Holding Out for a Zero

by Wardell, Heather

  He frowns and slaps himself on the forehead. I recoil, never having seen anyone actually do a facepalm before, and he says, “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. But I’ve ruined the surprise, haven’t I? Gloria didn’t want anyone to know about it.”

  “Who,” I ask, trying to stay calm, “is the man in the picture?”

  “He’s your brother, of course. Andrew, was it? Aaron?”

  I sway as he speaks, his words dizzying me, and Nico tightens his hold on me and says, “I’m afraid that’s not possible. Their brother passed away as a young child.”

  Instead of looking horrified, he nods. “Of course. That’s why she needed me.”

  Nico and I exchange bewildered glances, then he turns to the man and says, “I think we need you to start at the beginning.”

  The clerk nods, then says to me, “You okay?”

  I shake my head, still wobbly both physically and emotionally.

  “Come sit over here,” he says, gesturing to a table with a few chairs, “and we’ll talk.”

  Once I’m sitting I snap the rubber band on my wrist to jolt the confusion away, and in a minute I feel well enough to say, “I don’t understand. How is that Anthony?”

  “Anthony, that’s it,” he says, sounding as proud as if he’d remembered the name himself. “Well, I do age-progression photography here. Regular stuff too, of course, but that’s my bread and butter really. I take a photo of someone, run it through the software, give it some tweaks, and they’re any age you want.”

  “So the guy in the photo…” I twist in my chair to look at the window, but of course I can’t see him because the photo faces the street. If it had been one of Gloria’s paintings there’d be something to see on the back. Something horrible.

  I shiver and turn back around. “That guy is… my brother? How he’d look today?”

  He nods, his eyes softening. “Gloria’s a sweetheart. She felt sure you’d all want to see it.”

  I remember that there weren’t any pictures of any of us, including Anthony, in Gloria’s things. She must have had one, though, and given it to this guy. But why?

  I ask if he knows what made her do it, and he says, “It’s a present for your parents’ anniversary.” A frown crosses his face. “She was supposed to pick up the final print last week but she didn’t show.”

  “So you put it in the window?” I say, suddenly outraged, although I’m not sure whether it’s at him or the idea that Gloria was planning to hand over a picture of a fake Anthony to my parents on their anniversary. Didn’t she realize how much that would shock them? Was that what she planned to do with her horrible painting too?

  He turns the frown on me. “No way. I’d never do that. I’ve got hers all ready but she let me make a bigger print for my window because I was proud of my work. You can’t even tell he’s not a real person, can you?”

  I couldn’t.

  “So, do you want to take it?” He reaches into the file cabinet beside the desk and comes out with an order form. “Or I’ll call her and ask if that’s okay, maybe.”

  My throat clenches.

  “Gloria has passed away,” Nico says gently. “It was… an assault. It’s been in the news.”

  The guy gasps. “I never watch the news. Just makes me sad. Oh, that’s horrible. Like I said, she was a sweetheart. Then… I guess I’ll give it to you?” He looks uncomfortable. “There’s a hundred bucks owing on it, though. I wish I could let it go but times are tight and….”

  I grab my wallet, though I’m not sure I want to keep the picture, because it’s one last thing I can do for Gloria, and the guy insists on gift-wrapping it in its frame which I allow because I don’t want to see it again right now.

  Once Nico and I are out on the street with a package I have no idea how to handle he says, “Do you want to go back to the coffee shop so we can talk, or would you rather go home?”

  Surprising myself, I shake my head. “I don’t want to be alone right now.” Funny, since I had wanted that. But I have no idea how Gloria planned to use the picture, and now I have to decide what to do with it, and adding one more item to the huge ‘areas of chaos’ list my life has become just feels like too much to bear by myself.

  He slips his arm around my waist and we walk in silence back to the coffee shop where he settles me at a corner table then goes off to fetch us each another drink. I sit watching him, keeping my mind as blank as I can, which isn’t as easy these days since he keeps making me eat. When I have no food, my inner world goes silent. I like it that way.

