The Year of Second Chances, page 26
“Well, shit.” Levi looked conflicted. “What are you going to do?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Huh,” he said and propelled himself off his hospital chair. I watched him as he began to move around the room, picking up the remote for the TV, smelling a clump of flowers Nance had brought for Mom, staring out the window, as if he needed to distract himself, or as if the answer were among the parked cars below.
“Actually,” I began. A thought had arrived.
“Please.” Levi gestured, magnanimous.
“I do want to show Jake he has a place in my life. But I can only convince him of so much . . .” I wasn’t sure if it would work. I wasn’t even sure of how I would end the next sentence. “Would you . . . would you be willing to talk to him, make it clear that there’s really nothing between us?”
Levi turned from the window. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
My stomach flipped. I felt my brow furrow. “Why?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“No.” My mouth was dry again.
“Robin.” Levi’s smile was weary, but tender. He took a step toward me.
“What’s that look?” I tried to swallow, failed.
“I can’t convince Jake of anything. Because the truth is . . . I do have a thing for you. One thousand percent, I have a thing for you.”
My first instinct was to smack him, but I’d never hit anyone in my life, and I wasn’t going to start now, especially not in front of my ailing mother.
Instead, I said, “You do?”
“I do. And it feels . . .” He looked at his feet and then back at me. “Really fucking good to say it.”
My second instinct was to run. As fast and as far away as my stiff joints would carry me. “And what about how I feel?”
He looked panicked. “How do you feel?”
“I’m not sure what to call it, but the words that come to mind are what the fuck.”
He ran his hands through his hair again. “Fuck. Okay. That makes sense.”
Jake had been right. I couldn’t believe it. My brain was still struggling to keep up. For a year, I’d been naively lying on Levi’s futon, petting his dog, running around with him in the Cities, having a grand old time. Meanwhile he’d been keeping this huge secret, this part of himself hidden from me. “So you’ve been harboring . . . feelings.”
“I tried not to.” His voice became low and gravelly, like it did when he was getting emotional. “I didn’t want to feel this way. I didn’t want anything to happen, Robin. Truly.”
Levi. Looking at me like that. I had to look away. “Maybe you’re confused.”
“I am, but not about this.” He let out a small laugh of disbelief. “It was just this door that always stayed open in the back of my mind.”
“Always?” My heart pounded. “How long has this been going on?”
He scratched his forehead, calculating. “Uh, since I met you and you fell in love with my best friend. Ha,” he added weakly.
The hospital-room air seemed to press on my ears, my skin. I didn’t think my body could take another shock. And yet the words came, without my command. “In first year?”
Levi nodded slowly, his eyes glazing. “I remember the exact day. I remember the morning. You got out of Gabe’s twin bed, still in your winter coat, and you were all bleary-eyed and beautiful, and you looked like you had the world on your shoulders, and all I wanted was to lift it off for you.”
I tried to remember where Levi was that day, a day I had revisited so many times, but only within the little snow globe of Gabe’s bed, Gabe’s arms. “We met each other for, like, two seconds, Levi.”
“We had breakfast,” Levi corrected.
“I can’t believe you remember that.” But now I could, too. I could picture young Levi, tattoo-less with his waves in a messy shag, the majority of his bulk still baby fat. While Gabe and I picked at our biscuits, making eyes at each other, he had been scarfing down his food, spilling bits on his Black Sabbath T-shirt, headphones blaring.
“But you were listening to your music,” I argued, as if I could reverse this madness by pointing out continuity errors.
“Yeah, but I was super curious about you,” Levi went on. “Gabe came back, and you guys were dating, and I grilled him about you. Grilled him,” Levi repeated. “He actually got kind of pissy. Thought I was going to make a move.”
