by Anne Calhoun
His arm was warm, and strong, and her arm around his neck made her feel as if she were doing some of the work. In her bedroom she crawled into bed and fell asleep.
* * *
She awoke to a steady rain coursing down her bedroom windows. She’d slept through the sunny morning and into the afternoon rain, and knew she’d sleep through the night, once she fed herself. The panic attacks reduced her body to its most basic needs: food, water, sleep, which was good. It took a day or two for the humiliation of the panic attacks to subside, and if she spent the first day eating and sleeping, the second day wasn’t quite as bad.
She took a shower, toweled her hair damp, then dressed in warm fleece leggings and a loose sweatshirt. When she walked down the hall to her living space, she stopped abruptly. Seth sprawled in the armchair, one leg draped over the arm, drawing in his Moleskine.
“Hi,” she said.
He finished the shading, then closed the sketchbook. “I hope it’s okay that I stayed. I didn’t want you to wake up alone,” he said.
“I really do wake up alone most days,” she said, trying for humor.
“You shouldn’t. Not after something like that,” he said.
She felt raw, vulnerable, and utterly ashamed that he’d seen her that way. She turned away, then turned back and squared up her shoulders. “Yes. Well.” She cleared her throat and forced herself to look at him. “I have panic attacks,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “You hungry?”
“Yes,” she said.
He stayed close while they walked down the stairs, and somehow steered her to one of the stools under her breakfast bar. She sat there while he ran her a glass of water, then rummaged through her fridge and came up with eggs, onions, red peppers, mushrooms, and feta cheese. She watched him whisk eggs, then pour them into a pan to set while he diced the rest of the ingredients.
“I should be cooking for you,” she said.
He lifted one eyebrow, all but daring her to give it a shot.
“But this is nice. You’re good at this,” she said, watching him work.
“It doesn’t look all that different from coming off a combat high,” he said. “I’ve dealt with lots of those.”
Startled, she laughed, then put her head in her hands. “That’s real. Real fear, a real situation. Mine is all in my head.”
“How long have you had them?”
“Fifteen years.” For a while she’d been able to count days, months, years between attacks, marking time as normal, like a sober alcoholic or someone who’s experienced a traumatic event that completely reordered her world. After a while she gave up. “They started when I was thirteen. I was hit by a cab crossing Park Avenue. I broke my collarbone, fractured my shoulder, broke my left leg, and tore a bunch of ligaments in my knees. I hit my head pretty hard on the way down, too. Something about the noise, the horn, the tires, embedded itself in my brain. I’m hyperalert, I guess. It’s hard to live in Manhattan if horns trigger unreasonable fear-based responses. But then they disassociated from horns and started happening when I was stressed out.”
He made an “I’m listening” noise as he swept the vegetables into the eggs and folded it in half. She watched him cook in her kitchen, carefully stowing the utensils in the dishwasher, wiping down the counter before he got down two plates. It was all bizarrely normal, so she kept talking.
“The first one was at an eighth grade speech competition. I had a bad one when a wave swept my feet out from under me on the beach in Ibiza,” she said, remembering the sting of saltwater in her nose, her father and Charles laughing, Garry running out to rescue her. “That’s when the various treatments and interventions started. But the attacks only got worse, more frequent. Finals weeks. I had my most public one on the trading floor. There was a documentary crew on site, filming something about MacCarren, and I totally lost it. That attack confirmed what they’d always thought, that I didn’t have the inner strength, the will of steel to work at MacCarren. They were so eager to shunt me off to the side. I tried everything I could to stop the attacks. They didn’t stop. The Ponzi scheme is only part of the reason Betsy scheduled the class. She’s been working on a way to cure me almost as long as I have.”
“She’s a good friend,” Seth said. “That explains the scars.”
“Four surgeries,” she said. “My mother despairs of the scars. So disfiguring.”
“But you don’t hide them.”
“No,” she said. “The last thing I need is another complex.”
“You’re not a woman with complexes,” he said.
She didn’t know what to say to that. “Why did you stay?” she asked.
“Because you have eggs, and I don’t. I really felt like an omelet.”
His eyes were smiling, even if his mouth wasn’t. She smiled back, but didn’t let him off the hook. “Seriously.”
“Seriously?” He draped the dish towel over his shoulder. “Mostly it’s because you’re the only thing I’ve wanted to draw since I got home from Afghanistan.”
“Really? Why?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes you draw things to learn how. Sometimes your muse gives you the subject. Lately I don’t seem to be picking.”
“Can I see?”
“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
“Fair enough,” she laughed, and was still laughing when he flipped the omelet onto a plate and set it in front of her. She cut it, gave him half. He ate while the second one cooked, then they split the warm second one.
“What’s it like?” he said.
Describing them was easy. Preventing them proved to be the difficult part. “The world gets narrow. Like a tunnel. The doctors say my brain is dumping adrenaline into my body faster than I can process it.”
“I know how that feels,” he said. When she raised her eyebrows, he added, “You just described the average combat experience.”
“Really?”
“And your hearing disappears, or barely audible sounds become really distinct, like the tink of shell casings hitting your leg or the dirt.”
