by Carly Keene
“There’s my girl,” she says approvingly, squeezing me tight. “You finally put on a few pounds. You needed ‘em.”
I squeeze back. “Too bad they all landed in my ass.”
She laughs. “So what’s good here?”
“Eggs Benedict with avocado and mango mimosas.”
“Oooh.” She looks over the menu for thirty seconds. “Well, I know what I want. So what’s the plan for today?”
“Brunch now. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts later, then this little gallery where the girlfriend of a guy I work with has some really beautiful sculptures. Then dinner in the Fan District. A play if you want, or back to my place for girl talk.”
“Girl talk,” she says firmly, and sets her menu down. “I’ve missed you.”
Leilani and I became friends in a swim class our first year of college. We were the only girls in the class who kept their hair up in latex caps, to prevent its getting wet and snarled in the water. We connected right then, and then roomed together the next three years. And after that, we kept each other sane through law school (Leilani) and medical school (me), via endless phone calls and stolen girls’ weekends.
We’ve seen each other through the stress of GRE exams and hangovers and bad boyfriends, and we know each other well.
Right now, I study Lei’s face. There’s something unfamiliar there.
She looks up, startles, and barks, “What?” at me.
“Stand down, Lieutenant,” I say. “Have you been doing that Korean skin regimen? You look really good.”
A dash of plum color darkens her cheeks, but right then the server comes to take our orders.
As soon as he takes the menus, I take another good look at her. No, not skin treatments. The glow is internal. “You met somebody,” I say slowly. The plum color comes back to her dark-honey complexion, and she fidgets with her spoon. “What’s his name?”
“Elliot,” she says, and her face splits into a helpless grin. “His name is Elliot.”
Over brunch she gives me the details: friend of a colleague. A lawyer himself, works in DC. Tall. Mixed-race like herself. Loves basketball and anime like she does. Kisses like a god.
“Did you go home with him?” I tease.
“No.” She blushes. “He came to my place.”
I shriek in delight, and she has to shush me when every head in the place turns to us.
We finish our mimosas and Uber over to the museum to walk around and look at stuff. Every time I ask something else about Elliot, she dodges the question. Finally I give it up for the time being. At the art gallery, she buys a small marble statue that I think looks like a dragon eyeball and Lei thinks looks like a stylized yin-yang symbol.
By then, I’m starving again, but Leilani says she’s too tired to go out for dinner. “Let’s get a big bag of takeout tacos and take them to your apartment. You have the stuff to make margaritas?”
I always have the stuff to make margaritas.
When we get settled on the couch, with food and drinks on the coffee table, I poke Lei in the shoulder. “Okay. Spill. I need pictures, I need details, I need everything. Start now.”
She rolls her eyes, but she starts by showing me pics on her phone. I see the way they’re looking at each other, and they’re magic together. When she talks about him, she tells me how he kisses her, how sweet he talks to her, how he encourages her. How comfortable she feels with his family and his friends, even after only a few meals with them.
Lei winds down looking starry-eyed, but there’s a crease between her eyebrows too.
“So what’s wrong with him?” She glares at me, and I change the question. “What’s got you all worried then? There’s something.”
Lei grumbles into her taco. “You should’ve been a psychiatrist.”
Elliot wants her to move to Washington, DC to be with him. He says she can easily get a position at a law firm there, maybe even at his own. He says she’ll love it there. “I have a job already,” she says.
I raise my eyebrows at her.
She shrugs.
“So it must be about him,” I think out loud.
Lei bites her lip. “I’m not sure that he really is who I think he is. I want him to be. I’m just scared he’s not, and I’m an idiot, and I would have disrupted my whole life for someone I can’t really trust. I need him to be trustworthy.”
I sit back and nod, exhaling. “Yeah.”
“I’m afraid I’ll be like you,” she says. “You and that Endless Love boyfriend of yours you can’t let go of because you’re still convinced he’s the One. I think Elliot’s the One, but what if he’s really not—after I move there?”
He said he’d always love me. He said he’d come back for me. I sigh. “Endless Love? You mean the movie or the book?”
“Book. The movies are too easy on the crazy loverboy.”
I let out a long breath. “We weren’t like that, Tommy and me. We were . . . tight. We were forever.”
Lei leans forward and pats me on the leg. “Oh yeah? Then why isn’t he here right now?”
“He’s in the Marines,” I say defensively.
“He hasn’t called you since we were in college. That’s nine years, Alison.”
It’s not like I’ve sat around waiting for Tommy to come back. I’ve tried dating; I’ve had other boyfriends.
They’ve just never measured up. So I guess I am still waiting, after all.
“Leilani? What if Elliot really is the One? What if he’s your endless love, and you miss out because you’re scared?”
She blinks back tears, and it takes her a minute to answer me. “I don’t want to miss out.”
“Neither do I.”
TWO
Tommy Riley
I step through the automatic doors of the emergency department and ask at the front desk if I can speak to Dr. Sadler. The admin person eyes me up and down. “You don’t have a medical complaint?”
“No, ma’am. Personal matter.”
“I can leave her a message. You’ll be waiting?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Been waiting a long time.
