When she came to—an hour ago? two?—the sun was high in the sky, and her shame rose with it. Her excuse for skipping work had become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as excuses were wont to do—the illness of self-loathing was worse than any virus. Her head dizzy from the medicine, her stomach roiling from the emptiness, she texted Penny that she was ill and so sorry she couldn’t make the celebration tonight. Then she slunk down to the kitchen for something to right her blood sugar. She tried to make toast, but a fuse blew, and she left the bread there, defeated. Something needed to be rewired in this house. Something needed to be rewired in her life. She was ill equipped to fix any of it, in over her head. Never had it been so clear that running away had only made things worse. Funny how it had taken a dream, of all things, to finally do her in. Her eyes fell on Clara’s Talk of the Town DVD on the counter, and thus with her arms full of unhealthy choices she hauled herself upstairs to crawl back under the covers. Where she belonged.
The uselessness, though, even now, was an unfamiliar skin; just a half day in it left her squirming, restless. How hard could fuses and circuits and whatever the hell was haywire in her kitchen really be? What would she ever gain by being this easily discouraged—especially if the house really was the metaphor for her life that it suddenly seemed to be? A tentative how-to search on her tablet led to another. Maybe this was the way to decipher home ownership woes—with junk food and old movies and a string of hours she had already committed to wasting. She wasn’t about to jump up and attempt a fix just now, but thinking on it—well, that was becoming her specialty.
But then came this ringing, followed now by impatient knocking. It wouldn’t let up. Her pants were nowhere. Fine, then. She pulled the blanket off her bed, gathered it around her, and padded down to the front door.
She had it halfway open before she realized her mistake.
She hadn’t seen Josh since the day the whole family helped her move in, and seeing him now, alone on her doorstep, brought back the sense of a bad omen that she’d awoken with. The force of it hit her again, how the stars had fallen out of the sky. And what had the dream version of Izzy done? What had her mind’s conjured version of Josh managed? They’d both just watched their world come crashing down. Even in her wildest dreams, she couldn’t turn to him and make him really see her.
She squinted and blinked at him. The sunlight was unconscionably bright.
He took a step back. “Oh,” he said, holding his palms out. Don’t shoot. “Sorry. I had this crazy idea you weren’t really sick.” She followed his eyes to her hand, clasped around not just the blanket but also, to her surprise, a wad of soggy tissues. Oh, God, what must she look like? As her eyes adjusted to the light, she registered the wild mess of hair in her peripheral vision.
“Sorry to disappoint,” she said. “Better keep your distance.”
Josh must have come already dressed for tonight’s festivities. She recognized his light zip-necked sweater from the rehearsal dinner. His hair was artfully misarranged, his khakis ironed, his shoes shiny. Obediently, he took a step back. But he kept his eyes on hers, his head cocked to the side, as if debating whether to speak.
She’d been down with the worst flu of her life when Josh and Penny had gotten together. They’d both been concerned, taken turns checking in at her apartment when she grew too feverish and lethargic to even answer her phone. She still didn’t know exactly how it had started. Only that when she came out of her fever-dream state, forty-eight hours later, something had already shifted between them.
Between all of them.
She wondered if he was remembering the same thing.
“Penny was upset, when she got your message.” he said. “I figured the least I could do was—”
Izzy raised an eyebrow, and his voice trailed off. She wasn’t sure what was worse—that he had suspected she was feigning sickness, or that she looked so awful that he believed her to be ill after all. But given that the unflattering truth was saving her from the horrific lie …
“Iz,” he said finally, “am I imagining it? That you’ve been avoiding us?”
She looked down at her feet.
“Maybe I’m imagining the Penny part,” he said. “I know you’ve been tied up with the move. But I’m not imagining the me part. I miss you.”
Helpless tears welled in her eyes, and she coughed into her tissue-filled fist, trying to hide them.
“I wish I’d known this would be … I mean, I suppose I can understand, things getting weird between us. I guess I don’t know many people who hang out with their siblings’ significant others. Maybe it’s not … I don’t know, is appropriate the word?”
She swallowed hard and reluctantly lifted her chin to even her gaze with his. “Some people might say that’s the word,” she said quietly.
“But I thought we were different. We were friends first. Not just friends. We were … us.”
The words were the ones she’d wanted to hear, but the tone was off, a sidestep to the left of the center she’d had in mind. It was a variation of the conversation she had both most longed for and most dreaded, with every pathetic ounce of her being, since the moment he’d started up with Penny. But everything about it was wrong. She didn’t just look awful, she didn’t just feel awful, she was in shambles—unable to look him in the eye without a deep and self-conscious shame clouding her vision, triggering her fight-or-flight response until it was all she could do not to slam the door and run back upstairs.
And Penny was pregnant.
She couldn’t think of a single thing that seemed safe to say in response.
“I didn’t think I’d be losing you as a friend,” he said. His voice was a soft apology, barely more than a whisper, and in it she could hear a familiar note—in the same key of the hurt she’d been feeling these long months without him. “I thought I’d be gaining you as a sister.”
He was almost begging, but he forced a laugh, an invitation to join in or maybe to correct him, an unvoiced Can you believe how foolish I was? or maybe a Can you tell me I wasn’t? and she thought she detected a whiff of bitterness beneath its olive branch exterior. Maybe, though, it was just sadness. She kicked at the doorstep, where the crushed pieces of her heart had been spread to be trampled anew. “I honestly thought it would be better,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “You were already my sister. But now you really are—and now you’re really not. I can’t say I understand why it has to be this way. Does it, Iz? Can we fix it?”
She licked her cracked lips.
She had no choice but to speak. “I…”
Josh looked at her, expectant. Waiting.
“I didn’t get a chance to congratulate you,” she choked out. “On the baby.”
It was not the right thing for her to say in this situation, but it was a right thing for a person to say, at some point, and so it came to her, stupidly and all bent, in a moment when every other possible response seemed unequivocally wrong. Her voice didn’t sound congratulatory—more like one of those robotic assistants that come programmed into cell phones. He looked at her with disbelief. That’s how you’re going to play this? As if I didn’t say anything at all?
She looked back at him helplessly. And she could see the Josh she loved shutting down, replacing himself before her eyes with a polite stranger who’d married her sister. Which was exactly what she’d treated him as. How else would she have him act?
“Thanks,” he said finally.
“I really am sorry I’m sick. I hate to miss the party.”
The polite stranger nodded and took another step back. “Best not to force it. The doctor did warn us that Penny’s immune system would be compromised right now.”
Compromised. Their continued friendship was not necessarily inappropriate, but it was definitely compromised. That was the word he’d been looking for. No point in saying so now.
As he turned to leave, she caught a glimpse of his mouth—and it gave him away, called her back. Because it didn’t belong to the stranger. It belonged to Josh. And it was twitching the way it always did when his mind was busy working over a problem. She had a flash of him studying on the floor of her dorm room, his baseball cap turned backward. Driving in bumper-to-bumper rush hour, late for a sold-out concert they’d paid too much for. Sitting in the hospital waiting room the night his grandmother had a stroke. Watching those stars fall in her dream.
“Come back,” she said, her voice tortured. Breaking.
He turned, slowly.
She faltered.
“You and Penny should come back. Once I’m well. We can go to the glen—” She caught herself. They both knew Penny didn’t really hike. “We can … get drinks at the tavern. Before it gets too cold to sit outside.”