by Emily Giffin
“But you had time for dinner at Antonio’s?” I say, skipping the intermediate stages of anger and feeling rage rise in my chest.
He stands abruptly and says, “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Of course you are,” I say to his back.
He turns and gives me a cold, hard look. “Why do you do this, Tess? Why do you manufacture problems?”
“Why don’t you want to come home?” I blurt out, expecting him to soften. Tell me that I’m being ridiculous.
Instead, he shrugs and says, “Gee. I don’t know. ’Cause you make it so pleasant around here.”
“Are you for real? All I do is try to make things pleasant for you. For us. I’m trying so hard here,” I shout, my voice shaking, as my day comes into sharp focus. My grocery shopping, photo downloading, cooking, parenting. All the things I do for our family.
“Well, maybe you should stop trying so hard. ’Cause whatever you’re doing, Tess, it doesn’t really seem to be working,” he says, his voice angry but as controlled and steady as his hands were during surgery. With a final disdainful glance, he turns again and disappears upstairs. A moment later I hear him start the shower—where he stays for a very long time.
16
Valerie
“Are you a doctor, too?” A loud voice interrupts Valerie’s thoughts, reminding her that she is still at Antonio’s, waiting for Jason’s lasagna, which she would’ve forgotten to order without Nick’s reminder right before they finished their own dinner and he left for home.
She looks up and smiles at Tony, hovering nearby.
“A doctor? . . . No,” she says as if the notion is ridiculous. In fact, it is ridiculous, considering the fact that the only failing grade in her life came in high school biology class when she flat refused to dissect her fetal pig that her football-playing lab partner insisted on calling Wilbur. She can still remember the dizzying smell of formaldehyde and the sight of the feathery taste buds on its pale pink tongue.
Tony tries again. “A nurse?”
It occurs to her to throw him off his line of questioning by simply saying, “A lawyer,” but she knows he’s curious about her connection to Nick and the wine has softened her usual guardedness. Besides, there is something about Tony’s open, affable manner that makes her think he can handle the truth.
So she nods in the direction of the hospital and says, “My son’s a patient at Shriners.”
“Oh,” Tony says softly. He shakes his head regretfully as Valerie wonders whether part of that regret is not over her answer, but his question, the fact that his light small talk has somehow derailed into somber terrain. “How’s he doing?”
Valerie smiles, doing her best to put him at ease, practicing for a conversation she knows she will have again and again in the months to come. “He’s hanging in there. He’s had two surgeries so far . . .” She pauses awkwardly, forcing another smile, unsure of what else to say.
Tony shifts his weight from one foot to the other and then leans over to rearrange a salt and pepper shaker on the table next to hers. “Dr. Russo’s his surgeon?”
“Yes,” she says, feeling somehow proud of this fact, as if their affiliation reflects on her parenting. Only the best for Charlie, she thinks.
Tony looks at her expectantly so she continues, offering more detail. “One surgery on his hand. And one on his cheek. This morning.” She reaches up to touch her face, feeling the first jolt of anxiety since she left Charlie nearly two hours ago. She glances down at her cell phone, faceup on the table, the ringer on high, wondering if she could have somehow missed a call from Jason. But the screen remains reassuringly blank, a scene of a two-lane highway winding under blue sky and fluffy white clouds, disappearing into the distance.
“Well, then you know by now—Dr. Russo is the best. You and your son have the best,” Tony says so passionately that Valerie wonders if he has firsthand experience with patients or their parents. He continues with reverence. “And he’s so modest . . . But the nurses who come here—they’ve all told me about his awards . . . the kids he’s saved . . . Did you hear about the little girl—the one in that plane crash up in Maine? Her dad was a hotshot TV executive? It was on the news—about two years ago?”
Valerie shakes her head, realizing that she will never again have the luxury of ignoring such a story.
