by Melissa Ford
“Ari?” Noah questions.
“Either you are the most clueless person in the world or you did that just to mess with me.”
He startles, clearly having no clue as to why I’m standing in Union Square, keening loudly like a moirologist bringing the proper hysteria to a funeral. I try to get control of myself, but I don’t even have a tissue to blow my nose, and my breaths are coming out as shallow shudders. Ever the gentleman, like an etiquette-driven Superman, Noah leaps sidewalk squares in a single bound and purchases a pack of tissues from a nearby bodega. He even opens them before he hands them to me, neatly slitting the plastic so I can pull out the first one easily.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asks.
“Are you kidding me? You told me you liked me and then you brought me to Jill Storey’s to look at rings?”
I blow my nose and gesture back at the store’s sign, and I see Noah’s face change as understanding washes over it, and his mouth drops open as he starts to rub my arm. “Ari, I’m so sorry. I really didn’t think . . . It’s just that you’re with Ethan. I was asking your advice as a friend.”
“A friend who didn’t even know you were dating someone? Wow, sounds like a close friendship,” I snarl. I start walking, but his long legs only need one step for every two of mine, so no matter how quickly I stride, he remains beside me, my shoulder almost touching his arm. I throw out the empty jewelry store bag in a trash can as we pass.
He brings his head close to mine so I can hear him around the street noise. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you about Bee. I mean, we don’t really talk about our relationships. I don’t know a lot about Ethan.”
“You’ve met him,” I hiss. “He came to the studio with me, and you met him and gave him a Ken Regan photo. You know three billion things about him.”
“That’s overstating it,” Noah sighs. “I mean, you and I talk about writing and fashion.”
“We talk about untranslatable words like koi no yokan. We talk about your book that you never told anyone about. We talk about cancer and oral sex. Oh my God, I told you about oral sex.”
The stragglers from a tourist group next to us look over at me in disgust when I practically shout out that last thought, but I don’t care. I don’t care who hears me right now. I am mortified that I ever considered leaving Ethan for Noah. That I even considered it for one second. Because Noah is right. Our relationship isn’t really built on a lot of substance. He doesn’t know how I feel about being a mother or that I cry at sappy commercials. All he knows are stories—little vignettes delivered in pretty boxes, wrapped up in bows. We’ve never even spent a whole day together much less seen what the other person looks like when they wake up in the morning or when they’re sick or when they’re stumbling home after twenty-six hours of Fashion Week preparations. We’ve never had a fight or made up from a fight. He hasn’t been there for my best and my worst and all the mundane moments in between.
He looks at me calmly, and I want to smack the concerned expression off his face. I’m the Midwesterner; I’m the one that’s supposed to be even-keeled. He’s the one who’s supposed to be riled up; I’m usually unflappable. I don’t feel like myself in Francesca’s shoes.
It dawns on me that this is what it must be like for Ethan, to feel all of his passion and excitement, heart racing and mind trying to keep up, and he’s met by my imperturbable demeanor. So why is Noah making me feel so wholly unlike myself? Why can’t I simply let this argument go and walk away? I may still be able to catch the middle of Rear Window.
“You said you liked me,” I tell him. “You said it more than once.”
“I do,” Noah says. “I mean, I’ve had a crush on you since we first met at the dry cleaners. But I’ve known since the beginning that it’s a no-go. I would never get in the way of your relationship with Ethan.”
“But you have. Don’t you see that? Telling a girl that you like her, asking her to meet you at Jill Storey’s. You have gotten in the way of my relationship with Ethan.”
Noah is quiet, and once I say it aloud, I think about how silly it sounds outside my head. Why did I make such a big deal over the fact that he said he liked me? There are plenty of people I like, but it doesn’t mean that I want to be in a relationship with them. I was inflating the word in the same way that Rachel presumed things when I told her about our first coffee date after the dry cleaners. I close my eyes tightly and stop walking for a moment. I wish I could take my words back.
“Come on, Quinn. I’m sorry. I really didn’t think that asking you to meet me here was such a big deal.”
I take a deep breath, feeling as if my thoughts are coming at me too quickly to process, like taxicabs darting through intersections after the light changes. I gently lean my head against his chest. It is the first time he has ever touched me—really touched me—and I’m relieved that it feels wrong. He strokes the back of my head, but it doesn’t feel comforting like it does with Ethan. I stare at the tips of his shoes.
“You did. You led me on,” I say sadly, poking my finger into his chest for good measure, pushing his words back into his chest. “You made me think that things were going to happen with us, throwing out all those untranslatable words, telling me that you liked me.”
“I’m sorry if that’s what you thought. But I never saw things that way. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise by saying those things.”
“Well that’s the problem, Emmy Award-winning writer. Words mean something.” I take a step back away from him. He looks genuinely surprised, like a person who took a drink expecting water and found himself with a mouthful of vodka.
I am suddenly so tired, as if I’ve been standing here in Union Square for days, a living statue. I close my eyes again, shutting out Manhattan, feeling my body sway gently even though I’m doing nothing to move it. He’s going to go home and give Bee a ring, and I’m going to go home and have to reconcile with Ethan everything I realized today. I feel like an island, all alone, free floating in a sea of pairs, a singularity collapsed in on itself, a dark void of loneliness amid all the stars. Maybe there is no one out there like me. Maybe I’ve been misinterpreting signals from distant planets all along.
