Heart of the Matter

by Emily Giffin

  Embarrassed, Valerie takes the paper and looks away, wondering just how transparent she is, if all the nurses can tell how she feels, how close she and Nick have become. Or perhaps he is this way with all his patients and families—perhaps she has mistaken their friendship for a well-honed and finely tuned bedside manner. The thought that he is doing his job, that she and Charlie aren’t unique, fills her with relief and disappointment.

  Valerie zips the last duffel bag as Leta bustles out of the room, returning a moment later with a wheelchair for Charlie’s final ride through these halls—and a lanky hospital page named Horace to do the pushing.

  “I don’t need that anymore!” Charlie says with a happy shout.

  “It’s hospital protocol, baby,” Leta says.

  Charlie stares at her, confused.

  “Everyone gets wheeled out, sweetie pie,” she tells him. “So hop aboard. Horace might pop a wheelie for you.”

  Charlie makes a gurgling, happy boy noise and climbs into the chair as Valerie glances around the bare room, and gives her last, silent thank-you to a place she will never forget.

  Charlie doesn’t ask about Nick until later that night when he is in his own bed, his artwork and cards from the hospital transferred to his honey-colored walls, his army of stuffed animals surrounding him, his iPod in the docking station, playing soft Beethoven.

  “I never got to give Dr. Nick my card!” he says, suddenly sitting up. “I didn’t get to say good-bye.”

  “We’ll see him again in a few days,” she says, easing him back onto his pillow and turning his night-light on.

  “Can we call him?” Charlie says, his voice quivering.

  “Not now, honey. It’s too late,” she says.

  “Please,” he whimpers, reaching up to pull off his mask. “I want to say good night.”

  Valerie knows what the answer should be, knows that there are a dozen things she could tell her son to distract him from the subject of Dr. Nick.

  But instead she puts her hand in her pocket and pulls out her phone that she has kept near her all day and types a rapid text: We’re home. Everything good. Call if you can. Charlie wants to say good night.

  She hits send, tells herself she is doing it for her child. She is doing it for her child.

  Seconds later, the phone rings.

  Valerie jumps. “It’s him!” she says, pressing the talk button and holding the phone up to Charlie’s ear.

  “Hi, Dr. Nick,” Charlie says. “I didn’t get to say good-bye to you.”

  Valerie strains to hear his response. “No need for good-byes, buddy. I’ll see you soon.”

  “When?” Charlie asks.

  “How about tomorrow? Ask your mom if you’re free?”

  “Are we free tomorrow, Mommy?” Charlie asks.

  “Yes,” Valerie answers quickly.

  Nick says something else that she can’t make out and Charlie hands her the phone. “He wants to talk to you, Mommy,” he says, replacing his mask before yawning and closing his eyes.

  She takes the phone and says, “Hi, there . . . I’m sorry to bother you . . . on your day off . . . at night . . .”

  “Stop it,” Nick says. “You know I love when you call . . . I really wanted to come by today . . . I miss you. I miss you both.”

  Valerie walks out of the room, leaving Charlie’s door open a crack, and whispers in the hall, “We miss you, too.”

  Silence crackles over the phone as Valerie makes her way to her own bed. “Is it too late now?” he finally says.

  “Now?” she asks, confused.

  “Can I stop by for a minute? Take a peek at him?”

  Valerie closes her eyes and catches her breath long enough to tell him yes. Long enough to tell herself, for the hundredth time, that they are friends. Just friends.

  21

  Tessa

  In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I feel myself slipping into a holidays-suck-and-so-do-I malaise. It starts one morning when I am running late to pick up Ruby from school. My hair still wet and Frankie covered in crumbs, I strap him into his car seat, throw my minivan in reverse, and promptly slam it into the garage door—the closed garage door—resulting in a cool three thousand dollars’ worth of damage.

  Later that afternoon, in an apparent attempt to make me feel better, Larry, the tattooed, mustached garage-door repairman straight out of central casting, informs me that it happens way more than I’d think.

