She won’t answer, Andy thought. It’s not her number anymore. And what can I even say to her? And what will she say to me?
The phone rang once, then twice, and Andy was about to hang up and put the phone in his pocket, or maybe call a private investigator and try to figure out what had happened and where his dad was now, when a voice said, “Hello,” and then, “Andy?”
“Hey, Rachel.” Andy stopped and looked around, taking a moment to realize that he’d run far enough to see the Domino Sugar sign across the river.
“What’s wrong?”
“How do you know something’s wrong?”
“You call me after all this time and you sound awful. Something’s wrong.” Oh, Rachel. Her voice was so familiar. It all felt so familiar, like they’d picked up a conversation that they’d ended the night before.
“It’s my father,” Andy said. “He’s not dead.”
“What?” He heard her talk to someone, then rustling, the sound of a door slamming shut. “Sorry. I thought . . . Did you just say your father’s alive?”
“Alive,” he repeated. His voice sounded hoarse. His body felt knotted, fists clenched, quads and hamstrings tight. “He didn’t die. He got arrested. He’s just been in jail for almost my whole life.”
“Oh my God.” He could picture Rachel thinking, could remember how they would rest together, her head snuggled against his chest; how she’d look at the ceiling and click her tongue against the roof of her mouth. The smell of her hair, the softness of her arms. The way she’d make him laugh. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Go home, I guess. Talk to my mom. Try to find him. Try to ask him . . .” He lurched backward as a pack of cyclists sped by. “Ask why he didn’t want to know me.”
“Oh, Andy,” she said, her voice so sad, so familiar, so dear, that Andy felt like his body, the finely balanced tool that he’d fueled and coddled and cared for, was crumbling, like it was made of ash or salt. “Oh, Andy.”
“Rachel,” he croaked . . . and, just as he blurted, “Could you come with me?” he heard her say, “I’m getting married next month.”
“Married?” It hit him as if one of the shot-putters had aimed wrong and sent sixteen pounds of iron crashing into his gut. He opened his mouth and the word “Congratulations” hopped out like a toad.
Her voice was tiny. “I was going to call you . . . before it happened, to tell you, but I thought . . .”
How could you? he thought . . . except he had no right to ask that; no claim on her. He’d never tried to get her back, never even tried to tell her that he still thought of her, that he still imagined that somehow they would end up together.
“He’s a great guy,” she said, and he heard her trying to sound enthusiastic, like she was selling herself on her soon-to-be-husband’s greatness . . . and then, in a whispered rush, just before she cut the connection, he thought he heard her say, “Sometimes I wish it had been you.”
Rachel
2003
It won’t hurt like this forever. That was what I told myself when I was curled on my bed crying, or lying there motionless, feeling stunned and sick and sad, like I couldn’t get out of bed, like I couldn’t go back and be in the world. The only way through it is through it. At least he hadn’t pretended that he wanted me with him, hadn’t made a big fake effort at getting me to stay. The truth was that I’d been a distraction, poorly suited for a world where the sole focus was on bodies and times, where the party talk was all about lactic acid threshold; where, instead of holding me close and saying that he loved me, Andy’s first move every morning was to lie on the floor with a foam roller under his hips, or work his legs with a tool that looked like a plastic windshield wiper designed for myofascial release.
I had packed up my stuff while he was still in New York. I’d thought about going back to Florida, but the picture of my parents’ faces, the way that they’d be thinking, if not saying, I told you so, made the idea unbearable. Instead, I’d flown to New York, couch-surfed until I’d found a little efficiency on West Eighty-Sixth Street, reenrolled at NYU, and gotten a paying job at the Family Aid Society, where Amy was still my boss and, no big surprise, Brenda was still a client.
“Ooh, girl, what happened to you?” asked Brenda. We’d been scheduled for a nine o’clock meeting, and I’d been waiting on her front steps as she hopped out of a stranger’s car, looking perky in knee-high fringed black boots and a cropped black leather jacket. She had cut baby bangs, a quarter-inch fringe. It was a look only girls with perfect features and beautifully shaped skulls could pull off, and Brenda, cute as she was, was not one of them. Andy’s new girl probably was. I’d looked her up on the Internet and she was exactly what I’d expected—gorgeous, exotic, with slim hips and small, elegant breasts and a face that seemed flawless from every angle. “Your basic nightmare,” I’d told my friends. Amy had asked if I’d wanted to stay with her and Leonard for a while. Pamela had offered to come up from Virginia, and Marissa had volunteered to come down from Vermont. All three of them had told me that I was too good for him, that they’d never trusted him, that world-class runner or not, it was bizarre for any woman to sleep with a guy who had a smaller butt than she did.