back, trying to remind herself that Will was only saying what was true, even if she’d hated the way he’d said it.
Even if she’d hated when he’d said it.
But it’d been beyond her, to breathe right again, to think straight again. I’m overreacting, part of her wanted to say, the same way he’d said to her last week, but she’d locked up, her mind like a thunderstorm: Nonna gone, Donny gone, Donny not even the nice man she’d always thought he’d been. Deepa leaving Verdant, Austin leaving San Diego. Nora’s bathroom not like it’d always been; Nora thinking she might leave Verdant, too. Jonah in rehab. Jonah somewhere else altogether. She’d looked across the room at Will and suddenly it was like he was the wind that had been taken out of her; gusting through and blowing things apart. It didn’t matter that she knew it wasn’t really true; it didn’t matter that she knew she was being unfair.
She’d still asked him to go.
Stop, Nora, she scolded herself. You don’t have time for this; you can talk to him later. She needed to pack this bag; she needed a shower and a change of clothes; she needed to figure out what was next. She could deal with Will later. She moved quickly, opening Jonah’s closet to find the duffel bag he’d told her about, stuffing in the things he’d asked for, checking off items on her phone as she went along. When she finally had it all, she revisited her first instinct, going back to Jonah’s room to quickly make up his bed, hoping she wasn’t overstepping.
She was pulling his door closed behind her when she saw Marian on the landing.
“Where is he?” she said.
Nora lowered her brow, concerned over Marian’s apparent confusion. “He’s in the hosp—”
“Will,” Marian interrupted, coming down the hall toward her. “Where is he?”
“Oh, um,” she said, hoping she could pull off this lie. “He had to go into work.”
“That’s not what Jonah said. Jonah said he was there speaking to the doctor this morning, and then you kicked him out.”
Nora blinked. “I didn’t. How did he—he was asleep when I left.”
Marian shrugged. “Guess he didn’t sleep for long. He called us once you were gone. Probably he was faking.”
Nora sighed, stepped across the hall to her own door. “How did he sound? Mrs. Salas and I are going back soon. If you want to come—”
“What I want is to speak to Will about what the doctor said.”
“I spoke to the doctor too, Marian. You can ask me.”
“Yes, but Will is a professional. I don’t trust doctors, you know that.”
Nora ignored the jolt of satisfaction she felt at the revelation that Marian had moved Will from the category of “doctors” to “people she trusted.” Instead, she huffed in annoyance, opening her door, knowing already Marian—Marian who had once very much disliked Will Sterling!—was going to follow her in.
“I’ll give you his number,” she said. “You can call him.”
“Nora Clarke,” Marian said, her tone sharp. “What are you doing?”
Nora stilled in place, so effective was Marian Goodnight’s classroom voice. When Nora was growing up, this was exactly how she always reacted to it—a total body lockdown that ensured she had stopped doing whatever it was Marian didn’t want her doing. But this time, her outward-facing freeze-up was accompanied by something similar on the inside, like the morning thunderstorm in her mind had abruptly ceased entirely.
She set down Jonah’s duffel and took a deep breath.
“Go right over there and sit down,” Marian said, pointing to the flowered couch that two nights ago Nora had promised herself she’d be rid of. When she sat, one of the upholstered buttons poked her left butt cheek, but she di
dn’t even bother to move.
“Can’t make coffee on this contraption,” Marian said from the kitchen, obviously referring to Nora’s fancy coffee machine, and then she set about filling up the old kettle. “So it’ll have to be tea.”
“Okay,” said Nora, even though she didn’t like tea. That kettle was Nonna’s.
Once Marian had it on the stove, she came back over and sat on the other side of the sofa, obviously avoiding any upholstered buttons.
“You’re just like her, you know,” she said. “Your grandmother.”
It wasn’t the first time Nora had heard this—not even the first time she’d heard it from Marian.
But it was the first time it didn’t sound all that much like a compliment.
“Now you know I loved her,” said Marian. “She was one of my best friends in the whole entire world, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever get over her not being here.”
Nora nodded, tears springing to her eyes. “Me neither.”
“But she was awfully stubborn. Like a mule, about things big and small.”
“She wasn’t.” Even as she said it, though, Nora felt a knot of uncertainty take up residence in her stomach. She’d always thought of stubborn people as people who couldn’t admit when they were wrong. But Nora had never really been in a situation where she’d thought Nonna had been wrong about anything.
“Now I think I knew her pretty well,” said Marian. “I knew her differently than you did, sure. So believe me when I tell you, she was stubborn. Couldn’t get her to budge on that wallpaper, for example. And do you know, thirty years ago there was a man who wanted to take her out, a very nice man whose company I happen to know she enjoyed? But did she go?”
This was a rhetorical question, but also it was Marian, so Nora had to answer.
“No?”
“No! And do you know why?”
Nora shook her head.
“Because she said it wouldn’t be the right thing to do to your grandfather.”
“But . . . ,” Nora said tentatively. “He was . . . dead?”
Love at First Page 28