  “And would ya believe it?” he continues in a thick Boston accent. “Most often the men ah to blame.”

  “Really?” I say, mildly intrigued by this bit of trivia.

  Larry nods earnestly and says, “I guess ’cause men ah busiah, ya know?”

  I give him an incredulous look, anger bubbling inside me as I resist the urge to share with Larry just how many things I was mentally juggling when I left the house that day—way more than my husband could have had in his head when he sailed out the door with a thermos of coffee and his new Beck CD. Whistling.

  Beyond my own feelings of idiocy and Larry’s sexist commentary, what disturbed me the most about the whole incident was my gut reaction as I stood there in the garage, assessing the crash scene. Namely, Nick’s going to kill me. It is a sentiment I’ve heard time and again—almost always uttered by my stay-at-home-mother friends—and one that has always grated on my nerves, right up there with women who try to hide purchases from their husbands, for fear of getting in trouble. Which always makes me want to say, “Is he your father or your husband?”

  To be clear, I wasn’t afraid of Nick, but I was worried that he’d be disgusted with me. That he’d secretly wish his wife were a little more together. And I can’t remember ever feeling that way before.

  The fact that Nick turned out to be understanding, even mildly amused, when I confessed my mental lapse, wasn’t much of a comfort because it didn’t really change the underlying truth—that the power was shifting between us and I was becoming a needy, approval-seeking wife, someone I didn’t recognize, someone my mother warned me about.

  Several days later, the feeling returns after Ryan, my ex-fiancé, finds me on Facebook, requesting my “friendship”—and I find myself hoping that it might make Nick jealous, and thinking that I want him to be jealous.

  Staring at the tiny photo of Ryan wearing Ray-Bans, a shimmering lake in the background, I call Cate and give her the news.

  “I knew he would contact you eventually,” she says, referring to our debate some time ago in which I insisted that we would never speak again. For one, I had a scorched-earth letter promising that to be the case. For another, nobody in our circle of friends had heard a peep from him since our five-year reunion.

  “Should I accept the add?” I ask.

  “Hell, yeah,” Cate says. “Don’t you want to see what he’s doing? If he’s married?”

  “I guess so,” I say.

  “Besides, you can’t ignore a friend request—it’s rude,” Cate continues. “Especially when you were the dumper . . .”

  “So if he had broken up with me, I could deny his request?”

  “Absolutely. It would still be a little rude, but you’d be well within your rights,” Cate says definitively, the master of social networking nuances and scorned-lover tactics.

  “Okay. Here goes,” I say, my stomach churning with curiosity and anticipation as I click the confirm button, go directly to his page, and read his update, posted last night: Ryan is taking the ferryboat home, all set to reread Middlesex.

  I pause, thinking how odd it is to have such a vivid glimpse into someone’s life after having no clue what they’ve been doing for the last decade.

  “What? What do you see?” Cate says.

  “Hold on a sec,” I say as I scan his page, quickly discovering that he lives on Bainbridge Island but works in Seattle—hence the ferry. He still teaches high school English. He’s married to a woman named Anna Cordeiro, has one dog—a husky named Bernie. No children. His interests include politics, hiking, bikin
g, photography, and Shakespeare. His favorite music: Radiohead, Sigur Rós, Modest Mouse, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Books: too many to name. His favorite quote is from Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.” No real surprises. I summarize for Cate, who says, “What’s he look like?”

  “The same. Except he got contacts,” I say, remembering how blind he was without his thick glasses. “Or laser surgery.”

  “Does he still have his hair?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “And his wife? Is she cute or not so much?” Cate clamors, as if it is her ex we’re cyberstalking.

  “I don’t know. Cute enough. Short. Good teeth.”

  “Blond?” Cate guesses.

  “No. She looks Latino—or very tan . . . Here. I’ll copy and paste.”

  I send three photos to Cate—one of Ryan and Anna arm in arm on a pier, wearing red Patagonia fleeces, the dog standing alert at their feet. Another of Anna, grinning triumphantly on an ice-capped mountain. The third, a close-up of her with dramatic red lips, her hair in a smooth, low chignon.

