"Okay," I said.
Linn peered at her screen, trying to read my expression. "Yeah? Was that good? Are you cured?"
"I'll have to get back to you on that," I said.
It helped to have somebody tell me what I already knew, but getting over the idea of perfection that I'd built up in my head wasn't going to happen overnight.
"Fair enough," Linn said. "If you feel the urge to have stupid squishy feelings about him, just slap yourself as I would slap you, if I were able."
"Hm, no. I don't see that happening."
"Okay," she said, shrugging. "Then just make Hal come over and do dumb guy things with you, like watch the football and do kegstands and crush beer cans on your head."
"I'm almost thirty years old, Linn. My bones are getting too brittle for that."
She laughed. "Whatever. Just find some way to distract yourself whenever you can."
"Will do."
"And call me if you relapse," she said, her mom voice creeping in now.
My nose screwed up in disagreement. "What, so you can yell at me for not listening to you?"
Linn gave the question its due consideration. "Yeah," she decided. "Pretty much, yes."
"Bye," I said, and hung up the call after she waved her goodbye.
Renewed in my resolve to forget Nate, or at least to shove the memory of Nate to a dusty and disused corner of my mind, I got up from the computer and went in search of a distraction.
It was too late to call Hal to come over and play, so I was left to my own devices. The fridge produced apple juice and leftovers, and my DVD collection was sufficiently stocked with movies that featured lots of blood being shed and things getting blown up.
Picking one at random, I fed the disc in and eventually fell asleep to the soothing strains of ticking time bombs and rapid gunfire, dreaming of a wonderful life in which all of my problems were just as easily solved.
My mind settled down once I started shaking my life up. Taking Linn's directive and giving myself distractions, I rearranged some of the furniture in my apartment, discovered how to use more than one machine at the gym where I'd apparently held membership for the past year, and bought a new gaming system. Granted, they were very small steps, more trembles than shakes, but they were something.
Things were, against all odds, looking up.
Which, of course, is the primo time for life to pitch a curveball right at your head, and I didn't have the wherewithal to duck in time.
More precisely, I didn't have the wherewithal to cheese it out the clinic emergency exit, upon going to the reception area to collect my four o'clock client and finding Nate sitting next to her, threatening a tickle with waggly fingers. She squealed, he laughed and my stomach swan-dived off the nearest cliff.
What was he doing in my clinic? With my five-year-old client, no less, and her mother nowhere in sight? I hadn't heard an Amber Alert on the news. But surely people didn't kidnap children for the sole purpose of bringing them to their speech therapy appointment? That would be madness. And I knew madness intimately.
"Oh my god," I said, "what are you doing here?"
Abby, who appeared in fine health and not particularly perturbed about being abducted by a handsome stranger, hopped off the chair, blonde pigtails bouncing. "Hi, Mithter J."
"Oh, hey, Abby," I said, which was really the first thing I ought to have said and in my normal pitch range. "It's good to see you again."
"Yeah," she said, smiling as she twisted her body left and right.
I got on one knee so I was level with her. "Where, um, where's your mom?" I asked, flicking a glance at Nate, who looked mildly entertained, which was I thought was unreasonably audacious for a kidnapper.
"Work," Abby replied. "Uncle Nate brought me."
"Oh, uncle, ah," I said, seeing the family resemblance between her mother and Nate now that it had been revealed. "Ahh."
Nate rose from his chair, a glimmer of amusement still on his face. "Yeah, Julie had some kind of work emergency, so she asked me to get Abby for her."
"Ahh," I said again, suavely. "Okay. Uh. That's-- that's very nice of you. Okay. Well. Are you ready for speech, Abby?"
She nodded brightly and turned toward our regular therapy room. Before I could follow suit, Nate touched my elbow lightly.
"Hey, Mister J?" he said, the corner of his mouth turning up slightly at the sobriquet. "Julie said there's an observation room she usually sits in to watch the session; is it okay if I watch?"
I blinked at him. "Sure!" said the ghost of my prepubescent voice while the rest of me tried to stave off a cardiac episode.
