Chapter Thirty-Two
Thirty-Two
Sam is waiting for me when I push through the apartment door, my tote bag tangled around my wrist and dangling at my side.
I made a detour to Citarella on the way, thinking I’d bake something—good to have a hobby when you don’t have a job—but then saw they had pre-made cookies and thought, you know what? This seems faster.
Sam follows me into the kitchen, hovering over my shoulder while I hoist my bag up onto the countertop. It’s hours before I usually get home, yet Sam seems totally unsurprised that I’ve appeared here mid-afternoon. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was waiting for me.
I take a cookie and then slide the box onto the shelf above me, but then: what’s the point? I’m going to eat them all now anyway. I scoop it under my arm instead, and turn toward my bedroom.
“How was your day?” she asks, her voice rising on a note of extremely manufactured concern. Samantha is not a comforting person by nature. Need a hug? Don’t go to Sam. Need someone to give you an honest opinion about your bad haircut when it feels like everyone else is lying? Sam is your girl.
“It was fine.”
I try to shuffle past her, but she blocks the entrance to the kitchen. “Are you sure?” she says, trying again. “You didn’t get fired or anything, did you?”
I stop. Turn.
“I did, actually,” I say, my eyes narrowing. “How did you know?”
“I might have heard something through the grapevine.”
There’s only one way Sam could have heard, and that’s through Carrie, who must have messaged her to give her a warning. I am incensed by this.
“Since Carrie is such a stickler for the rules this afternoon,” I seethe, “why don’t you remind her that sharing my employment status with someone outside the company is also a violation of Taskio’s confidentiality rules. She needs to be careful. I wouldn’t want her to get fired.”
I push past Sam and into my bedroom, slamming the door behind me. It’s a move so satisfying I consider opening my door just to slam it again, and again, and again.
I sit down on my bed, then stand back up. My entire system is humming. I pace in a circuit from one end of the room to the other, there and back again, until I’m dizzy.
The cookies, I find, hold no appeal. I have no appetite. I check my phone. No messages. I check again. Nothing.
I type out a text to Andy. Got fired hope you’re happy.
I watch as three little dots bounce across my phone screen, then stop. He doesn’t finish his reply.
Instead, Sam leaves, hours pass, and I don’t hear a word from anyone. Not Carrie, not Andy, definitely not Connor, and not any of my old teammates, who are probably together in a bar right now, laughing at me.
I can’t bear it.
Forty-five minutes and one panicky transaction later, I’m scribbling a note to Sam as I race out the door. Gone back to Canada. Eat the cookies.
—
I catch the last flight of the day from New York to Toronto with minutes to spare.
Dad is understandably very surprised when I phone home to tell him not to lock the door, and when my taxi pulls up in the driveway around midnight, both my parents are waiting in the front hall, my dad in a navy house coat, my mom in a peach fleece.
They take the news I lost my job with surprising calm.
“And you flew all the way here to tell us that?” Dad jokes, disengaging the suitcase from my hand.
Mom and I both watch in silence from the foot of the stairs as he carries it up.
I start to crack a joke. She raises an eyebrow like nice-try-I’m-your-mother.
There’s no fooling her; she’s already gleaned everything she needs to know with one look at me.
She sighs, then flicks off the light switch. “We’ll discuss it in the morning.”
I thought maybe I’d have a message waiting from Connor when I released my phone from airplane mode, but there is nothing, and when I wake up in my childhood bed and there is still nothing, I start to worry that yesterday when he said forget it he meant forget about you and me.
At the breakfast table Mom is not interested in any of my dramatics.
When I tell her my life is ruined, she scrapes her butter knife across a piece of toast and tells me you must not have had a very good life then.
There are plenty of jobs in New York, she reasons, and if I don’t want to live there anymore then it’s about time I moved home anyway.
Dad is equally philosophical. He admits he never really understood that tech stuff, and recommends I speak to Dan, who can probably get me a job with the town.
If nothing else, the school holidays are only another month away, and the day camps are hiring.
No, he doesn’t think thirty is too old to be a camp counselor.
“In fact,” he says, “they’d probably value your experience.”
“She can’t do that, Carl,” Mom says. “We’re just about to do up Annie’s bedroom.”
I’m outraged by this. “What? No.”
“You don’t live here anymore,” she says, unable to comprehend my objection. “You don’t need a bedroom.”
What is very clear is that neither of them know Shannon and I aren’t on speaking terms. She hasn’t told them. I’m not even sure they knew Dan crashed our girls’ weekend. It’s a total black hole of information, and I can’t go fishing for the details without alerting them that something is up.
Shannon is aware I’m in town, that I know at least. Mom informs me she’s working all weekend—something about a big open house—but that she’s promised to come by for dinner sometime in the week. Sometime meaning never.
—
I’m allowed the weekend to wallow, and I spend most of it mad at Andy, furious every time I think about how I trusted him and how horrible it felt to have the rug pulled out from under me like that.
When it dawns on me that that’s exactly what I did to Connor, I feel even worse. When I remember it’s also more or less what I did to Shannon at her engagement party, I hit rock bottom on the self-pity, turning any resentment I felt at Andy in on myself.
But by Monday, my time is up. Mom is totally unimpressed with my intention to lie on the sofa for the rest of my life, telling me pragmatically that if I’m going to be here, I might as well get my appointments done.
