Drowning Erin

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  I arrive at dinner exhausted. Both the late night calls from my father and the nightmare about the tidal wave seem to be happening more frequently. Between the two I got very little sleep last night.

  When I mention my half-assed job search, Rob suggests I do a different type of marketing. “Working for a non-profit is never going to make you money,” he says. “Why not do what you’re good at and make a decent living at the same time?” He starts talking about marketing for a wealth management firm like his own, and though he means well, it’s a struggle not to fall asleep listening.

  If this were Brendan here, he’d be encouraging me not to settle. He’d swear somehow it would all work out. And a part of me wants that, wants to feel optimistic and hopeful about the future, excited by its possibilities. Except that sort of unrealistic thinking is just like Brendan himself: fun while it lasts, but gets me nowhere in the long run.

  As he drops me off, Rob mentions that he has an event he needs to make an appearance at on Saturday. He wants me to come with him.

  “It’s a grand opening. Cocktail attire. You know I hate going to those things alone.”

  I hate going to those things too, but mostly I’m hard pressed to imagine how dressing up and going to an opening won’t feel like a date.

  He grins. “You’re so transparent. It’s not a date, okay? I swear. It’s not a date. Just come with me, and then I’ll drive you home and shake your hand at the door. Hell, if it makes you feel better, I won’t even walk you to the door.”

  I sigh. “I don’t know, Rob.”

  “I won’t even fully stop the car—you can jump.”

  I laugh. “You’re impossible to say no to. You know that?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping,” he says, nodding toward the ring on my finger—not my engagement ring but an emerald he bought on our first anniversary. "Because maybe that ring isn’t the only thing from our past worth keeping.”

  "I like lots of things from our past."

  "I could have done a lot better, though. The longer I'm back, the more I’m realizing it,” he says, pulling my hands across the console into his. “If you give me another chance, I’m going to devote my entire life to making you happy.”

  I walk inside, feeling much better than I did before I saw him. And if being with him makes me feel better, and Brendan only causes pain, isn’t it obvious who I should want? What Rob and I had wasn’t perfect, but at least it was real.

  On Saturday I spend an inordinate amount of time getting ready. I’m wearing a dress of Harper’s—slinky and silver. "It's about time you started caring," she says as she curls my hair.

  I don’t actually care, but I’m trying to make myself care. Brendan moved on. I ought to at least pretend I have too.

  Rob arrives wearing a suit, reminding me how much I used to love watching him dress in the morning. I almost can’t fault the girls in his office for throwing themselves at him. Almost.

  “You look unbelievable,” he says. “I’m going to be the most envied guy there.”

  I warm a little inside. I was merely a small blip in Brendan’s existence, so brief and inconsequential I don’t even mark a point in his time line. So inconsequential he couldn’t even walk away from his pool game to tell me so. But that’s not the case with Rob. He’s proud to be seen with me, and he wants everything I can give.

  We’ve driven for at least 10 minutes before I notice we’re heading away from the city. “Where are we going?” I ask. “There’s nothing out here.”

  “It’s a vineyard. I’m a minority partner, and tonight’s the official opening.”

  I release my air in small, controlled puffs. “Blue Mountain?”

  He glances at me. “I’m surprised you’ve heard of it.”

  “I think Brendan is friends with the owner,” I reply, my stomach knotting up. “Is he coming?”

  Rob’s smile fades. “No idea. We’ve only spoken twice since I got home. I dropped by his place yesterday—have you seen it?”

  It feels like a test, although maybe I’m just being paranoid. What if he saw something of mine there? God only knows what I left behind. I tell him I have, my pulse racing.

  “The girl he’s dating was there, so I only saw it from the hall, but what’s up with the holes everywhere? The place looks like it needs to be demoed.”

  I feel like I’ve been hit. Again. When is this thing with Brendan going to stop providing fresh sources of pain? He told me he didn’t let girls sleep over. God, I was stupid. I was so fucking stupid to believe him, to believe I was special somehow. I wonder if he’s delivering his speech about being in the bubble to this girl. Or maybe they aren’t in the bubble. Maybe she has what I did not, whatever magical properties are necessary to make Brendan want more.

