Chapter 11 #2
“Nine.” He was quiet for a moment before he said, “I’m not counting the days as much. At first, I was getting through each minute, then the hour, then the night. Now, a week will pass before I think about drinking and it’s a different thing when I do. I don’t feel the same desperation.”
“It’s not, ‘Holy bells, I have to do something?’”
“No. It’s more like, that was something I used to do and I enjoyed it at times. I resented the hold it had over me and I’m glad for the freedom. I’ve been talking to some of my old friends,” he mentioned.
“Oh. Really?”
“Don’t get worried. I had started to feel bad about the way I acted, how I didn’t say goodbye and I ghosted them.
Not a real ghost,” he added. “No one is actually dead, except…I guess that I was dead to them. They were happy to hear from me but didn’t seem to have cared that I’d been missing for nine months, and they all wanted to pick back up at the same place. I can’t do that. I blocked them.”
“That was one of the reasons I stopped contacting my mom,” I said.
“She would talk just like no time had passed at all. She would tell me about going out, her boyfriend problems, her rent problems. Sex stuff I didn’t want to know.
I realized that she never wondered how I had been or asked me questions about my life.
She wasn’t worried when I didn’t call, either.
So I stopped, and she didn’t make an effort back. I didn’t have to block her.”
“Maybe we won’t visit Nevada when we go to Hawaii,” Nolan said.
“You’ve never been in the ocean, right?” He talked about snorkeling and seeing all the sea creatures, and he did a much better job at distraction than I had been doing.
We stopped for snacks and I didn’t drive fast, but we seemed to be making good time to the hospital.
Along the way, he called his mom for information and they got into a very heated discussion in French.
“What did she say?” I asked when he dropped the phone into the console.
“She has a meeting with an important client, which I was delaying with my questions. My dad was already transferred to the cardiac care unit. I asked if it was usual to move out of the ER so quickly and she let it slip that he had symptoms last night and drove himself to the hospital then. She didn’t think to let me know. ”
“Why? Why didn’t she want to tell you? I could see my own mom forgetting if a boyfriend or ‘husband’ was in the hospital, but your mother is cut from a different cloth,” I said.
“She’s not careless like that,” he agreed. “I’m not sure. It’s to punish one of us, I suppose. They hate each other and I’ve never believed that they cared much for me.”
“But she wanted to see you,” I said. “Remember? She wanted you to come down to pick up my paperwork. I bet her law firm has an extra-special delivery service that could have brought everything up north and then she could have billed eight times the actual cost. But instead, she wanted you to come. That sounds like caring.”
“No. She wanted to see you,” he corrected. “She was evaluating you.”
“Like it was a test?” I shook my head. “Why?”
“She assumed that the reason I asked for her help with your paperwork issue was because you and I were in a relationship, and I let her think so. I let her believe that you’re my girlfriend and we’re living together. So, she needed to evaluate you for suitability.”
“No offense, but it doesn’t seem like she’s a great judge of relationships. She’s married to a guy who’s in the hospital and she’s not even visiting him,” I said. “But why didn’t you tell her the truth?”
“I don’t know. I should have,” he answered. “For the last few months, things have been different. My mom and I haven’t discussed anything important in years, but when I went to rehab, it set something off. She acted strangely.”
“How? What did she do?” I asked.
“She called a lot. She would say that she wanted to talk.” He said that slowly, like he was working through the idea.
“You told me that you don’t do that,” I reminded him. “When you called her about working on my paperwork problem, you didn’t chitchat. You stuck to business.”
“Yes, because that was the relationship we’ve always had.
In college, after she hired detectives to track me down, I started calling once or twice a semester but we stuck to facts.
I told her that I was passing my classes and later, I let her know that I had left my job in LA and had moved up north.
But since I got back from rehab, she seems to be interested in more than just the facts.
She seems…” He thought, pursing his lips a few times and then frowning.
“Interested?” he asked. “She suggested that I should meet someone. Someone sober.”
“Is that why you called her to fix my paperwork problem? Because you thought that talking about me would get her off your back?”
“She’s not on my back, she’s just…”
“Interested, yeah, and you’re weirded out because she never was before. Right?”