  A nanosecond later, Cate opens my e-mail and exclaims, “Shit. She’s young. Rob the cradle, Ryan.”

  “I guess she does look young,” I say, realizing that I never seem to notice age, at least not when someone is younger than I am. It’s as if I’m mentally frozen at about thirty-one.

  “Does it bother you?” she asks. “Are you jealous? Do you feel anything?”

  I smile at her frenetic questioning and tell her she needs to consider switching to decaf.

  “I have,” she says.

  “Maybe you should get a fish?” I suggest teasingly. “Supposed to calm you down.”

  She laughs and asks again if I’m at all jealous.

  “No. I’m not jealous,” I answer truthfully, as I continue to click through eighty-seven photos of Ryan, Anna, and their dog, most in idyllic, outdoor settings. In fact, I tell her, it’s almost as if I’m looking at photos of strangers, rather than the man I almost married. “He looks really happy. I’m glad for him,” I say.

  “Are you going to write him?” she asks.

  “Should I?”

  “Technically he should first since he added you . . . But go ahead and be the bigger person.”

  “What should I write?”

  “Something generic.”

  “Like?”

  “Like . . . um . . . ‘Good to see you’re doing well, still teaching, enjoying the outdoors. Take care, Tess.’ ”

  I type the sentences verbatim and hit post before I can agonize over the wording. Instantly, my own posed photo appears on his wall. In comparison to his artsy shots, the stiff picture of me with the kids next to our Christmas tree looks utterly staged, lacking any of the sparkle or spontaneity captured in so many of Ryan’s photos.

  “Okay. Done,” I say, thinking I really need to change my profile picture. Unfortunately, I don’t have any majestic, mountaintop options. “It’s posted.”

  “You posted it? On his wall?” Cate asks, horrified.

  “You told me to!” I say, panicked and wondering what I just missed.

  “No! No! I did not!” she says. “You should’ve just sent an e-mail. Privately. Not on his wall! He might not want his wife to see it! She might despise you. She might be totally bitter.”

  “I doubt that. She looks perfectly happy.”

  “You don’t know what her issues are.”

  “Well, should I delete it?” I ask.

  “Yes! Immediately . . . Oh, shit. I gotta go into hair and makeup . . . but keep me posted . . . No pun intended.”

  I laugh and hang up, now transfixed by the last shot—a black-and-white photo of Anna, wrapped in a big blanket by the fire, staring adoringly at the camera. I tell myself once again that I’m not jealous, but can’t deny the tiniest, unidentified pang in my chest that returns several times over the course of the day, prompting me to sign back on to Facebook and check Ryan’s page, again and again. By five o’clock, he has yet to respond to my post but has changed his update to: Ryan thanks his wife for her foresight.

  Wondering what Anna’s foresight involved, I return to the photo of her by the fire, finally pinpointing my earlier pang. It isn’t jealousy, at least not any associated with Ryan or his marriage, but rather wistfulness over Nick, my own marriage, memories of how we met, how things used to be. If there is any jealousy at all, it is envy over the look of utter contentment on Anna’s face. The fact that Ryan likely inspired her smile, then snapped the photo, then converted it to an evocative black-and-white image, then posted it on Facebook—all things that would never happen in my house. Not these days.

  Later that night, after Ryan has finally e-mailed me back (Good to see you, too. Beautiful kids. Are you still teaching?), I tell Nick about the exchange, hoping for a satisfying, territorial reaction. Or perhaps a little nostalgia over our relationship lore; after all, it was Ryan who brought us together.

  Instead, he shakes his head and says, “Figures that guy has a Facebook page.” Then he picks up the remote control and flips on CNN. Anderson Cooper is doing a retrospective on the tsunami, horrifying images of destruction flashing on the screen.

  “What’s wrong with Facebook?” I ask defensively—more for my sake than Ryan’s.

  “Well, for starters, it’s a complete waste of time,” he says, turning the volume up slightly for a British tourist’s account of the tragedy.