“Yeah. It was one of those little single-engine numbers. They were flying to a wedding . . . the whole family . . . and the plane went down about a quarter of a mile off the runway, right after takeoff. Crashed into an embankment and everyone but that one little girl died right away from smoke inhalation and burns. The pilot, the parents, the little girl’s three older brothers. Tragic,” he says, looking mournful.
“And the little girl?” Valerie asks.
“Orphaned and alone. But she lived. She made it. ‘Miracle girl’ the nurses call her.”
“How bad were her burns?” Valerie asks, her leg jiggling nervously.
“Bad,” Tony says. “Real bad. Eighty percent of her body, something like that.”
She swallows as she contemplates eighty percent, how much worse it could have been for Charlie. “How long was she in the hospital?” she asks, her throat suddenly dry.
“Oh, jeez,” Tony says, shrugging. “A long, long time. Months and months. Maybe even a year.”
Valerie nods, feeling a wave of pure heartbreak at the thought of the accident, the unfathomable horror on that embankment. As she begins to imagine the flames engulfing the plane and all those people inside, she shuts her eyes to stop the images from coming.
“Are you okay?” Tony asks.
She looks up and sees him standing closer to her now, hands clasped, head bowed, looking strangely graceful for such a squat, burly man. “I shouldn’t have . . . It was insensitive.”
“It’s okay. We were very lucky in comparison,” Valerie says. She takes her last sip of wine, suddenly desperate to get back to the hospital, just as a cook from the back emerges with a to-go bag. “Lasagna and house salad?”
“Thanks,” Valerie says, reaching for her purse.
Tony holds up his hands and says, “No, no. Please. This one’s on the house. Just come back and see us, okay?”
Valerie starts to protest, but then nods her thanks and tells him she will.
“How is he?” she asks Jason as she walks through the door and finds Charlie in the same position she left him.
“Still sleeping. He even slept through his dressing change,” Jason says.
“Good,” she says—because he needs his rest and because every minute of sleep is a minute not in pain, although she sometimes thinks his nightmares are worse than anything else. She kicks off her shoes and puts on her slippers, part of her nightly ritual.
“So?” Jason says. “How was it?”
“It was good,” she says quietly, thinking of how fast the time flew by sitting there with Nick, how pleasant and easy it felt. “We had a good conversation.”
“I meant the food,” Jason says, raising his brows. “Not the company.”
“The food was great. Here.” She tosses him the takeout bag as he mumbles something under his breath.
“What?” she says.
He repeats himself more slowly, loudly. “I said—I think someone has a crush on Dr. Beautimus.”
“Dr. Beautimus?” she says, standing to close the blinds. “Is that some slang term I don’t know about?”
“Yeah. Dr. Beautimus. Dr. Dime-piece.”
She laughs nervously and says, “Dime-piece?”
“A perfect ten,” Jason says, winking.
Valerie rolls her eyes and says, “I think you’re the one with the crush.”
Jason shrugs and says, “Yeah. He’s hot. But I’m not trying so hard to deny it.”
“I don’t go for married men,” she says emphatically.
“I didn’t say you were going for him,” Jason says. “I just said you have a crush on him.”
“I do not,” she says, envisioning Ni
ck’s dark eyes, the way he squints with a slight grimace whenever he’s making a point or being emphatic. It occurs to her that she might sound unduly defensive, that she shouldn’t protest quite so hard—especially given the fact that she and Jason often banter about hot guys, such as the bachelor who lives across the street and occasionally mows his lawn shirtless, and that some of them happen to be married.
Jason opens the bag, inhales, and nods approvingly. “So what did you talk about all that time?”
“A lot of things,” she says, realizing that she has not yet told Jason about the basket from Romy. She considers doing so now, but feels suddenly drained, deciding it can wait until morning. “Work. His kids. Charlie’s school. A lot of stuff.”
“Did you mention that you think he’s smokin’?”
“Don’t start,” she says.
“Don’t you start,” he says. “It’s a dangerous path, falling for a Baldwin like him.”
