The Fix

by Kristin Rouse

  Holy shit.

  “I really enjoyed hanging out with you, Ezra. Don’t be a stranger?”

  I take the card and hold it gingerly. If I don’t, I’ll end up clutching it to my heart like I’m swooning. “It was good to meet you. And yeah. For sure.”

  “Thanks for schlepping out here. It was really sweet of you. I’ll see you in a couple of months, huh?”

  When she leans forward to wrap her arms around my neck, I try to keep my body from shaking the way my brain is. She smells amazing, and it’s hard not to notice that her body sort of perfectly curves into mine. For a hug, it’s shockingly intimate.

  She pulls away and, I swear, I hear her sigh. “Thanks again, dance partner.”

  There’s that wink again.

  “Have a good trip.” She waves at me over her shoulder and then disappears behind the sliding glass doors. I have to jar myself in order to round my car and get behind the wheel. I linger long enough that a security agent taps on my window to remind me it’s a no-waiting zone.

  I’m pulling away and back onto the highway before the significance of the card in my pocket registers. I glance at myself in the rearview mirror and shake my head, because surely, that didn’t just happen. Surely, Juliana didn’t just give me her number and email address. Surely, this crush of mine is still very much one-sided and a bad idea.

  Even if it’s not, there’s nothing I should do about it. I’m not in the sort of place where I can muck up the life someone else has pieced together when I’m so thoroughly flailing. And that sucks even more than saying goodbye to her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I reluctantly throw my car into park in front of the house way out on the west side of town and sigh. It’s Thanksgiving, and I’m expected inside my mother’s house in approximately… now. I drove all the way out here, so the least I can do is go in. But I haven’t spent a holiday with my mother in about fifteen years. In fact, I’ve barely even seen my mother in fifteen years.

  I come by my alcoholism honestly, or at least I do if you accept the theory that addiction has a genetic component. Constance was one of the meanest drunks you’d ever meet. She wasn’t physically abusive, but she had a short fuse and the sort of voice that carried. Mac told me once that before her drinking got out of control, she used to be gregarious and fun to be around when she had had a few. By the time it was finally bad enough that uber-forgiving, bright-side-of-everything-seeking Mac had to throw in the towel and leave her, they had ten years of turbulent marriage and and a set of twin sons in common.

  I don’t remember the version of Constance Mac must have first fallen in love with. What I recall from age of earliest remembrance to age ten is taking out the trash and listening to the wine bottles clinking together at the bottom, hoping and praying I’d make it to the trash can before the bag ripped from the excess weight. I remember dodging her line of sight so I wouldn’t get a nasty earful of whatever her particular poison was on any given day as I came home from school, because she was in a foul mood more often than she was a pleasant one. I remember a lot of sitting at the top of the stairs with Dylan while she screamed at Mac and he tried to calm her down so she wouldn’t “wake the boys.” What I remember the clearest was the day Mac made us pack up our rooms and we left Constance for good, and how Mac promised us the entire ride to our new house that nothing much would change, except for all the yelling our mom did. As it turned out, the yelling stopped, and so did seeing her.

  Mac passed on a pair of letters to Dylan and me a few years ago. Mac had read his, but hadn’t told us what was in it. Dylan told me he burned his without ever opening it. I tucked mine in a random book and didn’t look at it until well after Mac died and I was sober a couple of months. When you hit a certain point in a twelve-step recovery program, you make amends to people you’ve wronged, and that old, yellowed letter was Constance’s amends for a decade of terrible mothering and another decade of abandonment. I tortured myself over it for a while after I got sober, but I finally got around to dialing the number she’d written at the bottom a couple of months ago, around the time I realized I’d be needing to make amends of my own and would be hoping for the same sort of forgiveness I never extended to her. I might have only forgiven her because she’s about all the biological family I have left. We talked for a long time that first call, mostly about how she can’t forgive herself for passing on her addiction to me. At least it skipped Dylan. It’s too soon to tell about Gemma, though. By the way, being told at twenty-five you have a half-sister in kindergarten is a good solid mind-fuck, if that isn’t an experience you’ve ever had.