In graduate school we'd been forced to get over whatever self-consciousness we had while conducting therapy, as all our clinic training took place in therapy rooms with two-way mirrors concealing the critical scrutiny of our supervisors making notes on our every move on the other side, to make sure they could later tell us the myriad things we did wrong. To make things even scarier, clients' parents, spouses and caregivers, as well as keen undergrads, often sat in with them, judging our worth as future therapists to be sicced on the general populace.
When not frightened out of our wits, we often felt incomparably silly. Administering therapy for young children usually involves games, toys, storytime with appropriate animal noises, and a hell of a lot of exaggerated surprise and encouragement.
Oh my goodness!
we gasp with delight.
What a good R sound you made there! You are such a hard worker!
Eventually we learned not to mind the watchful eyes on the other side of the mirror, and if we felt silly, at least we also usually had fun with it.
And maybe it was just time that had softened the corners of my memories, casting a rosy haze over those hundreds of hours of being silently observed, but I couldn't remember a time when I had felt more exposed than I did now, knowing Nate was watching me.
I mean, this was a person who had seen me in excessive states of undress; how could I not feel at least a little foolish?
The feelings settled down to manageable levels as Abby and I sat at the table, studiously and efficiently going through a set of picture flashcards featuring colorful line drawings of short words beginning with S.
Seal, soup, sock, sand.
'Sand' made my cheeks feel warm, on association with a particular nighttime beach situation, but I determinedly did not look in the mirror to survey how obvious of a flush stained them.
We cruised through much of my lesson plan without incident, but then as we wiggled around the room, pretending to be snakes and hissing S-words, I couldn't help but feel like a complete idiot.
And then I felt like a complete idiot who wanted to kick Nate in the shins.
I mean, the unmitigated
gall
of this man to show up at my workplace unannounced, looking for all the world like he's just glided off the runway at Fashion Week, and make my insides twist themselves into a series of sheepshanks and ask politely if he can watch me work. And if that weren't enough, to actually follow through on watching me work and making me feel twenty-two again, beleaguered with doubt and all at sea.
Of course, that was all assuming that he was actually watching and had not wandered off in search of something more exciting than the proper pronunciation of esses. In fact, I quite hoped that he had wandered off.
"All right," I said, giving Abby a high five as our session came to a close. "You did great today. Don't forget to show your mom your notebook so she can help you at home with your snake sounds, okay?"
"Yesss," Abby hissed carefully.
I thumbs-upped my approval. "Nice," I said. "Okay, let's go find Uncle Nate."
Given that the observation room was immediately next door we didn't have far to go. Gingerly, I turned the knob and eased the door open, somewhat surprised to find Nate still in there.
"Ah, hi," I said. "We're all done."
"That was awesome," he said, taking Abby's hand. He grinned at her. "Mister J's pretty cool, huh?"
"Uh huh," Abby agreed.
Nate nodded sagely. "Julie raves about you," he said.
I avoided Nate's eyes and focused somewhere above his left ear. "Um. Just, you know, doing my job. So, there's a notebook in Abby's backpack with a list of words she should practice for next week."
"Got it," said Nate. He nodded seriously at my instructions, and then tossed a lopsided smile at me as Abby, bored, began tugging him out into the hallway. "I may have promised frozen yogurt."
I walked them back out to the reception area. "Okay, see you next week, Abby," I called out, and got a frantic wave in return.
Nate paused at the door, hesitant. "See you around?"
Unlikely. "Yeah, sure. Okay. Bye," I said, meaninglessly, each word more unnecessary than the last.
They continued to the parking lot, out into the summer heat, making funny hissing sounds at each other, from the looks of it, and I stood in the shadow of the door, watching Nate walk out of my life forever. Again. Probably for real this time.
I mean, what are the chances?
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected] Subject: Hi
Hey, I hope this is okay. I got your email from your business card at the front desk. It was really good to see you last week. I'm going to be in town for a while -- do you want to meet for coffee sometime?
-Nate ***
I reread the email fifteen times before concluding that there was an eighty percent chance that I wasn't hallucinating it, and if the email wasn't an elaborate figment of my imagination, then Nate showing up at my clinic hadn't been either.
