Cheating on Myself (29 page)

“You’re a good girl, Stella,” she announced at random one afternoon while she and I made a homemade tater-tot-topped casserole for the family. It was a little condescending, but there was no malice or sneer in her words. “You know you’re part of my family, no matter what.” She’d focused her intense gaze on me, and I could see the dabs of stray mascara that dotted her upper eyelid. She’d really let herself slip during this ordeal.

“I know. Thank you for that,” I answered, and wondered what she thought was going on with me and Erik. “I love you guys.”

“Some of us more than others,” she muttered.

“No, I love you all the same,” I said, absentmindedly chopping already-chopped carrots into miniscule bits.

“That’s not dicing,” she snipped and pulled the cutting board away from me. “That’s mincing. Those are irregular pieces. I needed perfect squares.”

“Sorry,” I grumbled. Her scolding momentarily distracted me enough that I forgot what we’d been talking about, but late that night as I lay in bed alone, I thought about what she’d said.
Some of us more than others.
Was she right? I felt infinitely more comfortable with Cat than I ever would with Erik, and even Laurel had begun to grow on me. Did I love them just a little bit more than I could ever love Erik?

* * *

That weekend, I sat in Pippa’s room with Erik, reading stories aloud from a Brothers Grimm collection, when a familiar voice in the hallway startled me out of the world of
Hansel & Gretel
. The velvety richness of Joe’s tenor carried through the plastic curtain that hung beside Pippa’s hospital bed, and I fought against the nerves that rumbled in my stomach at the thought of seeing him again. I couldn’t believe he’d come, even after everything I’d said to him.

I heard the door swing open, and the sounds from the hall came barreling in, along with the sound of Joe’s leather boots tapping against the linoleum floor tiles. He peeked around the curtain, and his smile was unrestrained and warm, as though our last conversation had never happened.

“Hey,” he said, smiling at me with the easy, warm smile I recognized from his stage persona. “I’m Joe,” he said to Erik, reaching across me to shake hands.

I wasn’t sure how much Erik knew about Joe, or whether he realized this was the guy I’d been dating. I decided it wasn’t the best time to tell him, and chose instead to say, “Erik, this is Joe, from the Dog Hounds—Pippa’s favorite band.”

“Oh, hey, man,” Erik said, pulling out his cool-guy voice. “Thanks for coming—did Cat call you?”

Joe glanced at me, then said, “Yeah. I wanted to play for Pippa, and see if I could help. Sometimes music therapy can do something. It’s worth a shot.”

“Cool, man,” Erik said, and I rolled my eyes. “Give it a crack.” He nodded in that slow, lower-lip-out sort of way he did every time we listened to songs he was supposed to like. “Rock on.”

I found it impossible to be squeezed between Joe and Erik, when Joe was so naturally, perfectly cool and relaxed and Erik… well, I couldn’t help but wonder if Erik had a little metal ball tucked up between his ass cheeks, and someone had told him he’d go bald if it fell out.

I felt bad for Pippa, who had to listen to him posing and posturing.
I
had put myself in this position, but she was trapped in a coma listening to her uncle pretend to be Mr. Cool Guy while her musical hero stood three feet from the foot of her bed, charming us all with his beautiful curls and sensual voice.

Joe had brought a guitar—more versatile than the banjo when he was playing solo, he’d told me—and settled in at the foot of Pippa’s bed. His hand patted her ankle, covered under a sheet, and then he began to play. It was soft and gentle, a song about kangaroos and koala bears and dancing in the rain. His voice had life and humor, and I just hoped somewhere in there, under the IVs and medicine, Pippa could hear the song he was playing only for her. Joe didn’t seem deterred by his lack of audience, but played and sang for almost an hour, while I sat still and listened, wondering why I’d never asked him to sing for me.

After Joe had played a few songs, Erik left to get some lunch, but I stayed and watched. Joe’s eyes locked on mine while he sang about koi and carp and wishes that sprinkled down like fish food in a tank. I tried to think of anything other than the way a curl fell across his eye, and how he probably smelled like doughnuts or cinnamon or the winter wind from his run that morning. But instead of distracting myself, I found I was drawn in, pulled into the swirling of his voice and the way it comforted me and wrapped around me, even when he was singing about pickles and focusing his everything on Pippa.

Cat and Travis came into the room after he’d been playing for a while, Travis in his hospital gown with a walker, his body still wrapped and broken but finally functioning. We all sat together at the foot of the bed, and I could feel Cat watching me while I restrained myself from staring at Joe. I kept my eyes down, and uttered a simple “thanks for coming” when he was done, hoping no one noticed how much it hurt for me to see him here, to watch him with Pippa, and to recognize just how much his presence relaxed me.

