8
I drive down our street toward the city, though I don’t know where I’m headed. The morning sunlight flashes between the tree trunks like a strobe in my peripheral vision, causing the pain on the top of my head to swell. My jaw is so tight my cheeks ache, and my hands grip the steering wheel with a force that originates from deep within, my knuckles bulging and angry. The hurt and indignation push against the screen in my mind. I swallow hard.
There’s only one place I can think to go to clear my mind, so as I approach the city limits, I continue east and roll down the driver’s-side window to allow the warm breeze to still my shaking body. I merge onto Interstate 84, through the heart of Portland and out the other side, and with every mile I put between our home and me, the easier it becomes to fight the raging river of emotions inside me. After an hour of driving, I exit Highway 26 and turn down an old dirt road, rolling up the window to keep the dust out. The car jumps and stutters over the rain-beaten path, but I don’t slow down until I reach the familiar tree that marks the path Cooper, Stephen and I used to take down to the Sandy River during med school on many Friday nights.
I stumble out of the car and follow the overgrown path between the trees with memory as my only guide, leading me in a dance around every rock and every protruding root of the large Douglas firs. The humidity in the air grows heavier with every step deeper into the forest. I breathe it in, breathing out a bit of the ache that has settled beneath my sternum. I still can’t think the words to myself, I just feel it—that deep emptiness inside me. It’s the first time since I met Cooper that I’ve felt that sense of loneliness that haunted me after Abby’s death, when everything I thought I knew about life was ripped away like a curtain to the truth.
Then the questions start.
Why?
What did I do?
What did I not do?
Was there some clue I missed?
Is there anything I can do to fix this?
The last question startles me so much, I stop, examine it, then shake my head until it floats away. No. I won’t be that sad woman who thinks she’ll be the one that’s different, the woman who thinks she’ll be the one to change a man.
I slog on.
I stop when I reach the break in the trees. It comes up fast, and I nearly slide down the small drop that leads to the clearing where the remnants of our fire pit still creates a mangled circle in the center, but I catch myself on a branch above my head. My heart races and my chest heaves with each heavy breath, but for the first time in years, it’s because I feel alive, not because I feel like I’m slowly dying. I let go of the branch and shoot down the bank, whooping the entire way. I reach the bottom unscathed, but I can’t stop my voice from releasing every emotion that will no longer fit inside my skin. What starts off as an excited howl turns to a frustrated screech to an angry roar. I imagine Cooper standing in front of me, and I scream at him for abandoning me like this. Because that’s what he’s done. We may not have stood in front of all our family and friends to make our vows to one another, but he betrayed all the promises we made in the dark, under the covers. He may not have moved out of our house, but he took his heart back and every other part of him I used to be able to claim as mine. Different people get different parts of him each day—his patients, his coworkers, his friends, his parents—but there was a deeper level of intimacy that was only mine to sink into. And now there isn’t. Someone else has touched him the way I touch him. Someone else has whispered to him the way I whisper to him. Someone else shares his secrets. I have to swallow back the tears and bile in my throat.
If he was unsure about our future together, why didn’t he tell me before he did the one thing he could never take back?
An hour later, I sit on a rock alongside the Sandy. It’s hot, and sweat trickles down my back and between my breasts. My shoes are cast somewhere over my shoulder, and my feet are curved around the wet, gritty rocks beneath me. My cheeks are rough with dried, salty tears.
I shouldn’t have come here. Returning to this place that sounds like Cooper, looks like Cooper, smells like Cooper, was the worst possible idea. I close my eyes and listen to the rushing water to drown out the memories of the many auspicious words he has spoken to me here—the “yes” he uttered when I asked him to take me home that first night, a thousand encouragements as we all battled our way through med school, the three little words that shifted something inside me.
I met him here nine years ago after the school’s orientation BBQ. Over a hundred medical students had gathered, all dressed in three-piece suits and silk dresses, clutching longneck bottles of beer. They talked with passion about anything but medicine, almost danced to the music. I located the nearest cooler, accompanied by my new roommate, who had dragged me to this party against my better judgment.
“Beer, stat!” she said over her shoulder, then threw her head back in laughter.
We shared the first round, before an alarming redheaded man ran up to us, said something about skinny-dipping and then took off toward the water. She followed.
Since I knew no one else, I found my way to the edge of the commotion and shuffled in a wide circle around it. I didn’t mind being on my own—in fact, most of the time I preferred it—but I hated the inquisitive glances. I think it was the awkward way I stumbled in heels that gave me away, as someone who preferred shooting hoops over parties. Half an hour and two beers later, my plus-one still hadn’t returned, and I was considering risking whatever I might see if I interrupted the group of people swimming in the river to get a ride back to my apartment. The possibilities required at least one more beer. I weaved through the ever more tipsy crowd, back to the cooler.
