by Audrey Bell
Maybe I'd be fine if I dumped Tyler. I could date a freshman lacrosse player, or The Silent Rower, who was actually much more legendary for his looks than his silence. He’d started talking his sophomore year, not a lot, but like a normal amount, which was too bad since he had a terrible personality.
He did look almost exactly like Johnny Depp, though. If he had stayed silent, he would've been the perfect husband.
Thinking of perfect husbands, I sighed and texted Tyler's psychotic little sister, Angelica.
Have Tyler call me as soon as someone bails him out. What trash.
I stared at my phone.
She sent me an emoji. Of a crying face.
This girl was the worst. I set my phone aside to keep from throwing it into the hand-painted white and lavender walls that my mother made such a fuss over.
I picked up my laptop and my margarita and walked towards my meditation center/yoga studio to friend more attractive people on Facebook and stare at pictures of The Silent Rower.
Maybe I could fix his personality. I cocked my head and friended him too. I tipped my martini back and frowned. This was not the right environment to recover in.
I friended my TA from Intro to Econ my freshman year who told me that he didn't think I had a very good work ethic.
And then I went to Tyler’s page, which he kept under a fake name, and I clicked through every picture and wondered if he’d ever call me.
He did, around 11 o’clock when I’d started humming along to “I Will Survive” in a bubble bath.
“You fucker,” I said, when the customized ring tone—ACDC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” disrupted my plans to drown in the bath.
“January,” he said. “Let me come over and explain.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “Why were you at a strip club? And since when do you do cocaine?”
“It’s not like I’m an addict.”
“That’s not what your agent said. He said you’re going to rehab.”
“To protect my image.”
“What image?” I scoffed. I squinted at my toes and splashed as I reached for the margarita. “Nobody knows who you are. You and your twisted little sister live in this delusional parallel universe where you think people care about mid-level NASCAR drivers. Well, they don’t. And you do have a drug problem. Obviously. Because what kind of person aside from a coke addict goes to a strip club at three o’clock on a fucking Thursday afternoon when they’re supposed to be signing a prenup with their fiancée,” I asked.
“January, baby.”
“Fuck off,” I said.
I hung up the phone.
It rang again.
She was a fast machine. She kept her motor clean. She was the best daaaamn woman that I'd ever seen.
I hated that song.
I answered it. "Fuck off is a pretty simple sentence. Did you not understand it? Or do you just not care that I don't want to talk to you right now?”
“This shouldn't change anything," he said. “Look, it was a mistake. But it's not like I betrayed you.”
"You were doing cocaine with strippers! Strippers!"
"I didn't sleep with any of them," he said defensively.
"Cocaine! Strippers!" I repeated.
"Would you stop yelling?"
"Look," I said. "I'm pretty pissed off right now. So, if you don't want me to yell, maybe call someone else."
"I think you're overreacting," he said.
"STRIPPERS, COCAINE, ARRESTED, REHAB," I spluttered, trying to think of the best way to say you've gotta be fucking kidding me. You cannot overreact to this kind of shit. It is impossible.
"Right. I made a mistake. I know that. Come on. Let me talk to you. I’m the same guy.”
That was the problem. "I know you're the same guy. Do you want to know who’s surprised that this happened? Nobody. Nobody is surprised. Except for me. And do you want to know why? I'm an idiot. I defended you to them. I defended you to literally everybody I know. And I was wrong. You are the same guy. Always have been. Always will be. I was just stupid enough to think I'd changed you."
“I made a mistake,” he said. “January, come on. Please. I made a mistake. I’m nervous about the engagement. That’s all. I just—we’re young, you know? This has been a whirlwind, baby. It’s only been four months. You know what I’m saying? Married sounds so permanent. You know?”
“No, I do not know, since you’re the one who asked me to marry you,” I snapped.
“Can I come over?”
“No,” I said.
“I’m in your driveway.”
“Well, that's disgusting. I mean, why do we even have gates? You're illegal. Go away. I don’t want to see you right now, Tyler.” I looked across my bathroom and for the first time the rage dissipated and it was replaced by something like sadness. “Do you even want to marry me?”
He didn’t say anything for a second. “I don’t know.”
I muffled a screech. “Well, why did you ask me then?”
“I don’t know!” he repeated. “I don’t know. I think I want to marry you. But, Jan—”
“You think? Okay. I've figured this all out for you, Tyler. You know what? You were on drugs. You were on drugs, so you asked me to marry you and you’re still on drugs, so now you’re confused,” I concluded. “You definitely need to go to rehab. And by the way, your shrubbery is the tackiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
I ended the call and sunk underneath the foaming bubbles, until I was yet again interrupted by the aggravating noise of she was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean.
I came up for air, grabbed my iPhone, and freaked out: “What the hell did you do to my phone by the way? I hate this fucking song,” I said. “I’m sitting here, in my bath, trying to relax, because I have a stress headache the size of Montana and my margarita isn’t chilled, and I have to listen to this seizure-inducing idiocy that you programmed onto my phone. I don’t even know how you figured out how to do that, since you can’t even figure out whether or not you want to marry me, but it is seriously fucking with my Zen."
