Finally, Rosie broke the silence. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Laura said honestly.
“It’s going to be okay,” Rosie said again, less convincingly this time, and the two women fell into an uncomfortable silence.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE SIMON
The drinking started when Simon first suspected Joyce was having an affair. They’d been married for a while at that point, with him moving right along the path of promotion at the hospital and Joyce working at the accounting firm. They’d been younger than they were now, of course, but not quite young. Both of them felt the pressure of starting a family.
Medical school pulled some of the last reserves Simon had out of him, and then residency left him drained and exhausted every night to the point where he’d stumble into bed some days just as Joyce was getting up to go to work. There were weeks where they barely saw each other, passing ships in their rigid schedules, and the thought of ripping each other’s clothes off or even just touching each other in a way that required attention and focus was beyond him. Making a baby seemed such a long-off goal when all he wanted to do was sleep and sleep and sleep.
It took Simon crumpling in on himself in one of the hospital breakrooms filled with cots, crying and mumbling that life wasn’t worth the pain, for someone to realize that what he was going through was more than just the effects of the grinding fatigue of medical training. It was a colleague of his, Renée Baxter, who was just at the cusp of her brilliant career as a neurosurgeon, who found Simon, promptly called a friend who was a clinical psychologist, and got him booked in for a therapeutic assessment that afternoon.
Simon was prescribed three weeks’ rest, plus medication to manage his serotonin levels in his brain, and a rigorous self-care program of walks outside, nutritious meals, and daily journal entries. He was clinically depressed, it seemed, but from what all of his expert colleagues were telling him, he didn’t need to be if he just stuck with the program.
Joyce took the first week off work, allowing herself to nurture him in a way that she’d never been like before. After three or four days of sleeping with gaps of breakfast in bed or a favorite television show watched with Joyce stroking his hair, he felt more human. The brittleness that had settled into his bones seemed to take on greater flexibility. He found himself wanting to touch Joyce again, to cup her breast in his hands and make her moan his name. Not that he did any of that just then, but he could feel the spark returning to his life.
One night after Joyce decided it was safe to return to work with her accounting firm, he had enough energy to cook a simple dinner of roast chicken, light candles on the table, and pour two glasses of wine. He put on slacks rather than his drawstring pajama pants, combed his hair, and shaved with precision. He was getting better, and neither of them were getting any younger.
When she came home, a takeaway from the Chinese restaurant down the block slung over her arm and an air of distraction pervading her, Simon realized his mistake in keeping his effort a surprise. They sat down to dinner, nonetheless, and Joyce told him about her client who was making terrible decisions because he’d just left his wife and fell in love with someone younger.
“He can’t think clearly,” she said. “The poor guy has himself convinced he’s in love and that she deserves half his money. Meanwhile, his wife, who he’s been married to for fifteen years and they have three kids, is left to fend for herself because he says he doesn’t love her anymore. The whole thing is ridiculous.”
Joyce took a sip of wine and ate a bit of the chicken Simon made. He’d cooked it perfectly and was proud of how juicy the meat was.
It was then Simon asked the question he wished he could take back. Not that it would have changed anything in the course of his life. Not really. But it would have delayed him knowing what was happening, and in that fact perhaps things could have been different.
“What strikes you as ridiculous?” Simon asked, mainly just wanting to hear his wife’s voice as he ate the meal he’d prepared for them and his chest relaxed from the grip that had made it hard for him to breathe these last several months. His brain felt like it was humming again, taking in all the information from his surroundings. Simon was alive, and in love, and even the drops of rain clinging to the window next to their dining-room table were beautiful.
“Oh, well, isn’t it obvious?” Joyce took another bite of her meal. Simon reached over, hoping to take her hand as she spoke, but she shifted it ever so slightly away, and then tucked it into her lap to grab her napkin and wipe at her mouth.
She explained, “He should have stayed with his wife. Keep their family together, let her have some of the funds without all the mess, and enjoy his love affair on the side. There’s no reason he should have to rip apart his family for this new woman. I mean,” she waved her hand in the air to emphasize the point, “he’s already shown his love doesn’t last, so why assume the next one will be any different?”
A chill went up Simon’s spine. He’d never heard Joyce talk that way.
“But maybe this new woman is the love of his life?” Simon smiled. Joyce remained focused on the flame of one of the candles while Simon tried to meet her gaze. Joyce’s mouth curled at the edges, but her eyes were glassy. She wasn’t reacting to him.
“If you believe in that sort of thing,” she said.
