Ilana, Submerged
originally published in the winter 2014 issue of Concrete Literary Magazine
The hurricane delays Ilana’s flight by six hours, and when she finally staggers out of Logan and into Rhonda’s wrath, red-eyed and muss-haired from naps and too many coffees in the stiff seats of the Frankfurt Airport, it doesn’t seem like it’s raining so much as it seems like the world has been immersed. The night is soupy with fog, and she surveys the parking lot, crowned by a wreath of idling cabs and rideshares. She decides it’s too late to call Steve, that he’ll whine and moan all the way home if she rouses him now, and she can technically expense this ride as work-related. So she throws herself into one of the cabs, and the driver gives her a dirty look as the slanting rain follows her in.
She moves to check her phone, but it’s dead, worn out from innumerable dim games of solitaire, from refreshing her Twitter feed every five minutes to check how the hurricane was progressing in Boston. She halfheartedly jabs at the power button a few times to no avail.
She sits back in the warm dark of the cab, and she wonders how Steve functioned while she was gone. He thought it was a little extravagant of Shorer-Johansson to send her to Frankfurt in her first six months as their newest editor, asked if that was really necessary, asked if that was even practical since there are only four of them in-house. But Steve’s as transparent now as he was two years ago, and she knows that all that boils down to But I’m gonna miss you and But I want our first time in Europe to be together. She wonders if he succumbed to the temptation of ordering takeout for the five nights she was gone, or if he’s been living off the Clif Bars and Cheez-Its Melissa buys in bulk. Melissa won’t have cooked for him; she says she won’t until he starts paying rent.
Steve wanted their first time in Europe to be their honeymoon, and he wanted it to be on a cruise. Before she left, he kissed the hollow between her neck and shoulder and murmured, half-immersed in sleep, “Pretend I’m out there with you, begging you to buy street vendor sausage. Maybe I’ll try to propose to you in German. Ish liddish, or whatever.”
“Ich liebe dich,” she corrected him.
“Yeah,” he said, rolling over. “That. Call me when you land, sh’liddish.”
The proposals are only semi-joking, but Ilana has heard so many that she’s begun to tense when Steve so much as starts a sentence with Maybe or What if. He pulled the first one out about four months ago, and a new one surfaces every week or so: What if I got you a goldfish and put a ring at the bottom of the bowl, like in the little castle thing? (A goldfish doesn’t exactly signify commitment, she’d countered.) Maybe I’ll send you a manuscript with a ring in the middle. (We don’t accept hard copies.) None of them has been entirely serious, but she knows she can only keep the engagement at bay for so long – if Steve is invested enough to keep rolling out scenarios, he’ll spring the real one on her soon enough.
A year ago she would have said she loved Steve. She says it now, out of habit or obligation, but can no longer muster the feeling. There are some vestiges of affection left in her – Steve is sweet, unassuming; he needs taking care of, and sometimes that’s rewarding – but the prospect of marriage threatens to snuff them out. When she first met Steve, she liked that he was all about forward motion; he had no emotional baggage, no tangled backstory, no hesitation when it came to discussing the difficult things. And it must make sense to him, she thinks, that marriage is the next step in the chronology of loving someone, but it’s not a leap she thinks she’ll survive. Consider ending in context of the whole, she would write in this margin.
She’s always told herself, told anyone who asked, that she wouldn’t even consider getting married before she could support herself, and although the Shorer-Johansson job is fulfilling that condition nicely, she still doesn’t feel ready. She can imagine worse endgames than spending her life with Steve, but the idea doesn’t make her particularly happy either. She knows that Steve is a Good Thing – kind to small children and animals, emotionally stable, loves his mother, etc. – but ever since the rude awakening of that first joking proposal, she’s become increasingly aware of everything about him that bothers her, and the list has grown long.
She’s not surprised that all the lights are out when she gets back to the apartment – Steve can’t operate properly on fewer than nine hours of sleep, and she wasn’t really expecting him to wait up through the delay. And Melissa has work in the morning – she’s never up later than ten or eleven on weeknights.
But then Ilana glances around the kitchen, and it takes her a moment to realize what’s off: the clock displays of the oven and microwave are dark, too.
Her eyes adjust as she hangs up her rain-soaked peacoat and yanks off her boots. She heaves her suitcase through the kitchen and into the living room, so she doesn’t wake up Steve or Melissa when she drags it over the wooden threshold to her room. The apartment isn’t very big, and she can hear Steve snoring from here, a steady rev like a lawnmower, audible even over Rhonda’s incessant lashing at the windows.
She drags her suitcase into the corner of the room as quietly as she can, and as she turns toward the hallway, her adjusted eyes register a person sprawled across the couch.
At first, she thinks it’s Steve, and her stomach warms at his unexpected thoughtfulness. But as she steps closer, she realizes that it’s the wrong size and shape to be Steve, and a chill judders through her.
Before she can slip out of the room, the shape leaps up and fumbles around on the couch and then, as she presses herself against the wall, turns a flashlight on her.
“Oh, Christ,” says the guy, “it’s just you,” and although his voice is familiar, it takes a moment to place.
Her chest shrinks and swells, and she shuts her eyes against the light and the recognition. She wishes fervently that Melissa had warned her, and then realizes that the warning is probably sitting in the depths of her exhausted phone, amid stale tweets and stalemated games of solitaire.
“Yeah, well, hey,” she says, peeling herself from the wall. She squints against the flashlight. “I live here. Did the hurricane sweep you in?”
Riley makes a self-deprecating noise in the back of his throat. “Come sit,” he says, flopping back onto the couch. The flashlight’s beam bounces away from her, and when she blinks, the room is impenetrably dark again. “There’s a story.”
She hesitates for a second, his form coming into focus. The last time she sat on a couch next to Riley, she broke up with him.
He watches her, and then pats the cushion next to him. “Come sit,” he repeats, and in the rain-hammered darkness of the living room, still blinking away the flashlight’s obliterating light, her sense sharpen, and as Steve’s snoring quiets in the other room, the smell of spearmint and pine wafts to her, and abruptly, dizzyingly, her mind plunges back five years: in Riley’s room, sixteen and seventeen, lying shirtless on their backs, singing along with the radio. She was the soon-to-be English major, pulled in eight directions by as many college acceptance letters; he was the tall kid with the easy grin and thick eyelashes who sat in the back of his classes drawing startlingly deft pictures of his classmates. They’d shouted Fall Out Boy lyrics at each other until Melissa came home, and she had given them the same uncomfortable smile that said I don’t want to think about either of you fucking the other.
Ilana sits, on the other side of the couch.
“Sorry I scared you,” says Riley. “Mel said you’d be coming home, but I started dozing and you startled me when you came in.”
“It’s all right,” she says. “I wasn’t supposed to get in this late. Rhonda screwed me over.”
“Rhonda,” he repeats, grinning, and another of her high school memories washes up: the night before a snow day, Winter Storm Ichabod mounting over southeast Massachusetts, sitting on the Nelsons’ couch watching the Weather Channel. I bet each meteorologist writes down an obscure name and someone judges which is the strangest, he'd said, and that’s the one they pick.
Ichabod, she'd said.
Ianthe.
Ignacio.
Imelda.
Ingvar.
