I went and stood near the bed. I looked down. I didn’t have a clue what to say, or whether she’d even be able to hear. After a minute, something dropped off my cheek and landed on the floor. I reached up and discovered that my cheeks were wet. I was feeling too many things to keep track of, and they were coming in the wrong order and out of sync. Maybe the asshole in the basement was something I should be angry or screwed up about. But for the moment there was just Steph, and she looked very sick.
“Honey,” I said gently. “Babe, can you hear me?”
Something was making a dead, electronic noise near the top of her bed. It didn’t sound like it was going fast enough, or sufficiently regular. I wasn’t sure what was off about it. It just didn’t sound right. It wasn’t a noise you wanted to have marking your time.
“Steph? It’s me.”
One of her fingers moved, and I took half a step closer. I wanted to reach down and hold her hand, but I’d heard what the doctor said. “I’m here, honey.”
Her eyes flickered, then opened. They only made it halfway, and didn’t do it at the same time or at the same pace. One started to drift back down, but she held herself together and it flipped slowly back up. She looked like a toy whose battery had run down.
“Lo, you,” she said.
Her voice was barely audible. She said something else, but I didn’t hear it.
I bent closer. “Honey—I didn’t hear you.”
“Sorry,” she said. It was a mumble, still, but her voice sounded a little stronger and wetter than it had.
“For what?”
“Fucked up.”
“No you didn’t,” I said, though I didn’t know if this was true or not.
“Did.”
“It’s . . . not a big deal.”
She nodded, or tried to, and now her gaze looked stronger. “Is.”
“What actually happened?”
The corners of her mouth turned down, and she glanced away. She looked miserable, and my heart suddenly felt very heavy.
“Steph, it’s all right. Whatever it is, it’s okay.”
“Drank with Sukey. Celebrating, and I was still pissed at you, and . . . I just drank way too much.”
“And?”
“Didn’t sleep with him.”
Somehow this denial made me feel worse. “So what have you done?”
Her shoulders moved up a little, then back down. I guess it had been a shrug. I nodded. She watched me nod.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll talk about it. We’ll . . . we’ll get it worked out. Everything’s always fixable, right? But you’re not well enough right now. And there’s something I have to do.”
She looked worried, and I realized what she thought I had meant, and it hurt that she looked alarmed at the prospect. “Not to do with him,” I said dully. “I don’t care about him. It’s something else.”
“Doesn’t mean anything. Nick doesn’t.”
“I believe you,” I said, though I was not sure. When do these things ever mean nothing? However small, they mean something. You turn to face in a different direction from your loved one, however briefly, and when you look back, everything’s changed.
I don’t mind, Cassandra had said, in the dead of night.
“Love you,” Steph mumbled. Her eyes looked blurred.
“You too. Rest. I’ll be back soon, okay?”
She sort of nodded, but she was more than half asleep again.
I looked down at her, then set off toward the door. I had my hand out to open it when she spoke again.
“Remember breakfast at McDonald’s?”
I turned back. Her eyes were open again.
“Well, yes,” I said. “Of course I do, honey. That’s us. That’s who we are.”
She didn’t say anything else. She just looked sad.
I went back outside into air that was heavy and vile and waiting for what the clouds carried above. I drove back down the Tamiami Trail, and half a mile before I reached downtown I pulled over into the lot of a Chieftain grocery store. I bought a pack of Marlboro Lights and a box of matches. I smoked a cigarette leaning against the back of the car. When I was done, I got out my phone and called Tony Thompson.
“It’s Bill Moore,” I said when he answered.
“Okay,” he said.
“You know that bottle of wine I gave you?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t drink it.”
“Okay,” he said again.
“You don’t sound surprised to be hearing from me, Mr. Thompson. You don’t sound surprised at what I just told you, either.”
“I think you and I need to talk,” he said.
Halfway back to The Breakers the skies opened. It rained so hard and so violently that the wipers couldn’t make any headway against it and I had to pull over. I sat listening to the hammering on the roof of the car and looking out through the rain into a world that was the color of wet twilight.
Stephanie and I met at college in Pennsylvania. We were not an obvious fit, and it was a while before we noticed each other. She came from money, kind of: she came from a place where it had once been, at any rate. Her father had been the CEO of some big-deal corporation that got fucked by the last recession, at which point he lost everything and his pile of stock options became worthless. He did not take it well. He drank. He fucked up. He eventually came back to the land of the living, but broken right down the middle. Some people can be happy making do, living some new and smaller story. This guy could not, and Stephanie had gone from having everything money could buy to being reminded every single day of what it did not, by a man who’d become one of the living dead. Meanwhile my own dad kept selling people paint, and the store made enough for the family to get by, but never a whole lot more than that.
Eventually our paths crossed at a party in our sophomore year. It was a slow build, unusual at a time and place where people hooked up at a moment’s notice and forgot each other twice as quickly. Initially we annoyed the hell out of each other, in fact, and we were too young to realize what this likely meant. Finally, drunk to hell at another kegfest in a beat-up house mutual friends shared on the edge of town, we got it.
We watched the dawn together from the backyard, shivering under the same blanket, holding hands. We walked back into town in gray light, and when it came time to part and go back to our separate houses I let her keep the blanket. She had it for a long time. She laid it on the bed on our wedding night, in fact. Maybe she still has it, though I have no idea where it would be.
We were together after that. In our final year Steph’s dad left her mom and Stephanie—left everything, in fact. He went out one day and never came back. Yes, people really do that. Six weeks later it was her birthday. The one thing her father had kept up after he stopped making much pretense at caring about anything else was Stephanie’s birthday. Throughout her teens he’d always make something big of it, and even in the first two years at college he and her mom would drive up from Virginia and they’d take her out somewhere for dinner and there’d be some significant gift, and although this became compromised in Steph’s mind as she came to realize that his largesse meant the household finances would be hurting for months afterward, it marked the day and was part of the turning of each year. It was her dad’s love for her made concrete. I was there on the second of these, and you could tell the guy was in a bad place, but you could also see the love he had for her. It glowed.
But now he was gone. There had been no calls in the intervening six weeks, no note, no e-mail, nothing—to either Stephanie or her mom. The guy just bugged out, disconnected the line, went 404. I spent the week leading up to the day knowing Steph still believed that, come her birthday, something would happen and this bad, sad dream would end. That there’d be a card in the mail, a gift—cheap, trivial, it didn’t matter to her—maybe even that she’d be sitting in the window of the house she shared with four other girls and see his car pull up outside.