“Hi,” someone had said too close to my ear as his fingers brushed mine, reaching the last bottle before I did. I almost snatched it from him and then felt embarrassed when he twisted off the cap and handed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said and turned to leave.
“Wait.”
Reluctantly, I turned back to him. I wasn’t in the mood to make shallow conversation with a guy who only wanted to encourage me to drink too many beers, then try to take me home.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that...I didn’t come all the way over here just to open your beer.”
I looked down at my dress and cursed under my breath. It was shorter and lower cut than I’d remembered it. I didn’t know why I’d brought it to school with me at all. Usually I wore basketball shorts.
“Of course not,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He smiled, and I knew he’d heard what I said. I would have felt bad for being rude if he wasn’t so obviously good-looking and so obviously knew it.
“Stephen,” he said. He reached out his hand. I kept mine to myself. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“That’s because I didn’t give it to you.”
He chuckled. “Fair enough. But you see, my friend would be really disappointed if I came back without it.” He pointed to another attractive...boy, really, who did his best to put on a brave face, showing off his laugh lines and the most perfect smile I’d ever seen. I was fascinated by the mole above his top lip. He lifted his bottle in greeting. I was so caught off guard by the sudden change in suitors, I smiled weakly back at him.
“He’s been hoping you’d walk by all night. I told him to go talk to you, but, well...he’s a pansy.”
I snorted. “Is that your tactic to impress me?”
“No. My plan, if you don’t agree to come over and say hi to the poor guy, is to steal your beer and go sit next to him.” He winked at me. I found myself grinning.
“You’re not stealing my beer,” I said.
As we approached, Stephen’s friend stood, and I saw that he was far from being a boy. He wore a suit that was charmingly generic and cut a little too loose, but he wore it well. His black silk bow tie hung untied around his neck, and the top buttons of his shirt were undone. He gave me a shy smile and hid his eyes behind his fallen hair.
Stephen introduced us. “Nameless woman, this is Cooper.”
This time, I gave my hand willingly.
“Dylan,” I said.
“Wow,” Cooper said in a low voice, then he laughed. I got the impression complimenting women didn’t come to him as easily as it did his friend.
Stephen bowed and strutted away, arms open to signal his job had been done. Cooper laughed and invited me to sit next to him on the log.
“I like your dress,” he said, and suddenly, I was a dress person.
I didn’t know it until months later, but that night, I’d found everything I didn’t know I was looking for. Now I don’t know how I’ll make sense of a world where he isn’t mine.
* * *
At ten o’clock, I park in the garage across from the hospital and trudge up to the automatic doors that lead to the emergency department. I take the elevator up, and once the nurse at the information desk buzzes me through, I slip into Labor and Delivery and melt into the endless buzz of doctors and nurses at work. I keep my head down and weave through the hallways unnoticed. I know every room, every door, every closet here. It’s the only place that makes any sense today, and I find solace in its predictable rhythm.
I spend the night on a hard cot in the on-call room, staring up at the empty bunk above me. I lie under the covers, still in my clothes and shoes, my fingers laced over the center of my chest. I’m sure I won’t sleep with all the questions swirling in my mind, but I must fall asleep sometime during the night because I’m awoken minutes or hours later by the opening of the door and a bright-eyed nurse intern, one of the few I don’t recognize. She must know me, though, because she says, “Dr. Michels? I didn’t know you were on call tonight.”
I blink a few times to soothe my dry eyes. “I’m not,” I say, my voice raspy. I plaster a smile on my face so as not to alarm her.
“Oh,” she whispers and puts a finger to her lips conspiratorially. She backs out of the room, and the door clicks shut behind her.
After a few minutes of lying there with the sounds of machines beeping and phones ringing and TVs playing in the rooms on all sides of me, I throw the blanket aside, straighten my clothes and walk the connecting hallway to the clinic. I walk into my office, close the door and lean back against it.
I must have walked too quickly because my skin is clammy and there’s a pain in the pit of my stomach. I push my fist into it and wait for it to subside. I haven’t eaten anything in more than twenty-four hours, but it doesn’t feel like hunger, it feels like something else. Then an image flashes through my mind.
Cooper, sweating, heavy breathing, hands on his skin, not mine.
I take a deep breath to combat the ache between my eyes. But then...
Moaning, fingernails, blond hair. Not mine.
