Out of Nowhere (27 page)

Dr. Maser nodded and adjusted her dress over her knees. “We’ll discuss that a little later. What happened with your boyfriend?”

I shared the gory details. “It’s been two days and he hasn’t called. He was really mad.”

“A perfectly normal response.”

“Well, he’s a perfectly normal person,” I said, lightly scratching my arms. A couple of days ago I’d developed a prickly rash, probably caused by stress. Like Dr. Kapur kept trying to tell me, anxiety could wreak havoc on a body. It could trick you into thinking you’re defective and make you desperate for a cure. “Too normal for a nutcase like me.”

“The fact that you have an anxiety disorder doesn’t mean you’re weak or crazy, Riley. It just means you’re fallible like the rest of the world. What matters is that you don’t let it rule your life.” She leaned back in her chair, rocking it a little. “From what you just told me about your fight with Cole, these fears seem to be having a noticeable impact on your relationships. Would you agree with that?”

After a short pause, I nodded. “It seems like whenever I feel close to someone, I start thinking about how it would affect me if I lost them. I don’t deal with loss in a healthy way. Obviously.” I gestured to her, the office, the fact that I was sitting here, in therapy.

“Yet you’ve allowed yourself to form close relationships with your mother and your brother and your friends. How are they any different?”

“Well, my mother has always been there for me,” I said. “So have my friends.”

“Your father was always there for you too.”

Until he wasn’t, I thought. And there were a couple of times I’d worried about losing my mother too, in the months following my father’s death and again in the early weeks of my brother’s life. Both times, she’d done nothing but sleep and cry. And both times, she’d returned to me eventually. Somehow, I believed she always would.

“What about Tristan?” Dr. Maser asked, slipping off her shoes and folding her legs up on the chair. “How are you able to be close to him?”

I thought about his chubby little arms, reaching for me, the unconditional trust in his eyes when he looked at me. “Tristan is helpless,” I said. “He needs someone to take care of him. He relies on me.”

She nodded. “You enjoy taking care of people. It gives you some measure of control over their wellbeing. Is that why you want to be a doctor?”

“Basically. And to save people.”

“Save people,” she repeated. “And it’s the same with the people you love, right? You feel the need to shelter them. Save them from bad things.”

“Of course. What’s wrong with that?”

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to protect your loved ones,” she said. “But unless that loved one is a helpless child, you can’t take sole responsibility for another person’s safety, and you can’t blame yourself when something goes wrong. Sometimes things just happen and it’s no one’s fault.”

She sounded suspiciously like Cole. I looked down, my gaze resting on the rug beneath my feet. I focused on the thin stripes, the pattern of colors. Red, brown, beige, red, brown, beige. After a moment, Dr. Maser’s smooth voice washed over me again.

“There was no saving your father, Riley. Trained paramedics and doctors couldn’t even save him. How could an eleven-year-old child possibly do it?”

I shut my eyes against the colors and saw that child, cowering near her father’s body, feeling like she had failed him with her weaknesses, her lack of knowledge. Wanting so much to stand over him and bring him back to life, if only she knew how.

I’d heard Dr. Maser’s words many times before, from many different people. But this time, remembering how powerless I’d felt the other night at the hospital, how out of control I’d been, their true meaning was finally starting to sink in. It wasn’t my job to take care of everyone and save them and protect them from harm. I was just one girl, human and imperfect. Sometimes, I still needed help talking care of myself.

Dr. Maser regarded me thoughtfully for a moment. “What will you do if your boyfriend decides he wants to end your relationship?” she asked.

A lump formed in my throat just thinking about it. “Well, it would suck. I’d probably feel sad and guilty for a very long time. And I’d miss him. A lot.”

“And then?”

“Then I’d do everything in my power to fix it. And if I couldn’t…I guess I’d eventually deal with it and move on. Learn to accept it.”

She smiled at me. “Good.”

* * *

When I got home later, I found Jeff in the kitchen, scooping protein powder into a shaker bottle at the counter. His face was red and the veins in his arms popped out even more than usual, which meant he’d recently been working out at the gym. Usually when I found myself alone in the house with him, I’d escape to the safety of my room as soon as possible. Today, I lingered.

