In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (31 page)

“How is she?” Phoebe asked, surprisingly sincere. Adam hadn’t expected her to be actively rooting for Cecily’s demise, but it was still a little jarring.

“Much better, they’re sending her home in a few days.”

“That’s great.” There was clear relief in her voice. “And you?”

Adam shrugged into the phone as if Phoebe could see him. “I’m fine.” It seemed a good assessment of his physical condition, anyway.

“Really?”

“Yeah.” But he felt a thousand pounds. Easing onto his back, he stared at the ceiling.

“Good.”

Desperately he wanted to apologize, but couldn’t. It seemed he’d used all his sorrys on Cecily. There was an unappealing brown spot on the ceiling, but his head was too heavy to turn away.

“I talked to the people at Michigan, and they said if I really wanted they could get me into the program this semester.” She sighed. “I’ll only miss the first week, so I was thinking I’d do that.”

He wondered what he said in those other worlds, where a butterfly flapped its wings slightly differently, where he wasn’t made of lead.

“You know nothing ever happened between Cecily and me, right?” he finally said.

In always sunny LA, Phoebe sighed. “Adam, that’s not why I’m going—”

“I know … but … I didn’t want you to think I’d hurt you that way.”

Maybe in some other world, Phoebe broke down or yelled at him or told him she
needed
him to come with her. In his world she said, “Thank you.”

Back on the day of their original fight, one of the reasons Adam had been so grouchy was because of that last hour of filming, when Cecily couldn’t get out her lines right:

“You destroyed those worlds, if not through intent, then through neglect. You were too busy waging your war on Bryce, and you weren’t watching the Neutrocon. The damage that you’ve done cannot be undone.”

At the time he’d been frustrated Cecily kept screwing up. But it was a hard chunk of text to say, and maybe not simply because it was melodramatic and full of exposition. Maybe it always seemed expository and forced to discuss incomprehensible loss.

“Honestly, I’ll be done with the program in a year and a half,” Phoebe said. “Maybe less if I can get part of the certification over the summer.”

There were things they needed to talk about. Specifics of their break, if they were going to try that. Logistical arrangements: He was filming in BC through spring; if she was leaving in a matter of days, who would take care of condo stuff? Would she be taking their (her) dog?

Lots of exposition.

There also seemed lots of extremely important words to say. That he still loved her and she meant more to him than any person he’d ever known. That he was so very, very sorry, even if he’d used all his apologies on another woman.

Hard to get through.

He thought of all those other worlds, where maybe he did things differently, where maybe he was better.

“Phoebe,” he said. “I’m really proud of you.”

*   *   *

Having grown up in Chicago, Phoebe Fisher really shouldn’t be so stunned by the cold of Ann Arbor in winter. But she’d been in LA an awfully long time—almost as long as she’d lived in the Midwest—and the frigid, wet air that chills her bones and makes her breath a visible entity is startling those first few weeks. She supposes late January is as bad as it’s ever going to get, but the ice is still a shock as she sets up the apartment she found on a grad student Web site or walks Kraken in the complex’s little courtyard. It’s a jolt each day she treks around campus between her classes and the health center, where she starts her counseling hours for students.

The cold campus reminds her of her brother. The weekends she’d visited him at the University of Wisconsin, when Chase had bundled her up in hats and scarves and took her to football games and the strip of bars popular with undergrads. “This is good,” he’d joked. “Fewer of my friends hit on you when you’re wrapped up like a burrito.” But she also knew how a part of him enjoyed showing off his actress sister from the yogurt commercials. She wonders what Chase would say about her moving to Michigan. If he’d be proud of her or think she was running away. Feels the familiar ball of something in her throat that she can barely remember what he looked like anymore.

Mostly the chill makes her miss Adam and his warmth. As she cuddles with Kraken under layers of blankets, she thinks of how hot it was to sleep beside him, how she used to wake up sweaty even though they had the AC on high. It makes her wonder if she’s really here because it’s such a great program or because in the haze of her hurt, it had seemed a good idea to put as much distance between her and Adam as possible.