My head is in the trash can next to my desk before I know what’s happening. I cough and choke on nothing, dry heaving into the bin. A single sob escapes my lips, but I choke that back, too. It won’t help anything. It won’t change what has already happened or what I have to do.
I spit into the trash can and drag myself off the floor to my desk chair. I fall into it, exhausted from lack of sleep and food. I look around my office, noticing how bare it is here, just like my house. Just like my mother’s house. At least there’s nothing at all to remind me of Cooper.
* * *
It starts to drizzle when I arrive home late the following afternoon. I sit in the garage and watch the raindrops come down through the rearview mirror. Cooper’s car is here, parked next to mine. He’s waiting for me to come home, the way I waited for him when he was gone all night. I wonder if that’s when it happened. The thought cuts a fresh wound on my heart. And yet...
I still feel him on the other side of the walls between us.
I tilt the rearview mirror down so I can check my eyes. When I see how swollen and bloodshot they are from crying and lack of sleep, I sigh. There’s nothing for it. I stare until my face no longer looks like my face, or any face at all—just shapes and colors all blurred together.
I’m not going to hurt you.
I hear Cooper’s words again as if he’s whispering them in my ear—what he promised me when we first started getting serious. I see the details of that day in my mind as if I’m watching a scene in a movie.
It was two weeks after Cooper and I started dating when I was already spending most nights at the apartment he shared with Stephen. Every morning, I woke up before him, both of us naked and pressed so closely together I had to peel my sweat-salted body from his to sneak into the bathroom and dress while he slept.
“Why do you get out of bed so early?” he asked me one morning.
“My first class starts before yours does,” I said, applying a second coat of mascara.
“Your class doesn’t start for over an hour,” he said. He rolled to his side and rested his head on his hand. The sheets barely covered the parts of him that still made me blush, not because I was inexperienced with naked men, but because with Cooper, his nudity was more than just sex. It was intimacy. I wasn’t used to baring so much of myself to another person, or having him bare so much to me.
I shrugged. “I like to get coffee first.”
He threw back the covers and came to stand behind me. He placed his sleep-warmed hands on my hips and turned me around to face him.
“You don’t have to hide from me,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
He touched his nose to mine and traced the tip playfully over my skin, teasing me.
“I’ve seen you naked,” he said. “I’ve seen you without makeup.”
“I know,” I said and tried to turn back to the mirror, but he stopped me.
“So stop trying to hide from me. I don’t expect you to be flawless.”
I gasped. “Do I have flaws?”
Cooper laughed. “Of course not.”
I’d pouted, but he kissed my frown away, soft and slow and with meaning.
“You can stop fighting, Dylan,” he’d said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Now I suck in a breath as my face re-forms in the mirror. I tilt it back into place and get out of the car.
It’s darker in the house than it should be at four o’clock, but not a single light is on. The puppy is happily gnawing on a bone in the living room. I lean over to rub his head before I continue on to the bedroom.
I find Cooper sitting on the edge of our bed, in the same place as when I last saw him almost thirty-six hours ago. He could have been sitting in that spot since I left, if it weren’t for the dampness of his hair and the scent of his freshly applied cologne in the air. He’s wearing a pair of sweatpants and a sleeveless undershirt, revealing the broad lines of his shoulders and arms. I fear I’ll never get to kiss those lines again, rub my hands across them when he’s stressed, find solace in them when I’m lost.
“How long has it been going on?” I ask, breaking the thick silence.
“It’s not going on,” he says, staring at his hands, too much of a coward to look me in the eye. “I told you. It was one time, and that was it, I swear. I would never do that to you.”
“You said you would never hurt me either.”
What I can see of his face contorts in what looks like pain, but he keeps it in check. “I know.”
“Who?” I ask next. “Who was she?”
The back of his neck blanches more, if possible. He had to have known I would ask.
“Kim,” he whispers.
“Kim?”
“From the bar,” he says.
“Our bar?” I ask—the place where we’ve often met Stephen and Megan for late-night drinks after work. I rack my brain for a Kim. “The bartender?”
Cooper nods. I remember her. A petite little brunette about the same height and build as Megan. A few years older than I am, I’d guess, and cute, but the kind of cute that can be rubbed off with a box of tissues. I imagine them on top of the bar, and my stomach churns again. Thankfully, there’s nothing left inside it.
My arms hang limply at my sides. My shoulders no longer have the strength to hold them up. Cooper finally looks up to face me. He’s clearly been crying, too, but I don’t let myself react.
“How can I fix this?” he asks, his voice watery.
