In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (30 page)

“So did you and Mother Teresa have a fight?” she asked.

Usually Adam got mad when Cecily referred to Phoebe as any sort of do-gooder, but that night he laughed. “Why do you ask?”

“Because normally about now you’re having phone sex with her, not getting hammered with me.”

Despite all her glib jokes about Phoebe’s newfound charitable side, Cecily was a superb listener. Adam could have opened up, had her order him to call Phoebe and apologize. In one of those other universes, something along those lines likely happened.

“Naw, I just wanted to come out and blow off steam,” he said. “That’s all.”

Perhaps it was the Sudafed/cough syrup combination, but Adam realized he was wasted; he responded by ordering a triple. The American tourists who’d sent the shots finally became brazen enough to ask for cell phone pictures and autographs. Drink in his hand, Adam looped his arm around Cecily’s shoulders and blinked again and again against the flash.

After that his memory of the evening is genuinely fuzzy.

In bits and pieces he remembers the following things happening:

His arm stayed around Cecily long after the tourists left the bar.

Cecily went to the ladies’ room, and he followed her down the wood-paneled hallway to the bathrooms.

Cornering her, his hands at either side of her head.

Cecily’s brown eyes huge and confused.

His lips on her neck.

A voice, sadly he’s pretty sure it was his, saying, “Don’t pretend you haven’t wanted this for four years.”

Then a sharp, searing moment of pain and clarity, when Cecily kneed him in the groin. “I don’t know what your deal is, Z,” she said. “But you’re being a total douchebag.”

Adam likes to think he apologized, but he’s reasonably certain he just stood there, doubled over and panting.

Things after that are hazy again:

Cecily taking his keys and saying something about him being too sloshed to drive.

Possibly puking in a puddle outside the bar.

A sad semi-smile on Cecily’s face as she helped him into his car’s low passenger seat and buckled the belt, everything slippery in the dark rain.

Half-formed wonder if Cecily knew how to work the manual transmission.

Brief jerk when they stalled somewhere around Sixteenth Avenue.

On the radio, that Coldplay song about the ticking clocks.

He thinks he may have drifted off.

Sensation of flying.

Something wet in his eyes, different than the rain.

Startling realization he was upside down.

Cecily contorted and broken through a film of red.

From that point on, everything is crystal clear again. Ascertaining that, despite being upside down, he was largely unharmed, Adam swatted the air bag out of the way and reached for Cecily’s shoulder. She moaned in a distant, disturbing way. Even in the poor lighting, he could see her face was covered in blood.

Adam was searching his pockets for his cell phone, wondering if 911 was the same number in Canada, when a man outside started tapping on the window (Adam would later learn the guy was the driver of the other car). He could see the flashing bulbs of emergency vehicles already en route.

Firefighters broke the glass and had Adam crawl out of the hatchback, while paramedics carefully secured Cecily to a litter and slid her out through the window.

It probably didn’t matter, but Adam told the emergency workers he was Cecily’s fiancé and rode along in the ambulance. Someone gave him a blanket to throw over his wet clothes and a wad of gauze for his cheek (maybe he was still high on cold medication, but it struck him as hysterical that the cut was actually below his eye but blood had obscured his vision because they’d been upside down). As they were pulling into the emergency department’s bay, Cecily’s eyelids fluttered open, and she gave him a terrified glance. Adam took her hand.

None of the doctors and nurses who scurried around Cecily were particularly forthcoming with information. The phrases “internal bleeding” and “spleen involvement” were said a lot. A blond woman in a lab coat insisted on taking Adam into the next room and putting three stitches in his cheek. As she was covering the sutures with a bandage, he started coughing.

The doctor’s brow creased. “Have you been experiencing chest pain?” she asked. “You may have broken ribs.”

Adam said he had a cold and remembered a few hours ago that had seemed a completely insurmountable problem.

Cecily was out of it and still a mess—blood caked in her hair, nose twisted and swelling, IVs dripping fluids into her thin alabaster arm—but they let him spend a few minutes with his “fiancée” before wheeling her gurney to surgery for a spleenectomy. Adam held her hand and told her he was sorry; she made an unintelligible sound.