He'd smirked. Ilana.
“Rhonda,” she agrees. Referencing their couples’ joke seems flirtatious; neglecting to acknowledge it seems cold. She allows her lips to curl up at the corners, and then she realizes that Riley isn’t looking at her at all. His gaze is on his hands, in his lap, and she wonders if he’s thinking the same thing.
“So,” she says, because Riley doesn’t seem to realize that the conversation has marooned itself. “What about you?”
He laughs again, in the back of his throat, and shakes his head a little. His hair, dark and wavy like Melissa’s, is on the cusp of needing to be cut; he can get away with the scruffiness for now, but in another week or so he’ll start to look unkempt. Same for the stubble on his cheeks and chin – becoming for now, but not for long. Her breath catches as she observes him, and she pinches a bit of lower lip between her teeth. He’s wearing a rust-colored T-shirt, his shoulders are broader, he’s heavier. She remembers, jarringly, that he’s been through college too, that he has a whole adult life she knows almost nothing about. She knows he went to art school, put those big hands to good use – Baltimore, she thinks, or somewhere in Maryland. For the longest time, all of his social media profile pictures had been the same one, taken in front of the Baltimore Museum of Art — she’d thought it was the Lincoln Memorial until she’d realized, during an episode of Instagram stalking she’s not particularly proud of, that there was no statue inside. Now, she studies his face, trying to remember if he’d had stubble in that picture.
She realizes she’s staring when he begins toying with one of the couch pillows and pulls it into his lap, hugging it to his stomach.
“Sorry,” she mutters. “I – I’m tired.”
He nods. “I’ll make it quick, hmm?”
“Oh, take your time,” she says, tugging the afghan, made by Melissa’s grandmother – his grandmother – when they were in middle school, from the top of the couch and draping it over her wrinkled jeans. “It’s already, what? Four? Go big or go home, right?”
He nods again. “Like with the frozen yogurt,” he says, and she flounders for a second before it comes to her: senior year, Zen Yogurt, unlimited toppings. Riley, with the steadiest hands, heaping her and Melissa’s Styrofoam bowls with berries, bananas, gummy bears, coconut flakes, graham cracker crumbs, white chocolate chips. This is the least necessary thing, Melissa would say, side-eyeing first the dishes and then the cashier at the front of the store, you don’t even like bananas, and Riley would shake his head. If we’re going to pay for unlimited toppings, we’re going to get them.
“Zen Yo’s closed,” she says. “I drove by when I went to visit my parents over Labor Day, and the windows are all boarded up.”
“Shit,” he says. “It would’ve been cool to go back there sometime, you and me and Mel. Catch up. I mean, not me and Mel, but I haven’t seen you in, like, what – four years?”
“Probably,” she agrees. “Every time I went to visit her while she was living at home, you were conspicuously absent.”
“I planned that,” he deadpans, and in the dark she can’t tell if he’s serious or not. “Didn’t want to rip open the wound.”
“Got it,” she says, a little stung, or maybe mortified, and a small smile crosses his face.
“Just kidding,” he says. “Bad timing, probably. The joke, and when you were visiting. Once you and Mel left for college I tried to spend as much time not home as possible.”
Riley’s parents have never understood his attraction to the arts, choosing instead to yell about his doodling through classes and drop hints about the employment rate of artists these days. If he did end up in art school, she thinks, it was probably a battle hard-won and not without the aid of scholarships.
“Is that what you’re doing here?” she ventures. “Avoiding Jim and Sandy?”
“Good guess,” he says, “but no. I’m, uh, I’m crashing here because I got dumped.”
“Oh,” she says, and she wonders guiltily if she started a pattern back in high school. “I’m, um, sorry. That sucks.”
He shrugs. “It’d been rocky for a while, so … no great loss, or anything. Just, you know. A place to live. Steady income. Et cetera.”
She misinterprets steady income and can’t rearrange her face before it shows. “She was paying y –”
“No!” chokes Riley. “No, no, I just meant – she had a job. I didn’t. Employment rate of artists these days, remember. Except she was also an artist. Just a better one than me.”
“Right,” she says, flushing. “Of course. I mean, not of course. Just. Oh. Would I know the name?”
It’s a mark of how nice Riley is, she thinks, that he humors her. She’s as hip to the art world as Steve is to the world of publishing, but Riley doesn’t point that out. Tonelessly, he recites, “Mona Graves, thirty-nine. Pratt Institute, class of 2008. Mixed media, installation pieces, oils, various household items. Best known for ‘Isthmus,’ 2011, papier-mâché, neon lights, ceramics, peat; and ‘Oxbow Decomposition,’ 2012, oils, brown sugar, Windex.”
“You’re making that up,” she says, but the disbelief isn’t entirely rooted in the rotting soil and baking goods. She sees her Riley, high-school Riley, big hands and feet and wide baby eyes, smooth pink cheeks, wearing the look of total, innocent awe that crossed his face when he pulled out of her for the first time, and tries to map that onto the broader-shouldered, fuller-faced, scruffier Riley sitting beside her. Tries to imagine him next to a woman more than ten years his senior – lying next to her, Ilana’s mind edits. It’s difficult. Unpleasant. Her brain pulls out after a few seconds. She reaches for the coffee table, fingers searching in the dark until she finds the soft, worn edges of her cards.
“All true,” Riley says, palms out. “So, yeah. She got sick of me lying around unemployed and fucking around with my tablet all day, and I got sick of her telling me that digital art is the spawn of the devil, so we fought once more for old times’ sake and then she threw me out.” He takes a deep breath, laying the pillow on his thighs and resting his forearms on it. “I called Mel, she got me on the next flight out of Baltimore, and she picked me up at Logan ready to kill because someone named Stan – Steve? I forget – had eaten her leftover Kung Pao chicken.”
“Steve,” Ilana confirms, fighting the urge to laugh or groan or deny all affiliation. She flips through the deck, extracting cards and shoving them back in at random. “That would be Steve. You met him?”
“Yeah, he seems cool. He was gone when I got in – probably afraid that Mel would strike him down with the Ten Plagues or something – but he was around when I got out of the shower, and he said hi and asked if I wanted pizza because he was ordering some. So we had pizza and he – oh, yeah. Did you see the flowers?”
“The flowers?” she asks.
“Yeah,” says Riley. “Tulips, on the counter – he brought them back with the pizza, said they’d surprise you when you got in.”
“Oh,” says Ilana, her stomach turning cold. She squints toward the dark kitchen, as if that will settle the swell of affection and dread, and cuts the deck in her hands. “No, I didn’t see them. The power’s out, it was dark.”
He nods. “Good guy you’ve got there,” he says, rubbing a corner of the pillow between his fingers.
She’s imagining it, she thinks. She’s imagining that he sounds disappointed and surprised and resigned; she has to be. He’s spent the last however-many years bedding sophisticated, artistic, thirties-chic Mona, lying on her couch and eating her Kung Pao chicken and watching her Weather Channel and putting toppings on her frozen yogurt. It’s been ten years since Ilana and Riley began dating, nine since they first slept together. In this time, she has slept with four other people, including Steve; the others have lasted a night, or a few months. She doesn’t know the intimate history of Riley’s last ten years – Riley hasn’t talked to Melissa about that kind of thing since he started dating Ilana. Or maybe he does, and Melissa just makes the call not to pass it along to her. Maybe he was a hot commodity in Baltimore. Maybe it’s just been her and Mona, joined together in the holy sisterhood of having seen Riley in his most vulnerable form. But any way the equation shakes out, she can’t justify the disappointment she thinks she heard. Ten years is more than enough time to let go of a high school sweetheart.