Chewing industriously on the side of one thumb, I let my cursor hover over the 'Reply' button.
Did I want to meet for coffee sometime?
It was an easy question, but finding an answer to it was
I'd been doing so well lately with not indulging all my what ifs; they were like children -- sometimes ignoring unwanted behavior makes it stop. They had almost stopped, I thought, but obviously they'd only been quietly regrouping to muster up the means for a last-ditch attempt at shredding my sanity by dropping Nate, solid and real, right in the middle of my path.
And I couldn't decide whether running to him or simply running away was better form.
Opting to concentrate, as best I could, on work for the moment instead, I closed out of my email without sending a response.
Thirty seconds later, I opened it again and typed
Yes
.
Honestly, I'm surprised I lasted that long.
A series of short, polite email exchanges landed us at a downtown coffee shop on a Saturday afternoon.
I arrived ten minutes early to scope it out and to be seated when he arrived, in case my knees decided to stop functioning at the sight of him; it had been fairly touch and go when he'd appeared in the clinic, and I didn't want to take any chances with sudden solubility.
He breezed in right on the dot, windswept from the funnels of wind that regularly tore through the maze of downtown architecture, his face lighting up when he caught sight of me seated in the corner. I waved from my table by the window as he walked over, vivid in dark blue stripes, sunglasses perched atop his head, his cheekbones and the slide of his nose rubicund from the warm summer sun, and I quietly congratulated myself for having the foresight to sit down first.
We shook hands, just as we had the first day we'd met, which seemed absurd, given everything that had gone down between us, but I wasn't sure I could handle anything else anyway, or what was actually appropriate to do when getting reacquainted with someone you'd had sex with while on vacation.
Should've Googled it before I left the house.
After we both got our coffees, he asked, "How have you been?"
"Uh, good," I said, though why I bothered lying was anyone's guess. Deserted at my own wedding, falling into bed with a near stranger, rediscovering sentiments I thought I had buried under six feet of cement long ago, said stranger suddenly popping up again out of nowhere -- I wasn't good, I was flummoxed.
"Yeah, well," Nate said, smiling softly. "You look good."
"That's probably because I realized one day I was getting direct debited for a gym I didn't even remember signing up for and went to recoup my losses. It's always nice not giving away money for free," I rambled.
He smiled some more. "Looks like it's working out really nicely for you."
"Um," I said, feeling my face get warm. I fiddled with the handle of my oversized coffee mug and tried for normal conversation that didn't involve me. "How long did you say you're in town for?"
"Uh, a while," Nate hedged. He rubbed the back of his neck, an abashed move, and glanced at me from under his lashes. "I just moved here last month."
I'm not sure what kind of utterance I had intended on making, maybe something unflappably urbane like
Why, that's wonderful news! We simply must get together for cocktails once you're settled in
. But even the best intentions had no chance at stifling what essentially emerged from my throat as a tight gurgle.
It was not a sound I looked forward to making again in polite company, but I could hardly be blamed for my lack of composure. I mean, I had only just come to terms with what my life was, with the fact that there was a Nate somewhere out there in the world leaving swoons in his whirlwind wake, and that world wasn't mine.
And then I had, with what I thought considerable sangfroid, accepted that the strange whims of the Nate somewhere out in the world were just flitting him, by the law of probabilities, temporarily past my path again.
I wasn't prepared, however, to deal with the Nate somewhere out in the world whose somewhere was permanently here.
Nate gave me an anxious glance. "Look, I'm not stalking you or anything, I promise. I didn't even know you lived here until I had to bring Abby to your clinic the other day."
"Right, yes," I said, nodding even though I was too illequipped to properly suppress my bewilderment.
"And then when I found out she was seeing you -- I mean, I had hoped it was you, because how many Emory James speech therapists can there be?"
I shook my head, confounded by the question, among other things. "I don't know, I could check?" I said, ludicrous and wheeling off in some distant universe where this wasn't actually happening.
