The Breakup Doctor

by Phoebe Fox

  “It is too!”

  “What?” I snapped. “What is what too?”

  “No.” Sasha was staring straight ahead out the windshield. “It’s Stu.”

  “What are you talking about? What does Stu have to do with anything?” But I knew. As soon as she said his name I knew.

  I saw her swallow, and then she pulled her eyes to mine. “I didn’t tell you because...because I know how I am about dating. And I like him, Brook. I mean, in that way. I really do like him, and we’re... I don’t know...good together, so far. Easy. I don’t want to spoil it, because I’m scared to death that I will, so I haven’t said any­thing to anyone. Not even you. I knew what you’d say.”

  I sat silent, processing. Trying to process. “You...and my baby brother, Stu...are dating.” I kept my voice utterly uninflected.

  “We’re seeing where it goes. We’re not putting too much on it right now.”

  “Huh. You get those catchphrases out of one of your dating self-help books?”

  She blanched, but I ruthlessly stifled the twinge of shame that flared up in me.

  “So just to make sure I’m all caught up here,” I said, my voice horribly cold, “you’ve been secretly dating my brother for who knows how long. And he’s been avoiding me because of that so he doesn’t have to actually lie to my face about it, like you have been. And meanwhile you’re also pitching big feature stories to your newspaper about my mother, who has had nothing to do with me or my father or my brother since she walked out on my family, so you can run down to Naples to spend hours and hours talking to her about her heartfelt feelings and dreams. Have I got it? You want to bogart my dad too, since you’ve managed to hijack the rest of my family for yourself?”

  I’d never seen anyone actually go dead pale before. Sasha’s face had shuttered like a house battened down for a hurricane. She just stared at me, and for a moment I flashed back to my brother at age seven, holding his bleeding hand and looking at Mugsy, our German shepherd, the two of them together inside the circle of pillows on the floor that we’d dedicated as a gladiator arena while I cheered their wrestling play on from the top bunk. In the moment before his wails filled the bedroom and my mom came running, the expression on Stu’s face had been one of bewildered betrayal.

  “Right.” Sasha threw the car in gear and pulled back onto San Carlos.

  “Sasha...” I said after a long, uncomfortable minute. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out.” But she said nothing, not even registering that I’d spoken. “Sash... I’m sorry. Really. I had a bad... I didn’t mean... Please.”

  Nothing. We made the rest of the trip to my house in total silence. Sasha didn’t even answer my goodbye when I got out of the car in my driveway, and the car was already moving in reverse before the passenger door fully shut.

  twenty-seven

  Even with everything else that had happened, all I could think about as I showered at home was my brother and my best friend.

  Once, when Sasha and I were younger—but much too old for dolls—Stu caught us playing Barbies in our room.

  “What are you two doing?” he demanded, standing in the doorway of my pink bedroom, his skinny prepubescent body puffed up with triumph.

  I shoved Barbie and Stu’s GI Joe—both naked in compromising positions—under my bed with a foot. “Get out of here, Stu,” I shouted at him. “You can’t come into my room.”

  “GI Joe is missing again. You’re playing with dolls!”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’ll be GI Joe, if you want.”

  “No. We don’t want. Go away, Stu.”

  His face grew stormy. “I’m telling. I’m telling everyone you’re playing with Barbie dolls.”

  “We are not!”

  “You are too. I’m telling everyone at school.”

  “Shut up, you little shit!” I started toward him, not sure what I meant to do, intent only on forcing his silence. I could imagine no greater shame than being revealed as a fourteen-year-old player of Barbies.

  But Sasha shot to her feet and beat me to Stu. She reached around his head and pushed the door closed behind him, shutting the three of us in.

  “Hey, Stuvie, you wanna make a deal?”

  He scowled. “No.”

  “Come on. It’s a good one.”

  Stu looked wary, but couldn’t resist anything Sasha suggested. He never could. “What.”

  Sasha wiggled her torso as she shimmied the bottom of her purple T-shirt like a cancan girl. “You leave me and Brook alone for the rest of the day and I’ll show you part of a boob.”