Steve’s snoring starts up again. Riley nods once, and Ilana picks up her cards, shuffles them. She hadn’t noticed that the snoring had ever stopped.
“How’d you guys meet?” Riley asks. He rubs a hand over his scruff, and she finds herself rapt at the unfamiliar habit.
“It was a little while after I’d moved up here,” she says, riffling the deck in her hands, and her mind drifts back to the beating sun, the blessed breeze of the giant fans in the T station She remembers the mint-green dress she was wearing, that her mascara was running in the heat. Four years in New York had been enough for her, and she’d decided to take Mel up on her offer of sharing a place in Boston rather than move back home. In between searching for jobs, she’d taken to exploring the city – she’d only ever visited it on middle-school field trips to the Freedom Trail and Museums of Science and Fine Arts. She’d been on her way to Harvard Square to squander a few hours perusing the Bookstore and the Coop, and the congested train was shuffling toward Central Square when the guy pressed against her hip unleashed a stream of muttered shits and fucks.
She surveyed him critically – youngish, clean-cut, ruddy-faced, sweating through a dark suit, too invested in whatever he’d fucked up to be anything but earnest – before asking, “Everything okay?”
He looked at her, startled, and his face flushed even more. “I – no. Yeah. No. I have a job interview in five minutes and I just realized that it’s in Kendall, not Central, and now I’m basically fucked because I was banking on this one interview, you know, and it’s gonna take at least another twenty minutes to get back to Central at this time of day.”
“Kendall?” she asked, and his face fell.
“Goddamn it,” he said, running a hand through his carefully groomed shock of sandy hair. “This whole interview is doomed.”
“Just call ahead,” she suggested. “Blame the train. I’m not even from around here and I can tell that that’s a legitimate excuse.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, relief breaking across his face. “Yeah, I could – at the station, I guess, I’ll drop the call down here – yeah, good idea. You might’ve just saved my life, you know.”
She shrugged. “No problem. As long as you knock the interview out of the park, you should be fine.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, pushing his fingers through his hair again, further disheveling it. “I’m Steve.”
She stifled a grin at the haphazard spikes he’d created, and decided not to clue him in. “Ilana.”
The train swerved, and he lost his balance, pitching toward her. “Ilana,” he repeated, his face hovering several inches above hers. “Can I buy you a drink sometime, maybe? To say thank you?”
“Oh,” she said, tearing her gaze from the jagged skyline of his hair. “Um, you’re really grateful, aren’t you?”
He grinned, and she noted the creases that formed at his eyes, the dimple that sank into his right cheek. “I really need this job.”
“Where is it?” she asked, watching him search for his phone in the pockets of his suit and accepting it as he pushed it into her hands.
“Harlow & Andrews?” he asked, like he wasn’t sure she’d be familiar with it. The train lurched, and he stumbled into her, flushing again. He apologized before continuing, “It’s a marketing firm. I’m applying to be one of their product managers.”
She finished putting her number into his phone and handed it back to him. “Sounds respectable,” she said, but as the train announced its entrance to Central Station, he spoke over her: “So I’ll text you, yeah … Ilana?”
“Yeah, okay,” she said, and as he’d darted off the train, she’d yelled after him, “But only if you nail that interview!”
On the couch, Riley nods. “And the rest is history, right?”
“Pretty much,” she says, letting out a breath. She sets down the cards, stacking them precariously on the edge of the couch. It feels like the past has piled up between them, and she realizes abruptly that, even if he asked, telling an ex-boyfriend the story of how you met your current boyfriend probably breaks some sort of code. She pokes her fingers through the afghan’s stitches. What kind of girl naively agrees to drinks with a guy she’s known for five minutes and then relays the story proudly to her first love?
“He seems like a cool guy,” Riley says, through the dust of the settling anecdote. She exhales. “I mean, he must be pretty cool, if he’s your boyfriend.”
“Faulty logic,” she says, surprising herself. “You’re operating under the assumption that all my boyfriends are cool.”
She expects it to sound self-deprecating, even mean; instead, it lilts flirtatiously, and Riley cocks an eyebrow.
“You misspoke,” he says. “You spend all your days editing, don’t you? And you still left out two whole words right there.”
She pauses, caught between these two mysteries – how does he know that she’s an editor? – but he solves one for her: “You forgot as you. ‘You’re operating under the assumption that all my boyfriends are as cool as you.’”
That’s three words, she thinks, as cool as you, but that’s her editor talking, parsing the language before evaluating the tone. His is also undeniably flirtatious – though, she considers, she didn’t mean to sound that way either. But if he meant to, when she just told him about her boyfriend …
She knows she’s picked up the habit of flirting with guys who pay attention to her; it feels like breaching the surface to capture a lungful of oxygen before Steve pulls her down again. It doesn’t mean anything; coming up for air isn’t cheating on the water. But Riley’s flirting is clumsy, she knows. He only drags it out when he’s sure he can pull it off. Maybe it’s just because she’s familiar, safe. Maybe it’s because she has a boyfriend.
“Mel said you’re working for a publisher here,” he says, when she doesn’t fire back immediately. “I’m not, you know, stalking you or anything.”
“Sure you’re not,” she says, crossing her legs under the afghan. She tries to put as much distance as possible between them, although she’s not quite sure whom she’s trying to discourage, Riley or herself. “That explains why I haven’t seen you in ten years. You’ve been skulking along right behind me, recording every detail of my life.” She affects a dramatic Scarlett O’Hara accent, waving her hands in a halfheartedly despairing flourish. “If only I’d turned around!”
Riley chuckles, and something beams warmly inside her chest. “If only I’d fucked it up,” he says softly, and the beam falters. “Tripped or sneezed or something so you’d know I was there.”
Ilana doesn’t think about Riley on a day-to-day basis anymore. Sometimes he flickers through her head, if something reminds her of him – Didn’t Riley have a shirt like that? Oh, It’s Always Sunny, that’s the one Riley kept badgering me to watch – or as a passing thought: I wonder how Riley’s art is going. I wonder if Riley still watches It’s Always Sunny. The only other instances come between two and five a.m., when Steve is sawing logs in his dreams and she can’t get comfortable in bed, when they’ve spent the evening bickering about something inane – why can’t he figure out how to hang up his wet towels; can she stop correcting his grammar, for Chrissake; is it really that hard for him to rinse the sink when he’s finished shaving; does she really need sixty-eight hair products in the shower, since all they do is fall over. This is when she lies on her back, or on her hip, on her belly (rinse and repeat), listening to Steve snore and sigh, and she thinks, Maybe I should have tried harder for Riley Nelson.
“Congratulations,” she says, after a long pause. “You finally tripped.”