"I really didn't think I'd ever see you again. But then there you were. And I said to myself, 'Self,'" Nate said, the restiveness on his face giving way to something softer as he tentatively held my gaze, "'if you don't invite him out for coffee you'll regret it forever.' So I did."
The rules of conversation, curse whoever invented them, required that I respond in some fashion, though what that fashion was I had no clue.
"I'm glad you did," I said, surprising myself. To prevent the conversation taking a mawkish turn, I barreled on with a jaunty, "So, if not to stalk me, then what made you decide to move here?"
"Well, with the divorce and all, Julie's got her hands really full, so I thought I'd come and help out, especially since I can make my own schedule. I've been wanting a change for a while anyway; I wasn't that happy in San Francisco."
Oh, San Francisco, that's where he was from. Cross that off the checklist.
"You guys are close, huh?"
He nodded, smiling. "She gets me. She, uh..." he said, trailing off with a little reticence in his voice, not entirely sure he wanted to say what he'd been about to say. He looked at me for a moment, deciding. "I came out to my parents when I was sixteen. They were pretty... not okay with it, but Julie was always on my side. She got me through a tough time. So now it's my turn to get her through."
It was a hard fight not to reach out and touch him then, to ease some of the tightness out of his shoulders.
Coming out to your parents. What was that like? Not a barrel of monkeys, I'd imagine.
"So, yeah," Nate said, rallying. "Here I am."
"You liking it here so far?" I asked.
"Yeah, yeah, it's cool. I really like my neighborhood; it's up north a bit, in Edgewater, and I'm pretty close to the lake," he said, "right on Granville and Kenmore."
I stared into the placid surface of my black coffee, and my gently undulating reflection showed me a face fixed in incredulity. "I live four blocks from there," I said.
Was this fate? If so, fate really needed to tone it down a notch or four thousand.
Nate's eyebrows knitted together. "Are you serious?"
"Yeah," I said. "This is weird."
Nate agreed. "I guess maybe we're destined to be friends, huh?"
It wouldn't be the most terrible thing in the world. Take away the hot sex, and he was still someone whose company I enjoyed, assuming the Nate I had met on vacation was the same Nate whose real world had just collided with mine. I wouldn't judge; I had been a different Emory down there, too.
Well, I'd probably judge a little.
"I think I'd be okay with that," I said after a while.
"Cool," Nate said, and we shared a little grin of understanding.
We were starting over, starting at the point we would have before, had we been normal people who'd met under normal circumstances. Being friends would be fine; it'd be great. And if that turned into something different as we went along, well, I'd panic at that bridge when I came to it.
We talked about him moving his business up here, and about places around our neighborhood that were recommended and not, all wide, open spaces of impersonal dialogue we could just as easily have had with someone we'd never met before. It was odd doing this with him. We'd pretty much skipped this part before; it felt like I had checked out the ending of a book first to see if I liked it before starting on Chapter One -- which some people consider cheating, going straight to the end first, but sometimes it's nice knowing in which general direction you're headed. There are so few circumstances that even allow it.
"So, um," Nate said, after a brief lull in our conversation, one finger describing the smooth, ceramic rim of his mug. "Mind if I ask about your fiancée?"
Okay, I guess we were officially moving out of brand new friend territory, and toward the infield of privileged information. I couldn't decide if he was being nosy, presumptuous or merely concerned. I suppose, in all fairness, I
had
brought it up at one point, a very inopportune point, at that, and had just left it to loom.
"Ex-fiancée," I cleared up, shrugging as though it was water off my back. "Left, like I said, on our wedding day. Hasn't come back."
She had returned the engagement ring -- my Grandma Violet's -- before taking off to parts unknown with GoodLooking Bastard, pressing it into my hand with promises that someday there would come along someone better suited to wear it, which pretty much sealed the
ex
part.
Nate made a small, sympathetic noise.
I frowned. "I can see that you're about to tilt your head at me and say something uplifting, so if we could not go there, that would be excellent."
"Sorry," he said, nodding his agreement. "I'm sure you've heard all the empty platitudes in existence by now."