It probably doesn’t help that the handful of people in her program also seem cold. Everyone is amicable enough when she introduces herself in classes, but Phoebe started in the middle of the school year; friendships that were going to be formed had already been established. She doesn’t fit in with any of them, anyway. There are the students right out of undergrad, a full eleven years her junior, who still swap bed partners and pound shots at the area bars. And while there are several people her own age and even older (one woman often mentions she’s fifty-seven), they’re all partnered up or divorced with families of their own (an unmarried woman in her thirties absolutely unheard of outside of LA’s Never-Never Land). When classes or their counseling hours end, they sprint off to pick up children from day care or hockey or ballet.

A lot of those first few weeks are spent waiting for delivery of semi-disposable furniture and staring at the phone, wondering how many times she can call Adam without violating the terms of their ill-defined “break.”

That she learns Virgil’s is hiring a bartender, and even of the restaurant’s existence, is complete serendipity. Lost on her way to a used-furniture sale she’d seen on Craigslist, Phoebe pulls into the Virgil’s parking lot to turn around. Because the restaurant on the bottom floor of the historic inn looks out of place and reminds her a little of Rosebud, she gives it a second glance, notices the small sign in the front window:
EXPERIENCED
BARTENDER
WANTED
.

Money really isn’t much of an issue. Even when she was at UCLA and essentially acting as Adam’s manager, she’d worked nearly full-time at Rosebud, and Adam had refused money for the condo, so cash had piled up in her checking account.

No, money isn’t the reason she parks the car and walks through the large blue door (sort of like Rosebud’s famous bronzed one). Nor does she dislike what she’s studying; she truly enjoys it, especially the limited time she’s allowed to talk to patients. While others in her program often complain that the students who come in are self-absorbed with silly problems, Phoebe understands better than most that being young and privileged isn’t necessarily free of pain.

No, she enters Virgil’s because everything is different and cold and she wants something familiar.

Probably too far from campus to cater to a U of M crowd, the restaurant appears a mash-up of a steakhouse and a sports bar: white linens on the tables and a large bar with several HD televisions on various sports networks (and one on the channel that shows classic movies) all on mute. A mix of Rat Pack oldies—perhaps even the same station as Rosebud—floats through the empty rooms. It’s forty-five minutes until they open for lunch, and she can’t help but wonder if the place will actually fill up and with whom.

Waiters in white button-downs and black pants are setting tables and cleaning, and a petite college-age girl is stacking menus at the hostess stand. She hands Phoebe a generic job application without fanfare, says she can fill it out at the bar.

When the hostess sees she was head bartender at the famed Rosebud in Los Angeles, the girl gets flustered, as if she’d discovered Phoebe is someone important—the way hostesses at Rosebud kick themselves for not recognizing Steven Spielberg or Jennifer Lopez.

“Wow,” says the girl, before launching into a lengthy nervous explanation about how the chef/owner has been having health problems and his nephew has been running things for the past few months. “I’ll get Cole—he’s, like, a classically trained chef from the city.”

As the girl shuffles off into the area behind the bar, Phoebe wonders if “the city” means Detroit proper. A few seconds later, the hostess returns and leads Phoebe to a little office off the kitchen full of dry goods and boxed soda syrup.

Phoebe’s application in hand, a distracted-seeming guy in a chef’s tunic comes in from the kitchen and introduces himself as Cole Fleming. He looks about sixteen and has a frustrating amount of facial hair, between a beard and a goatee, that makes him look even younger.

His shake is firm, but he doesn’t actually focus his attention on her until halfway through the gesture, then holds her hand too long.

“So,” he says, finally letting go. “You worked at the infamous Rosebud?”

Phoebe answers affirmatively, and this Cole Fleming gives her another once-over, as if she’d clarified a point. “Well, you’ve definitely got the Rosebud look.”

Because she’d been planning to move furniture, Phoebe’s wearing jeans and a sweater under her thick coat but assumes the comment is about her general attractiveness. There seems to be no great response, so she simply nods. Something about this kid makes her uncomfortable, and she doesn’t need the job. Pushing a practiced smile, she waits for the interview to be over.

But then Cole surprises her. “Is it me, or is that famous chicken salad overrated?”

