The Breakup Doctor

by Phoebe Fox

  I pointed. “The pump. Look at your calves.”

  Sasha turned so she could see behind her in the mirror. “Oh. Yeah.” She turned back around to face me. “Okay, I’m gone. Wish me luck.”

  “He isn’t picking you up?”

  Sasha looked uncertain. “Well...”

  “Good girl!” I blurted in surprise. For years I’d tried to impress on Sasha a list of rules for her many first dates, hoping to force her to slow her pace: no getting into strangers’ cars, new men didn’t get to know where she lived, and no going anywhere except the designated meeting spot. Finally my admonitions had sunk in.

  Sasha grabbed up her purse—a fringed gold clutch that matched her shoes—and then hesitated. “I feel bad leaving you. Are you going to be okay?”

  “Of course.”

  She chewed her lip. “Yeah, but I know the whole breakup thing is pretty fresh. Listen, why don’t I reschedule and we can—”

  “Sash, go,” I cut her off. “I’ll be fine. When you get home we can sit and have ice cream and cookies.”

  She frowned into my face for a few moments, as though staring at a topographical map of some particularly rugged terrain she was preparing to traverse. “All right. Don’t do anything I would do.”

  “Wouldn’t do.”

  She shook her head. “No... I meant it the way I said it. Do I need to take your cell phone with me?”

  “Sash, please. Go. Have fun,” I said, waving her out, hoping against hope that she’d take my advice and not sleep with this guy on the first date.

  Sasha didn’t make it back by the time I’d created an improvised stir-fry out of the dozens of veggies I found in her fridge. She wasn’t home by the time I finished eating, or cleaned up the kitchen, or sat and watched two Sex and the City reruns. I knew what that meant.

  Same old Sasha. When was she going to grow up?

  I was dangerously bored—Sasha may have had a point about not leaving me alone. Solitude gave my mind too much room to race, and my thoughts weren’t healthy ones. Trying to distract myself, I browsed the titles on her bookshelves: Snag that Man!; When Love Hurts; Turn Adieu into I Do. I yanked the last one out.

  Sometimes when he says, “Goodbye,” what he’s really saying is, “I’m scared.” That’s when it’s up to you to hear the hidden fears and pain of the little boy inside him.

  Blech. I snapped the book shut and threw it to the floor. What was Sasha doing with this kind of garbage? No wonder she had so much trouble with relationships.

  I checked my cell phone—just to see if I’d somehow missed a text or call from her, I assured myself.

  Nothing.

  I tossed the phone down on the guest bed and it lay there, staring indifferently up at me with its blank LED eye. I gave it a prod to make it stop. And then another prod. And then some more prods until—miracle of miracles—all that prodding resulted in a text message: We need to talk.

  Goodness, look at that. Like a Ouija board. Well, I couldn’t mess with fate. Clearly the universe meant for me to send it, so I thumbed in Kendall’s speed dial and hit send so quickly I didn’t give myself time to remember I was strong and independent, and didn’t want anyone who clearly didn’t want me.

  And then the phone and I faced off in a staring contest.

  Beep or something, damn you.

  Nothing.

  There was every chance it didn’t send correctly, I reasoned, so I sent the same message again and waited for the reply.

  And waited.

  Sometimes cell towers freaked out. Just to be safe, I hit send again.

  Maybe twenty or thirty more times.

  Nothing, nothing, nothing. I picked up the phone and started hitting the corner of it on Sasha’s nightstand—bam! bam! bam!—until I heard an ominous crack.

  The sound triggered a little sanity in me.

  Stop this. Get ahold of yourself. This isn’t who you are.

  I threw on some flip-flops, snatched up my car keys, and headed out to the Honda.

  Downtown is a grand word for the business area of Fort Myers. Originally built as a base of operations for the U.S. military to fight the pesky Seminole Indians who insisted on defending their ancestral lands, it was eventually abandoned and lay fallow for ten years before being settled as a residential community. It was another decade before Thomas Edison, our town’s patron saint, discovered the sleepy tropical town of Fort Myers and built his sprawling white riverfront home and laboratory along the Caloosahatchee in 1887 just outside the confines of the downtown area.