In the moment of silence that follows, Riley looks at his hands, twisting his fingers through each other, the way he used to before a test he was nervous about. Ilana snags a chipping mint-green nail in the weave of the afghan. She counts the seconds until he raises his right hand and rubs the back of his neck: four. Then, she predicts, he’ll tug at his nose: two seconds. And then, when he lowers his hand, he’ll tap his fingers three times against his thigh.
He clears his throat, and she looks up from examining the ragged edge of her nail. “You should read the note,” he says. “With the tulips.”
“There’s a note?” she asks, her chest filling with cold gray dread.
“Yeah,” he says, handing her the flashlight. She gathers the cards and leaves them on the table, flips the flashlight on. The tulips appear, lipstick-red, in her foreground, arranged in the cut-glass vase Melissa found at the Goodwill in Central Square. The envelope next to it is square, periwinkle blue, and familiar: Steve must have taken it out of the drawer where she and Melissa keep stationery and pens. Her name is printed in Steve’s block capitals, and she slips a finger under the edge of the flap.
The paper inside is folded awkwardly to fit inside the envelope, and she opens it slowly, apprehension gathering in her throat. She skims the square letters, Rhonda pounding in her ears. She’s not sure she can bear to read all of his niceties.
Five days is a long time to be without you … I know I always tease you with those stupid scenarios … realize how much of my life you’ve impacted … all I want is to … will you …
She puts the letter down. She’s spent so long worrying about macaroni crafts, skywriters, hollowed-out phone books – it seems inevitable, predictable, that something as mundane as a vase of tulips would be the culprit.
She fights the urge to throw out an arm and send the offending flowers screaming to the hardwood floor, and the only thing that stops her, if she’s being honest, is that Melissa paid a full eight bucks for the vase and says they should use it more often. She scrunches her hands into fists, stuffs one into her mouth and bites down on her knuckles, daring herself not to scream.
She’s going to break Steve’s heart, the way all his friends and his mom warned her not to. She’d laughed. She’d laughed when they said Redheads are always trouble. She’d laughed when they said She sure calls the shots, doesn’t she? She imagines the way his face will crumple when he wakes up expecting a yes with breakfast and she serves him a no instead, and the idea leaves her feeling like she might as well cut out his heart and sauté it instead, for the amount of pain she’ll cause him.
She stuffs the letter back into the envelope and closes her eyes, gripping the edge of the countertop. This is it, she thinks. This is where she has to end it.
When she opens her eyes, Riley is standing beside her, arms pulled tight over the swell of his stomach. “You okay?” he asks, and she is close to falling into him. She pictures Steve tomorrow at breakfast, like an overgrown child in his Patriots T-shirt and checkered boxers, pale eyes hurt and mouth loose, swinging up from a gape to flatten into a line like a crowbar. Her instinct will be to hold him, she knows; one of Steve’s greatest talents is looking pitiful enough to draw sympathy out of her coldest moods. She resolves to conduct this rejection from the other side of the room, where proximity will keep her from going back on her word.
“He’s sensitive,” Steve’s mother had said in an undertone when she’d met Ilana at Easter last year. “Be gentle with him. He might seem like he can take care of himself, but he needs someone to help him up when he falls. Always been that way.”
“Don’t worry, Marie,” Ilana had said, squeezing out the first name with only a hint of hesitation. ‘Mrs. Cavendish’ makes me feel like a character in a Revolutionary War novel, his mother had said earlier. “I’ll help him up.”
She’d spent the rest of the afternoon wondering what would happen if she were the one who made Steve fall in the first place.
She crosses her own arms now, tucking her chin against her chest. “I can’t do this,” she says quietly, and Riley moves closer.
"He was really excited,” he says, his tone carefully bland. “He told me about the proposal jokes, and how you’d be expecting something really elaborate and dramatic.”
Guilt crashes over her, pulling her beneath its undertow, and she digs her nails into her palms.
“He thought it would surprise you,” says Riley, “since it was so simple. He didn’t think you’d be expecting it.” She bites down on her lower lip until blood washes over her tongue.
“He said the red ones were your favorite,” says Riley. She sucks in a breath through her teeth, but the air is hard to grasp; it turns to water in her lungs.
“He said he can’t wait to call his mom and tell her,” says Riley, and Ilana, submerged, blurts, “Stop!”
He takes a step back from her, and she hugs herself tighter. “Let’s go back to the couch,” she says, loosing a hand to wave accusingly at the flowers. “I don’t want to look at these.”
They sit at opposite ends of the couch. Ilana buries herself in the afghan and picks up her cards, and Riley returns the pillow to his lap. He rubs the back of his neck, and Ilana watches him as she tries to bring herself down, shuffling the cards absently. There’s only one way out of this, she knows that, but what a way. All of a sudden, the idea of anything blooming between her and Riley seems laughable. She’s too tangled up in Steve to even see as far as daybreak.
She wonders what the next step is. How do you dump someone for wanting to marry you? She cuts the deck, letting the piles of cards in each hand cascade into her cupped palms, then squares them against her knee and starts again. Rhonda screams against the windows, and Ilana barely resists screaming back. Instead, she mutters, “Fuck off, Rhonda,” and Riley chuckles quietly next to her.
“Hey,” he says, bumping her other knee with a loose fist. “Radoslava.”
The contact deflates her; she shuffles the cards once more and lays them in the gulley the afghan has strung across her lap. “Ragnar,” she says softly, and he leans over again to pat her hand awkwardly. She smiles a little; she’d expected his touch to feel tempting. Instead, it’s chaste, relieving.
“It happens,” he says. “People don’t match up. It’s okay to acknowledge that. And sometimes, yeah, you realize it too late, and you’re already living together and forming your lives around each other, and it’s hard to understand that it has to end. But I think if you’re going to get out, now’s the time to do that.”
“I know,” she says, hearing the drag on the words, and she huffs out a quiet, acidic laugh.
“We don’t even live together,” she says when Riley cocks his head. “Steve has an apartment in Porter Square. He just crashes here all the time. He says it’s homier than his place. It annoys the fuck out of Melissa.”
She’d asked Steve, about eight months ago, why they never hung out at his apartment, and he’d shrugged, smiled. “Brooks always has his shit everywhere, or he has people over, and besides, I like being here with you. I like watching you in your space. I like borrowing your Goodwill grandpa sweaters when I’m cold. I like when you make me wait because you promised Melissa you’d unload the dishwasher before she got home. I like that you know where everything is, and you have to tell me where to find the mugs and the takeout menus. It makes me feel like I’m learning how your life works, and I like that.”
She’d filed each detail away, pulling them out when she was having a bad day: Steve loved her so much that just watching her unload the dishwasher made him happy. She wonders when that feeling got lost among his habit of incessantly tapping his fingers, saying nother instead of other, the oceans of crumbs dropped on the countertops and the lakes of cold water left on the bathroom floor.
She closes her eyes as she imagines, again, turning him down in the morning.
Riley dozes off after a while, exhaling in low, guttural breaths. She sits still for a bit longer, steeling herself, examining the situation from every angle, then wraps the blanket around her shoulders and lays her cards out on the coffee table.
She wins eleven games; she loses count of how many she loses. In the gaps between, she tries to prep herself for the morning, tells herself that she has to do what’s best for her. She tells herself that it’s not her fault it’s not working; it doesn’t make her awful or selfish or irredeemable. Sometimes the layout of the deck is just inherently flawed, cards and player wed to an inevitable loss. She flips another card and slides it to its sister.
