The Department of Lost & Found (26 page)

When Jake got back, he was mortified. No, he was worse
than mortified. His eyes welled with tears, and he asked me how
this could happen—how he could leave one morning when I was
by all accounts healthy (oxymoron, I know, but healthier, I
guess) and return
36
hours later to find me laid up in the hospital, fighting off an infection that could conceivably end my life.

I reminded him that I’ d actually taken the day off from work
that day, that I wasn’t feeling wel when he headed out to the
airport, but he just said, “But you told me it was a cold. Nothing. How was I supposed to know?”

I didn’t say this, Diary, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t
thinking it. And what I didn’t say was this: We have no way of
knowing anything, but why the fuck is that somehow a justifica-tion for you leaving? I mean, if he’s only sticking around for the
times that I’m sick, because I am sick, wel , then, that’s not really much of an incentive to stick around at all, is it?

But as I said, I didn’t say anything. I know. I KNOW.

Look, Diary, should I have taken that moment to not so gently
point out to Jake that he came back under the promise of taking
care of me? Of being my alpha? Of course, I should have. Should
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I have taken that time to say, hey, even with you around, I feel
incomplete, worried that you already have one bag packed?

Without a doubt. But the thing is this: Without him here, I
worry that I won’t just feel incomplete, I’ l feel empty. God
knows it was bad enough having my dog save the day just this
once. Of having my dog be the one being whom I can trust completely. Even if Jake goes away now and then, and even if he’s
increasingly distracted with their new album and slightly in awe
of his rising fame, isn’t it better to take a chance on him than
wait for my dog to wake up one day and find my cold, dead
body splayed on the floor?

I know. You’re tel ing me that it’s not. That I’m finally answering the question that I’ve long been plagued by: Is enough
truly enough? But the thing is, Diary, I’m tired. I’m
30
and I’m
single and I have cancer and I’m tired. And if my not-so-perfect
boyfriend wants to pretend that he’s a martyr and occasionally
wants to try to rescue me, far be it from me to tel him not to try.

And anyway, I should probably tell you that Zach and Lila
stopped by my hospital room. Together.
Days of Our Lives
was
just finishing up, and I was contemplating a nap when they
knocked on the door and came in. Lila brought flowers—“from
us,” she said, while Zach thrust his hands into his lab coat and
looked at the floor like a second grader who had just been scolded
by his teacher. After Lila had to rush back to work—she came on
her lunch hour, which objectively, I know, is very sweet—he
looked at me and shrugged.

“What’s that about?” I said.

“She told me that she thought we should visit, and I couldn’t
offer up a reasonable explanation as to why we shouldn’t.”

“So she has no idea? Doesn’t know about dinner the other
week or what you said? Or our brush with fame and fortune in
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the game show world?” To be fair, I hadn’t mentioned the trip to
Jake, either.

“She doesn’t want to hear it,” he said. “Every time I bring
up how I feel, or where we are or aren’t going with this, she shuts
me down.” He sighed. “You know how she can be. She’s like a
train, and we’re all just the tracks that she rides over.”

I didn’t think that I was in a position to judge, given that I
was living with my quasi-boyfriend, so I just smoothed the sheets
of my bed and told him that it was nice to see him. Even in these
circumstances. He kissed me on the cheek and told me that he’ d
cal this weekend to see how I was, and then he got back to his
rounds.

He shut the door, and I stared up at
Passions
. And it dawned
on me that Zach and I, we were one and the same. Two people
who didn’t want to feel lonely anymore, so we tied ourselves to
the closest anchors and let them bring us down. Sometimes, it’s
easier to sink than to swim.

PS—I guess the good news is that Dr. Chin used my hospital stay as an opportunity to bump up my nipple surgery a few
days. At long last . . . nipples. No more floating snow globes. I
actually have semi-real-looking breasts. At least for a XXX

star.

Sigh. And the better news is that at least this little setback
got me out of that miserable, sure-to-be mope-fil ed lunch with
Susanna Taylor and her gang of cancer-fighting superheroes.

◆

◆

t w e n t y

cannot believe her,” I said to Jake, over Sunday morning ba-Igels and tea for me, black coffee for him. “I mean, how could she do this? She knows it’s going to screw me.” I leaned back into the cushions of our couch and sighed.

Jake bit into his poppy seed bialy and thought it over. “Nat, seriously. Do you hear yourself? You’re asking her to choose your friendship over her big break, when really, you could choose just as well.”

“I don’t follow.” I frowned, and wiped cream cheese from the corner of my mouth.

“Well, I just mean that you could say, ‘Hey, you know what?

I’ve put Sally second to my career my whole life, and this time, 242

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I’m going to let her—
because of our friendship,
not in spite of it—

go after this thing that she really wants.’ ”

I took a sip of my peppermint tea, mulled it over, and wondered if Jake had found some sort of enlightenment on his road trip, because he was just as guilty as anyone of putting people second to his career.

Sally and I had gone to lunch the day before. We artfully danced around the subject until it became clear that we had nothing left to talk about. When I asked her again to please stop, to please not dig deeper into this story, she squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.

“Nat, you know that I’d do anything in the world for you. I mean, I feel like I’ve done everything I could for you as a friend. But there are limits. I have them, you have them. And well, these are mine. I’ve wanted this for
so
long. And not only does it suck that we can’t see eye to eye, it sucks even more that you can’t be supportive.”

She played with her straw so she didn’t have to look at me.