Suddenly, I bristled. Gabe. What would he think of this? Our perfect little trio, now not so simple. Levi looking at me from onstage while Gabe and I cheered him on at his shows. Levi watching us as we jogged down the courthouse steps at our wedding, trailed by bubbles. Levi and I racing to the car, Levi and I laughing over hummus and carrots, Levi and I grinning at each other onstage last night at the benefit. All of it was twisted now, distorted. Bile rose in my throat. It occurred to me that everything he had done for me this year—was doing for me now—he might have been angling for something else. The thought churned my stomach.
“Are you okay?” he asked, watching me.
My eyes landed on the faded permanent-marker checklist he’d written on his hand, the bags he’d brought, the change of clothes for Mom. “So when you asked me to help with the memorial . . .” I looked up at him, holding up air quotes “. . . and you helped me with the dating app . . .”
“We were just helping each other, that’s it,” he rushed to assure me. “I was really trying hard with the profile, too. For Gabe. I tried to sort of channel him, when I was writing those things about you . . .”
My ears began to ring. I held up my hands. “Wait, stop. You mean Bubbl? The—the prompts?”
“Yeah.” Levi cringed. “Those weren’t Gabe. Those were me.”
“He didn’t—you wrote those? You wrote the—?”
“Yeah,” Levi said, taking a deep, shaky breath. “The letter was his, but I set up Bubbl. Gabe gave me a million photographs to choose from. I probably wasn’t supposed to write that much, but I was kind of on a roll . . .” He let out a nervous laugh.
My breath was caught in my chest. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Gabe asked me not to,” Levi said. “I was going to tell you the other day at the garage sale, but you didn’t seem to . . . I decided to cut my losses.”
The floor began to turn. All those nights I’d pored over the profile to lose myself in Gabe’s words, I was actually losing myself in Levi. Levi? I supposed it made a kind of twisted sense, now that I knew how he felt. How he’d always felt. “They were so . . .” I said faintly, almost to myself. “They were accurate.”
“I did my best,” Levi said with a bit of pride. “I didn’t know if you’d use them, but I wanted to make you laugh.”
I tried to keep my voice steady as nausea rose again in my throat. “Did Gabe know?”
“Know what?”
“How you felt, Levi!” I yelled. Mom stirred in her bed. I lowered my voice as I continued. “How would he feel about you taking on this little project if he knew how much you wanted to bone his wife?”
I saw a flush rise above the collar of his T-shirt. “God, Robin, no. And I don’t want to bone you. I mean—” he coughed a little “—I am, like, attracted to you, but I wasn’t trying to undermine . . . I’m still trying to make sense of it myself.”
The smell of the hospital, the taste of it, was snaking through my nose and mouth. I remembered holding Gabe’s hand in a room like this, trying to find the familiar weight, feeling too many bones. Levi had been there from time to time. Levi had rested a hand on my back. Tears rose in my eyes. “And what about while he was dying?”
Levi looked as disgusted as I felt. “Good god. No.”
I wanted to wash off the memory of him sitting with me as we watched Gabe sleep those gray afternoons, the feeling of his comforting touch. “I know what it’s like to love someone. You can’t just turn those things off.”
“No,” he repeated. Levi looked as if he was about to cry, too. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I would never . . . Gabe was like my brother. You know that.”
“How am I supposed to believe you?”
“You have to trust me. I just felt things, sometimes, when I looked at you. Nothing more.” If it wasn’t for the bass in his voice, the breadth of his presence, he would sound like a boy with a crush.
I couldn’t look at him anymore. “Just go.”
He turned to leave. I kept my eyes on Mom, but I could sense he was still here, hesitating.
“The door,” he said.
“What?”
“Being in love with you. I told you it was like a door cracked open. It swung closed when Gabe was sick, and now it fell open again.” I heard him take a breath. “That’s the only way I can say it.”
I said nothing. His footsteps faded down the hall.
Soon after he’d left, Mom stirred again, turning her head slightly, her mouth still open. I brought her cup and straw to her lips in case she wanted to drink, but she didn’t open her eyes. Selfishly I wished she would. I wished she would wake up well and whole, not just for her own sake but for mine. I wished she was here to tell me everything was going to be okay. To hold me, so I didn’t have to hold myself.