"And more," I said, doing a half-hearted impression of a TV announcer.
"Do you miss her?" he asked. His mouth pulled downward suddenly, and he hastened to add, "Sorry, that was a really dumb question, and very much not my business."
It really wasn't, but there's something to be said about telling your business to someone with no stake in it. It's why occasionally it's easier to open up to a stranger than to someone who knows you. There's less judgment, less useless, if well-meaning, advice, less expectation.
Nate wasn't exactly a stranger, but he didn't exactly know me either, here in my natural habitat.
"I'm getting better at not missing her, if that counts," I said.
His eyebrows rose, surprised that I had picked up his question. "It does," he said.
Though he asked nothing more of me, I apparently had more to say that I hadn't been able to say to anyone else. My problems had long since ceased to be disclosable to my parents; released into the wilds of college and beyond since eighteen, smart enough to vote but still too dumb to be allowed alcohol, the difficulties encountered thereafter were officially mine alone. Hal and I, bound by the inexplicable rules of manhood, communicated in ways that occasionally suggested that post-Paleolithic evolution had never happened, and Linnea had always made it clear that she thought I could do better.
With the people closest to me out of the running, what I had left was the man sitting opposite me, someone who didn't really know me and knew even less of Michelle, and that in itself made it easier somehow to loose my thoughts on him.
"She was really easy to like, you know?" I mused. "She's just one of those people."
Nate nodded. "How did you meet?"
"I did my clinical fellowship at this nursing and rehab center over on the West Side, and she was-- still is-- Well, I don't know anymore, maybe she isn't," I said.
Who knew what she and Good-Looking Bastard were up to in their wild, unfathomable existences? He was from New York, that much I knew, as most Good-Looking Bastards seem to be; maybe she was scattering the ashes of our relationship into the Hudson River as I spoke, while he looked on from the prow of his massive bastard yacht.
"At
some
point, she was a nurse there," I said. "I met her on my first day on the job, and we shared a couple of patients, and she was always so bright and kind and... Not especially good at forward planning, though, considering what happened."
"What did happen?" Hurriedly, Nate added, "If it's okay to ask."
My mouth screwed to one side, my bottom lip catching in between my teeth. I suppose it was my own fault for not cutting off his line of questioning earlier, and now I could add another name to the laundry list of people who would see me for what I was -- deficient.
"Her ex-boyfriend crashed our wedding, which apparently in some cultures is a socially acceptable romantic gesture," I said.
"Bastard," Nate interjected.
Involuntarily, I laughed, his conclusion so very similar to the ongoing narrative I had in my head of their exploits. "I concur," I said. "But she didn't, obviously, and they took off to parts unknown. I have absolutely no idea where they are; down the street, for all I know. God, I hope not, though."
Nate, peering out the storefront window, shrugged an ambivalent shoulder. "Could be. I see a dude who looks like a meth addict across the street; I'm going to assume that's what this fiancée thief looked like, right? I mean, obviously, the only reason she would have left you for anyone else is if she suddenly lost her mind and got struck blind on top of it. Pretty action-packed, your wedding day."
I looked at him askance. "I don't think that's quite her version of events."
"Yeah, well," said Nate, "she's not here, so I'm just going to have to go with my version."
"I could buy into that," I said, after a moment's consideration.
"Excellent," he said, grinning. "Then you're going to love next week's installment in which he develops spontaneous alopecia."
I laughed again, his absurd scenarios making me feel so much better than all the empty words of comfort that had been shied at me ever since the wedding that never happened. "I can't wait," I said.
I hadn't said all that I could have said, like the first inkling I'd had that Michelle might be someone more special than most when she carelessly, brilliantly threw a Tom Servo quote at me; like how she had been the one to ask me out on my last day at the rehab center, just before I took my current job at Dr. Petersen's practice; like how needlessly nerve-wracking the proposal had been because her father accidentally told her about it beforehand.
They were memories for a book I needed to close. Besides, Good-Looking Bastard was a meth addict now and about to lose all his hair, and that seemed a satisfactory enough end to that particular story.
I take my victories where I can.