Chapter Nine
Nine
“Hey, Google,” I call, sitting at the high-top table in Kitchen B.
“Whaddaya want?” Deb the nutrition educator responds with a scowl. It’s lunchtime and she’s just putting the finishing touches on some fried-egg sandwiches for me and Cherise. We decided to take an unsanctioned break from bean lasagna today and I’m feeling the reward of it down to my very marrow.
We’ve been referring to Deb as “Hey, Google” since we found out that not only did she graduate from Le Cordon Bleu in the seventies, she became a registered nurse in the eighties and traveled the world with Doctors Without Borders.
Oh, and she has a pilot’s license. She knows literally everything.
Hence the nickname. She’s basically Google if Google had a soul and a New Jersey accent.
Deb slides the sandwiches onto the table and Cherise puts away the grant application she’s been working on for the last three weeks. I’m eating lunch with the two people who keep the roof on Harvest NYC.
“I was just wondering,” I say, faltering for a second, only because I’m not sure I actually want the answer to this question. “I was just wondering what you know about PTSD.”
Both Deb and Cherise look up at me over their sandwiches in unison.
Cherise’s eyes are wide, Deb’s are narrowed.
“I just mean…you know everything about everything. So. Is it real?”
“Is it real?” She’s looking at me like she’s finally realizing just how puny my intellect really is.
Which, of course, is why I’m asking Deb of all people.
If I wanted a clinical answer, I would have actually googled this.
But what I really want is for someone to gruffly point out the obvious to me.
“I take it you’ve never met a Vietnam vet? ”
“No! No, I know that is real. But, like, what about ordinary people? Civilians.” I’m starting to flounder. “It’s…recently been suggested to me that…I might have it.”
They both nod in immediate understanding.
“From the accident?” Cherise asks gently.
I put my sandwich down. My stomach has just tightened. The blood in my extremities has started to do that fluttery thing it always does when someone says the word accident to me. “Yeah. I guess.”
“You didn’t get screened for PTSD?” Deb asks with a frown. “The hospital should have at least offered some services.”
“There was this, like, worksheet thing. I filled it out.”
“And nothing came of it?” Cherise asks.
I’m embarrassed about this part. “Well…it’s so obvious…which answers you’re supposed to give…”
“Oh, my God.” Deb is tossing her sandwich onto her plate and raising her eyes toward the heavens. “She lied on the worksheet. It’s not there for you to pass, you dummy. It’s there for them to know if you need help!”
“She’s not a dummy, Deb! You can’t say that to people!
Jeez. And the hospital probably should have offered some help, worksheet or not.
” At first glance, everything about Cherise is round and sweet, even her voice.
But don’t be fooled. She’s the boss for a reason.
She’s a tenth-degree black belt in ass-kicking.
The interns have a not-so-secret photo of Yoda with Cherise’s face taped on. “Nobody ever suggested a therapist?”
I try to answer and then shrug in frustration. “Maybe? I honestly can’t remember. Those early days, when Vin and Raff were still in the hospital…when I try to remember specific details…it’s like…sticking my head in a wind tunnel or something.”
Cherise and Deb share a glance. “But someone recently suggested you look into it?” Cherise asks.
“Vin thinks we have it.”
“Well, you’d have to get properly diagnosed with it to really know.”
“I know…”
“But honestly, it would be weird if you didn’t have it. Considering,” Deb says. She’s nudging my plate toward me. I pick up the sandwich to appease her.
“I mean…I don’t know about PTSD. But it’s just been the worst year.
” It’s such a simple statement, but it makes the back of my eyes hot with tears just to say it out loud.
“The accident, yes. But everything since then, too. You’d think—you’d think going through something like that would bring you closer to someone—”
This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to admitting that the accident itself was terrible, of course, but the actual hardest thing about the last year for me was getting so distant from Vin. The emotion momentarily cuts off my air supply and I’m gulping against tears.
Cherise does me the favor of removing the sandwich from my clutches and handing me my glass of water. “Things…aren’t good with Vin?” she asks hesitantly.
“No,” I whisper. “Things are not good with Vin.”
It’s that awful/wonderful feeling of removing a splinter. It has to come out, but it hurts so fucking bad.
A group of people are laughing and joking in the hall and Deb gets up and closes the door to Kitchen B. She turns back with her hands on her hips. “Come on. Let’s hear it.”