The door to the room, I noticed, Levi had left propped. I got up to shove it shut.
27
I know the best spot in town for . . .
Pizza. It also happens to have the cheapest gas prices in town!
That afternoon, Jake and I had arranged—in a series of brisk texts—that I would take a cab to his place to retrieve my things while he was at work. Once I’d picked out my clothes from his drawers and retrieved my toothbrush, there wouldn’t be too many more traces of me left to erase. We’d talked about framing a photo of us next to all his others on the wall, but we’d never gotten around to it. Was this really the end? I found I couldn’t let it go, perhaps because I couldn’t grasp what had happened in the first place. I made sure to give Tiger one more scratch under the chin, in case it was the last, and as I left my key under the mat, I swallowed a lump in my throat. I knew I would have to reckon with Jake at some point—I had learned too much about how long it took to say goodbye, if this really was goodbye. But I had to put Mom first.
Now, I was jogging through battering rain in the hospital parking lot, my change of clothes rendered useless, my overnight bag getting soaked in my arms.
Since I’d told Levi to leave that morning, I’d composed a hundred messages, ninety-nine percent of them angry. The remaining drafts were just a long line of question marks. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers. I was afraid of more betrayal, of encouraging him any more than I already had, of replacing the vision I’d cherished of Gabe and me, our lives perfect and boring and wrapped up in each other, Levi on the periphery. That was what I knew. Now I knew so little. The only certain thing was that I was closer than ever to losing Levi as a friend. I may have already lost him. No, more like he had lost me.
As I approached Mom’s hospital room, I heard familiar voices. Nance, Mom, and—with a hint of relief—Theo. But when I reached the doorway, I paused. My eyes went straight to three plastic cups on Mom’s food tray, filled almost to the brim with red liquid. Tomato juice. And the small bottle Theo was tucking into his pocket appeared suspiciously like one of Nance’s treats I’d thrown away.
“Come on in, Warden,” Nance called. Nance and Mom had taken to calling me Warden since I’d prevented Nance from wheeling Mom out for a smoke.
But I stayed at the threshold, dripping. “What is that?”
“What does it look like?” Theo asked.
“Are you drinking?” I asked. I strode toward them, dropping my bag, picking up the cup in front of Mom. The smell of vodka stung my nostrils. “You have got to be fucking kidding me. She is in the hospital. She is on pain medication. You cannot mix that with alcohol.”
“Oh, psh,” Mom said from her pillow. “It’s basically aspirin.”
Theo and Nance exchanged a glance, giggling. I took the cup from Mom’s tray and looked around for somewhere to pour it out.
Mom made a sound of protest. “What, you think I’m gonna drive, Robbie? Where am I gonna go?” She gestured for the cup. “Come on. Relax.”
“Don’t you dare,” I told her, my pulse pounding in my chest, my ears.
She huffed, taken aback at my tone like I was a teenager, sassing her. “Don’t I dare what?”
“Did you tell them who came by earlier?” I spat, searching for the call button in Mom’s sheets. “Does Theo know?”
Mom sighed and looked at Theo. “They got me. DWI. As if I ain’t already punished enough.”
“Boo,” Theo said, sipping his Bloody Mary.
“Eh, who hasn’t gotten a DWI?” Nance muttered, waving a casual hand.
“Most people. Most people do not drink and drive,” I found myself saying, half to them, half to myself. “Maybe I should just let you get another one and go to frickin’ jail. Maybe that’s what needs to happen.”
Theo rolled his eyes. “So dramatic.”
“That goes for you, too!” I said, feeling my voice crack as it rose in volume. “You’re feeding her Bloodies two hours after a police officer just dropped off a ticket. This should be a goddamn wake-up call. For all of us.”
“This generation,” Nance muttered.
Mom scoffed. “Don’t I know it, Nance. Everything’s so black-and-white.”
