Finn took the morning off and accompanied me to the consultation with Dr. Acharya. I told him he didn’t have to, but he insisted. Part of me was glad to have him there, and part of me felt like I was being treated as if I wasn’t smart enough to ask the right questions or make my own decisions, but I kept my mouth shut for once.
I liked Dr. Acharya, a dark-skinned man in his fifties with a gentle voice, a serious demeanor, and hands that looked graceful and steady. He outlined the risks of the surgery, explained the procedure, and fielded my questions. I was a little alarmed to learn that I would be awake while someone sawed out a portion of my skull, but he assured me that the brain doesn’t feel pain. “And the drugs they give you will help you forget everything when it’s done,” he said.
I still hadn’t agreed to anything, but I was glad I’d gone to the appointment. I thanked the surgeon for his time and told him I’d be in touch. “The sooner the better,” he told me.
Afterward, Finn and I went for lunch, and I was grateful he didn’t launch into a high-pressure sales pitch. I wanted the chance to think about everything on my own. I was more inclined than I had been yesterday to have the surgery, but still not convinced.
While we ate, I was tempted to ask Finn if he’d replied to Maren. Half of me was dying to know, the other half recognized that the sooner I got her out from under my skin, the better. In the end, I decided it was better not to know.
After lunch, Finn dropped me off at the house while he went in to work. I spent the rest of the day hanging out with Bree and the kids by the pool, grateful that none of them asked me about my head.
But a thousand times that day I wanted to pick up my phone and call Maren, tell her about the appointment, ask her what she thought. I wanted her to do the chakras thing—not just the blowjob (although I wouldn’t have turned it down)—but the whole routine, because it was so calming, and I was feeling so mixed up. Was this operation worth the risk of losing my whole identity? Because that’s what it felt like. Everything I valued—my work, my independence, my pride—would be on the table with me, at the mercy of the surgeon’s knife.
I was also worried about her. I wanted to know how she was feeling and if she’d slept at all, if she’d had the nightmare, if she missed me. I wanted to tell her how badly I wished I could turn back time and do everything differently, do everything right, so she and I could have ended up together.
Later that night, when I was lying in bed, I checked my messages for the millionth time, but there was nothing from her.
I hardly slept.
The next morning, I was up early and decided to go for a run. I threw on running clothes and shoes and moved quietly through the house so I wouldn’t wake anyone. Leaving the front door unlocked, I took off down the street at an easy pace, my stiff muscles groaning as they loosened up. I ran for about twenty minutes and turned around, heading back to the house. While I ran, I tried to keep my mind focused on the pros and cons of the craniotomy, but I kept circling back to Maren. I started to get angry.
At myself, for going to Detroit. At her, for making me fall in love all over again. At the universe, for giving me this shit luck. At Chad, for giving me hope and then crushing it. At Finn, for ignoring his wife. At Bree, for cheating on Finn. Jesus, if those two could fuck up a good thing, what hope was there for anyone else? Nothing made any sense.
I missed my old self. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to go back to Portland and get my life back. Work. Hang out. Hike. Take a road trip now and then. Be alone when I felt like it and around friends when I didn’t. Fuck a random girl on a Saturday night if I wanted to, one that wasn’t going to matter to me.
But even that held no appeal. The only girl I wanted was Maren, and I couldn’t have her.
Back at the house, I ran straight for the yard, where I did some pushups and planks, sit-ups and stretches. Then I ditched my shoes, socks, and shirt, and jumped into the pool. I stayed under the surface for a long time, and when I came up, Finn was standing near the edge, dressed for work and holding a cup of coffee.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning.”
“Sleep okay?”
“Not really.” I swam to the edge and rested my elbows on it, setting my chin on my forearms.
“Sorry to hear it.”
“I think I might head back home.”
“What? Dallas…why?”
“I’m wiped out, Finn. I can’t even think. I just want to feel normal again.”
“That’s not going to happen.” Finn sat on the end of a deck chair. “The reason you don’t feel right is because there’s something in your brain that doesn’t belong there. Let’s get it out.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“I talked with Dr. Acharya’s office last night. They can get you in for surgery in ten days, and you can stay here as long as you need to.”
“No, Finn. I want to go home. I feel like I need to be by myself for a while.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
Finn opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.
“What?” I asked.
“How much of this is about Maren Devine?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how much of this feeling sorry for yourself is because you talked yourself into believing she’s better off without you?”
“That’s the truth,” I fire back.
“You’re miserable, Dallas. She’s miserable, too.”
“She’ll get over it.”
“What about you?”
I said nothing.
“You should reach out to her. She’s worried sick about you.”
“She’ll forget about me sooner if I don’t. Talking to her will only make things worse.”
My brother exhaled and ran a hand over his hair. “I don’t know what to do with you, Dallas. I think you’re making a mistake. Several mistakes.”
“What else is new?” I heaved myself out of the pool.
“It’s not like that, so don’t get all worked up.” He stood up and faced me. “I don’t think you’re making mistakes because you don’t know better—I think you’re choosing to suffer. I just don’t know why.”
