Stephanie started leafing through her takeout menus, annoyed. This was the part she hated, the part of a relationship that always nudged her to bail, the part where someone else’s misery or expectations or neediness crept into her carefully prescribed world. It was such a burden, other people’s lives. She did love Leo. She’d loved him in a host of different ways at different times in their lives, and she did want whatever their current thing was to continue. Probably. But she always came back to this: She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot. Or even better, how to sink in and absorb its particular comforts.
On the one hand, she knew that Leo was never going to really change. On the other hand, she knew that Leo had spoiled something for her. She wasn’t going to enter into the type of willful ignorance that life with Leo might require, but she wasn’t going to settle for less than the charge, the excitement she felt when Leo was around. She was open to love, but she was best at managing her own happiness; it was other people’s happiness that sunk her.
She realized (abstractly, she knew) that parenthood was nothing more than being responsible for someone else’s happiness all the time, day after day, probably for the rest of her life, but it had to be a little different. It couldn’t be the same as feeling responsible for another adult who came to the party full of existing hopes and behaviors and intentions. She and her lovers had always managed to break what they built between them. She never figured out how to nurture the affection so it grew; it always ended up diminished. She knew parents and children could break each other’s hearts, but it had to be harder, didn’t it?
Stephanie bent to pick up a torn page from the floor and placed it on the table with the rest, which were in disarray. She gathered the pages and put them in order. She sat and started reading from the beginning.
LEO DID FEEL BETTER AFTER A SHOWER. He’d made the water as hot as he could bear, and standing in Stephanie’s bathroom as he wiped steam off the mirror, he could see how pink and healthy his skin was. He had lost weight in rehab, and all the running he’d been doing showed. He hadn’t let himself go, that was for sure. As he toweled off, he realized that Stephanie was probably downstairs reading. Good. That was easier than explaining to her—in his own words—the details of the accident and its aftermath. Stephanie would know how to handle this; she was an expert at telling people their work needed to be euthanized—she delivered that news all the time—and she was going to have to help him bury Bea’s story.
Without even trying, Leo could come up with a list of people, starting with Nathan Chowdhury, who would be only too thrilled to write a scathing exposé about his accident, the hand job, the poor caterer from the Bronx hobbling around on one foot. (They would conveniently ignore or somehow downplay that he’d made her a millionaire.) He could see the accompanying pictures, the old drawing of him as King Roach. God. He hadn’t gotten this far—endured rehab, stayed clean for fuck’s sake, protected and carefully camouflaged his savings—just to attract the wrong kind of heat now. Or to end up the laughing stock of New York City, to have people pointing and whispering every time he walked into a room, to be the most e-mailed article on Gawker. He couldn’t have this looming over his head as he tried to set up meetings. Stephanie needed to help him put the whole thing to rest quickly.
When he walked into the kitchen, Stephanie was slowly leafing through the pages, repeatedly returning to one toward the middle (he knew which one). She was pale. She looked up at him and, ah, yes, he remembered that look. He fought back irritation.
“You see what I’m saying. It’s an Archie story,” he said. She sat perfectly still. He watched her, nervously. “Just because she doesn’t call the guy Archie—”
“This all happened?” she asked, as Leo walked over to the sink and got a glass of water. “She lost her foot?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she now?” Stephanie said, still not looking at Leo but at the pages spread on the table in front of her.
“I don’t know.”
“You haven’t heard from her?”
“No,” Leo said. “Well, kind of.”
“Kind of?”
“She’s called a few times, but I haven’t responded. George’s taking care of it. There was a settlement—a very generous one—and part of the agreement was no contact once the papers were signed.”
“I see,” Stephanie said. “I guess you better get George on the amputee right away.”
“I wasn’t privy to the terms of the agreement, Stephanie. I was in rehab. But I have to follow the rules and so does she. It’s in everyone’s best interest, including hers. If she’s caught violating the terms—”
“You guys get the other foot?” Stephanie said. She carefully stacked the papers in the middle of the table, smoothing a page that was wrinkled. Leo thought her hand was trembling a little. He sat down next to her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wanted to tell you. I really did. But I have a hard time even thinking about it.”
“Aren’t you a little bit curious?”
“Curious?”
“To see how she’s doing. Why she’s calling you? God, Leo, she lost a foot.”
“I know she’s being taken care of. I know she had the absolute best care. I’m not allowed to be curious and contact her.”