They didn’t make love that night, or the next night. When Simon finally brought up hope that they’d start their family, now that he was feeling more like himself, Joyce brushed off the idea with a deftly aimed barb.
“Soon you’ll be back to work, dear. Let’s see how you do once you have those pressures put back on you.”
It stifled Simon’s hopes, and his loneliness grew.
Two weeks later, Simon was back to work, with medication and a journal and daily walks outside on his breaks. It wasn’t until three months later, when he happened to be organizing the paper recycling and found, shoved in a large, crumpled envelope, a receipt from a clinic an hour away for a D&C. Joyce had gone alone. She hadn’t told him she was pregnant, or that she was getting an abortion.
Of course it wasn’t his. They hadn’t been intimate in months.
But Simon stayed, because he equally loved and feared his wife.
He started to drink in his office.
Years passed.
One small snifter of whiskey that grew into two and then more until he felt that welcoming numb wrap around his brain. Simon found he was happiest then, in the quiet moments after his last patient, before he headed home to play at being happy in his big house with his beautiful wife.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR JOYCE
Joyce offered to buy Susan—which she found out was the woman’s name—a coffee once their nails were dry, and they set off for a café Joyce knew in the middle of town. Café Leo featured red-and-white awnings, flower boxes that held bright-red geraniums in the summer, and excellent lattes.
Joyce chose a table in the back corner and waited for Susan to arrive. A small glass vase with a red rose sat in the center of the table, and the daily menus were printed in sweeping script on creamy cardstock.
She glanced at her watch, considering that perhaps she was being stood up, but then the bell on the door jingled and Susan stepped in. She shook the cold from her beautiful black coat, ran a hand through her hair, and searched the restaurant until her eyes fell on Joyce. The dark nail polish added an edge to her very proper look, Joyce noted. While Susan walked over to the table, Joyce looked down at her own nails, and the bright red she chose suddenly seemed tacky.
She felt old.
“How are you feeling?” Joyce asked Susan as she sat down. She reached out a hand and patted Susan’s forearm, giving it a friendly squeeze. “It sounds like you’re dealing with a lot right now.”
Susan took a sip from the glass of water sitting on the table. “This place is nice,” she said, looking around. It wasn’t lost on Joyce that she was avoiding her question.
“They just renovated.” Joyce made a noncommittal noise and waited, because she was certain Susan would not have come here if she didn’t want to talk about her brother.
Silence settled over the table, and a waitress stopped by to get their orders. Cobb salad and sparkling water for Susan, a green salad and skinny latte for Joyce. Throw in some pearls and a binder with fundraising raffle items and she could be at a regular committee meeting.
Joyce took a sip of her latte once it arrived, working to hide the tremor in her hand. Susan scrolled through her phone.
The two women were still sitting in an awkward non-conversation when their salads were delivered by their waitress. Joyce wondered if she’d made a big mistake inviting Susan out. Neither of them had touched their salads, and the café was starting to fill with the murmur of conversations around them as more couples and friend groups arrived to get a treat in the middle of the day.
Joyce decided to give it one more chance before asking for the check and calling it a wash.
“I invited you here in case you wanted to talk about your brother.” She said it quietly, with respect.
“That’s very kind of you. I just couldn’t seem to hold it together at the nail salon. I was feeling awful and thought I’d go and do something for myself that usually calmed me down, but clearly—” She gave Joyce a rueful grin. “Clearly that didn’t work.”
“Losing someone close to you is its own special kind of pain, I think. Until I lost my parents, I didn’t know what real sorrow was.” Joyce’s parents died just a few months apart. For all her toughness, her mother didn’t seem to want to live in a world where she couldn’t actively hate her ex-husband. Joyce missed them both terribly, in her own way.
A shadow passed over Susan’s face. “My brother and I weren’t close. I hadn’t spoken to him in years.”
“I can see how that would make this all the more difficult.”
“I feel like a fake.” Susan folded her hands delicately in her lap and straightened her back. “I don’t know how to handle any of this.”
“Death is always a challenge to cope with. We don’t give anyone the tools to deal with it properly, even though it touches everyone’s life.” Joyce had certainly heard enough stories from Simon to know that, even when a loved one was heading into a risky surgery, nobody was ever truly expecting their mother or cousin or child to die. Until it happened to you, death was something that affected other people. Of course, Joyce was at the point in her life where she knew death well.
Susan snapped her head up and looked Joyce straight in the eye. “What about murder? What kind of tools are there to deal with your baby brother being murdered?”
Joyce couldn’t hold Susan’s gaze and blinked several times before reaching for her latte. “I don’t know,” she finally answered.