The admin person says she’ll leave Ali a message, but she can’t promise Ali will come out to the waiting room to see me after her shift ends. I tell her that’s fine. I can wait a little longer.
I know she’s here. After making my way back to my hometown from my last posting, the first thing I did was look her up on the internet. I was stunned to find her starting her career in a hospital right here in Richmond, closer than I’d ever dreamed she’d be. Coincidence? Maybe.
Maybe not.
I sit my ass down on a waiting room chair and get comfortable. One thing you do learn in the military is how to wait, and you learn it good.
I look out the window at suburban Hopedale. This end of town was never my stomping grounds, back when I lived here as a teenager. We lived in blue-collar Union Hill on the east end, and my dad worked for the railroad. That was before the divorce, before Mom packed up our stuff and we took a Greyhound for California, where she’d always wanted to live. “Rosebushes!” she exclaimed. “And the ocean! Imagine it, Tommy.”
I don’t have to tell you it wasn’t all roses and sea air. Changing schools when you’re fifteen is no picnic. Neither is trying to find a job in a new city when you only have a high school diploma. We wound up renting a tiny apartment over the dry cleaners where Mom worked, and we had weird neighbors. 92-year-old Mr. Kravitz, who lived on one side of the laundromat, frequently wandered around his back yard stark naked. On the other side of the laundromat was Mrs. Crandall, who must have had eight hundred cats. And across the street was Miz-Sadler-call-me-Sunshine, an aging hippie artist who smelled of weed and potting clay.
All that first summer, Mom kept saying, “We’re making the best of it, Tommy!” and “Nowhere to go but up!”
I missed Richmond. I missed my friends. I got picked on at school. I got a job stocking and cleaning up at the bodega three blocks away, to help with rent and food money. I was sixt
een, and I was miserable in sunny California.
But across the street . . . Sunshine the hippie pottery artist had a daughter. She’d run the streets early in the morning, long legs moving fast and that dark ponytail flying out behind her like a flag. Up close, she had a smile that could stop your heart.
Her name was Alison.
Before I knew it, we were friends. And then the summer we turned seventeen, we became more. Ali got to be my whole heart. We’d spend nights on the roof watching the stars and telling each other secrets, or in her bedroom messing around instead of sleeping. We were excessive, we did it four times a night, we barely stayed awake in school. It was only after Ali got two B’s in her classes that she put an end to the sneaking around on weeknights and we had to save up for weekends.
Right before Christmas our senior year, it all went to hell. Ali’s grandmother got sick back in Connecticut, and her mom moved them there to be caretakers. We called and texted, and wrote letters, but she didn’t come back even after she turned 18. I waited three months. I begged. She didn’t come back. She called and said she wanted to be with her grandmother when she died.
She chose her grandmother.
Then the recruiter got hold of me, and I was gone myself.
The last time I talked to her was on the phone, and it was right before I got deployed to Iraq the first time. I had a buddy look her up at the college I knew she was attending, and I got a landline number for her, and I called it. I was drunk off my ass, of course, and we’d be shipping out at 0500. I had three hours left.
Somebody answered, and said they’d go get her. It took forever. And then there she was, her voice warm in my ear, and I told her everything. I don’t remember what I said, but she said she loved me too and I’d better not get killed.
Long story short: It’s been a long time coming. I’m busted up a little, but I’m not dead.
And I’m back to claim my girl.
THREE
Alison
It’s just before shift change, and I’m both tired and really hungry. I’m finishing some notes on a patient’s chart when Louise the admin lady comes by and drops a whole stack of patient folders on the nurses’ station desk, and then she sticks a pink message sheet on top. The triage nurses jump on the folders—we have great nurses—and start assigning patients. Melissa, my favorite of the nurses, brings me the message. “For you,” she says, and her voice sounds like this is something significant.
“What is it?” I ask, still typing “prescribed 40mg oral predisone daily, F/U with PCP in 2 wks.”
“Somebody to see you. In the waiting room.” She raises her eyebrows. “Want me to go have a look? The note says it’s a personal matter. You got a stalker or anything I should be aware of?”
I frown in confusion. “Uh, I don’t know of any.”
“Back in a minute, then. I’ll check him out.”
I close my mainframe session. Done for the day, finally. I take the pink paper and look at it, but it makes no sense. Thomas Riley. Here to see you, says personal matter, says he’ll wait for you.
I don’t know a Thoma—
Oh god. Yes, I do.
My Tommy. I stumble over to a chair and sit in it.
The last time I spoke to him, he told me that he still loved me. He’d always love me. Someday, when he could, he’d come back for me.
Dammit, I’m a grown-ass woman. There is no reason in the world that a promise made to me more than ten years ago, over the phone no less, should mean so much. But it does. I have to admit that the words struck so deep into my heart that I haven’t been able to shake them. As the years went by and there was no Tommy in my life, and no reason to think that he might be anywhere on the horizon, I told myself I didn’t believe it anymore. I dated other guys, not that it did me any good.
Tommy had been my first love, and my first lover. You always hear that teenage boys are too impatient to be any good in bed—that they’re insatiable, but what they can’t get enough of is always over too fast. My Tommy was different. He made me feel beautiful and sexy and wanted and loved, and he always made me come first.
