So Much Love Page 15

“I say think ahead, buy the biggest nine-months muumuu. Tell her you can’t wait.”

  Evan stared at the disco window display. “I can’t wait.” He clutched the bag, swallowed the jut of his Adam’s apple, nodded. “Okay. If you’re up for it. It’s a foreign land in there.”

  “I don’t mind.” And despite the trickle of envy in the back of his skull, he didn’t.

  —

  They really did go to Manchu Wok, long into the afternoon when the worst of the food-court tide had ebbed. They still had to eat at a counter, looking at each other slantwise. The food was all nostalgia: deep-fried chicken curls in sugar sauce, broccoli beef gluey with cornstarch, sand-coloured fried rice.

  In the carb-stuffed haze, Grey took out a receipt and a pen and said, “Well, tell me your list.”

  Evan stared blankly. He had a grain of rice clinging to his upper lip.

  “Book-wise.” Grey wiped his own mouth, then nodded at Evan.

  Evan mirrored him and brushed off the rice. “Jeez, I really don’t know what’s out. That’s why I wanted you to tell me. Can you tell me?”

  Grey shrugged. “I don’t know these people.”

  “Grey, c’mon, I told you, it’s about perception. It’s about cred, not about what book is going to give them the most joy when they’re snowed in at O’Hare at 3 a.m. What are you reading?”

  Grey opened the eggroll sauce and drizzled it onto his empty plate. “Book of short stories. I can read one story to Catherine in a night.”

  “A Recommended Read?”

  “No, no. Short stories mainly aren’t, you know.”

  “Really? Why? Too short?”

  “Too obscure, I guess. Too hard to finish and say, ‘That was about x, y, and z.’ ”

  “But good? This book you’re—you guys are reading?”

  “Well.” Grey pictured the splash of the bridesmaids jumping into the greenish lakewater, then the bride’s long train streaming behind her, catching leaves and minnows and flowers from her bouquet as she breast-stroked. Then he pictured Catherine’s still profile, her unseeing gaze—he couldn’t help but feel that if the story had been better, she would have turned toward his voice. “Not sure. I don’t read with quite my full attention.”

  “And yet you know more about this shit than anyone I know.”

  “I don’t. My job is spreadsheets, and ordering teenagers to move display tables.”

  “Pick the books, Grey? Eight good books, no two the same, that’s it. It would really help me out.”

  Grey nodded and, gathering their bags, they set out from the food court. The mall was no more crowded than earlier, but less organized, less polite. A woman in a thick orange cloak shoved past Evan, who grinned. “Ah, Christmas. Where to next?”

  “Back to your place, to get my car. I can see Catherine before the nurses’ shift-change.”

  Evan kept his gaze straight ahead, on Santa’s Crystal Palace. “I can go with you, and then take you back. I haven’t seen Cat in…only once since she’s been back. And that was weeks ago.”

  “You don’t have to.” Grey sped up to hurry through the Body Shop’s fake-fruit aura.

  “Of course not.” There was a snap in Evan’s voice. “I’d like to.” Gentler.

  “All right.”

  Grey saw the reporter slouched in her car as they pulled into the hospital lot, but she only glanced at Evan’s Volvo, then back down at her phone. Arriving in a car she wouldn’t recognize felt like a trick, and her bent head looked small and sad through the windshield. Had she been at the hospital all day? He knew about that kind of endless waiting. He raised a hand to point her out to Evan, but then put it down—he didn’t even know her name.

  Inside, the hospital was bright and calm; someone had put green tinsel along the nurses’ station desk in Catherine’s section. As soon as he entered her room, Grey’s clenched shoulders eased a bit—nothing had changed, she hadn’t gone anywhere, she was still quietly watching the air in front of her face.

  Grey said, “Hey, Catherine” from the doorway and then immediately felt self-conscious; he scurried to the side of her bed, touched her limp hand. Even after only a day away, he felt like he saw her more clearly: her hair had started growing back, covering some scars he might never know the reason for. Somehow, even on the intravenous diet, the hollows in her face had filled in a bit. But she wasn’t looking at anything. When her eyes lit on something, when she really saw and understood, they gained a flickering purpose, became a gaze you could feel on your face. Rare, but a dozen times since she’d returned, Grey had seen her watching him, her warm brown irises shifting to follow his movements in the room. He dropped everything in those moments, the book, the coffee, whatever trivial thing he’d been occupying himself with, and just told her he loved her, that he was waiting whenever she wanted to come back to their lives again, that he would do anything for her. Those were the moments she was most likely to hear him, and he tried to offer her as much as he could to keep her there with him, to prevent her gaze from drifting away again, though it always did.