  Stu tried hard to mask the eagerness that leaped into his expression, but failed miserably. “Whatever. I don’t care.” He shrugged, but he looked more like an uncertain turtle hunching into its shell. “How big a part?”

  Sasha held her palm out flat at her chest, just below her nipple. “To here.”

  Stu crossed his arms and jutted out his jaw. “An inch higher.”

  Sasha shook her head. “Nope. No way.”

  Stu moved his eyes to look at me, then at the pile of dolls on the floor that we’d hastily covered with Sasha’s sweater when he burst through the door. His calculating expression made me nervous.

  “Just do it, Sash,” I said uneasily.

  “Brook!”

  “That’s the deal,” Stu said stubbornly, sensing his advantage. “Nipple or nothing.”

  Sasha regarded him through narrowed eyes, and then her expression melted into a catlike satisfaction and she poked a finger into Stu’s neck, startling him into a laugh before he pushed at her arm and fought to regain his hard line.

  “No nipple, little man,” she said indulgently, but before he could give voice to the protest he’d already opened his mouth to utter, she added, “but I’ll throw in part of the other boob.”

  “And can I touch it?”

  Sasha laughed. “Maybe next time.”

  Stu looked like he was considering it, but I could tell the battle was already won. Sasha could probably have talked him into doing what she wanted just by the attention she was already paying him.

  “Okay.” His tongue darted out and then retracted back inside his mouth and he bit his lip. “Do it.”

  Sasha grasped his shoulders and turned him around. “After you leave us alone for the rest of the afternoon. I’ll come into your room and do it before I leave.”

  Stu just nodded, pale and speechless. Waiting a couple of hours with the bottom half of Sasha’s breasts at the end of them would probably just about kill him with anticipation and nerves. But it guaranteed he’d live up to his bargain.

  Was that how early it had started? I wondered as I washed off the grime of camping and the beach and jail. Even back then, Sasha a fourteen-year-old blooming with hormones, Stu nearly thirteen—was that when they’d first felt an attraction to each other? With me left stupidly on the outside, unaware of any other undercurrents beneath the manipulable annoyance that was my baby brother?

  It wasn’t that I had never wanted Sasha and Stu to look at each other that way. It was that it had never entered my mind as something that could happen—like getting a phone call from your dog.

  The rational side of me knew that I had lashed out at Sasha out of my own self-loathing and embarrassment and helplessness and hurt. But I had a sick feeling that this time I’d stepped too far over the line for us to ever pull back.

  I toweled off and collapsed into bed, not even bothering to dry my hair. I slept for six hours—not nearly long enough, I realized when I peeled my crusty eyes open at three in the afternoon and squinted against the sun glaring in even through the blinds. But if I didn’t get up now, I’d sleep the day away, and then be awake all night.

  Bad things happened in the lonely stillness of night.

  I checked my phone to see if, somehow, I’d slept through Sasha’s call. It
hadn’t rung—but I noticed the voicemail icon was blinking, and wondered how long it had been since I’d checked it.

  But it wasn’t Sasha—it was a number I didn’t recognize, and when I checked my voicemail I was disappointed again, because it wasn’t Kendall either, and it wasn’t Chip. It took me a moment to figure out who it was, since I didn’t know the voice, but finally I realized—Ben, my stunt date from the other night.

  “Hey, Brook...just wanted to say thanks for a nice time Friday. Unexpected surprise.” A throat clearing, and then, “Oh, this is Ben. Probably you already figured that out.” He laughed, a little awkwardly. “Anyway, I’d like to do it again sometime. Give me a call and let’s plan it.” It was time-stamped from yesterday afternoon—the perfect amount of time for a thank-you after a date if you liked the person and wanted to see them again.

  Why hadn’t I listened to that message before traipsing off with Chip Santana to make out on a beach in the middle of the night? Why hadn’t I heard it before I got arrested?