  Once Nico has returned with our mugs and taken a seat, we look at each other for a moment then I let my gaze fall to the package on the table. It almost seems to be pulsing. “I can’t believe… do you think my parents would want it? Or would it be horrible for them?”

  “Hard to say. How do you feel about it?”

  I sigh. “No idea. I guess it’s… interesting… to see how he might have looked, but he’ll never look that way. He’s gone, and it’s all because of—”

  I catch myself before I say, “Gloria,” but he recognizes my hesitation and says, “It’s all because of a tragedy. No matter who dropped the balloon, it’s a tragedy.”

  “Yeah.” I hang my head and stare at the table.

  He reaches out and lays a warm hand over mine. “I know you don’t need therapy, but as a friend, or a— well, as a non-psychologist, I’m here.”

  Liking his returning to the idea of us being more than friends and also feeling a nagging miserable fear that I don’t understand, I say, “I appreciate that, but I don’t know…” Then I do. I have to get it all out. “I don’t know what I should do. If I tell my parents what really happened, they might react like Remy. But they might believe me and understand. I can’t know what’ll happen.”

  “True,” he says softly.

  “I can’t handle that, and I really can’t handle it if they’re like Remy. They might say I’m a liar, they might yell at me, they might hate me even more than they already do… I’ve tried so hard to make up for what I did but I didn’t even do it.”

  He takes a breath to speak, but I’m on a roll. “And I couldn’t have fixed it anyhow! Nothing I did would have brought him back. I was trying to… to atone for it, but my parents’ only son was dead and he always would be. And then with Gloria, I started the diet to lose weight and it was working because she came back and then she died and again nothing I did made a difference. I try so hard, I really do, but I can’t control everything even though I want to and—”

  I grab a breath to keep going and instead burst into tears for the first time in twenty years. Horrified, I jerk my hands away from Nico’s and catch hold of my mug. I throw down a huge gulp of my coffee, and the blazing heat ripping through my mouth and throat snaps me out of my foolishness.

  “Valerie! You’ll burn yourself.”

  I shake my head, and even manage a smile. “I’m okay. Tough throat.”

  He doesn’t acknowledge this. Instead, he says, “You’ve got a lot to deal with.”

  I shrug, continuing to pull myself back together. “It is what it is. It could have been me who dropped the balloon, easily. It turned out not to be but it could have been. I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing. I’ve fixed that. So that’s a good thing. I make sure I’m responsible now so things can’t go wrong.”

  As I speak, I know that things have gone wrong, since Gloria died despite my best efforts, but Nico doesn’t go there. “So you’ve focused, in the last twenty years, on making sure things can’t go wrong.”

  “That’s what I said.” I narrow my eyes at him. “What’s your point?”

  “Just wondering… do you think Gloria changed her life after what happened to Anthony?”

  I take a breath to laugh and say she was just as flighty and goofy as always, then have to reconsider. She had still been annoyingly ‘live in the now’ in recent years, but while as a young teenager she’d done nothing but party and hang out with her friends the adult Gloria ha
d apparently been involved in all sorts of charitable and caring activities I’d known nothing about. “She… she helped people,” I say. “I heard it at the funeral. Making hats for homeless people, doing stuff at soup kitchens, donating whatever money she could to charities. She was never like that before.”

  “Maybe the experience changed her too.”

  I consider this, then find myself rejecting it. “But she grew up. Couldn’t it just be not being a selfish kid any more that made her like that? And she was gone from us, she left right after Anthony’s funeral and we didn’t see her until the Christmas after, more than a year later, so who knows what happened to her during that time?”

  “Also a possibility,” he says, and though his voice is neutral I know he doesn’t agree with me. He thinks Gloria changed her life because of her guilt about Anthony.

  Guilt she’d deserved, unlike me.

  Anger rising in me, I say, “Well, what does it matter? She’s gone, he’s gone, and I have a world that believes I killed him and a photograph of two dead people to deal with. Why is it always my job to control everything?”