“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t.” I went over to the fence where I’d hung the beach towel I’d been using the last couple days and wrapped it around my waist. It was no surprise to me that Finn didn’t know what it was like to feel you weren’t worthy of something. For fuck’s sake, his problem was that he’d assumed his wife would never leave him.
“Look, don’t go.” He checked his watch. “I have to get to work, but let’s talk this over some more, okay?”
“Did you write her back yesterday?” I had to know.
He paused. “Yeah. I did. I told her—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, changing my mind and walking over to where I’d taken off my running clothes. “It’s between you and her. I don’t need to hear it.”
“But it’s about you.”
“I don’t need to hear it,” I repeated, angrily piling my sweaty things in my arms.
“You’re acting like a stubborn child, Dallas! ”
“Fuck you! I’m acting like a man who wants to make his own decisions and have his family respect them for once.” I stormed toward the house.
Finn followed me. “I’m sorry, Dallas. Don’t go. Please. Let me help you work through all this.”
“You can’t,” I said, sliding open the patio door. “It’s too late.”
Sixteen
Maren
Despite the fact that I’d barely gotten any sleep Sunday night, I got up and went to the studio on Monday in time to teach a six a.m. class. What I really wanted to do was stay curled up on my couch all day and cry over a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts, but I knew that wouldn’t help me. I needed to get back to my routine in order to get through this.
Allegra took one look at me and opened her arms, and I went into them, glad to have a shoulder to cry on. But
when she asked what was wrong, I found myself unable to go into it. I just didn’t have it in me. Instead, I told her I was still having the nightmare and didn’t know what I was going to do.
“If I point you in a certain direction, do you promise to have an open mind?” she asked.
“Of course.” I grabbed a tissue from the box on the studio desk.
“Okay.” She grabbed a pen and Post-It note and wrote something down. “Call this woman.”
I looked at the paper. “Madam Psuka? Is that how you say it?”
“Yes. Like Puh-suka.”
“Who is she?”
“She’s a lot of things. Psychic, medium, intuitive, dream interpreter. She’s a little odd, but I consulted with her all the time when I lived up north.” She shrugged. “That’s the only problem. She’s not local.”
“Where is she?”
“Traverse City.”
“Oh.” Something clicked in my head. “You know what? My sister invited me to go up north with her this week. To Old Mission Peninsula.”
“Oh my God, that’s like right there. You should go!”
I bit my lip. “But it would be Wednesday to Friday. And I already took the weekend off.”
Allegra shook her head. “You worry too much about unimportant things. This is your health, your well-being. It matters the most.”
“I know, but—”
“Listen, are you gonna go broke if you have to pay a sub and someone to cover the desk for a few days?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Then go. I think she might be able to help you.” She touched her chest. “If I’m wrong and she can’t, I will take full responsibility. I’ll cover the sub with my own paycheck.”
“Stop. You are not doing that.”
“So will you go?” she asked hopefully.
I sighed and looked at the name on the paper. It seemed a little out there—I believed people could intuit things about their own consciousness, but I wasn’t sure a stranger could read anything into mine just by looking at my palm or whatever—but I was exhausted and unhappy and willing to try anything. “I’ll look her up.”
Allegra rubbed my shoulder. “Good.”
I checked my email repeatedly throughout the day Monday, but never got a reply from Finn Shepherd. Had he seen my message? Was he ignoring it? There was no way I’d gotten the wrong Finn Shepherd, Associate Professor of Neurology, was there?
I was just as obsessive about my texts, thinking maybe Dallas would come to his senses and reach out to me, or at least let me know he’d arrived in Boston safely and was going to do what the doctors said.
But he never did.
After work, I called Emme and asked her if I could come over.
“Sure,” she said. “Everything okay?”
“No,” I told her, fighting tears. “I’ll tell you when I get there.”
Nate opened the front door to their house and looked at me strangely. “Maren?” he said, almost like he didn’t recognize me. Admittedly, I was looking pretty haggard from the lack of sleep and all the crying, and I was on the verge of another meltdown right there on their front porch.
“Yes,” I squeaked, trying to hold it in.
“Are you okay?”
I nodded and squeaked again. “No.”
Emme appeared behind him, her eyebrows rising. “Maren! What’s wrong?”
One look at my big sister and I burst into tears, and I stood there wailing on their doorstep for a few seconds while they stared at me in shock. Nate recovered first and took me by the arm. “Come in, come in.”
I stumbled into their front hall and threw my arms around Emme. “He’s gone. He has a brain tumor and he’s gone.”
Emme gasped and embraced me. “What are you talking about?”
“Did someone die?” Nate asked.
I realized what I’d said. “No, no. He’s fine. I mean, he’s not fine—Dallas has a brain tumor—but he’s alive.”
“Oh my God.” Emme hugged me tightly and let me go. “Come sit.”
I went into their living room and sat on the couch. “Do you have any tissues?”
“I’ll get some,” Nate said, heading into the kitchen.