“Yes,” she said. “I could hear the bike wheel ticking earlier today, but nothing else. My heart goes crazy, and I can barely sip air.” She laid her fork and knife across her plate. “Everyone tells me to breathe through it, but breathing is part of it. I was intubated and I had a bad reaction to the sedative—these horrible nightmares about not being able to breathe. It drives me insane to not be able to get a breath, because an elephant is sitting on my chest, and then have someone say ‘Just breathe, honey. Just settle down and breathe.’ If I could breathe, I would!”
He snorted. “Sounds like a medic telling someone to clot.”
“Usually I get so light-headed I pass out. At that point my brain’s shut down and my body takes over, and I breathe again. I’ve tried everything. Every kind of therapy imaginable. Yoga. Meditation. I’ve given up everything from gluten to dairy to caffeine. I thought if I got back into drawing, I’d learn to focus on something outside the chaos in my body. They get worse when I’m under prolonged stress. Right now . . .”
“You’re under prolonged stress,” he finished.
“There’s no one but me. My father and brother are in prison. My mother is falling apart. My other brother is on his way back from New Zealand. But for right now, it’s me and my cousin Neil handling all of this. I am the public face of the MacCarren implosion, and I’m a train wreck waiting to happen.”
He ate the last bite of his omelet and aligned his sketchbook with the edge of the table. “Let me get this straight. You were hit by a moving vehicle and hospitalized, then had multiple surgeries. You’ve finished college and grad school, you tried working in one of the most stressful segments of the business world, and instead ended up working for a globally recognized foundation. And you think you’re a train wreck?”
She blinked. Seth had done his research into her life, and never said a word. “I think the panic attacks were originally about the horns, the accident
, but they’ve changed since then. They’re about not measuring up. They’re about failing my family, about being exposed as a fraud. A fake MacCarren. They’re about the threat of shame, exposure.”
“It’s human instinct to want to belong,” he said quietly. “Families, friends, tribes. That’s why shame and ostracizing are effective deterrents.”
“Right now some people would be filing a petition to change their name,” she said. “I want to redeem the MacCarren name. Not change it.”
He collected the plates, rinsed them, and loaded the dishwasher. “Tell me about your family,” she said.
“Not much to tell,” he replied. “I grew up in Cheyenne. My parents are professors at the university. My dad teaches Shakespeare and my mom teaches medieval history.”
Her jaw literally dropped. “Your parents are college professors.”
He smiled. “Yup.”
“Why didn’t you go home after you were discharged?”
“I’m the extroverted only child of two introverts who are happiest working in separate rooms. I love my parents, but my life is here, on the East Coast.”
His face had closed off, so she didn’t push. He wiped the counters down, then turned to her. “Does drawing help?”
She thought about the last few weeks. Something was helping . . . The drawing, or Seth? She couldn’t identify which of the two was helping, but now wasn’t the time to tell him he was crucial to her mental stability. “Yes,” she said. “The single-minded attention on one thing that’s right in front of me definitely helps.”
“Okay, we keep doing that, but we switch it up a little.”
“You want me to model for you?” she asked, trying to follow his train of thought.
“Another time,” he said. “I meant we record us together.”
“Doing what? Drawing?”
He looked at her, and the other shoe dropped. “You want to record us having sex.”
Even as she said it, she recognized the tension in her body, profound arousal fighting with profound fear. “Why do you think this will work?”
“It sounds like the trigger—the horn and the exposure—are connected to a sense of shame, a sense of not measuring up. That’s why you panicked on the exchange floor, why it gets worse when you’re being judged. Everyone looks ridiculous when they’re having sex. So do that, and watch yourself at your most ridiculous. What could be worse?” he said, and carried the plates into the kitchen.
She thought about this for a moment, trying to discern what her body wanted, what her mind feared, Seth’s intentions. Efficacy was so much a part of her life. She judged, valued, weighed, considered everything from grant applications to investment returns.
“It’s supposed to be fun,” she said, part question, part thought.
“It’s a way for you to lose yourself in your body and see you’re okay,” he said easily. The tink of silverware and dishes as he loaded the dishwasher, then straightened. “It’s about seeing yourself, about letting go, being in the moment, totally in your body. And it’s about seeing you the way I see you.”
Her breath caught at the thought of seeing herself through Seth’s nonjudgmental eyes. “How do you see me?”
He smiled. “Watch for yourself.”
“What if I don’t want to do it?”
“Then I’ll tell you how I see you, or draw you. But think about it. You have a camera that records video, right? We use that. You don’t even have to let me see it if you don’t want to. Think of it as a series of gesture drawings.”
“What if we start and I change my mind?”
“Then we shut off the camera and go back to what we were doing,” he said with a laugh.
“Oh,” she said. Her whole life seemed like an all-or-nothing proposition at the moment. “All right. I’ll think about it.”
“Get some sleep. Text me when you’re ready.”
“What if I’m never ready?”
“Then text me when you want to draw. It’s not an ultimatum. It’s an offer. That’s all.”
He bent down for a kiss, the contact fleeting, warm, tingling, then deepening, heating. “Do you want . . . ?” he murmured against her mouth.