  Evan came confidently into the room, then stopped several paces from the foot of the bed.

  Grey glanced quickly at Catherine. She was elsewhere today, not reacting to any sounds or movement in the room—her consciousness locked inside herself, or gone entirely, Grey couldn’t be sure.

  He glanced back to his friend and saw the tears coating Evan’s eyes. “Ev, listen—”

  “She’s getting beautiful again. She is.” A drop caught in his eyelash, then fell down along his cheek, into the glitter of stubble there.

  Grey nodded and glanced away, giving Evan a moment. He saw the collection of stories was splayed open on the nightstand just as he’d left it. He was looking forward to reading more, even if he didn’t understand some of the stories, even if they seemed grim. They were still stories, with people and events moving forward—something to hold on to. He opened the book at random and started to read aloud, to Evan and Catherine and any medical staff that might come into the room, just in case anyone was listening.

  Sometimes Nothing Happens

  “It’s a weird thing,” Daria tells Elliot. She’s doing up Stevie’s diaper and Elliot is holding the baby’s feet so he can’t kick. “Catherine came back and nothing happened. Everyone was so happy, watching the same news story over and over. Then some time goes by and you never hear anything anymore.”

  “Well, she’s probably pretty fucked up.” Elliot shakes his head and tries to jam Stevie’s left foot into the bottom of his sleeper. “What? Did you think she was going to start picking up shifts at the restaurant?”

  “Of course not, but I don’t know what to do. This isn’t, like, usual. Do you think I should keep trying to visit her in the hospital?”

  Stevie kicks his father firmly in the jaw and Elliot reels back.

  “That hurt?” She shakes out a sleep sack, holding it open and ready for the next step.

  “Yeah, some. He should do MMA someday. And you should do whatever you want. She’s not really your best friend.”

  “Still, I want to do the right thing. I called Grey when she was first in the hospital to ask if I could do anything. And I brought him that thing of muffins, remember? So he wouldn’t be hungry, sitting around in waiting rooms all the time.”

  “Oh, yeah. Nice of you.” Elliot grins at her over his shoulder as Stevie’s right foot finally catches and stays in the sleeper. Then he starts struggling with the snaps along the inside of the leg while Stevie writhes in silent, red-faced fury. Daria knows the screams are coming.

  “But I haven’t seen her. When I went over to the hospital, Grey was like, Oh, thank you for the muffins but now is a bad time. And he looked like he was dying—all pale and sweaty. So I didn’t push.”

  Elliot raises an eyebrow, like Oh really? And that’s probably what he says but she doesn’t hear it because the howling has begun.

  Daria swoops down with the sleep sack and stuffs Stevie’s flailing legs into it, then
catches him under the armpits and pulls him into her arms. His spine is stiff, his head thrown back in rage, and a brilliant sound emanates from his wet pink mouth. Elliot has his back against the wall, trying not to flinch.

  “You can go if you want. I’ve got him.”

  Elliot widens his eyes, eager, yet hesitating. “You sure?” They are both yelling, and Elliot is fingering something in his breast pocket. Probably a joint. He’s kind of a stoner, though Daria told him he has to be straight when he’s around Stevie and she thinks he mainly is. Still, it’s like he’s counting down to when he can smoke up.

  “Yeah, it’s good. I don’t work until four tomorrow, so I can stay up with him. Get on home.” The baby is still rigid against her breasts, but Elliot could probably lean across and give her a little peck on the forehead or cheek or whatever. But he doesn’t.

  Daria watches from the window as Elliot jogs across the parking lot and gets into his car, a weirdly elegant Cadillac from the 1980s that his dad fixed up for him. She jiggles the baby pointlessly as Elliot’s headlights flick on and exhaust appears. He backs out and drives away without blinking the lights at her or honking goodbye. She holds up Stevie’s tiny clenched fist and waves it at the taillights. “Bye, Daddy,” she whispers in her high-pitched Stevie voice.