“January,” he said, “I love you.”
“Well, I think you're a monster.”
“I wanted to blow off a little steam!”
“So go shopping or have a margarita. Don’t go to a strip club and do cocaine and get arrested with a harem of hobags and tell me you don’t know if you want to marry me!” I said. “Tyler, the only way any of this makes sense to me is if you’ve been a drug addict this whole time.”
“No. That’s not what it was,” he said. “Maybe it’s that you make me fucking insane. Have you thought about that?"
“Oh, so it’s my fault you’re on drugs? You know what? My parents were right. We don’t belong together.”
“Then I want the ring back.”
“Yeah, so does the Tacky Hall of Fame,” I snapped. “Good luck in rehab. I really hope you get me out of your system.” I ended the call, turned the phone off, and tossed it onto my bathmat.
What a fucking freak. What a fucking loser. I slurped on the dregs of my margarita and started to cry and then I slid down into the bubbles and screamed underneath the water.
Christian
Dr. Ferry had left the message on the answering machine at my parents' home. He couldn't have known how much trouble that would cause me.
"The doctor has news," my father told me when he called. "I'm outside your building, come down."
I was renting a shitty apartment on the third floor of a building that could've passed for a tenement house. My father claimed he had grounds to investigate it just based on the state of the gutters.
"I can call him back," I said. I didn't want to get out of bed, didn't want him to ask me why I smelled like a barroom floor, who had split my lip, and how my eyes had gotten so bloodshot.
I didn't want to see his hopes shattered, because I knew whatever the doctor had to say would be bad news.
I knew this like I knew my heart was beating. I knew it like I knew pain
, thoroughly and deeply, and in places where I could never rinse it out.
My father's voice at the end of the phone was full of hope. I could hear him smiling. "Nah, we'll go together."
"Alright," I conceded. "Let me jump in the shower and I'll be right down."
"No rush. I got coffee."
Shit.
He was idling in his cop car, which I'd hated getting into as a kid, on the rare days he didn't have time to stop home for the pickup.
I wasn't embarrassed of the car anymore, but it made getting around a horror show, every car in front of you drove five miles below the speed limit and stopped sharply at yellow lights.
I accepted the cup of coffee.
“You look like shit, Christian.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He shook his head, only half-serious, “What kind of trouble did you get into last night?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“So what happened to your mouth?”
“Front door,” I said.
He gave me a hard look. “Bullshit.”
I shook my head.
"How did the other guy look?"
"It was a door, so it came out looking just fine," I lied. He smiled and nodded. He believed me. Maybe I'd gotten better at lying to him—I'd never have gotten him to swallow that in high school—or maybe he was desperate to believe the best in me.
"So, the MRI must've shown something big if he wants us to come in, don't you think?" he asked.
I nodded. I tugged at my ear. “Yeah. You know it's not likely good news, right?”
“Don't think like that, Chris.”
“Doesn't matter how I think, Dad. The MRI isn't going to change just because I'm being realistic.”
He shook his head. “This could be a good thing.”
The coffee had gotten cold in the Styrofoam cup, and it was black, the way my dad took it. Sam too. I drank it quickly to keep from snapping at him. I had walked around on that gnarled leg, felt its deep aching and its deadness. I knew the last surgery didn't do what it was supposed to do and I knew it never really would be the same. That's what everyone had been telling me. Even Dr. Ferry with all of his improbable patients. He'd told me I was unlikely to fully recover, though he would try.
My father never believed he really meant that.
That was hard. He was a cop—a good one, a detective. And he couldn't see something that everyone saw a long time ago.
By the time we reached Dr. Ferry's office, I had time to get nervous. My father noticed that in the elevator.
“Relax,” he said. “It'll be good news.”
“You don't know that.”
“You deserve it though.”
I didn't believe that. Even I did think I deserved some sort of miracle, I knew it wouldn't matter. And I didn't believe I deserved anything.
Dr. Ferry usually told bad jokes. He liked puns, and stories about his son, Daniel, who was four, gap-toothed and in framed pictures all over Ferry's office.
But he didn't tell any jokes today, just smiled grimly and shook my hand.
We sat down in the chairs across from his desk and he dimmed the lights and turned his attention to a projector mounted on the wall.
"I'm very sorry about this, Christian, but the ligament graft simply did not take," he said.
You could see it on the first image, how the bone in my leg was thin and knotted from where it had been broken and set and then reset. And you could see when he moved the laser pointer along my knee to the place where I was supposed to have two new ligaments. There was nothing there, just frayed wisps of tissue. They’d been completely eviscerated. "I have no idea how you're even walking on it," he admitted.
I closed my eyes.
"I'm sorry. I know this isn't what you want to hear. But there are—”
My father interrupted. "Wait, we talked about him returning to hockey this year. What happened?"
"I tried to be very conservative in our estimate," he said quietly. And that was true. He had been. I'd heard him, urging caution at each appointment.
"You said you could do for him what you did for that Newell kid."