“I want,” she said. She knew that. In the total chaos of her life, she knew she wanted Seth. “My body, however, wants sleep.”
He chuckled, drew back. “Okay. Go sleep,” he said, and started toward the foyer, obviously intending to clear out and give her some space.
“You can stay,” she said. The words were out before she could stop them. “If you want. Or not. It’s raining,” she finished.
He probably got his best work in the rain, making deliveries so other people could stay warm and dry. He had a life, friends, a mysterious inner world she felt she’d barely glimpsed.
“I’d like that,” he said, and picked up his messenger bag, then followed her upstairs.
It was a quiet evening, cool enough for her to start the gas fire. She read for a little while, then closed her book and fell asleep wondering how much more she would reveal to the man who was rapidly becoming the only thing she needed.
– SIXTEEN –
When Seth woke up the next morning, Arden was in the living room, bundled into a thick robe and working away at the drawing on the easel. She was working with an 8B pencil, shading something, based on the rapid back-and-forth of her hand. “I made coffee,” she said absently.
Telling himself that until he had caffeine he didn’t have to think about how much better he slept with another person in the room, he went downstairs and poured himself a cup, then came back up the stairs. “How many floors are there?” he asked after he’d had his first sip.
“Four, not including the basement. There’s one more above us, bedrooms I don’t use and a bathroom, and access to the rooftop deck.”
“You mentioned that,” he said.
She smiled. “Come on,” she said, and exchanged her pencil for a coffee cup.
Hand on the mahogany rail for balance, she led him up the stairs to the top floor, then opened a six-paneled door that could have been a bedroom or bathroom but was actually a flight of stairs. “Close the door,” she instructed, “or the cold air rushes all the way to the basement.”
At the top of the stairs she threw the bolt and opened the door. They stepped out into a hidden garden. The unobstructed westward view showcased an expanse of the reservoir and the trees of Central Park. Tall evergreen bushes tucked against the wall overlooking the street provided some measure of privacy. Sturdy patio furniture clustered around a small table, with a gas grill and a portable heater tucked in a corner. The plants looked chilled, their leaves quivering in the slight morning breeze.
“Poor things. It’s time to take these inside for the winter,” she said, examining the leaves.
“The city looks totally different from up here,” he said, turning his attention eastward, catching a glimpse of rooftops and water towers stretching toward the river.
“Perspective,” she agreed, and came to stand beside him. Steam rose from her coffee, the rich aroma lingering in the chilly air. “Height and distance make everything look different.”
They stood there companionably for a few moments. Seth’s brain lurched oddly from the past, quiet moments in the freezing Afghanistan or Iraq mornings, coffee brewed over open campfires and shared all around, to the present. Arden eased into a chair and tucked her bare feet into her thick robe, and studied him. Seth returned her gaze, afraid to show too much, unwilling to let even that fear show.
“Let’s do it,” she said.
A heat strong enough to dissipate the chill in the air flooded his veins. He was surprised he wasn’t steaming. “Okay. When?”
She shrugged. “I should go see my mom today,” she said. “Could you take tomorrow off?”
“The whole day?” he asked, puzzled.
“I want to do something else before we . . .”
“Okay,” he said. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to go
on a date.”
He choked on his coffee but managed to get it down. “A date?”
“Maybe not a date,” she said. “I want to do something with you, something casual, something different from what we usually do. I want to go out. Just . . . go out and do something.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hiding from everything,” she said with an encompassing flip of her hand that took in her house, the city, and most of the world, “is the first step down a slippery slope. I’m not losing ground.”
How could she not see what a fighter she was? She was attacking so fiercely, refusing to concede anything to anyone, negotiating terms. By the time this was over, she’d believe that with every cell in her body. “Okay.”
“I thought we might—”
“Stop right there,” he said. He was all about gender parity in every aspect of life, but when it came to relationships, there were some things gentlemen still did. Planning a first date was one of them. “You want to go on a date. I’m going to take you on a date.”
She frowned, smiled, and wrinkled her nose at him, all at the same time. “Great,” she said. “Where are we going?”
“Out,” he said, and finished off his coffee. “I’ll pick you up at ten tomorrow.”
“Ten in the morning?”
“Ten in the morning.” There wasn’t much point in having a flexible work schedule and dating a woman who didn’t need to work at all if he didn’t take advantage of it. He bent down for a quick kiss. “See you tomorrow.”
* * *
His hearing cut in and out during the day, like a television with a faulty cable link. No signal reigned for the most part, but every so often he got a full blast of Manhattan’s sounds to go with the high-def picture. Horns, a subway thundering by under his feet, an idling semi right next to him as he waited for the light at Fourteenth Street. It was odd, annoying, but for the most part easy to ignore because the city was always louder than his beating heart.
* * *
The next morning he took the subway to Ninety-sixth Street and followed the flow of traffic lights down to Arden’s street, where he paused on the corner and assessed the situation. A few photographers loitered on the sidewalk equidistant between Arden’s town house and Daria Russell’s. They were drinking coffee, smoking, chatting in a desultory fashion. Seth pulled his phone from his pocket and texted Arden.