When she hears her bedroom door creak open at six-thirty, Rhonda has subsided, pale sunlight filtering through the windows. She hears Steve yawn, hears him shuffling down the hallway, and she turns over one last card, waiting.
© 2014 Hannah Lamarre
She moves to check her phone, but it’s dead, worn out from innumerable dim games of solitaire, from refreshing her Twitter feed every five minutes to check how the hurricane was progressing in Boston. She halfheartedly jabs at the power button a few times to no avail.
She sits back in the warm dark of the cab, and she wonders how Steve functioned while she was gone. He thought it was a little extravagant of Shorer-Johansson to send her to Frankfurt in her first six months as their newest editor, asked if that was really necessary, asked if that was even practical since there are only four of them in-house. But Steve’s as transparent now as he was two years ago, and she knows that all that boils down to But I’m gonna miss you and But I want our first time in Europe to be together. She wonders if he succumbed to the temptation of ordering takeout for the five nights she was gone, or if he’s been living off the Clif Bars and Cheez-Its Melissa buys in bulk. Melissa won’t have cooked for him; she says she won’t until he starts paying rent.
Steve wanted their first time in Europe to be their honeymoon, and he wanted it to be on a cruise. Before she left, he kissed the hollow between her neck and shoulder and murmured, half-immersed in sleep, “Pretend I’m out there with you, begging you to buy street vendor sausage. Maybe I’ll try to propose to you in German. Ish liddish, or whatever.”
“Ich liebe dich,” she corrected him.
“Yeah,” he said, rolling over. “That. Call me when you land, sh’liddish.”
The proposals are only semi-joking, but Ilana has heard so many that she’s begun to tense when Steve so much as starts a sentence with Maybe or What if. He pulled the first one out about four months ago, and a new one surfaces every week or so: What if I got you a goldfish and put a ring at the bottom of the bowl, like in the little castle thing? (A goldfish doesn’t exactly signify commitment, she’d countered.) Maybe I’ll send you a manuscript with a ring in the middle. (We don’t accept hard copies.) None of them has been entirely serious, but she knows she can only keep the engagement at bay for so long – if Steve is invested enough to keep rolling out scenarios, he’ll spring the real one on her soon enough.
A year ago she would have said she loved Steve. She says it now, out of habit or obligation, but can no longer muster the feeling. There are some vestiges of affection left in her – Steve is sweet, unassuming; he needs taking care of, and sometimes that’s rewarding – but the prospect of marriage threatens to snuff them out. When she first met Steve, she liked that he was all about forward motion; he had no emotional baggage, no tangled backstory, no hesitation when it came to discussing the difficult things. And it must make sense to him, she thinks, that marriage is the next step in the chronology of loving someone, but it’s not a leap she thinks she’ll survive. Consider ending in context of the whole, she would write in this margin.
She’s always told herself, told anyone who asked, that she wouldn’t even consider getting married before she could support herself, and although the Shorer-Johansson job is fulfilling that condition nicely, she still doesn’t feel ready. She can imagine worse endgames than spending her life with Steve, but the idea doesn’t make her particularly happy either. She knows that Steve is a Good Thing – kind to small children and animals, emotionally stable, loves his mother, etc. – but ever since the rude awakening of that first joking proposal, she’s become increasingly aware of everything about him that bothers her, and the list has grown long.
She’s not surprised that all the lights are out when she gets back to the apartment – Steve can’t operate properly on fewer than nine hours of sleep, and she wasn’t really expecting him to wait up through the delay. And Melissa has work in the morning – she’s never up later than ten or eleven on weeknights.
But then Ilana glances around the kitchen, and it takes her a moment to realize what’s off: the clock displays of the oven and microwave are dark, too.
Her eyes adjust as she hangs up her rain-soaked peacoat and yanks off her boots. She heaves her suitcase through the kitchen and into the living room, so she doesn’t wake up Steve or Melissa when she drags it over the wooden threshold to her room. The apartment isn’t very big, and she can hear Steve snoring from here, a steady rev like a lawnmower, audible even over Rhonda’s incessant lashing at the windows.
She drags her suitcase into the corner of the room as quietly as she can, and as she turns toward the hallway, her adjusted eyes register a person sprawled across the couch.
At first, she thinks it’s Steve, and her stomach warms at his unexpected thoughtfulness. But as she steps closer, she realizes that it’s the wrong size and shape to be Steve, and a chill judders through her.
Before she can slip out of the room, the shape leaps up and fumbles around on the couch and then, as she presses herself against the wall, turns a flashlight on her.
“Oh, Christ,” says the guy, “it’s just you,” and although his voice is familiar, it takes a moment to place.
Her chest shrinks and swells, and she shuts her eyes against the light and the recognition. She wishes fervently that Melissa had warned her, and then realizes that the warning is probably sitting in the depths of her exhausted phone, amid stale tweets and stalemated games of solitaire.
“Yeah, well, hey,” she says, peeling herself from the wall. She squints against the flashlight. “I live here. Did the hurricane sweep you in?”
Riley makes a self-deprecating noise in the back of his throat. “Come sit,” he says, flopping back onto the couch. The flashlight’s beam bounces away from her, and when she blinks, the room is impenetrably dark again. “There’s a story.”
She hesitates for a second, his form coming into focus. The last time she sat on a couch next to Riley, she broke up with him.
He watches her, and then pats the cushion next to him. “Come sit,” he repeats, and in the rain-hammered darkness of the living room, still blinking away the flashlight’s obliterating light, her sense sharpen, and as Steve’s snoring quiets in the other room, the smell of spearmint and pine wafts to her, and abruptly, dizzyingly, her mind plunges back five years: in Riley’s room, sixteen and seventeen, lying shirtless on their backs, singing along with the radio. She was the soon-to-be English major, pulled in eight directions by as many college acceptance letters; he was the tall kid with the easy grin and thick eyelashes who sat in the back of his classes drawing startlingly deft pictures of his classmates. They’d shouted Fall Out Boy lyrics at each other until Melissa came home, and she had given them the same uncomfortable smile that said I don’t want to think about either of you fucking the other.
Ilana sits, on the other side of the couch.
“Sorry I scared you,” says Riley. “Mel said you’d be coming home, but I started dozing and you startled me when you came in.”
“It’s all right,” she says. “I wasn’t supposed to get in this late. Rhonda screwed me over.”
“Rhonda,” he repeats, grinning, and another of her high school memories washes up: the night before a snow day, Winter Storm Ichabod mounting over southeast Massachusetts, sitting on the Nelsons’ couch watching the Weather Channel. I bet each meteorologist writes down an obscure name and someone judges which is the strangest, he'd said, and that’s the one they pick.
Ichabod, she'd said.
Ianthe.
Ignacio.
Imelda.
Ingvar.
He'd smirked. Ilana.
“Rhonda,” she agrees. Referencing their couples’ joke seems flirtatious; neglecting to acknowledge it seems cold. She allows her lips to curl up at the corners, and then she realizes that Riley isn’t looking at her at all. His gaze is on his hands, in his lap, and she wonders if he’s thinking the same thing.