  “Gloria,” he says quietly, “sounds like she was trying to control things, change things, too. Differently from you, but…”

  I’d been reaching for my coffee but my hand freezes halfway. Had she been doing that? I think back to what I can remember of the blur of the funeral, all the ways I’d learned she’d tried to help people become happier and healthier. She hadn’t bragged about any of it, her friends had been sure to tell me. She often hadn’t even admitted it unless she absolutely had to.

  “She was,” I murmur, too surprised to speak louder. “I always thought she was a flake, but she was a flake trying to make people’s lives better.” Frustration fills me. “But that couldn’t bring Anthony back. Nothing she did could manage that.”

  He nods in slow motion and doesn’t speak.

  I don’t need him to. My mind’s making all the needed connections. Nothing Gloria did could fix anything. And nothing I do can either.

  My precious control means nothing. I could have become a size quadruple zero, if such a thing exists, or a size 4000, and either way Gloria’s health would have gone where it did. My hard work, my rituals, my planning… they all mean nothing.

  I am a tiny insignificant speck in a vast universe, and I have no control over anything.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “Are you okay?”

  “Why do you keep asking me that?”

  Nico slips his arm around my shoulders. “You don’t seem quite yourself.”

  I pretend to trip on the sidewalk to dislodge his arm. “I’m fine. Yesterday was just rough.”

  He nods and doesn’t try to touch me again. Perversely, that ticks me off too.

  Yesterday hadn’t been rough. It had been damned near impossible. After finding that photograph, and realizing that nothing I did could give me the control I craved over my life, I’d grabbed at Nico’s idea of going to the Met today because I didn’t want to be alone. He’d taken me home, and I’d fallen into his arms in my apartment and held on until he gently eased back and kissed me good night. On the forehead.

  I’d gone to bed with the feel of his arms around me, and that and my sleeping pills had helped me get to sleep faster than the pills alone could have managed. But when I woke up this morning I’d been so tense I’d had a headache already and I’d been angry at him, blazingly so, without knowing why, and my rage didn’t go away during the time we spent wandering around the museum.

  In fact, it got worse, because yesterday he kissed me in that doorway and treated me like a new lover, then he called me his friend and kissed me on the forehead like my aunt did, and today that arm around my shoulders was the first time he touched me. Is he toying with me? Is he giving up on me already?

  I don’t know, and I hate that, and now that we’re heading to a late lunch at a little café he likes I’ve had about enough of him and whatever game he’s playing.

  “You’ll love this place,” he says, clearly not wanting to talk about yesterday. “Their sandwiches are amazing.”

  I stop dead. “I won’t. Stop trying to manipulate me.”

  He stops too and stares at me. “I’m not.”

  “You are! You love this food and that food and the other thing and it’s all to convince me to eat. Well, you can’t. So quit it.”

  “I’m not trying to— look, of course I want you to eat. But I’m not trying to—”

  “It’s up to me whether I eat,” I hiss at him, finally understanding why I’m so enraged with him. “I don’t care what you want. I’m fine, and it’s none of your business anyhow, so back off.”

  He stares at me like he’s never seen me before. “Valerie, talk to me. What have I done wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I mutter, knowing despite how furious I am that it’s the truth. He hasn’t done a thing wrong. I just can’t stand the sight of him.

  He touches my shoulder lightly. “Would you rather skip lunch? We could go to the Central Park Zoo and see when they feed the—”

  “It’s always about food with you!” I jerk myself away from him. “Seriously. Give it up. You think I have a problem but it’s obviously you who’s obsessed with eating. Leave me alone!”

  While he stares at me blankly, I turn and stalk away.

  “Valerie!”

  “I mean it,” I call back over my shoulder. “Leave me alone.”