  We arrive, and Brendan isn’t there, which feels like the first break I’ve gotten in weeks. But I still finish my first glass of wine in two gulps. My second one goes down almost as quickly.

  Rob starts introducing me to the other investors, and to the vineyard owner—who I never met with Brendan, thank God—and we fall into our familiar patterns. Bland social smiles, my hip brushing his thigh, his hand at the small of my back. This kind of event still isn’t my thing, but I don’t hate his role in it. I don’t hate the way he wants to show me off—the small, possessive things he does that Brendan never did.

  Rob leans down. “Are you doing okay?” he asks, his breath grazing my ear.

  I smile up at him and nod. “Yes. You?”

  “I’ve never been happier than I am right now,” he says, his hand wrapping around my hip. He leans down, pressing a kiss to the top of my head. “I’m gonna get us a sample of the shiraz. You’ll be okay for a second?”

  I nod, and watch him depart.

  An older woman leans toward me. “The two of you are adorable,” she says. “Newlyweds?”

  “Oh, uh…no. It’s not… No.” Well done, Erin. That made complete sense.

  “Well, you should be,” she says with a fond smile. “You’d have beautiful children.”

  There’s a low, unhappy laugh behind me. A laugh I could identify anywhere in the world, under any circumstances.

  “She’s right,” Brendan drawls. “You’re so adorable.”

  I turn slowly, bracing myself. His face is the only thing I’ve wanted to see for the past three weeks. I want to weep for how badly I’ve missed the sight of him: that sharp jaw and those slightly flushed cheekbones, eyes the palest possible blue against his tan. I’ve stared at that photo of him in a suit at Olivia’s wedding a thousand times, but tonight he puts that to shame. He is so beautiful that he breaks my heart all over again.

  “Hey, man, I didn’t know you’d be here,” Rob says, coming up behind me. “You know Chris?”

  Brendan’s eyes fall to Rob’s hand as it wraps around my waist, and I get a glimpse of that sneer of his. It’s a look I know well—I’ve seen it far too many times over the past few years.

  “Yeah,” Brendan replies. “You?”

  “Only recently. I invested in this place a while back.”

  I see a hint of tightness in Brendan’s jaw, a small twitch, and then he forces it to relax. A girl comes up to the three of us, handing Brendan a glass of red. She is beautiful, curvier than me, and I hate her on sight. I hate her ample cleavage, her leather dress, her perfect hair. I loathe everything about her.

  “Crystal,” he says, looking only from her to Rob, as if I’m not there, “this is my friend Rob and his fiancée.” I don’t even get a name now, apparently. Maybe he’s already forgotten.

  Crystal immediately starts gushing over my ring with the precise level of enthusiasm you'd expect from a 16-year-old. "I love it!” she squeals. “Diamond engagement rings are so over.”

  Rob and I exchange an awkward glance.

  "It’s just a ring,” I reply. “We’re not engaged."

  "Oh." She looks up at Brendan with a cute little expression of complete confusion—an expression I bet she has a lot. "You just said the
y were engaged."

  "We were engaged, and now we're just figuring things out," says Rob.

  "Well, that ring is fufleek either way," she tells me.

  "Fufleek?" I ask, thinking I've misheard her. I'd assume she was just pulling from another language entirely except…come on, Crystal doesn't speak another language.

  "Yeah, you know. Fleek as hell. Fucking fleek."

  "Ah, of course," I say, casting a shaming glance at Brendan. "Yes, that's what I wanted. A ring that's fucking fleek. We went into Tiffany, and that's what I said. 'Take us right to your fucking fleek section'."

  Brendan glares at me, but Crystal just giggles. Because of course she does.

  "Right on, girl. Have you thought about music?" she asks.

  "Music?"

  "For your wedding."

  What does this girl not understand about what Rob just told her? "I...no, not really. Like Rob said, we're not engaged."