“Sally, that’s completely not fair,” I responded, feeling my pulse race. “This has
nothing
to do with not supporting you, and everything to do with protecting my boss. You have no idea how ugly this is going to get.” It came out condescendingly, even though I didn’t mean it to.

The truth was that, just like the Mississippi contingent, I too had a “folder of secrets” on just about everyone in Congress—

who they might have been sleeping with, what (ulterior) motives they had to vote why they did, which interns had gotten felt up more than once and by whom. As Sally probed deeper and deeper into each senator’s reasons to back (or stymie) the stem cell bill, the two sides walked toward each other like medieval armies, only we were armed with our sordid knowledge of each other’s histories rather than swords and cavalry. What she was doing was
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exposing more than just the political divide on this particular issue, she was opening up a fissure into which we’d dumped all of our dirty laundry.

She looked at me over her Greek salad and stabbed it with her fork. “You know, Nat. Never,
never,
have I sat in judgment of you while you’ve clawed your way to the top.
Never
have I made you feel badly for forgoing your friendships or dating unavailable men or making the choices that you’ve made that maybe I didn’t agree with. I stood by you all the same.” She stopped, letting her eyes wander as she searched for the right words until she found them.

“And now? I don’t know. This feels like lousy payback. Like your boss’s ass is more important than mine.”

“I didn’t realize that you required payback. Forgive me. I thought you were my friend with no strings attached.” Overhear-ing my raised voice, the couple next to us turned and stared.

“Everything has strings, Nat. Everyone has the point where they know that they’ve been pushed too far.” Sally sighed, and I thought of Susanna Taylor and her philandering husband, of Zach and the games Lila played with him, of Jake and his almost broken promises.

Sally interrupted my musings. “Please don’t push me, Nat. Because this time, I can’t be held responsible if I push you back.”

i s t i l l n e e d e d to speak with the senator about the education bill, not to mention Sally’s story that wouldn’t go away, but by the time I got back into the office after recovering from my hospital stay, Dupris was on vacation for a week in Aruba.

“Tough life,” I said to Kyle, as we filtered through her mail, tossing anything even remotely unworthy of her time into the assistant’s bin. Blair was the one who would answer the letters to the family in Buffalo who believed that the senator wasn’t honoring 244

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her campaign pledges or to the elderly couple in the Bronx who wanted to thank her for stopping by their church. The busier the senator got, the less time she had for the actual people who voted.

Don’t get me wrong—she still stopped and smiled for pictures on the street when people asked her to, and she definitely still shook hands with eager voters as she made her way to lunch at The Four Seasons. But this time around, her second term as a senator, she seemed more focused on pushing herself higher and less intent on actually getting things done. I’d recognized it only recently. I wasn’t sure if it were because she had changed or I had, but it didn’t matter really. I recognized it just the same. That’s how it was with politicians: If you just noticed the shiny veneer on the outside, they’d always look perfect. So you had to peer closer, watch them when they didn’t think they were being watched. Eventually, you’d notice the dings.

“It’s not just a vacation,” Kyle said. “It’s a working vacation.

She’s down there with Andrews. He picked her up in his jet at Islip. Made it clear that she shouldn’t bring along her advisers.

Very hush-hush.” Gerald Andrews, the head of the Democratic National Committee. I raised my eyebrows. The things I missed while knocked out at Sloan-Kettering.

“Yep, they’re grooming her for the next ticket,” he said. “Her star is about to blow out of the sky.”

“Seriously? So the rumors are true. Can you imagine? The first female president.”

“Can you imagine,” he said, “what it would do for our careers?”

“ i b o u g h t o u r tickets today,” I said to Jake. He’d just come back from his publicist’s office, and I’d just gotten in from work.

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I sat on my plush white couch and rubbed Manny’s stomach while Jake filtered through delivery menus.

“God, I’m starving,” he said. “What do you feel like tonight?

Do you mind if we get Chinese? I’ve been craving moo shu all day.”

“Sure. But did you hear me? I bought our tickets to Sally’s wedding today. We’re taking the nonstop out of JFK at 9:00 a.m.

I figured that this would give us nearly three full days down there.”

“Sounds good,” he said, as he walked into the bedroom in search of the cordless phone. I wondered if he’d even heard me. I probably could have told him that I ran naked through the subway that morning, fake boobs and all, and he would have had the same reaction: In this present moment all he cared about was his moo shu.

The only time that I got 100 percent from Jake these days was when we were dealing with my cancer. With the diligence of a schoolmarm, he reminded me to take my medicine. Because Dr.

Chin encouraged a varied and colorful diet, Jake acted like my own personal nutritionist. And, of course, he asked me how I was feeling at least seventeen times a day, which I knew I should find endearing, but after about the ninth time, it grated. I know, I know. I should hardly complain. And it was true that he occupied not just the space in my apartment, but also a space in my heart.

He could have been screwing groupies and snorting coke and engaging in entirely too much unhealthy debauchery, but instead, he chose to be with me. I suppose that this was at least part of the reason that I ignored the fact that he’d already broken his promise to me that he’d stay.

There is a moment in every relationship when one of the parties senses its imminent demise. There’s a moment of incredible clarity, 246

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when your stomach drops with a heavy sense of dread, and you feel like control is slipping through your fingertips even as you try to hold on. The night I bought our tickets to go to Sally’s wedding and the one when Jake was dying for moo shu—that was the night I had that moment.

I followed him into the bedroom. He’d just hung up the phone with Empire Szechwan and said, “They’ll be here in fifteen minutes. That’s what I love about Chinese—you order it and they’re already at your door. I got you wonton soup. Figured that would go down easy.”