  I drove past the relentlessly white Edison home on my left, newly restored after damage from hurricanes and termites. Mercurial Florida carries devastating risks you can count on, yet they never seem to deter people from trying to thwart the certain and eventual wrath of nature.

  But even Edison’s august patronage couldn’t turn the riverfront town into a metropolis. Despite grand plans over the years, including a recent face-lift and image makeover that renamed the area “the River District,” a term I’d never heard cross the lips of any native of Lee County, the downtown area could only ever be described as “quaint.”

  Bricked streets gridded several blocks’ worth of buildings, some of them dating back to the turn of the previous century. Only the old Arcade Theater building still fulfilled its original purpose, housing the Florida Repertory Theater. The rest of downtown’s remaining historical buildings had been bastardized into kitschy boutique stores, restaurants, and lawyers’ offices.

  Though I was grateful to one such of the latter, as what Sasha and I called “the lawyer lot” provided one of the best parking areas in town after hours, a secret held by only a few natives that allowed us to find parking even during the most crowded events downtown. I’d shared the coveted secret of its existence with Kendall, and I knew that if he were prowling around downtown tonight, this was where I would find his car.

  But there was no black Mercedes in the lot. I drove up and down the gridded streets, checking the street parking on either side, looking for it. Nothing. There were lots off Bay Street near the Harborside Convention Center, and scattered lots in the banking areas and city hall. But no Kendall there either.

  Then I made the same circuit again, crawling so slowly past the entrances to every bar he usually frequented that cars behind me honked in irritated impatience. I shot a hand out my open window, my middle finger stabbing toward the sky.

  Where was he?

  A car in front of me suddenly peeled out of a street parking spot, and I whisked my car into it.

  I sent another message. Kendall, we need to talk. Where are you?

  I sat in the dark, waiting. After a while I turned off my engine and leaned my head back, lifting my phone in front of my eyes every so often to check the screen.

  We need to talk! I punched in angrily. I sent it.

  Still no response. This time I called. It went to voicemail after only a few rings, and a haze of red literally filled my vision. Fuck leaving a message. I hung up and called again. And again. And again. Finally the line stopped ringing and went straight to voicemail—Kendall had turned the damn thing off again to avoid me—and this time when his recorded message ended and I heard the beep, I screamed unintelligibly into the phone like zombies were tearing my flesh off.

  A girl walking by my car on the sidewalk who barely looked legal jumped about a foot into the air before turning to cast me a nervous look and scurrying away.

  I shut the phone off and threw it into the foot well, tipping my head forward over the steering wheel and trying to breathe. Minutes dragged by as I listened to the sounds of the downtown bar scene. Music seeped out of several bars on Hendry Street, bleeding together into a cacophonous noise. Bursts of laughter punctuated the drone of chatter from people passing by on the sidewalk.

  What on earth was I thinking? Screaming into Kendall’s voic
email like a crazy person? I needed to calm down. I was acting irrationally, erratic.

  I was acting like Sasha.

  That thought was all it took to throw me into action. I needed to get out of downtown—Kendall could be anywhere, and this was not how I wanted to run into him. And I needed to steady my fraying nerves. A drink would help take this frazzled edge off—but I’d learned my lesson about cracking open a bottle, so going back to Sasha’s wasn’t the best idea either.

  I’d head up 41 toward her house—far from any of Kendall’s usual haunts—and stop somewhere along the way to have a soothing glass of wine. Once I’d unwound from the tight coil my nerves were in, I’d go back to Sasha’s and sleep off this terrible, unsettled mood.

  Everything would be better in the rational light of day.

  twenty-one

  I woke up from a dream about Sasha. She was young, maybe twelve or thirteen, and sitting in an inner tube floating somewhere, while methodically applying colored Band-Aids over every exposed inch of skin until she looked like a human piñata. Then she was dancing on a stage, the bandages loosening and fluttering with every pirouette she made. Suddenly my mother was beside her doing a soft-shoe, the two of them falling into step as though they’d choreographed the dance, and my mother pulled off the bandages with each lunge and whirl and twist. I watched from the audience, wanting to get up, rush the stage, press the bandages back down and keep them from falling away, but my legs felt like sandbags and I couldn’t move.