  Not that it mattered. Ben Garrett was a nice man, but he couldn’t compete when my heart and my hormones were shoving two altogether different men into the front of my conscience. I couldn’t even make the call to tell him I wasn’t interested—I didn’t have the energy to be polite.

  My father was coming tomorrow morning to drywall the guest bathroom, which meant that I needed to work on my column today so I could turn it in by deadline. Fresh from jail and a terrible fight with my best friend, I had little in life that I wanted to do less. Or felt less qualified for.

  But I booted up the laptop anyway, because I had no choice; I’d committed to the column, to the Tropic Times, to Lisa Albrecht.

  Speaking of Lisa... I hadn’t spoken with her once since I’d mailed her letter to her ex-husband. He had to have received it by now—had he called her? The total radio silence on her end wasn’t a good sign—knowing Lisa, it probably meant she’d slid back into her overbearing, controlling quasi-stalking of Theodore, and wanted no interference from me.

  And I couldn’t even make myself pick up the phone and find out.

  I stared at the blinking cursor for what felt like hours, typing not so much as a “the.” For the first time I understood the term “writer’s block”—I had it in spades. Or therapist’s block. Or human block. It was ridiculous for me to be writing this column—I had nothing at all of any value to impart to anyone else.

  I finally scratched out nine hundred words about not letting feelings of rejection and hurt overwhelm you after a breakup. It was pap—in the same vein as the treacly self-help books I’d mocked Sasha for in the car. And it was crap—complete bullshit. But I had a deadline to meet and I had to turn in something. I hit send without even giving the article a final edit.

  I called Sasha. Fourteen times. She didn’t pick up on any of them.

  On Monday morning at seven thirty, the doorbell dragged me out of bed, where I’d been lying staring at my yellowed popcorn ceiling since just before five. My dad stood on the front porch with deli bags in his hands and a rise-and-shine smile on his face. “Ya ready to get this house into shape, doll?”

  No. I wasn’t ready for that. The house was a dump, and trying to renovate it into something lovely was like slapping lipstick on a corpse. But I manufactured a smile that felt like a crevice in my face and pushed some inflection into my voice when I said, “Sure, Daddy! Let me change into my work clothes.”

  We worked all day, nailing in two-by-fours to reinforce the joists, fitting the sheets of drywall into place, screwing them to the studs, taping and floating. For the first time I could remember, I didn’t chatter to my dad as he buried himself in a project. We worked smoothly, as a team, but in near total silence broken only by the occasional instruction from him. By the time we swiped the last trowelful of joint compound over it, the bathroom wall looked as smooth and pristine as new construction—and I felt no pleasure as we stood to admire our handiwork.

  “How ’bout that, doll,” my dad said, gazing proudly at the perfect job he’d done.

  “It’s like it never happened.”

  My father shrugged. “You can’t undo the damage. But since it let us get inside the wall...the new plumbing, the reinforced joists...it’s practically in better shape now than it was before,” he said, smiling.

  “That’s great, Daddy. Thank you.”

  “Doll.” He turned to face me. “What’s wrong?”

  As soon as he spoke, I felt my eyes turn prickly and hot, and my throat grew too tight for speech. I was in imminent danger of sobbing like a wounded child—which would throw my dad entirely for a loop, and was the last thing he needed right now. I turned away, pretending to rub at the waxy grime along the doorjamb from years of passing shoulders. Tears had filled my eyes so full that I was afraid to blink them away for fear of sending them spilling down my cheeks. I swallowed—hard, twice—and gathered myself. I had no intention of unloading on him about my fight with Sasha and my humiliation with Chip and my brush with Johnny Law. And I couldn’t say anything about Stu and Sasha, because I had no idea whether Dad already knew—and once their hookup ran its course it would be better if he didn’t. But I had to tell him something.

  “Dad,” I said, breathing deep and willing myself calm. “Kendall and I broke up.”

  “Oh...” His face seemed to lose its muscle support beneath the skin, and his eyes grew soft and sad. “Oh, doll. I’m... Gosh, I’m sorry. You liked him an awful lot, huh?”

  I nodded. It felt like years ago now, but I thought I loved him. I wanted—needed—him to be the one. My eyes prickled again.

  “Sweetheart...” He reached out a hand and rubbed awkwardly up and down my upper arm. And then he rested it on my shoulder, holding me with a firm grip. The Dad equivalent of a sloppy hug. I reached up and twined my fingers with his and we just stood there like that, staring at the work we’d done and not at each other, for a stretch of time that should have felt uncomfortable, but didn’t.

  After a little while he pulled his hand away and gestured back toward the wall with it. “You know, it’s just one little thing, doll. But I think it looks pretty good. Ya gotta start somewhere, huh?”

  I leaned into his shoulder as I followed his gaze. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess so, Daddy.”

  My phone rang later that night, and I leaped for it. But it wasn’t Sasha—or anyone else I hoped to hear from.

  “What is this?” Lisa Albrecht’s acerbic voice barked.

  I gritted my teeth. I wasn’t in the mood for an Albrecht Attack. “Hello, Lisa. I’m fine, thanks. How are you?”

  “What the hell is this column, Miss ‘Breakup Doctor’? Did you take a Tony Robbins seminar? Are you plagiarizing Marianne Williamson?”

  I stayed determinedly silent, letting Lisa marinate in her own abrasiveness. After a thick pause, I heard a hard, deliberate sigh, and then:

  “I am fine, Brook. How are you?” She spit it out staccato, and I could tell each word was choking her.

  “I’m okay, thanks,” I said pleasantly. “Nice of you to ask.”

  “You realize these are just time-wasting platitudes. No one really gives a crap about the answers.”

  “I do, Lisa. I actually do.” And I felt a rush of relief to realize it was true—despite everything that had happened lately, as soon as I heard Lisa’s (admittedly shrill and sarcastic) voice, I was concerned about her. I really did want to know how she was doing. Helping people was what I did, even if I was too pathetic and stupid at the moment to help myself. “How are things going with you—have you heard back from Theodore about the letter?”

  Another swampy pause, and then: “No. Well, yes, actually. Sort of.”

  “What do you mean?”

  And then we were having an actual conversation, rather than the usual angry monologue Lisa treated me to. She’d waited days for the letter to find its way into Theodore’s hands, s
he said, forcing herself per my instructions not to call him and grill him about it.

  “I left the house without my phone one night and just went for a drive to keep myself from calling,” she told me. Another night she watched a movie with the twins and literally sat on her hands so she wouldn’t be tempted. “I kept hearing your voice telling me I was pushing him into a corner. And I know...well, I hate feeling trapped like that, so I figured he must too.”

  Empathy. From Lisa Albrecht. Wow.

  Finally, when Lisa had been just about ready to drive over there and force him to talk to her, the boys came home from having dinner with their father, and Michael casually said, “Dad asked how you were doing. I told him how amazing you were being—really strong and centered about all of it.”

  “I was ready to tear into a list of all the ways he screwed up our lives,” Lisa said to me. “And then I thought... Well, this sounds stupid, I guess, but I kind of heard what my son had said—that he thought I was handling it so well. And I liked that. I don’t want the boys learning that if life lets you down, you fall apart.”

  Ugh. No. Terrible thing to teach them. Thank God I wasn’t their parent.

  I gave Lisa lots of praise for her behavior—I’d already learned she responded to it like an eager puppy. And by the time we got back to the reason for her call—my subpar, phoned-in column—she was calmer and more constructive. And, I realized as we talked, she was a damn good editor. She called me on every cliché, showed me where the rhythm of the article stalled, and batted around ideas with me until I hung up ready to overhaul the column into what I really wanted to say.

  I worked late into the night, but I was hardly conscious of the hours passing. When I finally hit send and powered down my computer, it was nearly midnight. I went to bed and fell into the first dreamless sleep I’d had in weeks.

  twenty-eight

  Sometimes you don’t realize just how largely someone figures in your life until they’re totally out of it.