“So,” she says, because Riley doesn’t seem to realize that the conversation has marooned itself. “What about you?”
He laughs again, in the back of his throat, and shakes his head a little. His hair, dark and wavy like Melissa’s, is on the cusp of needing to be cut; he can get away with the scruffiness for now, but in another week or so he’ll start to look unkempt. Same for the stubble on his cheeks and chin – becoming for now, but not for long. Her breath catches as she observes him, and she pinches a bit of lower lip between her teeth. He’s wearing a rust-colored T-shirt, his shoulders are broader, he’s heavier. She remembers, jarringly, that he’s been through college too, that he has a whole adult life she knows almost nothing about. She knows he went to art school, put those big hands to good use – Baltimore, she thinks, or somewhere in Maryland. For the longest time, all of his social media profile pictures had been the same one, taken in front of the Baltimore Museum of Art — she’d thought it was the Lincoln Memorial until she’d realized, during an episode of Instagram stalking she’s not particularly proud of, that there was no statue inside. Now, she studies his face, trying to remember if he’d had stubble in that picture.
She realizes she’s staring when he begins toying with one of the couch pillows and pulls it into his lap, hugging it to his stomach.
“Sorry,” she mutters. “I – I’m tired.”
He nods. “I’ll make it quick, hmm?”
“Oh, take your time,” she says, tugging the afghan, made by Melissa’s grandmother – his grandmother – when they were in middle school, from the top of the couch and draping it over her wrinkled jeans. “It’s already, what? Four? Go big or go home, right?”
He nods again. “Like with the frozen yogurt,” he says, and she flounders for a second before it comes to her: senior year, Zen Yogurt, unlimited toppings. Riley, with the steadiest hands, heaping her and Melissa’s Styrofoam bowls with berries, bananas, gummy bears, coconut flakes, graham cracker crumbs, white chocolate chips. This is the least necessary thing, Melissa would say, side-eyeing first the dishes and then the cashier at the front of the store, you don’t even like bananas, and Riley would shake his head. If we’re going to pay for unlimited toppings, we’re going to get them.
“Zen Yo’s closed,” she says. “I drove by when I went to visit my parents over Labor Day, and the windows are all boarded up.”
“Shit,” he says. “It would’ve been cool to go back there sometime, you and me and Mel. Catch up. I mean, not me and Mel, but I haven’t seen you in, like, what – four years?”
“Probably,” she agrees. “Every time I went to visit her while she was living at home, you were conspicuously absent.”
“I planned that,” he deadpans, and in the dark she can’t tell if he’s serious or not. “Didn’t want to rip open the wound.”
“Got it,” she says, a little stung, or maybe mortified, and a small smile crosses his face.
“Just kidding,” he says. “Bad timing, probably. The joke, and when you were visiting. Once you and Mel left for college I tried to spend as much time not home as possible.”
Riley’s parents have never understood his attraction to the arts, choosing instead to yell about his doodling through classes and drop hints about the employment rate of artists these days. If he did end up in art school, she thinks, it was probably a battle hard-won and not without the aid of scholarships.
“Is that what you’re doing here?” she ventures. “Avoiding Jim and Sandy?”
“Good guess,” he says, “but no. I’m, uh, I’m crashing here because I got dumped.”
“Oh,” she says, and she wonders guiltily if she started a pattern back in high school. “I’m, um, sorry. That sucks.”
He shrugs. “It’d been rocky for a while, so … no great loss, or anything. Just, you know. A place to live. Steady income. Et cetera.”
She misinterprets steady income and can’t rearrange her face before it shows. “She was paying y –”
“No!” chokes Riley. “No, no, I just meant – she had a job. I didn’t. Employment rate of artists these days, remember. Except she was also an artist. Just a better one than me.”
“Right,” she says, flushing. “Of course. I mean, not of course. Just. Oh. Would I know the name?”
It’s a mark of how nice Riley is, she thinks, that he humors her. She’s as hip to the art world as Steve is to the world of publishing, but Riley doesn’t point that out. Tonelessly, he recites, “Mona Graves, thirty-nine. Pratt Institute, class of 2008. Mixed media, installation pieces, oils, various household items. Best known for ‘Isthmus,’ 2011, papier-mâché, neon lights, ceramics, peat; and ‘Oxbow Decomposition,’ 2012, oils, brown sugar, Windex.”
“You’re making that up,” she says, but the disbelief isn’t entirely rooted in the rotting soil and baking goods. She sees her Riley, high-school Riley, big hands and feet and wide baby eyes, smooth pink cheeks, wearing the look of total, innocent awe that crossed his face when he pulled out of her for the first time, and tries to map that onto the broader-shouldered, fuller-faced, scruffier Riley sitting beside her. Tries to imagine him next to a woman more than ten years his senior – lying next to her, Ilana’s mind edits. It’s difficult. Unpleasant. Her brain pulls out after a few seconds. She reaches for the coffee table, fingers searching in the dark until she finds the soft, worn edges of her cards.
“All true,” Riley says, palms out. “So, yeah. She got sick of me lying around unemployed and fucking around with my tablet all day, and I got sick of her telling me that digital art is the spawn of the devil, so we fought once more for old times’ sake and then she threw me out.” He takes a deep breath, laying the pillow on his thighs and resting his forearms on it. “I called Mel, she got me on the next flight out of Baltimore, and she picked me up at Logan ready to kill because someone named Stan – Steve? I forget – had eaten her leftover Kung Pao chicken.”
“Steve,” Ilana confirms, fighting the urge to laugh or groan or deny all affiliation. She flips through the deck, extracting cards and shoving them back in at random. “That would be Steve. You met him?”
“Yeah, he seems cool. He was gone when I got in – probably afraid that Mel would strike him down with the Ten Plagues or something – but he was around when I got out of the shower, and he said hi and asked if I wanted pizza because he was ordering some. So we had pizza and he – oh, yeah. Did you see the flowers?”
“The flowers?” she asks.
“Yeah,” says Riley. “Tulips, on the counter – he brought them back with the pizza, said they’d surprise you when you got in.”
“Oh,” says Ilana, her stomach turning cold. She squints toward the dark kitchen, as if that will settle the swell of affection and dread, and cuts the deck in her hands. “No, I didn’t see them. The power’s out, it was dark.”
He nods. “Good guy you’ve got there,” he says, rubbing a corner of the pillow between his fingers.
She’s imagining it, she thinks. She’s imagining that he sounds disappointed and surprised and resigned; she has to be. He’s spent the last however-many years bedding sophisticated, artistic, thirties-chic Mona, lying on her couch and eating her Kung Pao chicken and watching her Weather Channel and putting toppings on her frozen yogurt. It’s been ten years since Ilana and Riley began dating, nine since they first slept together. In this time, she has slept with four other people, including Steve; the others have lasted a night, or a few months. She doesn’t know the intimate history of Riley’s last ten years – Riley hasn’t talked to Melissa about that kind of thing since he started dating Ilana. Or maybe he does, and Melissa just makes the call not to pass it along to her. Maybe he was a hot commodity in Baltimore. Maybe it’s just been her and Mona, joined together in the holy sisterhood of having seen Riley in his most vulnerable form. But any way the equation shakes out, she can’t justify the disappointment she thinks she heard. Ten years is more than enough time to let go of a high school sweetheart.