“Right,” he told me. “But I called her to help you because I believed that she would succeed. Once she wants something, she’ll stop at nothing. I knew that she would pay bribes, threaten, blackmail...she has no scruples.”
“However it happened, she got it done.” I looked in the rearview mirror to check on my bag, which had a new wallet in it. That held my debit card from my bank and my magical Michigan driver’s license.
“And maybe I did want to show her that I was ok. Maybe I did,” he admitted. “I don’t know, though, because I’ve never done anything to seek her approval before. I don’t actually care what she thinks about me and my life.”
“Then why did you let her believe that you and I are seeing each other? No, she must believe that we’re very serious, because we’re living together.”
“I’ll tell her the truth,” Nolan announced, but I shook my head.
“No, don’t. Keep lying.”
“Why?”
“Because it sounds like she’s reaching out and trying to form some kind of bond with you. I think she was doing the same thing when we were at their house and she wanted you to spend the night.”
“She wants us to do that tonight, too.”
“See? She’s making an attempt to be a mom-like person. If you tell her that you were lying about me, then she might stop.”
“I shouldn’t lie,” he said. “We’re supposed to be honest about drinking, honest in our relationships, honest at jobs, honest all the time.”
“Nobody’s honest like that,” I countered. “We all lie, even to ourselves, and I’ve spent a lot of time lying to my boyfriends to cut down on the steam stuff. I mean, I lied to manage their anger. I would have told them just about anything to keep them calm and happy.”
“That was a safety issue for you. There’s nothing like that here.”
“It would be nice for you to have a mother-son thing going. But if it’s important for your sobriety to tell the truth, then do that. Tell her.” I paused, thinking. “Or, we could make it real,” I suggested.
“What? What do you mean?”
“You and I could be in a relationship. I mean, we already are,” I answered.
“We live together. We do stuff together. We help each other—you help me a lot, and I try to help you, too. So in a way, it’s like we’re together for real.
Except without sex, which you already told me that you’re not interested in.
I’m not either,” I stressed. “If I never have to do it again, it will probably be too soon. I don’t mind if it’s gentle and it’s not like I never had an—”
“Viv. Vivi,” he interrupted. “Hold on, there. I just said that I don’t want to lie. The last thing I should do is to involve you in a bigger lie.”
“I’m saying that it would be true. Why do all relationships have to be the same? I don’t want the kind that I’ve had before. Do you?” I asked.
“Are you asking if I would I want the same thing I had with my former fiancée? No.”
I felt a weird shift in my stomach, like we’d just gone over a bump in the road. “Yeah, exactly,” I answered. “So, why not have something else? Both of us could.”
“Is this about you feeling guilty because you live with me? Are you trying to pay me back in another way?”
“Not through sex,” I answered. “Unless that’s what you want.”
“No. No,” he repeated. Then he looked out of the window and we didn’t talk much for the rest of the way to the hospital. He had other things to think about besides my suggestion, and it probably hadn’t been the right time to bring it up, anyway.
So, when the map told me that we were close, I spoke up again. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “You can just forget about what I said.”
“Are you afraid that I’m going to kick you out of the house? Is that why you made that offer?”
“No. And if you did kick me out, I would find somewhere else to go. I have a lot more opportunities now,” I answered. “I said it because I thought it was a good idea. This thing, the thing between you and me, is the steadiest and normal-est that I’ve ever had. Is that a word?”
“Maybe ‘the most normal.’ But I understand what you mean,” Nolan said. “It is for me, too.”
“More than your fiancée?” I asked.
“There.” He pointed. “That’s the hospital entrance.”
I dropped him off and then parked, because he was obviously in a hurry to see his dad.
Then I followed the signs and sat in the waiting room of the cardiac care unit with some other worried people.
He was gone for a while and I made myself comfortable and tried to do more of the assignment I’d been working on earlier, in my bedroom.
It seemed just as impossible and I got pretty much nowhere with it.
He came out after I had put that crapola away and I tried to read his expression, but all I could get was “shuttered.” “Are you ready?” he asked. “They close the unit to visitors for an hour and then reopen, but my dad said not to come back tonight.”
“Is he tired?”
“No, he’s sitting up and doing work, and I think I’m getting in his way. He let me know that some people have jobs and can’t just waste hours by chatting.”