  I blinked up at the unfamiliar ceiling. It took me a minute to realize where I was—not nestled in Kendall’s plush Frette sheets. Not huddled in my own hand-me-down sheets on my secondhand mattress. But in the soft full-size bed in Sasha’s guest room.

  Oh, yeah. Memory rushed back: the mold, Sasha’s date... My texts and crazy stalking and phone calls to Kendall. How mortifying.

  I sat up and sandbags slammed into the inside of my skull. I groaned and rubbed my bleary eyes as the first streaks of sunlight purpled the sky outside the window. Out of habit I reached for my cell phone. Not even six a.m. What time did I get home last night?

  Wait. For that matter...how did I get home?

  I tried to swing my legs over the side of the bed, but something was wrong—they were trapped. I thrashed to get them to move, but they seemed tied together. Throwing the sheet back, I saw the problem—my jeans were bunched around my ankles. Lovely. Apparently I’d passed out mid-disrobing.

  Was I drunk last night? I didn’t even remember drinking.

  Something neon green was on my top half. I pulled the unfamiliar T-shirt away from me in front to try to read the writing on it upside down.

  I Got Tanked at Fishy Bob’s.

  Fishy Bob’s? Why—and when—had I been there, done that, and literally gotten the T-shirt? I let the shirt drop into place and stared unseeingly at the louvered closet doors in front of me as the slow pounding in my brain began to bring back memory with every throb.

  I’d planned to track Kendall down, hadn’t I? To confront him? No...no, that was lunacy—I’d had the good sense to realize that, and I’d decided to...what?

  The pounding grew into a full-fledged splitting headache.

  Oh, yes. Have a drink. Somewhere out of downtown, where I knew I wouldn’t see Kendall. I remembered stopping somewhere—images flashed through my mind of a strip mall up Cleveland populated by seedy business like bail bonds and some kind of tattoo and piercing parlor that couldn’t possibly have passed any health inspections.

  Like a snapshot I saw in my mind a partially burned-out sign that hung crooked at the other end of the strip mall: shy Bob’s. That hadn’t sounded so bad. I’d gone inside.

  Memory filtered back in snippets: a few sad-looking booths lining the walls, concrete floor, torn vinyl bar stools, and a weathered bar front-and-center with what looked like a moonlighting Hell’s Angel behind it. I thought I’d started to turn back around to leave...until the big grizzly tending bar had called out something about “taking a load off, darlin’.”

  I could hear his voice in my head as clearly as if he sitting on the bed beside me: rough and gravelly, but his tone so kind it made me want to hug him. So I sat, and when the bartender put a shot glass on the bar and held up a bottle, I nodded and did the shot without even thinking twice.

  I remembered nearly choking on the sickly flowery taste of it—gin. But I got it down and kept it there. There was no telling how many times that routine played out. I was so hungry for appreciation that I would have set myself on fire if it meant I kept getting the nods and grins and benedictions the burly bartender offered.

  I got talky, I remembered now. I told him about Kendall after drink three, or four, and at the man’s unexpected sympathy and compassion, I might have segued into telling him about Michael and our shattered engagement. And then...I struggled to recall what happened after that.

  Nothing. Apparently at some point I’d blacked out.

  Surely I hadn’t driven home in that state?

  The sick feeling in my stomach was becoming as familiar to me as the wash of self-loathing that came with it. Post-breakup drinking was one thing...but drinking and driving was dangerous...irresponsible...reprehensible.

  I stood up—a mistake, as my head swam and suddenly I was pretty sure I was going to throw up. No, thank goodness, I was—

  God. Luckily I made it into the guest bath in time to not be the absolute worst house guest alive. Sasha had a hair-trigger gag reflex; if she saw a puddle of the remnants of my evening, it would have created a really unfortunate chain reaction.

