Despite everything my father did, I can only vaguely recall her crying once. I don’t remember what for. Probably he’d hit her. She’d done her best to send me upstairs when she’d sensed an argument would get ugly, but it was hard for her to correctly gauge it all the time. He’d come home drunk a lot, looking for a fight or a fuck—neither of which she’d ever wanted to give him. Either he was going to get violent or go looking elsewhere. How could she always guess right?
As I rinse, I try to understand why I’d become so depressed after my dad left. I should have been grateful. Maybe kids always want both parents around—even when one is a terror. Or maybe I had more good memories back then. I only have one now: a time when I’d stayed home sick from school and he’d lounged on the couch with me all day watching movies. He’d even let me rent an R-rated teen flick all the older kids had been chatting about six months earlier because of some nudity and the suggestion of sex. My mom had barred me from watching it, but Dad had said that she was being overprotective “about nothing.” I’d gone back to junior high the following day as the coolest eighth grader ever.
After I shower, I head into the kitchen for cereal, only to remember that I forgot to buy any at the store the night before. Christine’s presence had distracted me from my mental grocery list. I return upstairs to my phone and send her a text. “Nothing in the pantry. Breakfast?”
Her reply appears almost instantaneously. “Meet you @ Crow on a Roof. Nine.”
I head back to my room. As I climb the stairs, my stomach protests waiting three hours to eat, grumbling and groaning louder than any creaky floorboard. I have a feeling it will make me pay for this later. Already, I am more queasy than usual. By the time I reconstitute my office setup—sitting on the mattress with my computer in my lap and phone by my side—my lower abdomen is in full revolt. Each of my unfertilized eggs seems to have grown limbs and is throwing a tantrum, kicking and clawing at my muscles and vital organs. I run to the toilet with my hand over my mouth. Fish, cured in stomach acids, burns in my throat and my belly. When I see porcelain, I’m not sure which end belongs over the bowl.
When everything is out, I wipe down the bathroom surfaces with bleach left beneath the sink, pausing every few seconds to catch my breath. The smell of so much chlorine turns my stomach, but it’s preferable to the stench of sick. The bleach will also disinfect the room on the off chance that the hormones aren’t responsible for my illness. A spritz of standard bleach obliterates nearly everything: E. coli, salmonella, viruses. It will even unravel DNA. The only thing it can’t destroy is blood.
When I finish, I shower for a second time, brush my teeth, and head back to my room. Feeling clean helps, but a heavy metal drummer still plays in my head, thumping on the bass and slamming his sticks into the hi-hat to maintain the ringing between my ears. I stumble over to the bed, weak-kneed, and curl up in fetal position on the mattress. Sleep doesn’t ask my permission.
*
The phone’s vibration startles me awake. I swat blindly around the mattress, trying to find the handset without opening my eyes. Around the third slap, I remember my breakfast date with Christine and add vision to the search. Chris is good about giving me a five-minute grace period. The waiter is probably telling her that he needs the table.
The phone lies beneath a pillow. “Chris?” My voice sounds skinned.
“Liza, are you on your—Wait, are you okay?”
“Alcohol and fertility drugs don’t mix.”
“Say no more. I’ll grab you an egg sandwich to go.”
You choose your friends, not your family. Christine is the best sister an only child could ever want. She arrives twenty minutes later with a white paper bag from the restaurant, coffee, and a bottle of aspirin. Love and appreciation overwhelm me so that all I can do in return is offer a sniffling hug.
She pats my back. “What are best friends for?”
My gratitude gives way to guilt as I watch her set up breakfast on the dining table, grabbing plates and glasses from kitchen cupboards as if she owns the place. If Chris had disappeared, I’d be wallpapering Montauk with posters and pestering the police daily. David is doing the same for his friend. I’ve been selfish to expect him to snap out of it and start paying me attention after only a month.
I sit at the place that Chris has set for me. A fried egg sandwich with a thick medallion of ham between two croissants rests in the center of a plate surrounded by a glass of water, two aspirins, and a large black coffee.
I swallow the pills first and drink the water. Chris nods her approval and then indicates the Starbucks cup with the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich in her hand. “I always go with coffee first. If your stomach isn’t ready to hold anything down, you’d rather find out with liquids.”
I pull the paper cup beneath my nose and inhale the steam. The familiar scent calms the throbbing in my skull. The drummer is not playing so much anymore as he is feathering the snare, creating internal white noise.
Chris settles into the chair across from me, her back toward the kitchen. It’s the seat she always took growing up. Me on the right, her across, my mom at the head. Even when he lived with us, my father rarely ate dinner with the family.
I tentatively sip the black coffee. A warm, calming sensation spreads through my gut as the liquid goes down. “This is exactly what I needed. Thank you.”
“Love you.” Chris blows me an air kiss. “Besides, you’d do it for me. In fact, you have done it for me, many times. How many nights did you stay over after the divorce?”
The answer intensifies my shame about David. I spent four days at Christine’s house helping her pack George and the nanny’s things into boxes. I’d had Chris and Emma over for dinner at least one day a week afterward. Yet I’d wanted David to get over his friend’s likely death in a month.
“You’re my sister from another mister. I’d do anything for you,” she says. Despite her jokey tone, I know she means it. Chris and I have looked out for each other our whole lives. “How are you feeling?”
“Physically or mentally?”
“Both.”
“Physically? Much better thanks to you. I don’t know what I would do without you.” I reach out and squeeze her hand. She smiles at me to accept the compliment and then rolls her eyes at my sappiness.
“And mentally?”
“I feel sick with myself. I’ve been giving David a lot of grief about still wallowing over Nick and not boarding the baby train. But if David cares about Nick half as much as I adore you, then he’s within his rights to crawl into a hole for a year. It’s not fair to him.”
Chris tucks her hair behind her ears rather than join me in admonishing myself.
I sigh. “It’s also not very respectful of Nick. I haven’t mourned him at all.”
She leans her forearms on the table and looks up at me from beneath a wrinkled brow. “And Nick would have shed a tear over you? Come on. He was cute and charming and very driven . . .” Her honey eyes get a bit soupy at the thought of her once crush. She shakes her head to pull herself out of the daydream. “But we both know he wasn’t that nice, especially not to you. He always treated you like the girl David had settled for.”
“Well, I took away his clubbing buddy.”
Chris grimaces. “Most people grow up and get over that. Nick used to call you ‘Little Miss Mistake’ and say that you were too troubled to have real friends so you made up people to keep you company.”
Though I never heard Nick say such things, I can imagine him doing it behind my back, whispering it to one of those milquetoast girls he always brought on group dates that looked like she’d been pulled straight from a Robert Palmer video. I have a harder time picturing him insulting me with Christine in earshot. “When did he say that?”
She sips her coffee, hiding her face behind the mug. “When we went on that date.”
I burst out laughing. The reaction is involuntary and not at all rational. Nothing is particularly amusing about my beautiful maid of honor and David’s handsome best man trying each other on for size. Yet I find it absurd. “You’re kidding. You never went on a date with him.”
“I did. A little less than two months ago. I told you about it.”
“You did not.”