  Though not for lack of trying, I haven’t seen Constance more than once or twice since that first phone call. She’s about as far northwest as I am southeast in the metro area. My job has me working strange hours, and having a six-year-old she’s raising on her own isn’t conducive to odd hours. But when Thanksgiving was mentioned, I at least knew I wouldn’t be exposed to open, flowing bottles of wine. Although, sweet Jesus, am I ever not used to being sober on feasting holidays—I mean, isn’t that half the point? And to hear Constance say it, she owes me a few birthday celebrations as well. When we talk of everything owed, I’m going to be diplomatic enough to not charge emotional interest, lest I bankrupt her. Or myself.

  The problem with not having a mother for a decade, and then suddenly having one you can only feel comfortable calling by her first name is that there seems to be little else to talk about. Gemma, my half-sister, is sweet and chatty enough to draw attention to herself the way little kids are pros at, but by the time she bunks off to watch an ancient Charlie Brown special, Constance and I are left alone to put together dinner in thick, awkward silence. There’s a bunch of people from one of her AA meetings coming soon, so at least they’ll diffuse this a little. But they haven’t arrived yet, and son of a bitch, would this ever be easier with a drink or two. I’m sure the irony is not lost here.

  “So… How did that wedding you were in go? All right?” she asks, her voice a little higher than normal. She catches my eye and smiles at me as if we’re a normal, functional family, but it must feel as strange on her face as it feels to my eye, because she drops her gaze again and goes back to peeling sweet potatoes.

  “Fine. Yeah, good,” I reply, because this really is how I talk to my mother.

  “Any fun stories? Did you catch the garter?”

  “Ah, no. They skipped that tradition, and the bouquet toss.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad.”

  “Is it? They’re sort of played out, don’t you think?”

  “I think they’re charming.”

  “They aren’t a super-traditional couple.”

  “Did you at least get to dance with the prettiest bridesmaid?”

  I must flush or stutter or something, because before I even realize it, Constance has pulled a long string of convoluted sentences about Juliana out of me. To tell the truth, I haven’t stopped thinking about her since I dropped her off at the airport.

  It must be whatever is left of her maternal instincts when she tells me, in all earnestness, “That’s dangerous, you know.”

  “Which part?” I ask.

  “The different country part, for starters. But even if she lived down the street, relationships and recovery—they’re very complicated things.”

  “Yeah. I’ve gleaned that.” I don’t mean to sass her. Well, not entirely.

  She pokes her head into the living room, satisfied that Gemma is engrossed enough with Snoopy to talk about her. “Giving you advice this late in the game is laughable, I realize, but I met Gemma’s father when I was trying to get sober the first time.” Not the first time, I correct silently. There was a shining six months or so when I was nine that she put the bottle down, and we were a happy, functional family. Until something happened that made her drink again. Maybe nothing happened to make her drink again, I’m not sure—I just know we were gone by the following Christmas.

  “It was fantastic, at first. He was supporti
ve and sweet, and I thought—hoped—that I’d redeemed myself enough to be worthy of a good man, like I never was for Mac.” She cringes, like she’s worried that even saying my father’s name will send me running for a liquor store. I very stoically continue chopping up potatoes. “But it was too much for him, in the end. We’re civil now, for Gem’s sake, but it took a while to get there.”

  I’d love to rub her face in how different she and I are. That I got my shit together and sobered up young, that I don’t have a history of destroying marriages and abandoning sons I treated badly, and that Juliana is neither Mac nor Gemma’s father, whom I haven’t met and have no real interest in knowing. But, in all harsh, cold reality, I look just like Mac and, so far, I’ve acted just like Constance. I got his ruddy complexion, his long build, his poor eyesight but perfect teeth. And I got Constance’s disease. Mac turned to a hanging punching bag in our garage to vent his frustration, started building ships in bottles to calm his nerves, researched the Scottish Mackenzies we descend from when he needed distraction. I drank, I drank, and I drank.