She’s appalled to learn I don’t have a doctor or a dentist of my own in New York—what, don’t they have them there?
—and am still registered at my home practice.
“Well then, for heaven’s sake, call Dr. Lang,” she tells me. “She’ll probably see you this morning.”
In fact, I have to wait. The receptionist regretfully tells me when I phone that Dr. Lang doesn’t see patients on Mondays, but that she’ll squeeze me in tomorrow at 3 p.m. I tell her this suits me fine. It’s not like I have anything else to do.
Now that I’m on a roll, I decide to keep going—I book in to see the dentist in the morning, and then for a haircut over lunch. I relay my progress back to my mother.
“And then you can drop in and see your sister,” she concludes for me. “She lives just behind the doctor’s office.”
I agree, promising her I’ll text Shannon, knowing all the while that I won’t.
—
If living in the city is swimming against the current, living in the suburbs is swimming with it, getting swept gently along, no additional effort required.
I think of Connor and how he told me he always wanted to live in the suburbs as a kid, and wonder at what point he abandoned that ambition, or if he still secretly harbors it. Then I resolve not to wonder about him at all.
My strategy for visiting home, insofar as I have one, is to go as incognito as possible, avoid direct eye contact, and keep my head down. But some interactions aren’t so easily avoided. Like, for example, when a girl from my grade twelve history class is my dental hygienist.
We make polite small talk about our lives since we last saw each other—a nauseating twelve years ago—until she finally gets down to work, to my immense relief.
It’s unnerving running into someone you know at the best of times, but there’s something extra uncomfortable about our little tableau: me, reclining in a dental chair, and her, hovering over me holding a miniature ice pick.
Say what you will about going to the dentist, but at least by necessity you can’t do much talking.
“You could floss more,” she tells me, and sends me on my way.
By the time I glide across town to the doctor’s office I’m almost looking forward to the appointment.
Having known me since the day I was born (literally: she was there), Dr. Lang’s authority is undeniable, her presence comforting in a way that’s hard to explain.
This woman has seen me through every vaccination, every broken bone, every mystery rash I’ve ever had.
She knows me more intimately than almost anyone else in my life.
I sit on the bench in the examination room, feeling like a small child, while she takes me through the basics.
She listens to my lungs, shines a light in my eyes, looks in my ears, checks my blood pressure.
It strikes me that it’s all just an elaborate warm-up: going through the motions to offset the embarrassment of doing all this while wearing a piece of glorified paper towel with sleeves that hangs open at the back.
She nods her head in approval when I confirm that I still don’t smoke, then tells me briskly that’s fine when I get weirdly specific about how much and how often I’m drinking, and with whom.
Next she says: “And are you sexually active?”
The pang of longing for Connor is sharp and unexpected. It vibrates through me like a gong.
“No,” I say, my voice shrinking down to a whisper. “I mean, yes—I am, or I was. But I’m not now.”
“We’ll do a standard check for STDs with your pap smear. Is there any chance you could be pregnant?”
I shake my head no, but imagine it anyway: a vision of a little kid terrorizing the playground, a perfect blend of my bossy sass and Connor’s laid-back smarts.
“Why don’t you lie down and we’ll do your exam.”
I do as she tells me while she swivels away from her laptop, dragging herself on her little rolling stool to the counter on the other side of the room. Her brown slacks are ever so slightly too short, her patterned socks on full display in her clogs.
I will myself to calm down, to not think of Connor, or being sexually active, or how we never will be again. It fails miserably.
“Sorry,” I say, when she catches me trying to erase the evidence of a stray tear rolling down my cheek with the back of my wrist.
“Were you seeing someone back in the city?”
I nod again, biting hard into my bottom lip, desperately trying to suppress the sob I can feel bubbling up inside me.
“He was really nice,” is all I manage to say before the tears spill over in earnest, streaming down the side of my face and down my neck. “I ruined it.”
There’s no stopping them now, and it seems pointless to try and stem the flow, so I grip my hands tightly on my stomach and stare up at the ceiling, begging the moment to pass.
All the while, Dr. Lang stands calmly at my side. Her hand rests gently on my shoulder. The only sound in the room is the jagged hitch of my breath as I gulp for air.
“We don’t have to continue,” she offers, but I insist it’s fine, mostly managing to regain my composure after a few deep breaths.
For the rest of the appointment, she distracts me with easy, meaningless small talk. She tells me valiantly that I’m in perfect health—broken heart notwithstanding—then silently rubs my back for a second, before handing me a lollipop.
I make it all the way out of the building and to the parking lot, but the second I’m in the car my sadness is a wave so powerful that I drop my head onto the steering wheel and let it crash.
I cry so hard and so long that by the time I sit up the stitching from the leather is imprinted on my forehead.
After our fight I was mad, then indignant, and by the time I’d been home for a couple of days, mostly just feeling incredibly sorry for myself.
But I can no longer fend off the real emotions that have been lurking below the surface.
Sadness, and disappointment, and regret at all the things I could have done differently.
I always thought that if I found true love I’d recognize it, and cherish it, and it would feel bulletproof.
What a blow to realize that none of that was true.
When the thing I’d waited for for so long finally came along I barely noticed, and then fucked it all up, and for what?
I can get a new job. I can’t get a new Connor.