“Whatever,” she says, laughing at the term Baldwin and thinking that she did once have a crush on Billy—or whichever brother was in the movie Flatliners—and that Nick does bear something of a resemblance to him. Unfortunately for her, she thinks, as she watches Jason dive into his lasagna, Nick has even nicer eyes.
17
Tessa
“Tess?” Nick says that night when he finally comes to bed just after one in the morning. His voice is tender, almost a whisper, and I feel a rush of relief to hear him say my name like this.
“Yes,” I whisper back, realizing that we’ve just made a rhyme.
He takes several deep breaths, as if collecting himself or deciding what to say, and it occurs to me to fill the silence with a question about what is going on in his head. But I force myself to wait, sensing that his next words will be telling ones.
“I’m sorry,” he finally says, pulling me close to him, wrapping his arms around me. Even without the hug, I can tell he means it this time. Unlike his apology for being late, there is nothing obligatory or automatic in his voice now.
“Sorry for what?” I breathe, my eyes still closed. It is ordinarily a passive-aggressive question, but tonight it comes from a sincere place. I really want to know.
“I’m sorry for what I said. It’s not true.” He takes several more deep breaths, exhaling through his nose, and then says, “You’re a great mother. A great wife.”
He kisses my neck, just under my ear, and hugs me harder, all of his body now against mine. It has always been his way of making up—action over words—and although I’ve criticized and resisted this approach in the past, tonight I don’t mind. Instead, I push back against him, doing my best to believe him, dismiss the brewing doubts about our relationship. I tell myself that Nick has always been a bit of a dirty fighter, quick with cutting words that he later regrets and doesn’t really mean. Then again, I wonder if there isn’t always a grain of truth in them, somewhere.
“Then why did you say it?” I whisper, between his kisses and some of my own. “Why did you say things aren’t working?”
It occurs to me that the two things aren’t mutually exclusive. I can be a great wife and mother—and things could still be broken. Or slowly breaking.
“I don’t know . . . I just get frustrated sometimes,” he says as he tugs down my sweatpants with rapidly building urgency.
I try to resist him, if only to finish our conversation, but feel myself caving to the overwhelming physical pull to him. The need for him. It is the way I felt in the beginning, when we’d rush home from school to be together, making love two or three times in a night. A way I haven’t felt in a long time.
“I want you to be happy,” Nick says.
“I am happy.”
“Then don’t look for problems.”
“I don’t.”
“Sometimes you do.”
I consider this, consider all the ways I could’ve greeted him differently tonight. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I do manufacture trouble, like the housewives I once criticized for drumming up drama in order to alleviate the monotony of their days. Maybe there is a void in my life, one that I’m relying on him to fill. Maybe he really did simply have a craving for Italian food tonight.
“C’mon, Tess. Make up with me,” he says, sliding off his pajama bottoms, pulling up my T-shirt, but not bothering to take it off. He kisses me hard on the mouth as he moves inside me, offering penance. I kiss him back just as urgently, my heart beating fast, my legs wrapping tight around him. All the while, I tell myself that I’m doing it because I love him. Not because I want to prove anything to him.
Yet, moments later, after I let go, and feel him doing the same, I hear myself whispering, See, Nick? See that? It’s working. It’s working.
18
Valerie
Valerie watches Charlie intently coloring inside the lines of a jack-o’-lantern, alternating between an orange crayon for the pumpkin and a green for the stem, using careful, steady strokes. It is a boring project for a child his age, requiring no creativity whatsoever, but Charlie seems to understand that it is good for his hand and takes the assignment from his occupational therapist seriously.
She says his name as he draws a black cat in the background, exaggerating each whisker with long strokes. He ignores her, now staring at his drawing from several different angles, moving the paper rather than his head.
She says his name again, wanting only to ask what he wants for lunch. He finally looks up, but says nothing, making her wonder what kind of mood he’s in. It has been a few days since his surgery, and although she is more accustomed to the mask covering his face, she is not yet used to the way it obscures his expressions, making it harder to tell what he’s thinking.