  “Because this is a good song for a wedding,” she says, pointing at the small trio playing music in the corner. “I don’t know what it’s called, though. Classical music should have words, you know?"

  "It’s called ‘Fur Elise’,” says Rob. “It’s Beethoven."

  She looks appalled. "What the fuck? You mean like a fir tree or fur you wear?"

  "It was actually titled 'For Elise', but someone misread Beethoven’s handwriting," Rob explains. "He wrote it for one of his pupils."

  "Good," she says with a sigh of relief. "Because I'm sorry, but I couldn't get behind a song about fur. I love all animals, even the mean ones like foxes. Killing them just so you can look good is wrong."

  Holy shit. This girl is so fucking dumb I almost feel bad for hating her as much as I do. Almost. "You're wearing a leather dress,” I point out.

  She looks down at her dress and back to me, her face completely blank. “Yeah? What's wrong with that? There's no fur on it."

  My mouth twitches, the merest hint of the bitter smile I want to shoot at Brendan. He sees it, and he’s pissed.

  “Have you guys been down by the lake yet?” he asks, holding my eye. “It’s the perfect place for a picnic.”

  Our picnic. I can’t believe he’s bringing it up.

  Crystal says that sounds romantic, while I cross my arms over my chest.

  “Picnics are overrated,” I counter. “Who wants to eat with bugs crawling everywhere?”

  “You’d love it,” Brendan says, smirking. “I bet you’d swallow everything.”

  I narrow my eyes. “Sounds like picnics are more memorable for you than they are for me, Brendan. I’ve never been to one that was worth my time.”

  Rob glances between us. “I thought you two were finally getting along?”

  I go to answer him but I can’t, because I want to cry and scream in equal parts. I can’t stomach another minute of watching Brendan with that girl, of having him taunt me.

  I excuse myself and hurry to the bathroom. Inside, I shut the door behind me and press my face to the cool tiles, flushed by both anger and distress. I reapply my lipstick, willing my breath to slow, my hands to steady. And when I finally step back outside, Brendan is waiting.

  I’m not sure if I want to laugh or cry at how little anything has changed. The last time we spoke outside a bathroom it was an identical situation, wasn’t it? He’d brought someone hot and dumb then too, and I was blindingly jealous, just like I am now.

  "Nice choice,” I sneer. “But maybe next time you should look for some quality other than bra size.”

  "And maybe you should look for some quality other than the size of his wallet."

  "Fuck you, Brendan,” I say, as my hands curl into fists. “You know that's never been the reason I was with Rob."

  "Oh right. It's probably everything else,” he smirks. “It must get you so hot the way he immediately recognizes songs by Beethoven and can tell us all the story behind them."

  "At least he'd realized by the time he hit his 20s that leather came from animals."

  He looks at me in disgust. "I knew you were going to bring that up."

  "Sorry, it's just so completely unsurprising. I should have known you'd wind up with some vapid little girl with a big rack."

  "I haven't wound up with anyone," he snaps. "Unlike you, I don't move right from fucking someone like I’m never going to get it again to being all over someone else. I mean, how long did it take before you got back together with him?” he demands. “An hour? A day?”

  “Does it matter? As I recall, you were ‘so happy’ for me.”

  “I just don’t know what you’re doing with him. The only thing that guy gets hard for is the closing of the stock market."

  "Yes, it's so terrible the way he makes tons of money and wants to be a good provider," I reply. "Women hate that."

  "Yeah, well if you loved it so much, why were you getting naked for me 20 seconds after he left?”

  "Maybe I just wanted to see if it could be better with someone else,” I fire back. “It wasn’t.”

  He closes the space between us until he is pressed up against me. His muscles are coiled and under the starch of his shirt, I smell him—skin and soap and heat. His pupils are so large that the blue is a mere shadow, his mouth slightly ajar, his body tense.

  “You’re so full of shit,” he hisses, his mouth a breath away from mine. “Let’s go in the bathroom right now. I’ll prove it.”