  *****

  He does. I spend the rest of that day and all day Sunday alone in my apartment, staring at the small unframed photo of Gloria and who Anthony could have become and wondering why Nico had to make me so angry. We’d been happy together, when he hadn’t been pushing food on me, and his kisses were magical. On Friday, anyhow. But then they vanished, and that infuriates me. When it’s not making me miserable.

  At about seven Sunday night, as I swallow yet another Tylenol for my awful headache and try to convince myself I’m tired enough to throw in my nightly sleeping pills too and shut out the whole horrible world for a while, my cell rings.

  Nico.

  I vow not to answer, but before I know it I do.

  “Valerie,” he says, relief in his voice. “I didn’t know whether you’d talk to me.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it,” I say. I can hear my own coldness, but I don’t care. I told him to leave me alone and he isn’t. Why does nothing work the way I want it to?

  “I… look, I’m not quite sure what to say about yesterday.”

  “Say whatever you want.”

  I hear a hint of a sigh from him. Somehow, it both makes me furious and brings tears to my eyes. “I like you, Valerie. A lot. And I obviously did something you didn’t like. I’d say I won’t do it again but I don’t know what it was so I can’t. And I’d say I’ll make it up to you but I can’t say that either, for the same reason. I don’t know what you want from me, but I want to give it to you.”

  “Well, I don’t know what I want either, so I can’t help you. I just…” My annoyance fades away, leaving a dull flat sadness. “I can’t do this, Nico. You’re a nice guy, you really are, but this is just not the right time for me, I guess. With Gloria, and all the stuff I’ve learned lately, I don’t think I can be in… whatever this is… right now.”

  “I… oh. Okay.”

  The surprise and disappointment in his voice hurt, but I push onward. “We’re not really together any— it’s not working, and it’s not going to. It’ll all go wrong and fall apart, and I guess I’d rather end it now than get to that stage. Okay?”

  “I don’t have a choice, do I,” he says, his tone making it clear he knows the answer.

  “I can’t do this,” I say again. “So no.”

  He pauses, and I tense. I don’t really think he’ll swear at me or call me names, but I don’t know him that well so I can’t say for sure. He’d be justified, maybe.

  No. He would not be. I’m protecting myself and that is the right thing to do. And I’m not wrong. I’ve had
a rough few months and taking charge of my life would be good for me.

  As I decide that, he says, “Valerie, you can’t control everything in life. I know you want to, but it just doesn’t work that way. Is trying to get that worth losing what we might end up being to each other?”

  I remember how caring he was the day we’d met and how wonderful his kisses are. The idea of not having him in my life makes me want to scream, “No, it’s not worth it.” But if I let him in then lose him…

  My past breakups weren’t too bad but I didn’t care that much. With Nico it’s already feeling different, like I could really connect to him. And letting that happen then losing him after spending months or even years with him…

  The thought of how horribly out of control I’ll be when that happens means I say, “I can’t… it’s over, Nico.”

  He definitely sighs this time. “Okay. Well, not okay. I hate this. I like you, and I wanted to help you get better, but—”

  He cuts himself off, but too late. “So that’s your game. I’m not going to be your… your psych project, Nico! I didn’t ask for any help and I don’t need any. Take your therapist crap somewhere else, because I don’t need it at all. I’m fine. I’m in control. I’m in control!”

  Then I prove that by hanging up on him.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Control, in fact, is all I have over the next few days. Nico doesn’t call again, which hurts but doesn’t surprise me. I’d been right that he was going to leave me, so I’d done the right thing by getting rid of him first.

  I know I’ll have to leave the apartment eventually, but since I’m eating at most one meal replacement bar a day, which I now cut up into eight pieces so I won’t have to struggle to get it down all at once, and I’ve got a ton of those, ‘eventually’ doesn’t have to be any time soon.

  And that suits me fine. There’s nothing for me outside. I loved Anthony and he left me. Gloria too. My parents love me, I guess, but the distance between us makes that nothing more than an intellectual supposition. We haven’t talked since the day I went through Gloria’s things, and I don’t care. I don’t feel anything for them and I doubt they do for me either.