“Hey, Ari, for what it’s worth. I really do like you.”
I feel his fingers brush my cheek and his lips find mine for a brief second. I don’t kiss back.
I never get to the Film Forum, but he gives me a movie moment, kissing me softly on a corner of Union Square like a 1960s Manhattan heroine, and then he walks away. I don’t open my eyes until I’m certain he’s gone.
AS I WALK INTO the apartment, I feel like a bag of glass, all shards and fragile pieces. Beckett squeals when I enter, standing up to lunge directly at me, and I bury my face in his neck, breathing in his simple, familiar scent. Martina catches me up on the day, the time of the last diaper change, Beckett’s nonexistent nap. She gives Beckett a kiss good-bye and then pauses at the door. “Your mother called. It sounded urgent.”
I kick off Francesca’s boots and start to feel like myself again, looking at all the household objects around me. Those are my framed photographs and books and Beckett’s toy basket and the door to our bedroom. I let Noah mentally go, like a balloon that I’ve been clutching as I walked through all the noise and commotion of a fair, and now in the quiet moment before I get in my car to leave the carnival, I release the string, watching him float away somewhere into the expanse above Manhattan.
No one knows what happened this afternoon except Noah and myself, and I have no plans to ever speak to him again. Which means no Thanksgiving dinner where I wear the half-finished dress hanging in my closet. No celebrity introductions, no jumpstarting Arianna Quinn Designs. No more Nightly tapings or funny text messages breaking up my day.
“Fuck,” I exhale to myself, breaking my own rule of never cursing within earshot of Beckett. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
If I’ve let Noah go, then why do I still feel a residue on my skin, the stickiness that comes from how he loops into all of my issues with Ethan? It took being with Noah to realize that Ethan and I don’t see the world in the same way, nor do we want the same things out of life, and I’m not sure how we can reconcile that unless we’re both willing to change. And that comes with the newfound realization that there is nothing behind the exit door, no shiny, exciting prize. There’s just an empty room.
“I should probably call Grandma and get this over with, right?” I ask Beckett. I sigh and set him down on the floor, and he immediately grabs for one of his toy cars and starts trying to pry off the wheels.
I dial my parents’ number while I stand at the counter. When I hear my mother’s voice, something breaks inside of me, tearing open the small, sad space that’s been crusting over ever since I got away from Union Square. I wish I were on my mother’s tan sofa. I want her to hold me, tell me that everything is going to be okay. That Ethan and I will figure this out, and I’ll be able to launch my career even with the Noah-shaped hole he just left in my life plan.
But I take a deep breath and put on my sunniest voice, as if it’s a costume I’m slipping on over my head. “What’s up? Martina told me you called.”
“You sound awful,” my mother tells me the moment she hears my voice.
Life would be a lot easier if I was like my mother. My mother would have never gone to coffee with a man she met at the dry cleaners. My mother has never worried that she isn’t creative or making a name for herself or doing something important with her life. My mother doesn’t worry how she’s like my father. She has her friends—The Girls—and my father and me. She has her church and other organizations around Minnetonka. And that’s enough. She’s made that be enough for herself. I’m the one who maybe wants too much, more than reality is willing to offer.
“I have Rachel’s bachelorette party tonight,” I tell my mother. “I don’t really want to go.”
“Now, Arianna, put on a happy face for her. Your time will come, too.”
I give an exaggerated grin, even though my mother can’t see me through the phone, and then drop back down to a straight face. “What if I came home for the weekend? Beckett and I could use a break from the city.” I could rent a car, start driving tonight, Beckett in the backseat and show tunes playing on the stereo like musical hope. We could drive through the dark hush of Ohio, curve around Lake Michigan, cross Wisconsin at daybreak and race the sun toward Lake Minnetonka. I’ve mapped it out before. It’s twenty hours of driving, crossing the Mississippi River.
“We’d love to see you, Ari. What about early November?”
“I don’t want to wait,” I tell her, picking up Beckett. We go and lie down together on the sofa, and he runs his car over my face and down my neck. “I think I’ll look for a plane ticket tonight on one of those last-minute travel sites. Maybe I’ll find a good price for the two of us to come home this weekend.”
My mother is silent, and I wonder if she’s judging me. “After Rachel’s bachelorette party. We would leave in the morning. I wouldn’t be missing anything.” I hear her sigh, like air escaping out of a bike tire as you ride it down the driveway.
“I hate to tell you something like this over a telephone, but I guess I have no choice since you’re all the way over there in New York City. I don’t want you to get yourself worried or upset, especially not before Rachel’s party. This is such a big thing for her, a girl’s wedding. So I am going to tell you something and then I need you to set it out of your mind for the rest of the evening.”
I am accustomed to my mother’s slowness, her ability to take the most nothing story and stretch it out for what seems like hours. I stare at the ceiling as Beckett’s car passes over my collarbone.
“Spit it out,” I tell her.