  Sasha. Oh, god—was she home when I’d stumbled in last night, so drunk I had no recollection of it? She’d be so pissed at me... We’d promised when we were teenagers that if one of us was ever too drunk to drive, we’d call the other one to take care of us—or get hold of someone who could.

  Wait...had I called Sasha?

  I splashed my face and rinsed out my mouth, then stumbled out of the bathroom and into her room. Sasha was tucked safely in bed, sound asleep. No indication of whether she’d had to come get me from some dive bar last night and pour me into the house.

  Desperate for clues, I walked into the living room and flicked the curtain aside to look outside, the sun now bright enough to feel like nails being driven into my eyeballs. Sasha’s car was there—but so was mine.

  Oh, god, I did drive home. I could see my keys on the table just inside Sasha’s front door, along with my purse and...a crumpled sheet of paper? I walked over and saw that it was a note on Fishy Bob’s letterhead—they had letterhead?—scrawled in Magic Marker: Bernice and me drove you home. Hair of the dog’ll fix you back up. Forget that asshole. It was signed, Stalker.

  Stalker. The Hell’s Angel bartender.

  And there was a P.S.: The blood probly ruined your shirt.

  My heart froze. Blood? I could see the white fabric of my top shoved into one side of my purse and yanked it out, the stiff brown patch on one side in the back making my heartbeat resume with a thud. What had happened to me? I clapped my hand onto my shoulder and felt nothing, then did the same on the other one.

  “Ow!” I nearly jumped out of my skin at the raw sting of it.

  My heart dropped to my stomach as I raced back to Sasha’s guest bath and carefully peeled the garish T-shirt over my head. Sure enough, my right scapula was covered in a wide gauze bandage. Breath held, I peeled up the tape on one side and gently pulled, the gauze sticking to whatever wound I’d sustained.

  It was glossy with some kind of ointment, and reddish brown with dried blood. I pulled out some tissues and gingerly wiped at one edge—the sting needled through me, but I kept at it. Under the blood, something dark was embedded into my skin. Crap—had I ridden bitch on Stalker’s bike and wiped out?

  But the dark edges were too crisp for asphalt burn, and slowly a sinking feeling began in my belly. I kept dabbing, bu
t I already knew what I was going to find.

  I’d gotten a tattoo.

  There on my shoulder were letters in bold, black ink. I prayed I was reading them wrong backward in the mirror, but I knew I wasn’t.

  “No More Jackasses.”

  Oh, no. No, no. Drinking and dialing was one thing—even stalking I could cope with. But there was no way I’d done something as ridiculous, as permanent, as tattooing myself with something so appalling. I’d thought I’d hit rock-bottom, but this was much, much worse.

  And then, impossibly, it was even worse than that, I saw as I kept wiping. Below the letters was some kind of cartoon, and I leaned closer to the mirror to make it out.

  It was a full-color drawing of a donkey with—oh, dear God—a very evident equine erection, a bright red circle over the whole thing with a line drawn through.

  If I’d had anything left in my stomach, I’d have thrown up again.

  Thank god Sasha was still sound asleep. I couldn’t let her see this. As crazy as she ever got after a breakup, as far as I knew she’d never permanently defaced her body. She’d have shown me if she had—shame wasn’t in her vocabulary.

  Uselessly, I tried scrubbing at the thing with a washrag, praying that it was a temporary tattoo, or henna—but the first scrape of terry cloth against the raw skin felt like I was using the sander that had rubbed a hole into my moldy wall, and I had to bite my lips shut to hold back the scream that nearly resulted, for fear of waking Sasha.

  It was real.

  How the hell had I gotten a tattoo on my shoulder and had no recollection of it? Why had Stalker and the rest of my new BFFs let me do it? Or had they encouraged it? Guilt bit at my conscience at the thought—he’d had the kindness to drive me home when I was in no shape for it. But surely it was clear that I wasn’t the tattoo type? And I certainly hadn’t been in any state to make a decision about permanently inking donkey genitalia onto my body.