“Hey, Rye Bread,” he said when he noticed me standing in the doorway. “Hope I didn’t scare you. I left my protein and vitamins here so I just dropped in to grab them. I figured while I was here, I may as well make myself a shake.”

I nodded and he gripped the bottle in his fist, shaking it rapidly to blend its contents. I watched the muscles flex in his forearm and remembered Saturday night in the hospital parking lot, when that same arm circled my waist, keeping me from falling.

“Jeff,” I said, leaning back against the fridge.

“Mmm?” he said around a mouthful of protein.

“I’m sorry about the other night at the hospital. When I kicked you out.”

He swallowed and I could see the surprise in his denim-blue eyes. I’d never apologized to him before. Hell, I’d never really engaged him in a conversation like this before. He shrugged his football-player shoulders. “That’s okay,” he said. “You weren’t yourself.”

Myself, I thought. How did he see me? When did he think I
was
being myself? When I was being cold and hostile to him?
He loves you too
, my mother had said. How could he love the girl I was around him? How could he bring her maple dip donuts and hold her steady when she needed support? No matter what I threw at him, no matter how badly I messed up, he’d never stopped trying. Just like any parent.

“You know,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “I used to have panic attacks when I was in middle school.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Right before I had to write a test. I’d sit there in my desk and feel like my heart was going to explode. My hands would get so sweaty, I couldn’t hold on to the pen. God, I hated tests.” He laughed and took another swig of his shake. “Turns out, the reason I hated them was because I could barely understand the questions. At the end of seventh grade I was diagnosed with dyslexia.”

“Oh,” I said. How did I not know this? Maybe, I thought, because I’d always gone out of my way to avoid getting to know him. Or maybe he was afraid people would look at him differently once they knew.

“I thought I was just stupid,” he said, putting the bottle down on the counter. “Everyone thought I was stupid. Even my own father.”

“That’s horrible.” Now I felt even worse for questioning his intellect all this time. No wonder Mom got so pissed every time I’d implied her boyfriend was dumb.

“I knew I’d never get into a decent college, not with my grades. So I went for a trade instead. It worked out okay, I think.” He smiled for a moment and then his face turned serious. “I just hope Tristan takes after you and your mom instead of me.”

Tristan already possessed so many of his dad’s qualities…his eyes, his charm, his perseverance. All the best things about him. “Tristan will be okay either way,” I said, and I thought back to this morning, when he was getting ready to leave for daycare. After twenty minutes of struggling and ignoring offers to help, he finally managed to get his sneakers on his feet, all by himself. It would be moments like those, little glimpses into his burgeoning independence, that I would miss the most if I went away to college. I’d miss being here every day, watching him grow into his own little person. Just the thought of it made me sad.

“I should go get ready for work,” I told Jeff, who seemed lost in his own anxious thoughts.

“Oh. Sure,” he said, focused on me again. “I’ll see you on the weekend. Your mom and I are, uh…going to look at some houses on Saturday.”

I turned toward the kitchen doorway, itching to flee from the room and this particular topic of conversation. But again, I forced myself to stay. “Mom didn’t mention it.”

“Well, she thought…” His voice trailed off and he glanced at me, uneasy. But I already knew what my mother thought. She thought I would rather drink bleach than be included in their house-hunting plans, especially since I’d made it quite clear that declining a full-ride scholarship and running away from home was preferable to moving into a new house with my new stepfather. No wonder she worried about my mental state.

“She—we—would love it if you came too,” Jeff said, seeing the war of emotions on my face.

“I can’t. I have to work on Saturday.” I also had to work this evening, so I turned again to leave the room. In the doorway, I stopped and glanced back at Jeff. “Just make sure to find a house with at least three bathrooms, okay? I want one all to myself.”