  I won’t do that to Rob. But I wouldn’t do it anyway. Brendan has wounded me endlessly and unforgivably over the past three weeks. He’s turned me back into the girl I was in high school and after Olivia’s wedding, the one so overwhelmed by grief she could barely get through the day.

  I shove him hard and push away. “Move on, Brendan. I have.”

  I’d planned to ask Rob to take me home, but Crystal won’t let anyone get a word in edgewise. She’s too busy trying to explain how being a Broncos cheerleader is really “the exact same” as being a prima ballerina. It’s not until Brendan returns that she finally stops babbling.

  “Where were you?” she whines.

  “I ran into this girl I know,” he says, glancing at me. “I’d forgotten what a liar she is. I’m not sure she tells the truth about anything.”

  My throat closes in at his words. I know he’s just trying to make me angry, but he’s right. I’m not even sure which lies he’s accusing me of: the one I’m telling Rob by omission, or the ones I’ve been telling for a long time—about my family, what I want from life. I do nothing but pretend. It’s all I know how to do.

  The realization exhausts me. I’m so tired of the effort it takes to lie, to be this person Rob thinks I am, to pretend I’m not heartbroken. I tell Rob I’m sick and I need to leave. At least this lie feels true.

  “What was going on back there?” Rob asks on the way home. “With you and Brendan. He seemed like he was mad at you.”

  I tell him Brendan was just angry that I was being a bitch to Crystal. I can picture him sneering, calling me a liar, even as I say the words.

  He pauses. “Why were you?” The quiet in the car feels ominous, as if the question is asking so much more.

  “Because she’s an idiot.”

  He could counter that it’s unfair to blame her for being an idiot, or that there’s no reason to ridicule her for it to her face, but he says nothing.

  We reach Harper’s house, and he walks me to the door. He watches my face. He wants to kiss me, is wondering if I’ll let him.

  I do. And just like everything else with him, it is lovely and familiar and eases something inside of me.

  “I fly out pretty early in the morning,” he says slowly, holding my gaze as if these words are important. “But I’m home on Saturday. You know that I want you back, and I think you’re ready to give me a chance, but before I go, I want to make something clear: I don’t care what you did or who you were with while I was gone. I just need to know it’s over.”

  There’s something in the way he says it, in the way he’s looking at me. It’s
almost as if he knows I was with Brendan.

  64

  Brendan

  Three Years Earlier

  Gabi cries all night long. All I can do is apologize, again and again. She’s a nice girl, and I’ve fucked up, so badly. I don’t know why I allowed it to happen, or how to fix it.

  The next morning I go to work, but she won’t get out of bed. I lead the morning tour, and just as we’re coming in, my landlady calls. She’s yelling, and I can’t understand her, so I hand the phone to Seb.

  “Did you leave a sink on something?” he asks me. “She says there’s water coming through her ceiling.”

  I will always remember this moment. The innocent half-second when I ponder what might have happened, followed by the moment the Earth shifts. The moment where I realize the consequences of my behavior might be so much worse than hurt feelings, than grief.

  It’s the moment when it occurs to me my mistakes might be fatal ones.

  65

  Erin

  Present

  I cannot sleep, so instead I tally my losses: Sean isn’t taking my phone calls. My father is getting worse. I’ve got no job. Harper’s roommate returns in a little over a week, and when she does I’ll have nowhere to live and no money with which to acquire something. I’ve sent a few resumes out, but I’ve heard nothing back.

  And all of that is minimal compared to the agony of picturing Brendan with that stupid, stupid girl. I know I’m not perfect. I can easily imagine that there are better girls out there than me. Girls who are prettier and smarter and less fucked-up. But she’s not one of them.

  Just the image of him with his arm around her waist makes me want to vomit. He never once stood like that with me in public. It’s not even about wanting him back, because that was always a lost cause, always impossible. I just want him to stop breaking my heart. I remember when he told me we were in the bubble. Like a pocket of air in a submerged car, he said. What he didn’t say, and what I should have realized, is that when the bubble is popped you don’t shoot to the surface. You drown.