A short nurse led him to an empty waiting area with an ancient television, depressing furniture, and a wall-mounted phone. She said someone would call and update him once they had a better idea of his fiancée’s condition. Even though he hadn’t told her his name, she called him “Mr. Zoellner” and smiled. As laid-back as Vancouver was about C-list actors, it was clear she knew exactly who they were. That seemed very, very bad, so he tried not to think about it.

There was a pot of incredibly stale coffee, and he drank cup after cup because it was warm and gave him something to do. He knew Cecily didn’t get along with her mother but thought he should call her anyway. Scrapped the idea when he realized he didn’t know Cecily’s mother’s name.

When Phoebe called his cell, Adam wasn’t sure if he’d been sitting there an hour or a day. He wondered if the nurse had tipped off PerezHilton.com or one of the celebrity weeklies and Phoebe had learned about the accident online.

“Hey, I wanted to catch you before you got to work.” She sounded authentically optimistic. “I was going to surprise you—”

In one of those parallel universes, he let her finish the sentence. In his world, he told her he had been in an accident and was at the hospital.

“Oh, God—”

“I wasn’t hurt,” he said before she could ask. “Cecily’s in surgery.”

Phoebe took in an audible breath, but to her credit didn’t ask why Adam had been in a car with Cecily in the wee hours of the morning. “Is she gonna be okay?”

“I don’t know.”

The phone on the wall rang—the surgeons with an update. Adam told Phoebe he’d call her back and hung up.

Cecily was okay … ish.

The doctors removed her spleen, and a few days later a plastic surgeon reset her nose, promising in a month no one would ever know the difference. They kept her in the hospital a week, and
E&E: Rising
’s producers were forced to postpone production for ten days. In one of the other worlds, Adam went home and made things right with Phoebe. In his world he stayed in BC.

Perhaps because the hospital staff still thought they were engaged, no one asked him to leave. The short nurse gave him a pair of hospital scrubs to replace his torn and bloodied clothes, and the blond doctor gave him cold medicine. Both said how sweet it was that he was so worried about his betrothed.

That first night/day/night—they all blended together—Cecily dipped in and out of confused consciousness. The hollows under her eyes were black and puffy, her lovely face distorted. There was a large bandage on her abdomen that he assumed covered a large scar. He thought about the ad campaigns she did, where she was nearly always undressed. It made him physically ill to think she might not be able to do that anymore, to think that her nose might heal wrong and she wouldn’t look quite so stunning, couldn’t get work.

Blaming the accident on the rain, the police hadn’t cited either Cecily or the Volvo driver (apparently Cecily
hadn’t
been matching him drink for drink, and her blood alcohol level had been well within the legal limit), but that seemed a technicality of the highest degree. Adam was pretty sure blame could squarely be dropped on his shoulders.

No one had bothered to clean the blood out of Cecily’s hair, so he dabbed it off with a wet cloth. Standing over her bed, he whispered over and over and over again that he was sorry.

The spleen, he sort of remembered, had to do with the immune system and infections. He tried to look things up on his smartphone, but the hospital’s Internet service was spotty, so he ducked out of Cecily’s room long enough to call his mother in Florida. Leaving out details of the story, like the fact that it had been his car and he’d been too drunk to drive it, he said a “friend” had a spleenectomy and asked about complications. His mother confirmed everything he’d read about the greater potential risk for infections.

“Is it really bad?” he asked.

“It’s not ideal, but your friend should be fine as long as she’s careful. The biggest risk is after removal, but I’m sure they have her on all kinds of antibiotics.”

Adam had left the pronouns gender neutral, but his all-knowing mother seemed perfectly aware that the friend was a woman, and perhaps an inappropriate one. She asked about Phoebe.

“Pheebs is doing really well,” Adam said with false enthusiasm. “She got into the MSW program at Michigan.”

“That’s an excellent school,” said his mother. “Tell her congratulations from me.”

For the first time since his conversation with Phoebe, which seemed to have taken place entire centuries ago, it occurred to Adam that he could have just congratulated her. A part of him wanted to call Phoebe and do that (and maybe in one of those other worlds he did), but he went back to Cecily’s bedside and apologized some more.