He laughed. “Okay, I get it. Sometimes I forget to put the toilet seat down. Blame it on thirty-five years of bachelorhood.” He tossed the shaker bottle into the sink and grabbed his bag of protein and vitamins. “I gotta take off too,” he said, and we left the kitchen together. In the hallway, he reached over and gave my hair a good ruffle. This—along with many other habits of his—still got on my nerves, but I guess I wasn’t the easiest person to live with either.

“You’re a good kid, Rye Bread,” Jeff told me. “I think your dad would be really proud of you. I know I am.”

With one last hair-ruffle for good measure, he disappeared out the front door. I stood there in the hallway for a minute, alone, feeling almost peaceful in the silence. “I think so too,” I said to the empty house.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Call him, Riley.”

I yanked off my dirty apron and stuffed it in my backpack. “Lucas, quit badgering me.”

“No, I will not.” He peered down at my arms as we left the back room together. “You’ve been scratching at that stress rash for days. I think you’re allergic to the absence of Cole.”

We stepped out of the warmth and dryness of Jitters and into the chilly rain. The heatwave from the weekend had ended in a Biblical-like downpour. It had been raining for five days straight. “I tried. He won’t return my calls or texts. He doesn’t want to talk to me.”

Lucas held his apron over his head as we sprinted to the bus stop. On the days we had a shift together, he rode partway home with me. “I’m sure he just needed time to cool off,” he said as we waited on the edge of the sidewalk. “Try again. You need to make the first move.”

The bus pulled up then, saving me from having to answer. We climbed on and paid, then found a seat up front. “What if he’s still pissed at me?” I asked, shivering. Rain water dripped down my back.

“Just explain,” Lucas said as the bus got going again. “He’ll understand.”

I sighed. “Maybe.”

We didn’t speak for the next two stops. Soon, we crested a small hill and Lucas’s building came into view. He gripped the back of the seat in front of us, preparing to stand. “Call him, Riley,” he said again, half out of his seat. “Or else you’ll never know.”

He was right. Again. It was up to me to fix this, and I had to try. “Okay. I’ll call him.”

He nodded, satisfied, as the bus screeched to a halt. He waited for two women to pass by before shoving into the aisle. “Let me know how it goes,” he said, waving at me over his shoulder as he stepped off the bus.

I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. My arms still itched, but not as bad as before, and certainly not as bad as the time I had hives last spring. I’d been thinking about that day a lot lately. Waking up covered in welts. Preparing for a routine, tedious day in the ER waiting room that turned out to be anything but. Looking up to find a dirty, sweaty, blood-streaked boy who seemed to have dropped out of nowhere, like something you didn’t see coming until it hit.

So much of what happened in life was completely random. Like accidents. Like death. Like meeting someone in an unlikely place who would ultimately change the course of your life. And more often than not, there was nothing we could do about it. It was out of our control.

I opened my eyes and looked out the window. The bus had stopped at an intersection and I thought, as I often did while waiting or walking in intersections, about Cole’s car accident. Everything about it was fraught with what ifs. What if that car had been going faster? What if it had hit at a different angle? What if afterward, in his hospital bed, his brain had decided not to wake up?

So easily, the people we love can be lost to us forever. But sometimes, if we’re lucky, they’re only lost for a moment. Sometimes, they can still come back.

* * *

My stomach growled as I stepped off the bus. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and for the first time in days, I felt hungry. Since Sunday I’d been mainly surviving on cereal, peanut butter sandwiches and root beer. Now, my system seemed ready for real, hot food again.

The house was dark as night, even though it was only mid-afternoon. I opened all the blinds, letting in the muted light, and then headed to the fridge in search of last night’s lasagna. I normally ate leftovers cold, especially lasagna, but today I craved warm food in my stomach.

I stood in front of the open fridge, my fingers clenched around the cold Tupperware container. Then, after several long moments and a lot of hesitation, I walked over to the microwave, opened it, and placed the container inside. Soon, the garlicky scent of lasagna reached my nostrils and then spread throughout the kitchen.

The microwave beeped. I removed the container and dug out a fork from the drawer. My routine when I was alone was to eat in front of the TV, and everything in me begged to do just that, but I resisted. Instead, I returned to the spot in front of the microwave and sat down on the linoleum with my food.