Emme sat next to me. “So what happened? Are you serious about this brain tumor thing? That’s what was going on with him?”
I nodded, trying to compose myself so I could at least get through the story. Nate returned with a box of tissues and handed it to me before taking a seat across from us in a leather and chrome chair.
“Okay if I’m in here?” he asked.
“It’s fine,” I said, blowing my nose. “Embarrassing, but fine.”
I told them about the conversation Dallas and I had had last night—how he’d attempted to break things off without telling me the truth, how I’d figured it out and confronted him, how he didn’t want anything to do with me going forward.
“He s-said he d-doesn’t love m-me,” I blubbered. “He said it w-was a m-mistake.”
“My God, you poor thing.” Emme rubbed my back. “That had to be so hard.”
They let me cry for a while without saying anything, but Emme made soothing noises and kept a hand on my back.
When I’d calmed down enough to talk, I grabbed another tissue. “God. I’m such a mess.”
“He seemed distracted at dinner,” Nate said. “I’m usually pretty good at reading people, and I had the impression he was really uneasy about something.”
“Maybe the fact that he was about to dump me? Or his brain tumor. Take your pick.”
“God, this is horrible. And so sad.” Emme looked like she might cry too. “I’m really sorry, Maren.”
“What’s the prognosis on the tumor?” Nate asked, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “Can it be removed?”
I lifted my shoulders. “I don’t know for sure, because he wouldn’t talk to me about it. He said he doesn’t want my pity. I think there’s a surgery he can have, but there are risks he’s worried about.”
“What kind of risks?”
I thought back to the conversation when Dallas had led me to believe it was his dad with the tumor. “I think he said something about potential loss of mobility on the right side.”
Nate’s expression was grim. “That has to be a particularly horrible prospect if you’re a tattoo artist.”
“I know, but not as bad as—as…” I couldn’t even think it. A fresh round of tears welled, and I sobbed into a tissue.
“So now what?” Emme asked.
“Who knows?” I cried. “I emailed his brother in Boston, the neurologist, but he didn’t email back.”
“Have you reached out to Dallas?” Nate asked.
I shook my head. “He told me not to.”
Nate looked surprised. “You’re just going to do what he says?”
“What choice do I have? He rejected me, Nate. He doesn’t want me.” Pain wrenched my heart all over again.
Emme spoke up. “First of all, I don’t think that’s true. He might not have been himself at the table last night, but I saw the way he looked at you. He adores you.”
“Then why would he push me away?”
“I don’t know for sure, but if I had to guess, I’d say he doesn’t want you to have to deal with his medical problems.” Nate shrugged. “He probably thinks he’s doing you a favor by cutting you loose.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Emme said angrily. “He told her he loved her the night before.”
Nate shrugged. “All the more reason to set her free.”
“That makes no sense at all.” Emme refused to budge. “If he loved her, he’d want to be with her.”
“Not if he thought sacrificing her was for her own good.”
“He said he doesn’t want anyone to have to take care of him,” I told them.
“Typical man,” Emme huffed. “That’s what you do when you love someone. You take care of them.”
“He said I should forget him and find someone better. He’s all fucked in
the head because of how his family treated him. They favored his older brother,” I explained to Nate. “So he grew up thinking he’s not good enough, but he is. Oh, God, you guys. This is hopeless.” I tipped over onto Emme’s lap, and she stroked my hair.
“I’m sorry. Men can be so stubborn.”
“Look, guys sometimes think they’re being heroic by shutting down their emotions,” said Nate, a little grudgingly. “Feelings scare us.”
“I don’t get that,” said Emme. “Feelings are not scary. Brain tumors are scary!”
“Admitting you have feelings makes you vulnerable, though,” Nate went on. “It’s like you’re giving someone the opportunity to hurt you.”
“He sounds like Stella,” I said to Emme.
“So he’s protecting himself by breaking things off?” she wondered.
Nate shrugged. “Essentially, yes. But he doesn’t see it that way.”
“A man’s brain is a frightening, frightening place.” Emme looked down at me. “So now what will you do?”
I sat up and blew my nose again. “Try to get over him again, I guess. There’s nothing else to do.”
“Why not give it a little time and then reach out to him? Tell him how you feel. Tell him you still want to be with him, if that’s what you want.”
“It is, but …” I shook my head, wondering if the tears would ever stop. “I’m afraid I’d only make a fool of myself. He flat out said he doesn’t love me.”
My sister put her arm around me and tipped her head onto my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know it hurts.”
It did. And I couldn’t help thinking that somehow it was my own damn fault. I took a shuddery breath. “Hey Emme, is that invitation still open to go with you to Abelard this week? I could use some time away.”
“Absolutely.”
Nate exhaled and rose to his feet. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do. In the meantime, how about some pizza?”
“Maren doesn’t eat pizza,” said Emme.
“What? Who doesn’t like pizza?” Nate stuck his hands on his hips.
“I like it, I just don’t eat gluten,” I explained. “But you know what? I’ll eat it tonight. I’m in the mood for it.”
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