  And that’s how, in one awkward evening with my birth mother I can’t remember ever loving, a baby half-sister I can’t find common ground with past a coloring book, and a bunch of hardened, chain-smoking alcoholics I don’t ever want to become, I decide for certain that Juliana’s card will continue to go unused. At the end of the day, I know Juliana isn’t Mac, but I’m too afraid that I’m just enough like Constance to fuck her up.

  ***

  Since the wedding, Wednesdays have become family dinner night at Mama A’s house, and according to Mama A, I’m very much part of that family. I linger around long after my laundry is folded and help Mama A in the kitchen. I find I don’t have to talk on nights I’m not feeling up to it because Lukas and Mattias talk more than any ten people could, so it doesn’t matter. Anja and I share packs of cigarettes on the back porch. It’s nice, but mostly it’s consistent, which I desperately need in my life. With the Almeidas, it almost feels like I have a family like I did before Mac up and died on me. It’s on the first night of this after Thanksgiving that I realize with a guy like Mattias in my life, it feels an awful lot like I have a functional relationship with a brother—even and especially when said brother is currently railing on me for being what he terms ‘an asshole to his sister.’

  Right? It threw me for a loop, too.

  To Mattias, it seems, it sort of doesn’t matter that Juliana lives on another continent and I’m not even nine months sober—the polite thing to do, I’m told very forcefully, is to, at the very least, be in touch, and to make it clear things can’t go beyond friendship until my life is a little more stable. And I’ll own up that emailing her would have been the more polite thing to do, of course, but why the fuck would someone like Juliana Almeida ultimately care that someone like me never emailed her?

  That’s when Mattias hits me with, “You messed with her head, man.”

  “I… I have no idea how. We just talked.”

  “That’s not how she saw it at all. She figured it meant something else. You’re not the sort of guy to lead a girl on, Ez, at least I’m pretty sure you’re not. So what the hell gives?”

  Holy shit.

  “I didn’t mean to lead her on, Mat, I swear. I… Wait. Does she…?”

  “Like you? Yeah. She told me she told you as much when she said goodbye to you at the airport.”

  Apparently getting sober has done very little for my comprehension of girl-speak. Drunk or sober, the phrase “I enjoyed spending time with you” does not equate, in my head, to “I’m interested in you.” And why the ever-loving-hell would she be? I’m a fucking disaster.

  “I… I really don’t know what to say.”

  He snorts. “Clearly not.”

  “Mattias!” Anja hisses.

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Ez. Just… She’s my sister, man.”

  When we’re smoking together, I tend to light and hand cigarettes to Anja. I fumble this at the moment because all this about Juliana has me baffled and confused. It makes no sense. But if I suspend my disbelief for just a minute or two and actually consider what Mattias has said—

  Holy shit.

  “He shouldn’t have cornered you like that.” Anja says when Mattias ducks back in the house, leaving us polluting our lungs just like he found us.

  “I’m so confused,” I admit.

  Anja bounces up and down for a minute while she thinks, then blows out a long puff of smoke. “Juliana isn’t the sort of girl to beat around the bush about what she wants. She’s pretty on top of her shit. I’m sort of amazed she didn’t make it more obvious that she was interested. She mentioned it to me, but I didn’t think it was my place to say anything.”

  My head is nearly spinning in place. “She said something? I… What did she say?”

  “That you’re good-looking, that you have a good personality. Both of which are true. I was a little too preoccupied to play matchmaker at the time, though. And I’m not sure I would have even if I hadn’t been.”

  She doesn’t have to elaborate for me to understand what she means. Constance is right: addiction and recovery and relationships are hard enough all on their own. Combining them can be a nightmare. One tends to destroy the others. Just ask my parents.