  The action startles the baby into a momentary lull in his crying, but he soon picks it up again. Daria cannot fucking stand it when Stevie cries unless he is right against her. Placing him in the valley between her breasts where she always thought her heart should be doesn’t really make any difference to the baby, but when the screaming gets too much, it’s the only way to comfort herself. As for Stevie, walking is the only thing that soothes him to sleep at this point in the day. Even though she was on her feet at the restaurant for eight hours, pacing the hall in her fuzzy orange slippers is far less exhausting, more peaceful, even with Stevie squalling in her ear.

  After he is down, sweaty and limp from all the energy it takes to yell for fifty minutes, she fills a glass halfway with ice cubes and then dumps lemonade over them. The last two inches she fills with white wine out of a box in her fridge. She read online that the best time to drink is right after you nurse because that is as far away as possible from the next time, and it gives your body time to process the alcohol. Except Elliot was still here when she finished nursing, so she had to wait for him to go. Not that she thought he’d judge, more that he’d take it as an invitation to settle in for the evening. Guys like Elliot don’t have just one drink, and she knew if he stayed she’d wind up watching Jimmy Fallon and making out with him, and then Stevie would wake up and she wouldn’t have any clean milk in her to give because she would have been drinking the whole time.

  Catherine never seemed to like Elliot very much. She wasn’t mean about it, but whenever Daria said something nice about him like, He’s not bad-looking or He fixed my toaster in ten minutes, Catherine would always come back with But do you like him? Which is a tough question to answer, in truth. Daria usually responded with some version of You’ve never been really on your own. You don’t know what it’s like out there in Tinderland. Which is true, and Catherine usually shrugged and backed off. Catherine got really lucky with her first serious boyfriend, and that makes her charmed but also a bit of a sap.

  Daria takes a sip of her drink and an ice cube bops her nose. She feels bad for thinking of Catherine as a sap. It’s mean and also unfair, since she isn’t here to defend herself—as bad as thinking ill of the dead. Now she feels bad for thinking of Catherine as dead. But in Daria’s head, Catherine is in the same category as dead people, it’s been so long since Daria has seen her. She jiggles the ice around, takes a better sip, and sets the glass down. She digs her iPhone out of her pocket, scrolls through her contacts to Catherine’s two entries. The first one is her cell. Everyone in Iria knows about that phone—it was on the news, or a picture of a similar one was. It’s a cheap brand Daria hadn’t heard of before because Catherine thinks iPhones aren’t worth the money. The cops found it the morning after she disappeared, in the parking lot outside DiGiovanni’s Ristorante, where she worked. Where Daria works too. She knows that stupid parking lot well—how tricky it is to turn Elliot’s truck around in the narrow centre aisle, the way the spot on the end is narrower than the others and practically impossible to back out of if someone is in the spot across. So even though she wasn’t there, Daria knows that Catherine’s little Chinese cellphone was either in a heap of brown snow along the edge of the lot or else in the gritty slush. If it was in the slush, the police probably had to put it in a bowl of rice to dry it out before they could get any information from it. Or maybe cops have another way of doing that, faster and with less chance of something going wrong—Elliot’s Galaxy never came back to life after going through the wash, despite a whole week drying out in the rice. Whatever, she knows the police were able to get all Catherine’s texts and call logs and contacts because the news said there were no clues in there. Her last text was to her husband, telling him she was going to meet him in thirty minutes at some French place uptown. Which she didn’t do.

  Catherine’s second number is labelled “Cat Land”—a landline, which Catherine still has since her husband is old and thinks landlines are important. Daria laughed a lot at that, which pissed Catherine right off, which was really hard to do.

  “He actually has a cellphone, he isn’t a Luddite,” Catherine told her. “He just thinks you need both.”

  “But, just, why? What can a landline do that a cellphone can’t?”

  “I don’t know, okay?” Catherine sighed, rolled her eyes. “What does it matter to you?” But she was blushing a little. Could you be genuinely embarrassed for another person? Daria had never been in love like that.