Then my grandmother got cancer a few months before we turned eighteen. This was Sunshine’s mother, and the actual reason she left Connecticut to go to California, change her name, and join the last drugs-and-free-love commune still functioning in the mid-80s. My grandmother was the reason Sunshine never went back to Connecticut, the reason that I grew up without any extended family at all.
Sunshine has always said she had no idea who my father was. I think to this day she has no idea how deep the hunger for family ran in me. “It’s all in the past,” she’d say. “Let it go. Be free of it.”
I still don’t know why she agreed to go back to Connecticut to help her mother die at home. Maybe she thought it wouldn’t take long. Granny Pat was supposed to have six weeks, but it took her six months to die. I wanted every minute of those six months with her. I wanted the stories, and the pictures of little Sarah Jane, who would grow up to change her name to Sunshine Justice, and I wanted Granny Pat’s love, her attention, the glow in her eyes when she looked at me. I wanted all that, especially because it wouldn’t always be available.
Just a little while longer with Granny Pat, I told myself. Tommy’s my forever. He’ll wait for me, I told myself.
Except that he didn’t.
I don’t really blame myself, but I don’t really blame him either. It just happened, and then we lost touch. He wasn’t on Facebook or MySpace. I didn’t have his address or his number. His mother had moved away from Rose Bay.
It occurs to me now that I have been waiting for this day for so many years. What if I’m disappointed? What if he’s come to say, “Oh hi, thought I’d drop by, things are going great for me without you, yeah, I’m married with six kids, nice to see you, have a nice life”? The pain of it would be devastating.
I give myself a minute to think about that, and then I remember what I had said to Leilani just last weekend: What if Tommy Riley really still is my endless love? I wouldn’t want to miss out on that.
Melissa comes back and leans over to speak in my ear. “There’s a nice-looking young man in the waiting room. Well, maybe not so young. Dark hair cut short, can’t tell what color his eyes are. Leather jacket. Built like a bulldog—you know, all shoulders?
Last time I laid eyes on Tommy was twelve years ago, and he was built boyish and lean. I take a deep breath. My stomach turns over.
“Come on, take a peek through the window,” Melissa urges me.
I stand up on shaky legs and follow her.
I scan the waiting room through glass, and I see him right away. I see all the ways he’s different: the lines on his forehead and around his eyes, the stern look on his face, those giant shoulders and biceps. And I see all the ways he’s the same: his beautiful mouth, the casual James-Dean sexiness.
“Boyfriend?” Melissa asks.
“No,” I say, knee-jerk. “Old friend.”
“Yeah,” she says skeptically. “Friend. Because that’s what’s got you in knots.”
I don’t answer, because out in the waiting room there’s a little girl, maybe three or four, getting away from her mother and making a break for the door. Tommy’s suddenly laughing and reaching out to catch her, and the grin lights up his face the way it always did. I can see the boy in him again, and it’s my heart that turns over this time. He picks up the little girl, booping her on the nose and talking to her, making her smile. With her in his arms, he turns toward the window, pointing toward her mother. He sees me through the glass as he’s handing the little girl to her mom.
And, oh god, the look on his face. The longing in those gray-blue eyes.
“Go,” Melissa says, but I’m already gone.
I’m already barreling through the waiting room like my life depends on it, and his arms are already open for me, and he’s so solid, so real. I take deep breaths of his familiar smell, and I didn’t mean to cry but I’m suddenly like a water balloon pok
ed with a dozen needles, can’t keep the tears in, can’t hold him tightly enough. I think he’s crying into my hair. “I’m sorry it took me so long,” he whispers.
The only thing that interrupts this embrace is my stomach growling. He laughs in my ear with a catch in his voice, and pulls back a little. “Hungry?”
I nod, and swipe at my nose with a tissue from my pocket. “God, I’m sorry, I’m snotting all over your jacket.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “Come on, doc, I’ll feed ya.”
FOUR
Tommy
She runs into my arms like she’s coming home.
I’m halfway between laughing and crying, because it’s everything I imagined. The feel of her in my arms. There’s more of her to hold, all woman, and she smells the same, like cut grass and polished wood and vanilla, my Ali.
I’d stand there holding her forever, except that her stomach growls. I promise to feed her.
We walk out of the place. People are probably staring, but I don’t care. I don’t care.
There’s a chain breakfast place close by, and that’s where we go. As soon as we’re sitting in the booth across from each other, I’m rethinking the seating arrangement. This way, I can look at her, but if I sat next to her I could touch her.
She orders a giant breakfast combo. I haven’t even looked at the menu, so I just tell the waitress, “Same for me,” and go back to looking at her.
Still so beautiful. That big cloud of dark hair, pulled back into a ponytail, those hazel eyes that see everything. Her heart-shaped face. I can’t see them below the table, but those curvy hips and long legs are still there.
It’s still there, too, the pull between us. I have to adjust myself inside my pants, and that’s the same too, my dick always trying to escape when she’s close by.
We stare at each other. I could be seventeen again, except for my scars.