  I bristle at his implication that I have time to waste—whereas he is the busy surgeon with better things to do.

  “No it’s not,” I say. “It’s a great way to reconnect with old friends.”

  “Uh-huh. Tell yourself that . . . Better yet, tell what’s-his-name that.” Then he gives me a playful wink, before returning his gaze to the television, secure as he was in the very beginning, back when I broke off my engagement with another man for the mere chance to be with him. It was once the thing I liked most about him—his unwavering confidence—but now, it feels like a brand of indifference. And as I pretend to be as engrossed in the documentary as he is, my mind is racing, remembering how things used to be, remembering how they began.

  Hi, Nick. It’s Tessa Thaler. From the subway.

  I remember writing the words down, working up the courage to call him, practicing for Cate, changing my tone from somber to sultry to sprightly.

  “Do it again,” Cate demanded from her favorite perch on my futon—and really the only place to sit since Ryan had moved out with our couch six weeks before. “And no up-talk this time.”

  “What?” I asked her, my palms sweaty.

  “You’re ending your sentences with the inflection of a question. Sounds like you’re not sure who you are . . . It’s Tessa Thaler? From the subway?”

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I told her, pacing along the Asian-inspired screen separating my bed from the living area.

  “You want him to start dating someone else? Or worse, forget you altogether?” she asked, the master of scare tactics. “C’mon. Timing is everything.” She removed an emery board, a bottle of nail polish remover, and several cotton balls from her mammoth purse and began giving herself a manicure.

  “I’m not ready for a relationship,” I said.

  “Who said anything about a relationship? Maybe you’ll just have hot sex for once in your life. Would that be so bad?”

  “For once in my life?” I said. “How do you know Ryan and I weren’t having hot sex?”

  She shuddered as if I were talking about her brother—which wasn’t far from the truth given the fact that we had operated as a chummy threesome during much of college. “Well? Were you?”

  I shrugged and said, “It was decent.”

  She shook her head, filing her nails into a shape she called “squoval.” “Well, we’re aiming for something north of decent. So pick up the damn phone and call him. Now.”

  And so I did, dialing the number on his business card, an
d taking a deep breath as the phone rang. Then, upon hearing his unmistakable hello, I read from my script, somehow managing to end all my sentences with a period.

  “Who?” Nick said.

  “Um . . . We met on the subway?” I said again, completely flummoxed and deflated.

  “I’m kidding,” he said. “Of course I remember you. How are you?”

  “I’m good,” I said, wishing I had practiced beyond the first three sentences. I looked to Cate for reassurance as she gave me a thumbs-up and a hand gesture to keep the conversation rolling. “How are you?”

  “Can’t complain . . . So how was the honeymoon?” he asked, no hint of lightheartedness in his question, although weeks later he confessed that it was an attempt at a humorous icebreaker—but that he felt insensitive as soon as the words were out.

  I let out a nervous laugh and told him there was no honeymoon, no wedding.

  “Oh,” he said. And then—“I’m sorry? Congratulations?”

  “Thanks,” I said, which seemed to cover both sentiments.

  “So? Are you just calling to share your news?” he said smoothly. “Or to ask me out?”

  “To share my news,” I said, his banter making me bold. “The asking out is up to you.”

  Cate raised her brows and grinned, clearly proud of my response.

  “Well, then,” he answered. “How ’bout tonight? You free?”

  “Yes,” I said, my heart thumping wildly—a reaction I never had with Ryan, not even seconds before our first time.

  “Are you a vegetarian?” he asked.

  “Why?” I asked. “Is that a deal breaker?”

  He laughed. “No . . . I was just in the mood for a burger and a beer.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said, thinking that sprouts and tofu would have sounded just as appealing. Anything with Nick Russo.

  “Okay. I’ll meet you at the Burger Joint at the Parker Meridien . . . Do you know it?”

  “No,” I said, wondering if it was something I should know—if it gave me away as the homebody I was with Ryan, something I had vowed to change.