“We—can’t communicate anymore. Or maybe we never could. But it didn’t used to matter. Now…he’s like a stranger to me. But also…he’s still Vin. He’s still the man I married. And I just don’t get it. How, in just one year, could we be here?”
I don’t say that here is Vin moving out, but I can see from their eyes that I don’t have to explain the details of how broken we are.
I don’t have to spell out that last night my husband and I tried to do what we historically do best and ended up freaking the fuck out and when he rolled out of bed for work this morning, I felt his warmth leave my back, felt his hand leave my hip, which is how I learned we’d been spooning and I just, for the love of God, want to know how he felt about that.
The PTSD is seeming more and more plausible. (See above.)
Cherise has one warm hand over my cold ones. Deb is pointing at me with her sandwich. “Honey, that is the deal with these Italian American men. PTSD or not. They’ll die for you but they won’t tell you one word about how they’re feeling.”
I laugh in a knee-jerk reaction, but then her words sink in and make me feel so instantly ill, feverish and foul-tempered and nauseated, that I have to just put my hands over my face and breathe through it.
I’m feeling irrationally angry at Deb for using the concepts of die and Vin in the same sentence.
Why would she think I’d want to hear that?
Dying for someone is not romantic. It’s sickening.
I take a deep breath and lower my hands. “Not all Italian American men. Raff tells me every thought that ever comes into his head.”
Cherise quickly slides back from the table and goes to root around in the fridge. She comes back with a covered plate of sliced cheeses. “Courtesy of Tommy.”
Her boyfriend is a cheesemonger and I like him because, personally, I don’t think you can beat complimentary cheese.
But Cherise is now avoiding my eye contact and I think I know why. “Are you still mad at Raff?” I ask her as I choose between two stinky cheeses.
“I was never mad.”
Deb and I raise our eyebrows in unison and it makes her laugh and crack and roll her eyes. “Okay, okay. When some rando fools around with your little sister, it’s okay to be skeptical of them!”
“He had honorable intentions!” I insist. Because he’s my best friend and I don’t think it’s diametrically opposed for sluts to have honorable intentions.
“It was a fling for him, but it was serious for her.”
I concede this, because I’m sure it’s true. “I will say this about Raff: His superpower is getting people to take care of him. But he does it without thought; he doesn’t even want it half the time.”
“Was that…” Cherise clears her throat. “Was that part of what was hard about this last year? Taking care of Raff after the accident?”
I consider this. “Hard? I mean…I think…when Raff was still living with us, everything was on autopilot, sort of? It was just…take care of Raff. Everything was almost, kind of, simple.”
“Things can be simple and hard at the same time,” Deb says. “And there’s no way it was easy, taking care of someone in that position. For you or your marriage.”
I lean my forehead on my hand, like I’m shading my eyes from the sun. But in reality, I’m shading myself from everything they’re telling me. I hate that it might be true.
Raff is my family. Of course I dropped everything to nurse him back to health. But…is it part of the reason that Vin is leaving?
Deb’s watch starts beeping. “Damn. I’ve got a class.”
“I actually have a meeting, too.” Cherise is looking miserable to leave me here, crying into my sandwich.
“Go. Go.” I shoo them away. “I’m fine. Really.”
“No, you’re not,” Deb corrects me with two rough hands on my shoulders. “But you’ll get there.”
They leave the kitchen and I clean up after our lunch.
I’m on autopilot again. Hollow and tired and feeling like a stranger, myself.
The rest of the workday jostles me back and forth.
I don’t see Cherise again, which is a relief because if I did I’d probably embarrass us both by collapsing into her arms in a fit of tears.
I do happen to hear Deb teaching in Kitchen A on my way out of work.
“My greens ended up soggy,” a student laments. “They should have been crispy!”
“Don’t waste your energy over how you think things should be,” Deb booms. “See things for how they actually are. Soggy greens are better than no greens.”
I’m shaking my head and smiling as I leave the building. Don’t waste energy on should.
It’s good advice, especially considering I only have about two teacups of energy left in my entire body.
I make it the five blocks to the train and collapse onto the wooden bench on the subway platform.
A young couple walks past me, not even glancing in my direction.
He’s walking backwards while he holds her, his fingers laced against her lower back.
She’s pouting with her arms crossed and her eyes on anything but his face.
They’re having one of those arguments that are actually foreplay.