A twinge of anger pulls at the center of my chest. He had all night and all day to think about this, and the first thing he wants to know is how he can skip past the discomfort and get back to how we were?
“By making it not have happened.”
“Jesus,” he growls. He rubs his hands over his face and through his hair. I wish I could sit down and unburden myself of the weight of what answers he’ll have next, but I decide to give the conversation space. If I’ve learned anything about working with people, it’s that the discomfort of silence breeds truth.
Cooper stands up and comes over to me. The air around us is still, as empty as I am.
“I don’t even know what to say,” Cooper says. “I won’t insult you by pulling out some cliché. Although they all feel true right about now.” He gives a dry laugh, though we both know there’s nothing funny about it. “Please, say something. I can’t stand not knowing what you’re thinking.”
“If you didn’t want to be with me anymore,” I whisper, “you should have just left. You should have just stayed gone instead of making me think we had a chance.”
“But I do want to be with you, Dylan.”
He reaches for my hands. I step away. His voice is pleading, and I know it should affect me somehow, but when I look at him, I don’t see the Cooper I love anymore. I see a stranger. I leave the bedroom, so I don’t have to look at him. I feel him follow me anyway.
“No, you don’t,” I say over my shoulder. “You just didn’t want to admit it to yourself, so you took the easy way out.”
When we reach the kitchen and he still hasn’t responded, I turn to face him. He shakes his head, urging me to believe that’s not true, knowing I won’t hear it.
“Why?” is my last question. The biggest question. What led us to this point of no return? Could it have been prevented, or was it inevitable that we’d get here—at the end, one way or another?
I can tell by Cooper’s reaction that it’s the question he’s been dreading most. He pushes his palms against his eye sockets and turns slightly away, but then some internal argument, no doubt, convinces him to face me.
“Please, don’t make me say the words, Dylan. Please. There is absolutely no excuse for what I’ve done. I take full responsibility for... I take full responsibility for the consequences.”
“No,” I say, stepping forward. “There is no excuse. But there’s always a reason. And if the reason is big enough for you to...fuck some other woman—” he winces at the words, and I find some small satisfaction in pushing the knife in further “—then I deserve to know what it is.”
“You’re right,” he says. He opens his mouth. He’s shaking his head—at himself, maybe—when he says, “I just couldn’t take it anymore, Dylan. I’ve been waiting for you to come around for nine years, and for what? Do you know how embarrassing it is to call you my girlfriend when all the other guys at work are married and have kids? They treat me like the bachelor of the place while they have company picnics with their families and coach Little League. Sure, they invite me, but I go hiking with Stephen instead because you’re at work. You’re always at work.”
“Cooper, that’s my job!” I yell at him, my face aflame with anger but also shame. I had no idea Cooper felt so displaced.
“I know. I know that’s your job, but you take on more than you have to, and you know it. And you’re always trying to take on more. Dylan, I love Stephen. He’s my brother. But you—” His breath hitches, and he takes a step closer to me. “You’re my best friend. I want to spend time with you. I want to make a life with you...” His voice trails off at the end, and my head spins. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
“I don’t want our lives to pass us by, Dylan. I don’t want to be a forty-year-old first-time father.”
“You said you would wait,” I say. “You said I was the only one for you.”
“You are. I will wait.”
“And you’ll hate me for every second of it. I knew this would happen as soon as you made partner. It’s so easy for you to expect me to set aside my own dreams, now that you’ve fulfilled all yours.”
“Dylan,” he says. “I don’t want that from you. Do you think I would have asked you to marry me if I didn’t love your passion?”
“Right. Well, I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t get married. Maybe you can go ask your new friend.”
He sucks in a breath. Right now I want him to feel at least a fraction of the pain he’s causing me. But the vision of another woman in a white dress walking down the aisle toward him tears me apart from the inside.
He emphasizes each word when he speaks again. “I don’t want to marry anyone but you.”
“But it’s just one of the many things on a long list of everything I haven’t given you.” I pace back and forth from the stove to the counter while he stands dumbstruck, waiting for me to say something, to say that we can get past this. Finally, I stop and look at him. “Well, I hope she gave you everything you wanted.”
“I hardly even remember it, Dylan. Because all I was thinking while it was happening was that it wasn’t you.”
The sting of my hand is what alerts me to the fact that I’ve slapped him, and my first instinct is to apologize, but I refuse to take it back. The sharp sound assaults my eardrums, but I stand tall.
When I can breathe again, I say, “It should have been.” I walk toward the bedroom, then turn back to him. “You can stay in the guest room until you find another place.” Then I close the door behind me, and the door on us.