Steve’s snoring starts up again. Riley nods once, and Ilana picks up her cards, shuffles them. She hadn’t noticed that the snoring had ever stopped.
“How’d you guys meet?” Riley asks. He rubs a hand over his scruff, and she finds herself rapt at the unfamiliar habit.
“It was a little while after I’d moved up here,” she says, riffling the deck in her hands, and her mind drifts back to the beating sun, the blessed breeze of the giant fans in the T station She remembers the mint-green dress she was wearing, that her mascara was running in the heat. Four years in New York had been enough for her, and she’d decided to take Mel up on her offer of sharing a place in Boston rather than move back home. In between searching for jobs, she’d taken to exploring the city – she’d only ever visited it on middle-school field trips to the Freedom Trail and Museums of Science and Fine Arts. She’d been on her way to Harvard Square to squander a few hours perusing the Bookstore and the Coop, and the congested train was shuffling toward Central Square when the guy pressed against her hip unleashed a stream of muttered shits and fucks.
She surveyed him critically – youngish, clean-cut, ruddy-faced, sweating through a dark suit, too invested in whatever he’d fucked up to be anything but earnest – before asking, “Everything okay?”
He looked at her, startled, and his face flushed even more. “I – no. Yeah. No. I have a job interview in five minutes and I just realized that it’s in Kendall, not Central, and now I’m basically fucked because I was banking on this one interview, you know, and it’s gonna take at least another twenty minutes to get back to Central at this time of day.”
“Kendall?” she asked, and his face fell.
“Goddamn it,” he said, running a hand through his carefully groomed shock of sandy hair. “This whole interview is doomed.”
“Just call ahead,” she suggested. “Blame the train. I’m not even from around here and I can tell that that’s a legitimate excuse.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, relief breaking across his face. “Yeah, I could – at the station, I guess, I’ll drop the call down here – yeah, good idea. You might’ve just saved my life, you know.”
She shrugged. “No problem. As long as you knock the interview out of the park, you should be fine.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, pushing his fingers through his hair again, further disheveling it. “I’m Steve.”
She stifled a grin at the haphazard spikes he’d created, and decided not to clue him in. “Ilana.”
The train swerved, and he lost his balance, pitching toward her. “Ilana,” he repeated, his face hovering several inches above hers. “Can I buy you a drink sometime, maybe? To say thank you?”
“Oh,” she said, tearing her gaze from the jagged skyline of his hair. “Um, you’re really grateful, aren’t you?”
He grinned, and she noted the creases that formed at his eyes, the dimple that sank into his right cheek. “I really need this job.”
“Where is it?” she asked, watching him search for his phone in the pockets of his suit and accepting it as he pushed it into her hands.
“Harlow & Andrews?” he asked, like he wasn’t sure she’d be familiar with it. The train lurched, and he stumbled into her, flushing again. He apologized before continuing, “It’s a marketing firm. I’m applying to be one of their product managers.”
She finished putting her number into his phone and handed it back to him. “Sounds respectable,” she said, but as the train announced its entrance to Central Station, he spoke over her: “So I’ll text you, yeah … Ilana?”
“Yeah, okay,” she said, and as he’d darted off the train, she’d yelled after him, “But only if you nail that interview!”
On the couch, Riley nods. “And the rest is history, right?”
“Pretty much,” she says, letting out a breath. She sets down the cards, stacking them precariously on the edge of the couch. It feels like the past has piled up between them, and she realizes abruptly that, even if he asked, telling an ex-boyfriend the story of how you met your current boyfriend probably breaks some sort of code. She pokes her fingers through the afghan’s stitches. What kind of girl naively agrees to drinks with a guy she’s known for five minutes and then relays the story proudly to her first love?
“He seems like a cool guy,” Riley says, through the dust of the settling anecdote. She exhales. “I mean, he must be pretty cool, if he’s your boyfriend.”
“Faulty logic,” she says, surprising herself. “You’re operating under the assumption that all my boyfriends are cool.”
She expects it to sound self-deprecating, even mean; instead, it lilts flirtatiously, and Riley cocks an eyebrow.
“You misspoke,” he says. “You spend all your days editing, don’t you? And you still left out two whole words right there.”
She pauses, caught between these two mysteries – how does he know that she’s an editor? – but he solves one for her: “You forgot as you. ‘You’re operating under the assumption that all my boyfriends are as cool as you.’”
That’s three words, she thinks, as cool as you, but that’s her editor talking, parsing the language before evaluating the tone. His is also undeniably flirtatious – though, she considers, she didn’t mean to sound that way either. But if he meant to, when she just told him about her boyfriend …
She knows she’s picked up the habit of flirting with guys who pay attention to her; it feels like breaching the surface to capture a lungful of oxygen before Steve pulls her down again. It doesn’t mean anything; coming up for air isn’t cheating on the water. But Riley’s flirting is clumsy, she knows. He only drags it out when he’s sure he can pull it off. Maybe it’s just because she’s familiar, safe. Maybe it’s because she has a boyfriend.
“Mel said you’re working for a publisher here,” he says, when she doesn’t fire back immediately. “I’m not, you know, stalking you or anything.”
“Sure you’re not,” she says, crossing her legs under the afghan. She tries to put as much distance as possible between them, although she’s not quite sure whom she’s trying to discourage, Riley or herself. “That explains why I haven’t seen you in ten years. You’ve been skulking along right behind me, recording every detail of my life.” She affects a dramatic Scarlett O’Hara accent, waving her hands in a halfheartedly despairing flourish. “If only I’d turned around!”
Riley chuckles, and something beams warmly inside her chest. “If only I’d fucked it up,” he says softly, and the beam falters. “Tripped or sneezed or something so you’d know I was there.”
Ilana doesn’t think about Riley on a day-to-day basis anymore. Sometimes he flickers through her head, if something reminds her of him – Didn’t Riley have a shirt like that? Oh, It’s Always Sunny, that’s the one Riley kept badgering me to watch – or as a passing thought: I wonder how Riley’s art is going. I wonder if Riley still watches It’s Always Sunny. The only other instances come between two and five a.m., when Steve is sawing logs in his dreams and she can’t get comfortable in bed, when they’ve spent the evening bickering about something inane – why can’t he figure out how to hang up his wet towels; can she stop correcting his grammar, for Chrissake; is it really that hard for him to rinse the sink when he’s finished shaving; does she really need sixty-eight hair products in the shower, since all they do is fall over. This is when she lies on her back, or on her hip, on her belly (rinse and repeat), listening to Steve snore and sigh, and she thinks, Maybe I should have tried harder for Riley Nelson.
“Congratulations,” she says, after a long pause. “You finally tripped.”
In the moment of silence that follows, Riley looks at his hands, twisting his fingers through each other, the way he used to before a test he was nervous about. Ilana snags a chipping mint-green nail in the weave of the afghan. She counts the seconds until he raises his right hand and rubs the back of his neck: four. Then, she predicts, he’ll tug at his nose: two seconds. And then, when he lowers his hand, he’ll tap his fingers three times against his thigh.
He clears his throat, and she looks up from examining the ragged edge of her nail. “You should read the note,” he says. “With the tulips.”