Phoebe chuckles through her nose. The celebrity guests and tourists alike rave about the Rosebud salad, and it outsells every other lunch entrée by scores, but the dirty little secret to the twenty-five-dollar salad is that the chef uses canned chicken breast—the “special” marinade is salt and water.

“You don’t even want to know,” she says.

He laughs and invites her to sit down across from him at the little desk so they can exchange the needed information: She’s a grad student with evenings free; he needs someone immediately because one of their bartenders got engaged to an auto exec and promptly quit.

“Normally I’d have you make a bunch of cocktails, but most people here order Bud Light and merlot, so you don’t really need to know what’s in a Manhattan.”

“Rye, sweet vermouth, and bitters, with a cherry and orange twist,” she blurts out, then feels heat on her cheeks.

Cole Fleming smiles again. “Can you start tomorrow night?”

Back in her car, Phoebe picks up her phone and unconsciously dials Adam because this is the kind of thing that they’ve been sharing with each other forever.

Heart pounding, bowels queasy, she remembers they’re on a break and things don’t work that way anymore. Aborting the call, she wonders again if coming here was a mistake.

The night she told Adam she was accepted at Michigan and he and Cecily got into the accident, Phoebe had been watching
E&E: Rising
(she was always working or volunteering on Thursday nights, so she DVR’d the episodes). When the phone rang, she hit pause, freezing on a tearful Cordelia Snow and Captain Rowen lamenting the loss of some other world.

Cecily’s beguiling face was the first thing Phoebe saw after Adam told her they’d slept together and hung up. In disgust, Phoebe hurled her quasi-engagement ring at the screen, hitting Cecily’s perfect nose.

Instantly she was mad at herself for getting upset. It was true Phoebe did occasionally want to scream when Cecily batted long lashes at Adam and pulled at his arms like a coquettish little girl. But Phoebe was certain nothing was going on between the two of them, and that Adam was only saying otherwise to hurt her, because he was hurt that she might leave.

Shaking her head, Phoebe went to retrieve the ring but stopped, noticing something about Adam’s frozen image on the TV screen.

That close, she could see the tear halfway down his cheek. Her breath caught, and she realized that she’d never seen him cry in real life. At least once a season,
E&E: Rising
was determined to show Rowen’s humanity by having him break down on Cordelia, and Phoebe had seen him cry in the
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
remake, but never as Adam Zoellner. When he was upset, he got red and angry or drunk and maudlin. Petulant and pouty or stressed and shaky, but Adam never cried, at least not in front of her.

Reaching out, she put her finger to his forehead on the screen. All at once she could see him coughing and shivering, alone and sad in the generically furnished unit he rented in Vancouver. It made her insides loose and hollow. She remembered how, when her brother died, Adam drove all night in a snowstorm to see her without a thought to his own career, and she felt even sicker.

Sliding her ring back on, she decided to go to USC. If a spot didn’t open up for her on the waiting list, she’d pad her résumé with more volunteer work and get in the next year. She was already a decade older than everyone else; what was the difference?

Wanting to tell Adam in person, she bought a ticket online for the first flight from LAX. Initially she planned to surprise him but figured it was best to let him know she was coming to avoid a rom-com-esque missed connection. Phoebe was already through airport security when she called his cell, hoping to catch him on his way to work. He told her he was at the hospital with Cecily and hung up on her again. She was stunned, everything she thought she knew about their relationship suddenly in question.

In a daze she’d walked back through the gate and out the door to the taxi line. It was 9:00
A.M.
in Ann Arbor, so she’d called the University of Michigan from the cab, told them she was accepting their offer, and asked about starting in winter term. By the end of the week she was gone.

*   *   *

Still in front of Virgil’s, Phoebe puts her phone back in her purse.

Of course she and Adam have been talking since she left, mostly practical things about the condo and Kraken and scripts she’d been looking over. The parameters of their break remain rather loosely defined—something about reevaluating when she’s home in March. Deep, deep down she thinks (or maybe needs to believe?) that they’ll eventually get back together after he’s had the opportunity to whore around a bit as penance for her leaving. Perhaps it’s a testament to how she herself needs therapy, but she misses him enough that she’s pretty much okay with that (well, unless he really
does
sleep with Cecily).