"I did not say that. This is a very different injury, Officer Cutlass."
"Well, what's the next step? We try another surgery? I mean, this is a real setback, it took him months to come back from the surgery because of all the cut—”
"I am concerned that by repeatedly subjecting this leg to invasive surgery, we might damage his muscle tissue irreparably," Dr. Ferry said. "And I'm not confident, given the number of surgeries he's had that've required aggressive antibiotics, whether or not the risk of infection would be worth, what, to me, from the condition of the leg now, looks like a shot in the dark." He paused. "He can have a normal, functional life without a functional ACL and with a damaged hamstring, but he won't be able to play college-level hockey. I think we need to start making plans for a different kind of future."
"This is bullshit," my father said. He got to his feet. Dr. Ferry reached for the lights. "I don't have to listen to this shit and neither does Christian. We'll find someone who knows what they're doing."
"Dad," I said.
"Let's go, Christian. We'll find someone better."
He reached the door.
"I think it would be best if we sat down and talked about it," Dr. Ferry said.
"Christian!" my father barked.
"I want to hear what he has to say," I said.
"It's bullshit. He wants you to quit," he snarled. "Let's go."
"Wait for me in the car, then," I said shortly.
"Suit yourself," he said. The door behind him closed heavily.
I winced. "I'm sorry about him. He's...he's had a hard time with this."
Dr. Ferry nodded. "I've seen worse." He flashed me a grim smile. "No father wants bad news about his kid."
"I know." I took a deep breath. "So, what's next?"
He turned off the projector and looked at me. "You do gentler physical therapy, to strengthen the muscles you do have. Maybe we can try again in a few years. In an effort to salvage your athletic career, you did highly invasive, risky surgeries in quick succession, which we'd never do for someone just trying to regain a decent level of mobility. If we give it some time, maybe two or three years, we might be able to revisit an allograft." He rubbed his chin. "I am sorry it didn't work. We knew there was a high probability with everything that you had been through that your body might reject the new ligaments."
I nodded.
"I'm sure this is disappointing. For you and obviously your father."
"Nah," I said. "It’s fine. So I'll call the office to set up physical therapy?"
"Yeah, and listen, I'm sure you're dealing psychologically with the loss of your career...I think it could be really helpful to talk to a psychiat..."
"I'm good," I said, cutting him off. I flashed him a smile. "No worries."
My father looked like he'd been crying when I got into the car and it was almost enough to make me want to call up Ness. Tell her—whatever it is you got into after the crash, I want to get into that. I want to be bombed out of my mind too.
We didn’t talk until we’d arrived back at my building.
"I can't believe you live in this hellhole," my father muttered. My landlord was in his boxers, smoking on the front porch.
"I like it."
"Nobody could like this. Your super looks like a sex offender."
I laughed.
"Look, I'm sorry I got upset back there."
"It's fine," I said. I got out of the car and leaned down as he kept talking.
"You know, there's this doctor out in Paolo Alto doing experimental..."
I shook my head. “No, Dad.”
"You can't quit on this, Chris. This is your life we're talking about."
I shrugged. "My life is different now."
I closed the door and walked towards my building.
"Christian," my dad called out his window.
I smiled and
lifted my hand to wave at him. But I didn't stop walking away.
January
I sent Tyler his ring by FedEx to the rehab facility in California he’d checked into. It had some name like Vows or Beautiful Sunset or Horizons on Acid. Something ridiculous. Hopefully, he'd meet the kind of crack addict who deserved him.
He didn't tell me whether or not he received it, but Angelica would not leave me the fuck alone.
She drove over to my house to try and give me presents from Tyler every single morning. And while Cinta always knew to turn her away, my mother never did.
I had reached my final straw on a Tuesday, when my mother let Angelica into our house, and told me that the nasty paisley lacquer clutch that Angelica "gave" me wasn't death itself.
"I have to get out of this stupid town and away from these stupid people," I said.
"I don't mind Angelica. I'm glad things with Tyler are over, but Angelica has potential."
"To what? Make me murder her?" I asked. "I need to leave."
"You're being dramatic."
I called my father's assistant. "I need to move my flight to like now."
Brooke sighed, but found me a new flight. She was amazing. Hopefully, one day, they will be able to clone her so I can hire her too.
"What are you even going to do in Boston?" my mother demanded, following me as I flounced from my bedroom to the front hallway with my carry-on bag, laptop, and Xanax. "Your stuff won't even get there until next week."
"I don't need my stuff. I need some peace," I said. "Which I can't get because you keep letting Angelica Snow into my house and Dad won't stop talking about how stupid I am to have ever gone out with Tyler."
"You're being a little dramatic," she said.
"Don’t you have something else to do?" I asked. "Like, aside from harassing me about what I'm going to do in Boston? I’m a very capable girl. I know how to make plans."
Cambridge, MA
It took forever for Lupita and the movers to get my apartment in Cambridge set up. And I was, first of all, aggravated by how long it took. But as soon as they left, I walked around the two-bedroom apartment, shivering. I felt totally abandoned. Lupita should have stayed with me.
