“Could we stop with ‘the young woman’—”
“—pulling beers at the crappy bar in my neighborhood, waiting on the asshole frat guys.” His hands, she saw, were gripping the rail at the side of her bed. “And she looks like she’s lost twenty pounds in the last three weeks and she has dark circles the size of the Grand Canyon under her eyes, which are beautiful, by the way.” Emily squirmed. Had he really just said that? A man she barely knew? Did men do things like that—tell women they had beautiful eyes? Wasn’t that kind of creepy? Or had her year with Curtis—and her years alone—made her jaded? “Now, what exactly am I supposed to think?”
“I—”
“That she didn’t listen to anything I said. That she’s just letting her sister wreck both their lives.”
Oh, don’t be a drama queen, she thought, but she said, “She’s not—”
“No,” the doctor retorted. “She is. Clearly, she’s burning through your cash. You’re working yourself to the bone. You can’t control her. This is big trouble, Emily.”
Emily shook her head. “I’m not,” she insisted. “It’s just a difficult time. We’ve had so many expenses. Our rent doubled. And—” Her hands fluttered uselessly on the blanket. She was too tired to explain. Why couldn’t he simply understand, without her having to utter the words? But then that was the problem, wasn’t it: he did understand, despite everything she said. “We took this larger apartment and I didn’t realize how the utilities would go up. And we needed stuff for it. I didn’t have anything. I could live with just a plate and a saucepan and a mug.” She laughed and shrugged. “And I did. Clara wanted to live like normal people.”
Dr. Gitter looked at her sternly. “Normal people don’t work—what—sixteen hours a day. And I live just fine with a plate, a saucepan, and a mug. And a coffeemaker.”
Emily smiled gratefully. “Yes, definitely a coffeemaker.”
“Emily,” he said, softly now. “Your sister is ill. She needs to be hospitalized.”
“No,” Emily said. “It’s not an option.”
He leaned in closer. “It’s the only option. You can’t take care of her. Your parents can’t take care of her. She can’t take care of herself. If you just cut her off and try to let her manage on her own, she’s going to wind up dead or in jail—”
“She’s fine now.”
With a sort of groan, he stood up and let his head fall into his hand. “You know that’s not true.”
The kindness in his voice was too much for her. It had been so long, months, since she’d spoken, really spoken with her friends—since she’d really talked to anyone honestly—and the force of his attention made her nervous, as nervous as his million messages on her voice mail. When she opened her mouth to speak, a dry, weak sound came out. She closed her lips, swallowed, hugged her arms close around her, and then, embarrassingly, began to cry, in great, huge, pitiful sobs, burrowing her face into her hands, snot streaming from her nose. The doctor stood stiffly for a moment, looking down on her, then moved to the side of the bed and twined his arms around her, causing her body to shudder and collapse. “It’s okay,” he whispered.
“No, no, it’s not, it’s not,” Emily sobbed, her face pressed against his sweater. “Everything is wrong. I was in a play and it went to Broadway without me. And it was my one chance. And I wasted a year with this stupid guy and…” She broke into a loud, hiccuping sob. “And then Clara said she was coming and I was so glad to have my sister with me. I always wanted to be close to her, like in Little Women, you know?” He nodded. “But she always hated me. She always, always hated me and I thought now we could be real sisters. We could have fun. And I thought she was getting better, but I made a mess of that, too. I’m a failure. And I hate her, too. I hate her.”
Again she began to cry, which felt good, too good, to admit all this, the truth, the actual truth—or a version of it, the darkest slant on it—which she could not, somehow, have told any of her friends, and certainly not her parents. And good, too, to give in to the impulse to cry and scream and say No, no, no, no, everything is not all right—to not be the girl who showed up for work on time, no matter that three miles from her house there’s a mass grave, burning and smoking, no matter that the world appears to be ending and that her work is pointless and soulless—and this, really, was what felt good, to simply not care, not care that she was burdening this man with herself, her sister, her troubles, that she had forced him, awkwardly, to comfort her, and that she had done so, very possibly, because she was utterly, pathetically alone, so alone that the arms of a stranger, wrapped firmly around her, felt, like her tears, better than anything she had felt in a long time.
“It’s okay,” he said again, and this time she didn’t contradict him. “This is crazy talk. You’re not a failure, not at all. You’ve been doing a great job taking care of her. It’s hard. Look, I know how hard it is. And that stuff with Curtis—” At this, she abruptly pulled away. How strange to hear his name from another man’s mouth. “That’s who we’re talking about, right?” She nodded glumly. “He’s an idiot.” And then, with a gulp, she was laughing. Because he was, wasn’t he? “That whole slacker thing. I mean, come on.” He was laughing, too, but then he wasn’t. “Listen,” he said, “none of this is your fault.”
“No, it is. You’re right. I didn’t even try to keep her under control. I just wanted her to be happy. Sometimes”—she lowered her voice, and the sobs came again, like hiccups—“sometimes I think I’m just like her.” He pulled her close again and her breath began to come in something less than gulps.
“Why would you think that?”
She pulled herself out of his arms and looked straight up into his eyes, which were, she saw, not as dark as she’d thought: a pleasant brown. Hazel, really. “Because of my genes. It’s in our family. Everyone’s crazy. My grandfather killed himself.” His face crumpled and for a moment she thought, strangely, he was going to kiss her. “I keep thinking—it’s like there’s a bomb inside me, ticking, and one day it’s going to go off and I’m going to be like Clara. Every time I lose my temper or can’t sleep or eat chocolate cake for breakfast—”
“Okay, okay.” He laid a cool hand across her forehead, as if he was trying to gauge her temperature. “I get it. But you’re not like Clara. Or your grandfather.”
“It’s not just my grandfather. It’s my whole family. And my parents are second cousins, so I’ve got a double dose of it. All the Kaplans marry each other. They’re freaks.”
“But not you?” he asked. “You didn’t marry a Kaplan?”
“No.” She laughed. “Oh my God, if you’d met my cousins, you’d never have asked that. They’re like these Range Rover–driving idiots.”
“Well, if that’s not an option,” he began, twisting his mouth into a broad grin, “why don’t you marry me?”
“What?” A tissue had found its way into her hands and she was, she suddenly saw, worrying it into moist shreds.
“I’m serious,” he said. “Marry me.”
“You don’t even know me,” she said slowly. “We just met.”
“No, we met last year, when you came in with Curtis. I remember the day. You were wearing a blue dress. I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” Emily flushed. Curtis, in the whole year they’d been together, had only ever told her she looked “nice.” Out of the sides of her eyes—she simply couldn’t look him in the face; this was all too strange and embarrassing—she glanced at Dr. Gitter. “You used to come in and have lunch under the skylights, and I could see your hair from across the atrium. I thought, ‘That’s the girl for me.’ And you always asked Dr. Lang the most intelligent questions.” He looked directly into her face. “I loved the sound of your voice. I thought, ‘There’s no way she’s going to stay with that loser.’ When Dr. Lang told me that you and Curtis had split up, I almost said, ‘I knew it!’ And then, a couple months later, there you were, knocking on the door of her office. I thought, ‘It’s fate!’”