“Am I crazy?” I looked at the three of them, my hands holding my throbbing temples. I began to count on my fingers. “Misdemeanor. Concussion. Car destroyed. Clearly alcohol is a problem, and we are making it worse. You two most of all.”
“Geez Louise, we’re hardly closing down the bar here, Robbie. It’s one drink.”
Nance let out a chuckle. “If giving your friend a pick-me-up is a crime, lock me up.”
I tried to speak slowly through my frustration. “I’m just saying booze is the last thing she needs right now. The opposite.”
“What, you want to cart Mom off to rehab for one DWI?” Theo asked, looking skeptical. “You’d have to bring along half the town of frickin’ Brokenridge, then.”
Nance snorted. “Hell, they should just turn the Red Lyon into a Betty Ford.” She stood and stretched, looking around for her purse.
“I didn’t say rehab,” I said, but I should have. I began to get angrier. At myself, at them, at everyone. I pointed at Theo’s cup. “Just get that shit out of here.”
Theo looked at Mom. “What do you say, Mom? You want us to get out of your hair?”
“I’m gonna use the ladies’,” Nance muttered on her way past me. “Too much ruckus for me.”
“But you come right back,” Mom called to Nance as she left the room. “None of us are going anywhere, and neither are the drinks. You took mine away, okay, Robbie? Happy? Let them be. They’re not doing any harm.”
“They shouldn’t be drinking around you. I’m going to call the nurse in here . . .” I finally found the call button and held it up. “And they’ll agree with me. They might even kick you both out.”
“You can’t just barge in here telling everyone what to do,” Mom said, trying to sit up. She winced in pain.
“Robin . . .” Theo tried a gentle approach. “Why don’t we stop talking about kicking people out and focus on making Mom feel better?”
“Theo, you’re not dumb.” I lifted the cup in my hand, spilling a bit of tomato juice. “You know this is bad. We can’t just have a party and let her walk out of here with a bandage on her head like, Oopsie daisy, had a bad night out!”
“But that’s exactly what happened!” Mom cried. “For chrissakes!”
“It’s not just one night,” I said to Mom. “It’s not just one drink. You know that.”
“Excuse me.” Theo’s voice was stiff with anger. “Do not shame her. I know you expect everyone to be perfect like you—” I tried to contradict this, but Theo went on, talking over me “—but people are allowed to make mistakes. This could have happened to any of us.”
“But it didn’t,” I said. “Because we know our limits. Mom doesn’t.”
“Mom is an adult,” Theo snapped.
“You know Robbie just likes to run things,” Mom said to Theo. “That’s what she does at the restaurant, too—”
“The restaurant has nothing to do with this!” Rage roiled in my gut, in my throat, behind my eyes. “Mom, you ran drunk into a wall on the highway. You could have killed yourself, you could have killed someone else. You should be worried about what’s going to happen next. Maybe it will be a bad liver! Maybe it will be a heart attack, like Dad! Maybe—” I stopped to catch my breath, but I found I couldn’t finish.
The two of them stared, shocked.
Mom was the first to turn her head away, as if she couldn’t bear to look at me. “Leave your dad out of this.”
Theo was still considering me. Something passed between us, the silent understanding we used to share more often. For a moment, I thought he was finally hearing me, that he was seeing what I was seeing.
But he sighed, instead. “I don’t think you should be here right now, Robin. Mom needs to be around good energy. She needs people who love and support her. For who she is,” he added, taking Mom’s hand. “Not who you want her to be. Okay?”
It was the two of them against the world, as always. There was my family, and there was me.
“I do love her, T.” I felt my voice shake, with anger or hurt, I wasn’t sure which. “I love her as much as you do. That’s why I have to tell her the truth.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Theo said, exasperated.
“Language,” Mom said.
It was this, this dismissal, that sent me over the edge. After a lifetime of protecting him, entertaining him, caring for him like my own child, I couldn’t believe who I was becoming in my brother’s eyes. An annoying inconvenience. A villain. Fine. If he wanted to leave me alone in this, he could fend for himself, too.