The QT spokesperson put out a statement saying that Adam and Cecily had been involved in an accident on their way home from a “cast hangout,” but both were expected to make full recoveries.

Adam’s own publicist called with advice on how to handle the situation.

“As Phoebe’s friend, I think you’re a dick,” Evie said, blunt as always. “But as your rep, it’s actually not a terrible thing if the world knows you’re banging the Jericho Jeans girl.”

“I’m not.” Adam wondered why he didn’t call Phoebe and tell her that.

“Fine, if the world
thinks
you’re banging her.”

He told Evie he couldn’t talk and went back to Cecily.

Sometimes he slept in a reclining chair that the short nurse brought in. Sometimes he got soda and pretzels from the vending machine. Mostly Adam stood by Cecily’s bed apologizing.

Phoebe left him messages, but he couldn’t bring himself to listen to them. Every time he thought about what he would possibly say to her, he felt nauseated. After thirty-five hours, his cell battery died.

As the days and nights blended, Cecily became more and more aware and less and less medicated.

“Would you stop saying you’re sorry, already?” she said one groggy morning. “I was the idiot who thought it was a good idea to try driving stick in a monsoon.”

“Cese, I…” he began, but she cut him off.

“And why does everyone keep asking when we’re getting married?” Her tone was light, but things felt off. It was hard to gauge true emotions with her mangled features.

She told him to go home and take a shower but didn’t complain when he stayed.

By the third day, she was alert enough that they started playing checkers and Scrabble and the other games stashed in the hospital. She asked if he’d teach her to play chess, and he did, even though he hadn’t played since he was a kid living at his grandparents’ house.

Whenever he could, he snuck in apologies—when he checked her king with his knight, when he went to the café to get her flavored iced tea, when he helped her to the bathroom because she was “done dealing with bedpans.”

“You need to stop with this ‘sorry’ crap and go home,” she said. “You look like ass and you’re seriously smelling up my room.”

He apologized, but she didn’t acknowledge it.

“And I’m sure Mother Teresa is wondering where the hell you are.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

The network president sent a giant floral arrangement, and Cecily cracked that Rex Stern might not have been so generous if he’d seen her face. For a woman who made a living on her looks, she was handling the black eyes and broken nose exceptionally well. Ron Brosh, Avery Lane, and a bunch of other people from the show stopped by during visiting hours. They brought cupcakes and slippers, books and magazines (the accident was a small item in both
Us Weekly
and
Living
, the latter of which had “an insider” claiming that Adam and Cecily were secretly engaged. For the first time, Adam was grateful he was on a basic cable show and wasn’t a bigger star). Everyone asked Cecily how she was feeling and told her she looked great, which was an utter lie.

No one asked what happened or why Adam and Cecily were out together—everyone knew they were close and had been whispering about a torrid affair for years. It was probably a little eyebrow raising that Adam was still at the hospital, wearing a pair of blue surgical scrubs, but no one asked about that either. When one of the nurses called Adam Cecily’s fiancé, Ron poked him in the ribs. Adam shook his head, and they left it at that.

Cecily told Adam the people she wanted to see and those she didn’t, and he acted as gatekeeper. She refused to let him call her mother in Newfoundland the first few times he brought it up but finally consented.

Even so, things still felt off between them.

On what must have been the fifth night, he helped her to the restroom as he had been doing for days. With her arm slung around his shoulder on the way back, she turned to him and offered a serious look.

“Z,” she said, and he nodded expectantly. “I haven’t dropped a deuce since they cut me open.”

He laughed and knew things between them were going to be okay. Though for years after, she could convince him to do almost anything by simply pouting her pretty mouth and saying “spleen.”

That night Cecily’s mom came in, and he finally did go home. Adam was almost to the parking lot when he realized that he didn’t have a car in the city anymore and dialed a cab. It had been a frighteningly long time since he’d had a real shower or eaten anything of substance, but he picked up the phone, sat on the bed, and called Phoebe before climbing any of those rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy.