Chapter Seven
David was on level sixteen of SpudzMash and desperately trying not to focus on his ex-wife, sleeping on the cot inside the medical bay, but his eyes kept drifting over to her.
She looked so peaceful. It reminded him of a thousand better nights between them, and a time when Evelyn didn’t completely despise him . . .
She began to stir. Quickly, David clicked off his phone and went to check on her.
“Hey,” he said, pulling up a rolling chair beside her.
He had a strong instinct to sit down on the bed beside her and offer a hand, but he squashed that impulse.
He hadn’t actually dated anyone since his divorce, and he still remembered how hotly passionate sex with Evelyn could be .
. . He was genuinely worried about sliding down beside her, feeling the heat of her body pressing through their clothes and losing control of himself in the process.
Despite all their problems, chemistry had never been one of them.
Now they were divorced. He wasn’t a psychologist, but he reasoned that divorced people should definitely not have sex with each other.
“How are you feeling?” David asked.
Evelyn moaned.
“That good, huh?” David smiled and then swiveled back to grab her a cup of water from the cooler in his office.
Evelyn groaned again. “What am I doing here?”
David squinted, concerned, and put the cup of water down on his desk. “You don’t remember what happened?”
She let out one deep and shaky breath. “I . . . I . . . There was a girl.”
David attempted to explain. “I was in the studio, watching your rehearsal, when I noticed your left eye twitching.”
“My what?”
“Your left eye,” he said, pointing to his own.
“I remember that when you get migraines . . . your left eyebrow twitches. Anyway, I didn’t think you looked well.
So, being the doctor on set, and considering you just had a head injury the other day .
. . I figured it was my responsibility to check in on you.
” He left out the part where he was genuinely concerned for her.
“I caught up with you on the elevator and found you bent over, moaning and groaning in pain, grumbling nonsense. I suggested you come down to the medical bay for a quick checkup. You agreed, and then, you fell asleep on my cot.”
Her eyes went wide. “That can’t be right.”
Evelyn attempted to rise from the cot she was lying on, but stumbled. Clearly, she was disoriented. “Evelyn,” David said, trying to calm her down. “If you would just sit back down—”
“No,” she said, shaking him off, her agitation at the situation growing. “No, this can’t be right. How long have I been asleep for? What time is it? I need to get back to work.”
David sighed. “You needed to sleep.”
She pointed one accusatory finger at his head. “You kidnapped me!”
“Excuse me?”
“You brought me here and forced me into your, your . . .” She gesticulated wildly toward the medical cot in his office. “Bed.”
David raised both hands in open surrender and attempted, once again, to calmly explain the situation as her physician.
“I did no such thing,” he said flatly. “As I told you, you weren’t feeling well. I suggested you come back to my medical bay, and you agreed. You sat down on the cot and fell asleep. Demi was here when it all happened.”
Evelyn swallowed. “She was?”
“Yes,” he clarified patiently. So damn patiently. “Like I said, you were all out of sorts. We both helped you down here.”
She was too stunned to respond, and a pit of worry began to form inside his belly.
Evelyn always had migraines, but he couldn’t recall her experiencing such extreme memory loss because of them.
Granted, she was older, and migraines could shift their patterns and intensity as someone aged and their hormones shifted, but Evelyn was still only in her early thirties.
She shouldn’t have been anywhere close to perimenopausal.
He dragged one hand down his face, considering other options. There was the run-in with the piano and, of course, the stress of producing A Christmas Carol. He wasn’t a neurologist, but he supposed that both those factors could be playing a role in her odd behavior.
“So,” Evelyn asked again, “I was here . . . the whole time?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Not . . . somewhere else.”
David squinted. “Where else would you have been?”
Immediately, she retreated. “Nowhere.”
David cocked his head sideways. She had the look of a wild beast suddenly finding itself cornered. He felt the need to press her on it.
“Evelyn,” he said, rubbing his forehead. Now he was the one getting headaches. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really going on with you?”
“Nothing’s going on,” she said quickly. Too quickly.
“I know when you’re not one hundred percent.”
“Now, wait just one second,” she said, attempting to lift from the bed once again. “If you think you’re going to show up after two years and ruin the most important production of my life . . .”
David interrupted her. “I’m not trying to ruin anything.”
“But you’re not going to give me the all clear to go back to work? Just because . . . just because I wanted to take a little nap at lunch?”