“I’m not Charlie,” he finally says, his voice low, scratchy, theatrical.
“Who are you then?” she says, playing along.
“An Imperial stormtrooper,” he replies ominously, sounding as much like a grown man as a six-year-old can.
Valerie smiles. She silently puts it on the list of benchmarks—first solid food, first walk around the halls, first joke at his own expense.
“I don’t even need a Halloween costume,” he says as Nick walks in.
Valerie feels her own face light up and is sure Charlie’s does, too. Never mind that they both know why he is here—to assess the graft and remove any accumulating fluid with a needle. The procedure is less painful than it looks, both because of the morphine Charlie’s still receiving intravenously and because nerves have not yet attached to the graft—but it is still not a pleasant one. Yet Nick manages to distract them both, as if the procedure is an ancillary part of his visit.
“Why’s that, buddy?” Nick asks. “Why don’t you need a costume?”
“ ’Cause I’m already wearing a mask,” Charlie says, his voice a high soprano again.
Nick chuckles and says, “You got a point there.”
“I can be a stormtrooper or a mummy.”
“I’d go stormtrooper if I were you,” Nick says. “And I’ll be Darth Vader.”
You cannot hide forever, Luke, Valerie thinks. And then, I am your father. The only two Star Wars quotes she knows by heart, other than May the force be with you.
“You have a Darth Vader costume?” Charlie asks him, reaching under his mask to scratch along his hairline.
“No. But I’m sure I could find one . . . Or, we could just pretend,” Nick says, raising an imaginary weapon.
“Yeah. We could pretend.”
Valerie feels a warm glow watching Nick and Charlie grin at one another, until Charlie’s voice grows earnest and he asks, “Are you coming to the party?” He is referring to the Halloween party in the rec center downstairs; all the patients and their families are invited to attend. Of course, she and Charlie plan to go, along with Jason and Rosemary.
“Oh, honey. Nick has two kids—I’m sure he’s taking them trick-or-treating,” Valerie says quickly, as she unpackages the Spider-Man costume that Jason picked up at Target yesterday, the only one he cou
ld find that fit her two criteria—no horror connotation and a mask that would cover Charlie’s own mask.
“I’ll be there,” Nick says. “What time does it start?”
“Four o’clock,” she says reluctantly, giving him a look that she hopes conveys gratitude but also makes clear that this is above and beyond his duties as their surgeon.
She turns to him, her voice becoming soft. “Really, Nick,” she says. “You don’t have to . . .”
“I’ll be there,” Nick says again, running his hand over the blond stubble beginning to sprout from Charlie’s shaved, pink head.
She pictures Nick’s wife and children at home, waiting for him, and knows she should protest one more time. But instead she basks in the warm feeling in her chest, slowly spreading everywhere.
“That’s really nice of you,” she finally says, and nothing more.
Later that afternoon, while Charlie naps, Valerie begins to have second thoughts about accepting Nick’s spur-of-the-moment Halloween promise and feels the sudden need to let him off the hook. From years of logistical difficulties, she is well aware that Halloween is a two-parent operation, requiring one to stay home and pass out candy, the other to take the kids door-to-door—and recognizes the high likelihood of Nick’s wife balking at his decision to attend the hospital party. She wants to spare him that domestic squabble and avoid the awkward exchange that will ensue in the event he loses the debate. More important, the thought of a broken promise or anything smacking of a disappointment in Charlie’s life is too great for her to bear. So she decides to make a preemptive strike—a strategy she has come to know well.
She considers waiting for Nick’s next round to have the conversation, but feels a sense of urgency to settle matters before she can change her mind again. Rapidly removing her BlackBerry from her purse and Nick’s card from her wallet, she fights a wave of inexplicable nervousness and dials his number, hoping he’ll answer.
After the third ring, he answers abruptly, impatiently, as if he’s just been interrupted doing something very important—which is probably the case.