“I told you that the doctor found something strange and was concerned, so he ran some extra tests.”
“No,” I say, sitting up despite Beckett’s protests. He rejects me and climbs off my lap once I become an upright road. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“Yes, I did,” my mother insists. “It was right after Fashion Week, and we were talking about October.”
I close my eyes, trying to remember the conversation. “You didn’t say anything about the doctor finding something strange. What kind of strange?”
Before she says it, I know. I know in the way that identical twins sometimes report sensing something about the other one despite being halfway across the world from each other. My mother and I share the same blond hair, the same fine bone structure, the same translucent skin that burns in summer. And somewhere deep in our bodies, imprinted in our shared DNA, is some form of primal communication, blood drop Morse code pulsing through my veins, spelling out the obvious.
“Well, there was a lump, Arianna. In my breast. You know I don’t like to talk about these things, and I really don’t want to worry you. But the doctor’s needle test came back inconclusive, so he scheduled me last week for something called a core needle biopsy. And that test came back with a not-good result.”
“What does a not-good result mean?”
“Please, Arianna, it’s cancerous. A not-good result means cancer. And I have to have surgery in early November to remove the mass. I just wanted you to be here so your father won’t be alone. You know how he gets. He can’t even boil water for himself when he’s flustered.”
“So you have breast cancer?” I ask in the smallest voice, grateful that Beckett doesn’t know this word yet.
“I hate that word,” my mother says. “It sounds so . . . pink. Let’s just say that I have a lump in my breast and leave it at that. It’s barely cancer. The whole thing could be over with this surgery. It probably will be over with this surgery. It’s a very little lump.”
The front door opens and Ethan enters, oblivious to the fact that my life has been blown apart and I feel as thin as paper.
“Send me the dates; I’ll look for a plane ticket tonight. Of course I’ll be there for Dad, but I’m really scared about you.”
“Oh, Arianna, don’t be hysterical. It’s an outpatient procedure. I’m not worried. You’ve always been too emotional.”
I roll my eyes to the ceiling to pretend I don’t notice Ethan’s questioning look as he sets down his book bag. I’m a cold island, holding everyone at arm’s distance to Ethan, and an overexcited handwringer to my mother. I can’t win.
I hang up the phone gently and continue to stare at the ceiling. “What was that about? Are you going home to Minnesota?” Ethan asks casually. “Without me?”
“My mother has a lump in her breast.”
I needed to just say it, and once the words are out of my mouth, blunt and flat, they feel like dropping a paving stone. Part of me wants to jump out of the way to ensure that none of me gets crushed under the weight of the words. The other part of me knows that the words need to lie there in order to have something to step on, to make it through to the other side.
And then I launch myself into Ethan’s arms, and it’s the exact opposite of how it felt with Noah. It feels like I’m coming home. He envelops me in a tight hug, stroking my hair and murmuring something into the follicles, as if my scalp has a direct line into my brain. I bury my face in his shirt, trying to blot out everything I thought today when I was riding on the subway on the way to Noah.
“Holy shit, Ethan. My mother has breast cancer.” I say it a few more times, almost as if I’m trying to make myself believe it. I can feel Ethan nodding above my head, and I release him and start pacing around the room. If I can keep moving, this will make sense. If I can keep moving, then I will arrive at another point, one with a future that is entirely within my control and understanding. I start picking up Beckett’s toys and depositing them in his toy box.
“Right, so I’ll look for plane tickets in a mo
ment,” I mutter to myself. “I’ll have to tell Martina that I’m taking Beckett with me. I’ll figure out meals for my dad once I get out there . . .”
“I’d like to go, too,” Ethan says.
“It’s too hard to take off in the middle of school,” I tell him. “No, it’s better for me to just go out there and do this. My mother would hate it if we made a fuss over her. I mean, this is going to be it, right? Some women just have the lump removed and then life goes on.”
“Yeah,” Ethan says in agreement. “But I still want to go with you. I mean, not to be there for her, but to be there for you. My school will understand, and if they don’t, I can always quit.”
“No,” I hear myself say, as if someone else has taken control of my voice, a ventriloquist. “See, that is the problem. Quitting is your first response. You’re always prepared to run.”
“Come on, Ari. People matter more than jobs.”
“They do, they do, you’re right, they do. But no, in this case, your job matters more than coming out to Minnesota. I told you, I’m fine doing this on my own. I want to do this on my own.”
“I know, you’re Arianna Quinn and you like to do things all by yourself. But your mother has cancer. Could you let me in right now? Just for a few minutes? To be there for you?”
I run out of toys to put away, and I start tackling the dishes in the sink. I squirt too much detergent onto the sponge, and it makes me want to cry as I see it drip down the side. It’s just soap, but it feels like everything else, slipping away. I attack the dried coffee at the bottom of the mugs, the cream cheese that is clinging to the plates. “Can you stop moving for one second?” Ethan asks. I glance over my shoulder, and he’s holding Beckett.
“I don’t want you to switch jobs every two seconds. I want you to stick with something.”
“Who said anything about switching jobs? And more to the point, I didn’t realize my job affected you,” Ethan comments.