He sighed. It was pointless trying to argue with Evelyn.
Why did he even bother trying to help her?
She seemed to have no interest in helping herself.
It was just like when they were married and he was constantly begging her to go to therapy, to work through their problems together.
Instead, she just dove deeper into work.
She disappeared into it, and pulled away from him, from her entire life.
“Look,” David said, not wanting to waste breath on the same old argument. “I get it, okay? This show—it’s the culmination of a lot of hard work. You’re so close to your dream now, you can taste it. I can taste it for you. But if all these dreams come at the expense of your health—”
She cut him off right there. “Oh, now you care about me?”
“Evelyn.”
“Now you want to be here for me and make things right between us. Just in case you forgot, David, you walked out on me. You left me. You left me all alone, without explanation, and after what happened with . . . with . . .”
David could feel the name they’d chosen for a child who never took her first breath sitting on Evelyn’s throat.
He wanted her to say it, speak her name.
Instead, she fell silent. A charged quiet drifted over the room before she looked away from him, pressing her eyes into the wall.
It had been two years, and still, she couldn’t acknowledge the loss.
She blamed David for leaving—hated him for it—but she never saw all the ways she had abandoned him long before he ever walked out that door.
Just then, thankfully, Demi appeared in the threshold of his office.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Demi said, shuffling inside to speak with them both.
“But the cast and crew are starting to return from lunch. Should I get them started on the second act without you? Or will you be coming back for the rest of the afternoon? I just wasn’t sure .
. . what with the mumbling, and the headache, and all. ”
Evelyn’s cold gaze drifted back to David. She raised one eyebrow in his direction. “Well?”
David sighed. It was no use. She was, truly, the most stubborn woman on the planet. “Evelyn and I just need five more minutes,” David said, making his final call with a forced smile in his ex-wife’s direction. “Then she’s good to go, and all yours.”
“Great,” Demi said, with a happy shrug of her shoulders. She bounced back out of the room. “Then I’ll just get everybody lined up and ready to start rehearsing the second act.”
His office returned to that charged and uncomfortable silence, before David rose from his seat and headed toward the medical cabinet in his office. Using the code Vikram had left him to unlock it, he began rummaging around the shelves for something to help Evelyn with her migraines.
“What does your neurologist have you on right now?” he asked.
“A daily, combined with an abortive.”
“Is any of it helping?” he asked.
“Nothing works but the Maxalt,” she said, frustrated.
He nodded. He remembered that from their marriage, too. “How many do you have left?”
“Not nearly enough.”
Finally, he found what he was looking for. Promethazine, normally given for nausea and vomiting, but it could help a migraine when triptans like Maxalt weren’t available.
“Here,” he said, pouring one out in her hand.
“I don’t know if it will help, but at least it’s something stronger than Excedrin Migraine.
And maybe it will tackle some of these episodes you seem to be experiencing.
In the meantime, please drink water and promise me you’ll get home early to rest tonight.
I know it’s old-fashioned—prescribing water and sleep—but sometimes, old-fashioned things work best.”
She softened. “Thank you.”
He returned to his desk. She took the medicine.
There. He had done it. He was a caring physician, helping a patient to perform to the best of her ability, all very professional.
And Evelyn was just about to leave, return to set, taking all those memories of breathless nights and shared intimacies with her, when she stopped and turned around at the door.
“Do you remember . . . when we were kids?”
“Kids?”
“When you lived next door to me,” she said.
“You came over to my house. It was the first night of Hanukkah, late afternoon. I was sitting on the curb outside, my parents were fighting, and you gave me . . . I guess you had made me this wooden menorah in school. It had David written on the front, and you had painted these little yellow Jewish stars along the border.”
He sat back in his chair. He had a hazy recollection of the memory, but it was there. He recalled coming home from school, hearing her parents fighting. They were always fighting. More than once, when their screaming reached a fever pitch on a school night, his own mother had called the cops.
“Why did you give me your menorah?” she asked.
His gaze narrowed on her curiously. Why had he given her the menorah?
Of all the questions to ask, after everything that had happened between them, it seemed more than a little irrelevant.
And yet he knew the answer to that question.
He felt it like an ache inside his soul .
. . even if she would never fully understand it.
“You needed it more than me.”
“Hm,” she said quietly. And then, with far less fanfare than when she’d arrived, Evelyn departed from his office.