  “I don’t think I’m completely oblivious,” I say. “She seemed kinda flirty, but I… I figured I was just seeing what I wanted to see, not what was actually there.”

  “It was easy to see that you liked her. But I don’t know if dating should really be on your radar with everything you have going on,” she says.

  “It’s not. Believe me, it’s not. It was just a crush. I never thought she’d… you know….”

  “Reciprocate?”

  “Yes! But Jesus, Anja, I’m a fucking train wreck.”

  Anja blows a smoke ring with a flourish. “Mat and Luk are incredibly protective of Jules. It’s just how they are. But she’s also a big girl, and she’ll understand if you tell her you’re not interested in all that right now. Just, you know, sack up and tell her.”

  This whole thing seems wildly incongruous. I should not be the one in this situation who’s being lectured about clarifying our relationship. She’s the beautiful, funny, massively intelligent woman who’s completely out of my league. Surely she should be the one letting me down easy.

  I say as much to Anja, who shakes her head. “She is not out of your league. Addiction aside, Ezra, you’re a total catch.”

  I glare at her. “Don’t humor me. We’ve known each other too long for that crap.”

  “It’s not flattery. Honestly, another time and place, the two of you would make kind of an adorable couple.”

  I roll my eyes. “Well, I don’t really think that’s much of an issue now, do you? There’s long distance, and then there’s ridiculous distance.”

  “I think you’re right about that. Just do the guys a favor? Explain that to her? She’s super-cool and she’ll understand as long as she knows where your head is at. But as a fellow girl, I can attest that being strung along sucks.”

  It’s my turn to cough nervously, and Anja even whacks me on the back a few times to help me clear my pipes. Never in a million years would I ever guess that a guy like me could possibly “string along” a girl like Juliana. I figured it could only ever work the other way around.

  “Guess you learn something new every day,” I mutter to myself.

  ***

  I’ve been on the receiving end of rejection before, but rejecting someone else is entirely new to me. And I’ve certainly never rejected someone like Juliana. Truth be told, I don’t want to close the door to her. So as shitty as I know it makes me, my email to her reads:

  Sorry I haven’t been in touch—I hope you’re doing all right. And I’m looking forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks when you get here, if you still want to hang out with me. You know… as friends.

  It’s such a pansy-assed move. But apparently it’s just enough to work, because
within an hour, I get back:

  It’s all right—life gets hectic sometimes. And I definitely want to hang out. As friends. I’ll see you soon.

  Julianna

  I don’t realize at the time this’ll start a month-long cycle of daily emails between us. Every message she sends, short, long, or anything in between, I find myself replying to within minutes. It’s easy because, as friends, I don’t have to torment myself over what I’m saying to her.

  Yeah, right.

  Just friends or no, I realize full well that I’m playing with fire here. That appeals to my addictive personality way more than it should.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Juliana: I know they’re terrible for the environment, and it’s literally my job to care about that—but oh my God, I love Post-Its so much.

  Me: Post-Its?

  Juliana: Post-Its. They’re magical. Don’t you think they’re magical?

  Me: I don’t think I have nearly the occasion to use them as you clearly do.

  Juliana: Watch. Now you’re going to use them all the time because I’ve told you why they’re wonderful. I could write poetry about Post-Its. And I don’t even like poetry.

  Me: I don’t like poetry, either. I’d read your poems, though.

  Juliana: I’d read yours, too.

  I don’t have the sort of job where I sit at a computer all day, and I’ve been pretty thankful for it—I like moving around and being on my feet, and, frankly, I get headaches when I stare at a screen for too long. I’ve done a pretty good job in my adult life of avoiding an obsession with my phone. Maybe because I spent so much time being obsessed with booze. Other than Anja, Mattias, and Lukas, I barely even text. Now, however, I’m finding my phone to be an extension of my hand when I don’t have my hands on bodies at work, because Juliana’s job definitely involves sitting in front of a computer. And ever since asking her to see her ‘as a friend,’ I see her name a lot more than I ever expected I would.