He walked back the way they’d come. She turned on her wipers and went to pull away from the curb, but her windows had fogged up. She turned on the defrost and sat watching the glass clear before she pulled onto the street. At the next corner, she was about to turn right when she looked to her left and saw Brian. He stood in the small park. He’d removed his coat to lay it over the homeless man.
He stepped out of the park, turning his shirt collar up against the rain, and ran up the street toward his home.
Her mother, of course, had a whole chapter devoted to what Rachel had just witnessed: “The Act That Causes the Leap.”
Their fourth date, he made dinner at his apartment. While he was loading the dishwasher, she removed her T-shirt and bra and came to him in the kitchen wearing nothing but a pair of tattered boyfriend jeans. He turned just as she reached him and his eyes widened and he said, “Oh.”
She felt in complete control, which of course she wasn’t, and free enough to dictate the terms of their bodies’ first engagement. That night they started in the kitchen but finished in his bed. Started round two in the bathtub and finished on the counter between the his-and-her sinks. Then went for the trifecta in the bedroom again and did surprisingly well, although there was nothing left to come out of Brian at the end but a shudder.
Throughout that summer, the giving of the body went spectacularly well. The giving of everything else, however, was a slower process. Particularly once the panic attacks returned. For the most part, they descended when Brian was out of town. Unfortunately, the first rule of accepting him as her boyfriend was accepting that he was out of town a lot. Most of his trips were quick two-nighters to Canada, Washington State and Oregon, twice a year to Maine. But others—to Russia, Germany, Brazil, Nigeria, and India—took much longer.
Sometimes when he was first gone, it felt good to return to herself. She didn’t need to see herself in terms of being half of a couple. She’d wake up the morning after he’d left and feel ninety percent Rachel Childs. Then she’d look out the window and fear the world and remember that ninety percent of herself was still at least forty percent more than she liked.
By the second afternoon, the thought of going outside came laden with barely suppressed hysteria swaddled in more manageable everyday dread.
What she saw when she pictured the outside world was what she felt when she dared enter it—that it came at her like a storm cloud. Encircled her. Took bites of her. Inserted itself into her body like a straw and sucked her dry. In return, it gave her nothing. It thwarted all her attempts to engage it in kind, to be rewarded for her attempts to be a part of it. It sucked her up into its swirl, spun her, and then spit her out of its maelstrom before moving on to its next victim.
While Brian was in Toronto, she froze in a Dunkin’ Donuts on Boylston. For two hours she couldn’t move from the small counter that looked out onto the street.
While Brian was legging back from Hamburg one morning, she got into a cab on Beacon Street. They’d driven four blocks when she realized she’d entrusted a complete stranger with carrying her safely across the city for money. She had him pull over, overtipped him, and got out of the cab. She stood on the sidewalk, and everything was too bright, too sharp. Her hearing was too acute, as if the ear canals had been cored; she could hear three people on the far side of Mass Ave talking about their dogs. A woman, ten feet below on the river path, berated her child in Arabic. A plane landed at Logan. Another took off. And she could hear it. Could hear the cars honking on Mass Ave, and cars idling on Beacon and revving their engines on Storrow Drive.
Luckily there was a trash barrel nearby. She took four steps and threw up in it.
As she walked back toward the apartment she shared with Brian, the people she passed stared brazenly at her with contempt and disgust and something that she could only identify as appetite. They contemplated nipping her as she passed.
A Scientologist accosted her at the next block, shoved a pamphlet in her hand, and asked if she’d like to take a personality test, she sure looked like she could use some good news, ma’am, might learn things about herself that would— She wasn’t ever positive but suspected she might have thrown up on him. Back at the apartment she found specks of vomit on her shoes, but when she’d puked into the big barrel she’d been certain it had been all net.
She removed her clothes and took a twenty-minute shower. When Brian came home that night she was still in her robe and almost to the bottom of a bottle of pinot grigio. He made his own drink, single malt with a single cube of ice, and sat with her in the window seat overlooking the Charles and let her talk it out. When she finished, the disgust she’d expected to see in his face—the disgust that surely would have lived in Sebastian’s—wasn’t there. Instead, she saw only . . . What was that?
Good Lord.
Empathy.
Is that what it looks like? she thought.
He used the tips of his fingers to brush her wet bangs back and kissed her forehead. He poured her more wine.
He chuckled. “You really puked on a Scientologist?”
“It’s not funny.”
“But, babe, it is. It really is.” He clinked his glass off hers and drank.
She laughed, but then the laugh died and she thought of who she’d once been—in the housing projects, in the prowl cars on ride-alongs, in the halls of power, in the streets of Port-au-Prince, and that endless night in the squatters camp in Léogane—and she couldn’t connect that Rachel with this one.
“I’m so ashamed.” She looked at this man who was better than any she’d ever known, certainly kinder, certainly more patient, and the tears came, which only deepened her shame.
“Ashamed of what?” he said. “You are not weak. You hear me?”
“I can’t even walk out the fucking door,” she whispered. “I can’t even get in a fucking cab.”
“You’ll see someone,” he said. “You’ll figure it out. You’ll heal. In the meantime, where would you want to go?” His arm swept the apartment. “What’s better than here? We’ve got books, a full fridge, an Xbox.”
She dropped her forehead against his chest. “I love you.”
“I love you too. We can even do the wedding here.”
She took her head off his chest, looked in his eyes. He nodded.
They got married in a church. It was a few blocks away. Only their closest friends attended—on her side, Melissa, Eugenie, and Danny Marotta, her cameraman in Haiti; on his side, his business partner, Caleb, Caleb’s wife, Haya, a stunning Japanese immigrant who was still struggling to learn English, and Tom, the bartender from the bar where they’d met. No Jeremy James this time to walk her down the aisle; she hadn’t heard from him in two years. As for Brian, when she’d asked if he wanted his family there, he shook his head and a darkness settled on him like an overcoat.
“I do business with them,” he said. “I do not love them. I do not share the beautiful things in my life with them.”
When he spoke of his family Brian didn’t use contractions. He spoke slowly and precisely.
She said, “But they’re your family.”