  Daria feels pretty old for twenty-two, but Grey is from another generation entirely—Catherine is twenty-seven and he is ten years older than that. Every time he came into the restaurant, Daria felt like she had an overdue English paper. Actually, Catherine is twenty-eight now. She had her birthday while she was stuck in that torture chamber—Daria’s eyes burned when she saw the reminder pop up on Facebook last May. People were writing stupid shit on Catherine’s wall about how they loved her and prayed for her and whatever, but Daria just shut the page. She knew Catherine wasn’t reading fucking Facebook, wherever she was.

  A similar burn flares in Daria’s ribcage when she thinks of what must have happened to a girl gone that long against her will. She knows it had to be against her will because Catherine never even called in sick to work. The news reports that Daria sometimes watches hinted at the worst things in the world.

  She lets herself poke her finger at “Cat Land” on the screen but quickly hits the red phone icon to cancel the call before it can connect.

  Elliot’s right: she and Catherine aren’t that close. Daria has these numbers in her phone because she has the numbers of every server at the restaurant in case she needs to get someone to cover for her. Even the breakfast guys can sometimes be begged to take a dinner shift. She sets the phone down on the table along with the wine and then stands to convert the couch into the bed. Then she picks up the phone again to make sure her ringer is on—Elliot usually calls before she’s asleep. Late at night, Elliot will sometimes say that he loves her, that he imagines them getting married and taking care of Stevie together. Even though she knows he’s very stoned by that point, it’s still something.

  “Did you hear that news about that kid?” Stephanie asks as she and Daria start setting up her first tray of salads.

  “Hear what?” Daria doesn’t have a lot of time for chat at work—there are tips to be made.

  “The kid, Donald Something, who disappeared around the same time as Catherine. He’s dead!” With Stephanie, you can really hear the exclamation marks.

  “Oh, god. So they found Donny Zimmerman’s body?” With the tray perfectly set on her palm, Daria straightens up but then sways a little. It’s the word body that makes the idea of death real—a human being
becoming an object.

  “Yeah, like buried in the yard outside the house where Catherine…you know. If you’re going to murder someone, you should try a little harder to hide the body, don’t you think?”

  Daria steadies her tray and walks away even though Stephanie has opened her mouth to launch into another sentence. She doesn’t want anyone, let alone perfect blond Stephanie, to see how shaken she is over some stranger’s death, and if she had said anything at that moment, it would have been obvious. She can’t help but think of dirt on Catherine’s tan skin, her body crumpled in a hole. She didn’t know Donny Zimmerman, doesn’t even know if Catherine knew him. She has seen photos of his mom and dad crying in the newspaper but not in a long time—Donny was old news for a while, but now everyone will be talking about him again. His parents seemed so alone, clinging to each other on the front steps of their house. They looked lonely even though they were both there.

  Daria hipchecks the door open, thinking about when Donny Zimmerman first disappeared. She remembers sitting on the back stairs while Catherine read an article about him on her phone, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. She talked about going to one of the candlelight vigils at the high school, though Daria can’t remember if she ever went. All the fuss Catherine made over some kid she’d never met. Sometimes she thinks it was as if Catherine was writing the script for how to feel once she was gone too.

  Daria swallows and takes a deep breath before she strolls into the dining room to deposit the salads and take some garlic-loaf requests. She sometimes feels like Cat is talking to her inside her head because Daria learned so many things from her: the way she set up her trays and order pads, even her polite little lines with the customers. “Enjoy this!” “Can I get you any finishing touches?” “Hope it’s perfect!” Catherine was the best of the dinner girls, and DiG’s front-of-house staff are mainly girls—young and also attractive. DiG’s is a high-endish restaurant with a nice crowd and good tips, so most waitresses, and all the ones that last, put up with knowing they are a bit of a show for the male customers. At least, that’s what Daria thinks—she was never sure if Catherine understood that part of the job, or even that she was pretty. And she was pretty, with her heavy dark ponytail and small bright face. Not gorgeous or anything; catalogue, not runway. But still. She definitely didn’t flaunt it, for tips or for anything else. When Daria was twitching in the mirror, trying to get her top pulled up above slutty but below sweet, Catherine would wash her hands and say, “You look fine.” As if fine were enough.