“There’s a note?” she asks, her chest filling with cold gray dread.
“Yeah,” he says, handing her the flashlight. She gathers the cards and leaves them on the table, flips the flashlight on. The tulips appear, lipstick-red, in her foreground, arranged in the cut-glass vase Melissa found at the Goodwill in Central Square. The envelope next to it is square, periwinkle blue, and familiar: Steve must have taken it out of the drawer where she and Melissa keep stationery and pens. Her name is printed in Steve’s block capitals, and she slips a finger under the edge of the flap.
The paper inside is folded awkwardly to fit inside the envelope, and she opens it slowly, apprehension gathering in her throat. She skims the square letters, Rhonda pounding in her ears. She’s not sure she can bear to read all of his niceties.
Five days is a long time to be without you … I know I always tease you with those stupid scenarios … realize how much of my life you’ve impacted … all I want is to … will you …
She puts the letter down. She’s spent so long worrying about macaroni crafts, skywriters, hollowed-out phone books – it seems inevitable, predictable, that something as mundane as a vase of tulips would be the culprit.
She fights the urge to throw out an arm and send the offending flowers screaming to the hardwood floor, and the only thing that stops her, if she’s being honest, is that Melissa paid a full eight bucks for the vase and says they should use it more often. She scrunches her hands into fists, stuffs one into her mouth and bites down on her knuckles, daring herself not to scream.
She’s going to break Steve’s heart, the way all his friends and his mom warned her not to. She’d laughed. She’d laughed when they said Redheads are always trouble. She’d laughed when they said She sure calls the shots, doesn’t she? She imagines the way his face will crumple when he wakes up expecting a yes with breakfast and she serves him a no instead, and the idea leaves her feeling like she might as well cut out his heart and sauté it instead, for the amount of pain she’ll cause him.
She stuffs the letter back into the envelope and closes her eyes, gripping the edge of the countertop. This is it, she thinks. This is where she has to end it.
When she opens her eyes, Riley is standing beside her, arms pulled tight over the swell of his stomach. “You okay?” he asks, and she is close to falling into him. She pictures Steve tomorrow at breakfast, like an overgrown child in his Patriots T-shirt and checkered boxers, pale eyes hurt and mouth loose, swinging up from a gape to flatten into a line like a crowbar. Her instinct will be to hold him, she knows; one of Steve’s greatest talents is looking pitiful enough to draw sympathy out of her coldest moods. She resolves to conduct this rejection from the other side of the room, where proximity will keep her from going back on her word.
“He’s sensitive,” Steve’s mother had said in an undertone when she’d met Ilana at Easter last year. “Be gentle with him. He might seem like he can take care of himself, but he needs someone to help him up when he falls. Always been that way.”
“Don’t worry, Marie,” Ilana had said, squeezing out the first name with only a hint of hesitation. ‘Mrs. Cavendish’ makes me feel like a character in a Revolutionary War novel, his mother had said earlier. “I’ll help him up.”
She’d spent the rest of the afternoon wondering what would happen if she were the one who made Steve fall in the first place.
She crosses her own arms now, tucking her chin against her chest. “I can’t do this,” she says quietly, and Riley moves closer.
"He was really excited,” he says, his tone carefully bland. “He told me about the proposal jokes, and how you’d be expecting something really elaborate and dramatic.”
Guilt crashes over her, pulling her beneath its undertow, and she digs her nails into her palms.
“He thought it would surprise you,” says Riley, “since it was so simple. He didn’t think you’d be expecting it.” She bites down on her lower lip until blood washes over her tongue.
“He said the red ones were your favorite,” says Riley. She sucks in a breath through her teeth, but the air is hard to grasp; it turns to water in her lungs.
“He said he can’t wait to call his mom and tell her,” says Riley, and Ilana, submerged, blurts, “Stop!”
He takes a step back from her, and she hugs herself tighter. “Let’s go back to the couch,” she says, loosing a hand to wave accusingly at the flowers. “I don’t want to look at these.”
They sit at opposite ends of the couch. Ilana buries herself in the afghan and picks up her cards, and Riley returns the pillow to his lap. He rubs the back of his neck, and Ilana watches him as she tries to bring herself down, shuffling the cards absently. There’s only one way out of this, she knows that, but what a way. All of a sudden, the idea of anything blooming between her and Riley seems laughable. She’s too tangled up in Steve to even see as far as daybreak.
She wonders what the next step is. How do you dump someone for wanting to marry you? She cuts the deck, letting the piles of cards in each hand cascade into her cupped palms, then squares them against her knee and starts again. Rhonda screams against the windows, and Ilana barely resists screaming back. Instead, she mutters, “Fuck off, Rhonda,” and Riley chuckles quietly next to her.
“Hey,” he says, bumping her other knee with a loose fist. “Radoslava.”
The contact deflates her; she shuffles the cards once more and lays them in the gulley the afghan has strung across her lap. “Ragnar,” she says softly, and he leans over again to pat her hand awkwardly. She smiles a little; she’d expected his touch to feel tempting. Instead, it’s chaste, relieving.
“It happens,” he says. “People don’t match up. It’s okay to acknowledge that. And sometimes, yeah, you realize it too late, and you’re already living together and forming your lives around each other, and it’s hard to understand that it has to end. But I think if you’re going to get out, now’s the time to do that.”
“I know,” she says, hearing the drag on the words, and she huffs out a quiet, acidic laugh.
“We don’t even live together,” she says when Riley cocks his head. “Steve has an apartment in Porter Square. He just crashes here all the time. He says it’s homier than his place. It annoys the fuck out of Melissa.”
She’d asked Steve, about eight months ago, why they never hung out at his apartment, and he’d shrugged, smiled. “Brooks always has his shit everywhere, or he has people over, and besides, I like being here with you. I like watching you in your space. I like borrowing your Goodwill grandpa sweaters when I’m cold. I like when you make me wait because you promised Melissa you’d unload the dishwasher before she got home. I like that you know where everything is, and you have to tell me where to find the mugs and the takeout menus. It makes me feel like I’m learning how your life works, and I like that.”
She’d filed each detail away, pulling them out when she was having a bad day: Steve loved her so much that just watching her unload the dishwasher made him happy. She wonders when that feeling got lost among his habit of incessantly tapping his fingers, saying nother instead of other, the oceans of crumbs dropped on the countertops and the lakes of cold water left on the bathroom floor.
She closes her eyes as she imagines, again, turning him down in the morning.
Riley dozes off after a while, exhaling in low, guttural breaths. She sits still for a bit longer, steeling herself, examining the situation from every angle, then wraps the blanket around her shoulders and lays her cards out on the coffee table.
She wins eleven games; she loses count of how many she loses. In the gaps between, she tries to prep herself for the morning, tells herself that she has to do what’s best for her. She tells herself that it’s not her fault it’s not working; it doesn’t make her awful or selfish or irredeemable. Sometimes the layout of the deck is just inherently flawed, cards and player wed to an inevitable loss. She flips another card and slides it to its sister.
When she hears her bedroom door creak open at six-thirty, Rhonda has subsided, pale sunlight filtering through the windows. She hears Steve yawn, hears him shuffling down the hallway, and she turns over one last card, waiting.
© 2014 Hannah Lamarre
