A standard guy in a golf shirt. Nothing special, as far as Malcolm could recall. He showed up at the Half Moon with Patrick one time, both of them already pretty loose. Toby was meeting up with them, too. They’d been making the rounds to give Neil a sense of the town’s offerings, and Patrick had saved the Half Moon for last, so they could really settle in. But Malcolm had been distracted that day, had argued with a vendor, and the feeling of being behind was becoming more and more familiar. After, he remembered thinking he should have been more welcoming.
“I knew it,” he said, though he had not known it, not even close. What they’d come to tell him—it was obvious now that the visit had a purpose—would have been anyone else’s first suspicion, but not Malcolm’s. He tried out the idea sometimes, but only to remind himself that he wasn’t dumb, that he’d considered all possibilities. But it just didn’t compute. They were having trouble, but they were a pair. Jess’s face, her body, her moods—they were all as familiar to him as he was to himself.
Malcolm tried to conjure up Neil’s face so he could study it, this near stranger, but it was just too far-fetched, that a person he didn’t know at all could have anything to do with the person he knew best.
“Who told you?”
“Him. Neil.” Patrick looked away.
“He told you? Not her?” Malcolm studied Siobhán. “Did she tell you?”
“She’s not answering my texts.”
“So it might not be true.”
Neither Patrick nor Siobhán could think of something to say to that.
“It’s true,” Patrick said finally.
“We didn’t want you to feel stupid,” Siobhán said. “We thought best you hear it from us. But I think we should keep in mind what Jess has been through, and—”
“How does she even know him?”
Siobhán looked down at her hands. “They met at our house—”
“Like barbeques and things? I met him there, too. There must have been something else.”
“You know how it is. We get together on a Saturday and you’re here at the bar. Jess always comes. And so would Neil this past year or so.” All three of them looked around the bar as if seeing it for the first time.
“But did they talk? I don’t understand.”
“He’s a lawyer, too,” Patrick said. “Big firm. Graduated law school around the same time Jess did. I guess they have mutual friends.”
“I knew that,” Malcolm said. “I remember that. Somebody from her old study group is at the same firm he’s at now.” He had little facts tucked away about everyone. Not gossip, he didn’t like gossip, but conversation pieces should a person turn up at the Half Moon feeling low. “And what? You’re telling me it’s serious?”
“Well,” Siobhán began, but Patrick shook his head almost imperceptibly, so she swallowed back whatever she was about to say. Malcolm was relieved. Which would be worse, that it was serious or that it wasn’t? What an odd question. He didn’t want details. He wouldn’t be able to take them in. All these weeks he’d been running through the things he’d done, the ways he could have been better, but really Jess had been deep into a story that spun away from him entirely. He could feel his pulse as it pushed his blood through his body.
“She’s going through something,” Siobhán said in a near whisper. “That’s what I keep telling myself. She’s going through something that the rest of us can’t understand.”
“I can’t understand it? You’re including me in that?”
Roddy was wiping down the bar. What a night it had been. If Malcolm could capture lightning in a bottle every time, he’d be okay. But if he couldn’t, what then? He couldn’t operate a place that was only half-full three nights a week. He was forty-five years old and he’d never had any other job. And he was good at this one. But middle age was looming and he could already see the headline that would arrive with it: that a person could be extraordinarily good at something and still fail at it.
“It’s my fault,” Siobhán said. “I didn’t like to think his girls wouldn’t know anyone in school. So I always told Patrick to include him.”
Malcolm stood. “You know what? I can’t do this right now.”
Last time he spoke to Jess was a full month earlier. He was carrying a bag of groceries into the house when he saw her name light up the screen of his phone, so he dropped the bag on the counter and two apples rolled out, bounced to the floor. He stabbed the button that would bring her voice to him. She asked how he was, how the bar was, his mother. His answers must have been brief and she must have heard frustration in his voice because she pulled up short of whatever she called to say, said she had to go. “Jess!” he shouted into his phone, but she was already gone. When had she ever stopped herself from saying something? And then he understood she’d been crying. In their whole relationship, he could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen her cry, and each of those times had to do with their plot of garden remaining bare while everyone else’s bloomed so large and wild that they had to work to keep it in check. Follicles too few. Numbers too low. Canceled cycles. Illogical insurance requirements. Waiting to zero out. Waiting longer. Failure to implant. Failure to thrive. Hoping her period would come soon. Hoping it would not come. From the very beginning he was afraid to be specific when they talked, in case he’d get some detail wrong. Little pastel-colored boxes of medication and supplements on the counter, filling an entire shelf of the fridge. Jess on the phone with the insurance company, her color-coded folders spread across the kitchen table, insisting the clinic had already sent a letter, reciting the names of medications like she had a doctorate in pharmacology, like she was fluent in a language he didn’t understand. Overhearing her every Saturday morning—her paperwork time, as she called it—saying, sure, she’d be happy to hold, saying she’d already been holding for an hour, and then lowering her head to rest in her arms.
Jess telling Malcolm that she didn’t fucking know what she wanted for dinner, because she’d been on the phone all fucking day, and then saying sorry, she was sorry, she was just frustrated. Malcolm standing beside her chair with a feeling like he was apart from something. Like if he reached his hand out to touch her, there’d be something in his way.
When was the first time he had that feeling? The night at her friend Rachel’s wedding, in the restroom of a yacht club in Hyannis. He thought about that night a lot since she left. She’d asked him to come with her, to hold her dress. She unzipped and lifted the gown over her head, handed it to him, and then opened the little cooler bag she’d stashed at the coat check. He folded her dress over his arm and could feel the warmth of her skin coming off the material. Once undressed she panicked. The sink edge was too narrow. The drain plug was missing. What if everything disappeared down the pipe? Before he could think of a solution she dropped to her knees, and unfolded a triple layer of paper towels on the tiled floor. When she was satisfied she placed her little bottles of saline and powder on top of the towels, her needle and plunger, too. “Can I help?” he asked as she mixed the contents of one tiny bottle with another.
“I got it,” she said and smiled up at him, no doubt having the same memory he was having right then, of Malcolm sweating through his T-shirt the one and only time he’d done an injection for her, a trigger shot that had to go into her back, which she couldn’t reach. Once it was done, he remained seated on the closed seat of their upstairs toilet until his heart stopped racing while Jess pressed her open palm to her back and counted to thirty. “Doesn’t it seem like a doctor should be doing this?” he asked that night.