While You Were Gone: A Thought I Knew You Novella (9 page)

I grabbed a chair and plunked it down opposite her. She glanced up, surprised.

“So,” I said, picking the tomatoes I’d asked them to hold off my roll. “You don’t like me much. I don’t know why. But it seems like it can’t be any real reason. I’ve never done anything to you. I just got here a few weeks ago.” I didn’t make eye contact. My bravado was false. Most is.

“I don’t dislike you.” Her voice was low, but it trickled out unemphatically. It was a lie.

“Hmmm, well.” I shrugged and smiled at her. “I bought you lunch so… you have to at least try now.”

She said nothing and stared at her plate, all her bubbly confidence deflated. I’d tried to make it better, but I’d inadvertently made it worse. I stood, my half-eaten sandwich limp on the tray. She looked up, and I gave her a weak smile and a little wave.

Out on the sidewalk, I’d breathed in cold air until my lungs hurt.

“Wait!” someone yelled, and I turned.

It was her, her hair flinging left and right as she ran toward me. She stopped, inches away. Too close, invading my personal space. I backed up.

“Let’s get a drink, okay? Tonight, after rehearsal. We’ll do dinner and drinks. What do you think?” She was breathless and smiling, her cheeks flushed.

I cocked my head to the side. What the hell?

She laughed and waved her hand. “Simon,” she said, like that explained everything. “He watches you. I’m being an idiot.”

I shrugged. Men paid attention to me on occasion. I was pretty, not beautiful, but tall and blonde and arrestingly direct, so I’d been told. She leaned forward, her hair brushing my cheek, her hand on my shoulder, and whispered into my ear, “I’m sleeping with him.”

She backed up and, eyes sparkling, put a finger to her lips. “Shhhh.”

Later, at dinner, she’d told me everything: their affair, his flailing marriage, her desire to get married, his desire to escape. We drank and talked late into the night. I’d never had a real girlfriend before, a drinking, giggling, sharing, advice-giving girlfriend. Rehearsals and auditions had been my girlfriends, my boyfriends, my enemies and confidantes. For everything else, there was Paula. Human connection is an instantly addictive drug. It was my heroin.

We lunched at the same deli every week, like spouses paying homage to their relationship. We giggled and cheered when Simon finally left, groaned when Nikolai joined us, gossiped about the third and fourth chairs, rolled our eyes at anyone two minutes late to rehearsal, commiserated over a botched solo. In between, we talked about Paula and Amy’s overbearing family, her parents’ financial crisis, her sister’s competitive streak.

I missed her more than I’d cared to admit.

I’m lying on the bed in Greg’s suite, trying to focus on
Big Brother
, but even that doesn’t keep my interest. I pick up my cell phone and dial Amy.

She actually answers this time. I drop the phone with a soft
plop
on the bedspread with surprise and scramble to retrieve it.

“Hi! How are you? I was worried about you?” Her sentences tilt up insecurely, and I imagine her perched on the other end, settling down into the big easy chair in her mother’s living room. Five years older than me and still living at home. I wonder what it’s like to live, fully supported, among people you understand, people you like. I stare at the whitewashed walls of the hotel room and wonder if I’d want that.

“You didn’t call.” I say this simply, without malice.

“I know. You told me not to, and I was angry at you. I’m not anymore.” She rushes on, all her sentences run together, and I hear her breath before her words, one long giant huff of air.

“You were mad at me?” I strike an unintentionally sharp tone.

“Kar, come on, don’t. I was. I just thought you were being unfair. No position is guaranteed to anyone, right? Besides, you didn’t even seem like you wanted it that badly. I don’t know…”

I ponder this. It’s not the competition I resented, but the winning. Maybe she’s right, and I didn’t want it. I don’t know. I push the thought away.

“I met someone.” It bursts out of me, and I wonder if my whole drive for calling her centered around being able to finally talk to someone about Greg.

“Wait, what about Scott?” She laughs into the phone in a way that means
you tramp
but not seriously. I realize that, yes, I’ve definitely missed her. A girlfriend, maybe even a best friend. A confidante. Someone to giggle over rum and Cokes with.

“Scott broke up with me. He met someone else, he said. The same night… you won concertmistress. The day before I got into the accident. It was a shitty two days. But… ” I let my voice linger. “It’s the day I met Greg. So….”

“We need a girls’ dinner out, I guess.”

“We really do.” I pause. “It’s only been a month, but I really think I might marry this guy.”

“What? That’s crazy, Karen!” She pauses and continues seriously. “You don’t do this. You don’t fall all over a guy, ever. You were lukewarm about Scott on a good day. What gives?”

“I don’t know,” I say slowly. “You’re right, I don’t. He’s different. This is different
.
I know, I sound like a teenager. I feel like one.”

“Does he feel that way about you?”

“I don’t know. I think so?” I scratch my arm. “He can be hard to read. I don’t think he’s had a ton of affection in his life, so he can be standoffish.”

“Sounds like someone else I know,” Amy comments wryly.

I smirk into the phone. We agree to meet up when I get back, and I hang up, feeling lighter than I have in weeks. That makes me think, oddly, of Paula, and my finger hovers over her name in my contacts list. Before I can pull the trigger, my phone vibrates in my hand. Greg.

Meet me downstairs! I’m starving! xo.

And just like that, Paula is forgotten.

It’s been eight weeks. The cast is off. My arm, my skinny, hairy, wizened arm, is free. I flex my fingers, pulling my thumb to my forefinger and bowing across an imaginary set of strings.

“See? Good as new! Nothing gained, nothing lost.” The orthopedist is clipped and efficient, anxious to scoot me on my way.

