She supposed she should be heartened that she was still worried about hurting her sister’s feelings. If by Tuesday evening she could manage to conjure an emotion other than despair over her pregnancy, she’d be on her way back to being a decent human being.
Stepping through the maze of unpacked cardboard in her stocking feet, she gently lifted the lone decorative box from the closet’s top shelf. She sank to her knees on the worn carpet and pushed the pale blue lid aside. A snapshot of her and Josh dressed as Bonnie and Clyde at a Halloween party stared up at her, Josh’s arm slung confidently around her shoulder in a way that had once seemed natural. For a moment she sat quietly, breathing in the remnants of their friendship—the heart-tugging array of ticket stubs and photographs and gallery pins and festival programs and trail maps and guidebooks and the leather-bound travel journal they’d shared for a while. She didn’t need to riffle through the box, to touch them or to see them. But she liked to be in their presence, to remind herself that these memories were real, that she hadn’t imagined them after all.
Izzy had booked a neuroscientist last Valentine’s Day to talk on Freshly Squeezed about what happens to your brain chemistry when you’re in love—or trying to come out of it. “What a bad deal,” the expert had joked, explaining that the regions of the brain most active after a rejection or a breakup are areas associated with love, craving, focus, and deep attachment. “All you want is to forget about this human being and go on with your life—but no, you just love them harder.”
Great, Izzy had thought. Even science is against me.
If she flipped through the journal, inevitably she’d land on the page where Josh had sketched the Yellow Springs themselves, before she’d ever had an inkling of making her home close by. Even then her mind had wrapped itself around the quick moves of his fingers holding the thick pencil, his other hand cradling the open journal as if it were a fragile thing, the way he’d occasionally stop and lunge for her share of their trail mix. “Not on your life!” she’d shrieked, ravished. As usual, they’d made their plans at the last minute, and she hadn’t prepared enough for the journey. Not the right snacks for this length of time, not the right shoes for this much hiking, not the right words for what she wanted to say.
Don’t do this to yourself, a familiar voice inside her warned.
Oh, but she had. Done it to herself. From the start. She’d failed to recognize that all of life was like those warnings about being good citizens of this world where extraordinary tragedy could be averted by ordinary people: If you see something, say something. And she had seen—not at first, but eventually—the evidence no one else seemed to. The image of what was meant to be. It had taken years to come into focus, but when it had, how obvious: It was right there all along. Yet she’d been too cowardly to open up to Josh; neither had she said a word to Penny in the early days when real damage had not yet been done. Things had escalated quickly.
“Explosive,” Penny had called her early days with Josh. And everyone knew you couldn’t undo a bomb once it went off.
Izzy had kept her feelings to herself then, so she had no choice but to deal with them alone now. She wasn’t crass enough to hurt her family with the truth, or na?ve enough to think it would do anything other than make matters worse, or crazy enough to believe that if she missed Josh hard enough, she could make him miss her too. She knew that her vibe was off, that the meditation teacher hadn’t landed on her by accident. But she didn’t know how to stop.
She snapped the lid back on the box. She would not waste her Sunday morning this way, would not squander these rare hours where there was a moment of Zen to be found. At least for a short time her feet would be rooted to the ground, and hope would be in the air, and she would not be trapped by her secret sadness. She’d feel like herself again.
She could come back to this later.
*
The sun was starting its rise into the sky as Izzy pulled out of the driveway and caught sight of Paul, bending to pick up a bundled Sunday paper from the end of his driveway. He raised a hand in silent greeting, and she rolled down the passenger window and slowed to a stop.
“Nice to see someone still get an actual newspaper these days,” she called.
She caught sight of the headline through the thin plastic cover—“Still Missing: Day 7”—and instantly regretted her words.
“You’ve got to hand it to them,” he said dryly. “They keep putting it out, even when there’s nothing new to report.”
All weekend she’d had a nagging feeling that she just wanted to know for sure that Kristin was okay. Which was ridiculous. Of course Kristin was okay. She’d taken her mother’s china from the dining room. She’d cleaned out her bank account. It was Paul who was not okay.
“Well, I’m glad I ran into you, because I think you forgot to bill me for the auto repair services.” She offered a half smile. True to his word, he’d fixed her taillight and left her in peace.
“I didn’t forget.”
“How did I know you were going to say that?”
“Lucky guess.” He looked like a man who had absolutely no idea what to do with himself. Izzy, for once, did know what to do with herself—and she preferred to do it alone. But the look on his face was so familiar that she knew if she pulled away from this curb right now, she’d leave feeling even worse than she already did.
Paul seemed to have no one, yet for some reason, here she was. Just as when she’d been whaling against her broken car in her driveway, he’d magically appeared. And for that, she owed him a favor. Even if it was one she didn’t particularly want to give.
“If you won’t let me pay you, how about a trade?”
“For?”
She gestured to the passenger seat next to her. “A change of scenery.”
As the words hung between them, she halfway hoped he would say no.
He hesitated, but only for a second. “Why not.”
So it would be, then. She looked him over. His jeans and fleece would do, but definitely not the Dockers. “Got any not-so-nice shoes to change into? Old sneakers? Hiking boots?”
He shook his head. “In my apartment. By where you turn toward John Bryan State Park? I’ve been meaning to go get another load of stuff. I keep hoping I won’t need it, but…” He coughed into his hand, avoiding her eyes. “It’s been a week.”
“I’ll take you. John Bryan is where we’re going. Hop in.”
She waited while he locked up, and they sat in precarious silence on the short drive through town until Paul directed her to a nondescript two-story brick building dotted with tiny balconies, identical save for their dingy assortment of plastic furniture. She looked over at him, certain she’d turned in to the wrong place—this seemed so far beneath his pay grade. But he was unbuckling his seat belt, reaching for the handle, unfolding his long legs onto the pavement.
He disappeared inside for a few minutes and emerged wearing a pair of tennis shoes that looked way too new for a hike—practically unworn—and hoisting a bulging duffel bag over his shoulder.
She popped the trunk. He made his way around, and a more conspicuous silence filled the car as she waited for him to buckle back in. He cleared his throat. “I know it’s weird, me taking stuff back to the house, staying there still,” he told her. “I’m not even working right now. My patients deserve better than substandard care, and anyone can see my mind is elsewhere. I just can’t bring myself to—”
“You don’t have to explain.” She risked a glance in his direction. He was staring at her. “It actually seems weirder to me that you’d stay here.”
“Yeah?” He barked out a laugh. “I deliver at the hospital in Xenia—the logical thing to do is find a nicer place there. But even though it’s only fifteen, twenty minutes away, it seemed too far from the kids…” His voice trailed off, and she was seized by a sinking feeling that bringing him along had been a mistake—for both of them.
But no. He needed this more than she did, even if he didn’t know it. It would be good for her, too, to think about someone other than herself, to get out of her own head.