“Nope. Just my career,” I say cavalierly. He looks startled, and I laugh self-consciously. “I didn’t want that anyway. No worries.” I hop down from the table, already thinking about what witty quip I’ll text to Greg, maybe a picture, maybe a sexy message. My ankle is new again. My arm is healed. All my broken parts are put back together.

Outside, I settle for a quick picture of my un-casted arm and a flirty text, a combination of informational and sexy.
Next week should be fun ;).

Before he can reply, my phone buzzes in my hand. It’s a number I don’t recognize, and I stare at it in confusion.

I click “accept.”

“Is this Karen Caughee?” a brisk voice asks on the other line. In the background, I hear a loud clattering, almost like the din in a restaurant. The voice is androgynous, a reedy, haughty tone, and I can’t make out what they’re saying.

I stop in the street and cover my ear with my hand. “I’m sorry, I can barely hear you.”

The voice comes into sharp focus, definitely female. “I
said
is your mother Paula Caughee?”

I close my eyes. “Yes. Who is this?”

“This is Officer Minks. We’re holding your mother in lockup down here at the police station.”

“Oh, God. What did she do?” My gut sinks like a stone. She once got into a bar fight. Imagine a fifty-year-old woman clawing at the face of a younger, fitter, thirty-something while her friends tittered around her. My mother was a joke at Tig’s. I wondered this time if she’d actually hurt someone, caught that young McGill U grad right in the cornflower blue of her iris. I cringed.

“Driving under the influence, ma’am.” Not a fight, then. I let out a breath slowly. The voice continued, both warning and droning, somehow. “You’d better come quickly.”

“What’s her bail?” I press my hand to my forehead.

“Four thousand dollars.”

I don’t
come quickly
as instructed by the desk sergeant. I go back to my apartment. I spend about a half hour on Google and look up sentences and bail rates for DUIs. I look up treatment facilities. I arm myself with information.

I also need to calm down. My blood roils hot and fast under my skin, and if I focus even on the idea of Paula, my vision swims with rage. How dare she?

I consider, briefly, leaving her. Calling Pete:
your turn.
Could I do that? He’d get her. They’d sit in the cold, stainless steel cube of a cell, and Pete would commiserate. He wasn’t pushed to any breaking point with Paula. He still calls her Mom. He thinks she’s damaged but not ruined and certainly not capable of breaking anyone else. He considers her like a broken-winged bird, wild eyed and scared. To me, she’s a mountain lion: animalistic and angry. Beautiful to look at, impossible to love.

Her withdrawal as my mother happened slowly and seemingly overnight. One day, I looked up, and she hadn’t come to a show in days. The days turned into weeks, and she stopped asking. Dad had left, Pete had gone away to college, and her abandonment felt swift and pure, as if maybe she’d never really been there in the first place. Her abandonment was made all the more sharp against the backdrop of Amy with her family in tow, literally four times as supportive as my own. Six, sometimes eight of them: parents and siblings, and aunts and uncles and cousins. She had a veritable tribe.

At one time, Paula sat across from me at Chateau Frontenac, tipping her hand in a
sit up straight
motion and silently reminding me to remove my elbows from the table. She visibly held her breath during auditions, standing in the front row, taut as a violin string. That mother—the one I knew—was gone. I’d spent the end of my teen years and my early twenties wondering: If I’d been better, faster, if I’d been accepted to the Toronto Philharmonic as an over-eager nineteen-year-old instead of turned down, would she have drunk less? If she’d drunk less, would she have been less volatile? Her violence was fueled by liquor and suspicion of my father’s infidelities. Any object within arm’s reach—a broomstick, a glass, a kitchen chair—became the outlet.

I moved out one Sunday with only the most cursory of notice. The Thursday before, I’d made dinner, some chicken and Campbell’s soup casserole, waxen and gluey, and called Mom for dinner. She appeared, bleary-eyed but pleasant. I was relieved, because pleasant wasn’t always on the dinner menu. Sometimes, she was caustic, sarcastic, or even downright incensed. We ate in silence. She never asked about anything: my career, dates, friendships. It was as if, when Dad moved out, he’d left behind only an apathy that no amount of second-tier talent or Ritz cracker casseroles could ameliorate.

“I’m moving on Sunday.” I stopped, inhaled, put down my fork, and blotted my mouth with a one-ply paper towel. “I’m moving out,” I repeated slowly, so she’d understand. She blinked twice, her mouth opening and closing like a fish on a hook.

“Why?” She lifted her chin at me, a gesture of defiance, but her eyes were wild.

“Because.” My fork clanked against my plate, louder than I’d intended. “This”—I waved my hand back and forth between us—“is not a life. We barely even speak to each other. I can’t live this way.”

“You sound just like your father.” She gave a high-pitched, chittering laugh, almost hyena-like. “Are you cheating on me, too? Do you have another mother?”

“God, no. One is enough.” I mumbled this, my mouth glommed full of pasty food, but she caught it, and her eyes narrowed.

“I didn’t know I’ve been such a hardship to you, Karen.” Her jaw went very still, in that way my father used to call “the green sky before the tornado.” It was a warning, a calm before the storm, that tight clicking of her lower jaw, tooth against tooth, breathing only through her nose.

I said nothing, just sat and drank water as she tinkled the ice cubes around her vodka tumbler. I watched her glass, and she watched my face watching her glass. She stood, took her plate and drink to the sink, and dumped the ice cubes down the drain. She turned, stared at me for a moment, and shook her head as though she didn’t recognize me.

On her way out, she dumped her dinner in the trashcan, glass plate and all. She stood in the doorway, palms braced against the trim, and did her dragon nose breathing routine.

“You know,” she said.
Puff. Puff.
“It was me—not your father—who gave you your career. You’re just like him, you know. Neither of you appreciate what I’ve done for either one of you. You can have each other.”