He left, and Cat fixed her gaze on me. “WTF are you doing, Stella?”

“Is it okay that he came?” I asked casually. “I didn’t think it would upset her, and he offered, and it just seemed like she would love it.” I glanced up, and saw that Travis was leaning on Cat and she held him up, all five feet of her supporting the weight of his body somehow. “If it comes up, can you tell Erik you invited Joe to come?”

She shook her head. But when she saw the pleading look on my face, she agreed. “Sure, hon. I’ll do that if it comes up.” She paused. “Stell? You know what happened to us doesn’t change the fact that you chose to leave Erik the first time.” When I didn’t respond, she sighed. “Thank you, Stella, for having Joe sing for her. Pippa is lucky to have you in her life.”

* * *

Perhaps it was something about the kangaroos and koalas, or maybe it was sheer coincidence, but the doctors told us later that afternoon they felt confident Pippa was ready to come out of her coma. They’d recognized positive signs, and felt there was a level of consistency in her brain functioning that made it safe for them to release her from her medical hold.

We all gathered at her bedside the next morning as they began the process to pull her out. The doctors had told us it would take days, if not weeks, for her to recover fully from the heavy dose of medication she’d been relying on, and they warned us that she probably wouldn’t talk for a while and would have trouble remembering things we told her later. But it didn’t matter, since she was finally going to wake up. She was finally coming back to us, and from the tests the doctors had run, it looked like she’d recover fully.

I stepped back when I saw her lids flutter, watched from the shadows outside the circle of family that pressed in around her. I was fairly certain waking up with a small army of people hovering over you would be shocking and scary, and I didn’t need to be
right there
. I knew I didn’t need to be physically present to be a part of this. I didn’t need to hover in order for her to know I was there for her.

Cat cried when Pippa’s eyes finally opened and she stared up at her. Travis held Heidi tight as Pippa focused on the people who loved her. Pippa’s eyes opened to her future—and strangely, when I imagined what that future would be and where her next steps would take her, I knew I would be a part of it.

At that moment I was sure, without a doubt, that I’d always be in her life. Even if Erik wasn’t beside me, pulling me into the folds of the family, the bonds I’d formed with Pippa and Heidi and Cat—even Laurel—would carry on. No matter what happened between Erik and I, no one could take away the connection I’d built with the other people I’d come to love as a family of my own. They were a sure thing.

True friendships and the kind of bond I’d formed with Pippa and Heidi couldn’t fall apart if you held tight, not if you clung to them and cherished them and
wanted
them to carry on. A bond like the one I had with the girls only broke when you gave up on it, or
let
the person drift away into a thing of the past—when you said goodbye because it was time. I would never be ready to let go of those dear girls, and I knew I only had to if that’s what I chose to do.

I could hold on to them, and still find a way to hold fast to me.

Erik reached for me, pulling me forward into the circle of family surrounding Pippa, and I began to cry. I cried for her, and I cried for Cat, and I cried for me.

I cried because I knew by continuing to fit into this circle as Erik’s partner, holding fast to his crisp shirttails and clinging to him simply because I needed to feel like I belonged and because I needed someone to need me, I really had given up on me. Completely. At that moment, watching Pippa creep back from the scary shadows of a temporary world, I could see how my life would slowly creep back to the way it was, if I let it. And that’s the thing that scared me.

I’d been foolish to think things could be different between Erik and me, now that we’d had this experience together. To think that the accident had happened because somehow, the universe wanted us to slip and slide back into the familiar coexistence that had left me empty and unhappy in the first place.

I felt sick, realizing a future with Erik would never give me the same rush I’d felt in his office that day, or in Cat’s upstairs shower—it would just be more of the same. More coping and existing, simply because that’s the way our life was. Because that’s the life we’d found together. Because it was the best life I could wish for myself when I was with him.

The life I had with Erik was the very one I’d designed and plotted and planned for as a fifteen-year-old girl, imagining it in my mind before working toward some specific and intangible endpoint. But then, like a sand castle left forgotten on the beach at the end of a summer’s day, I’d stepped away and let someone else shape it and mess with it and eventually create something entirely different from my original design. Hell, that someone—maybe it was my own insecurity, or Erik, or a wicked combination of the two of us together—had stomped on my castle and left it in pieces. But I guess a piece of me could still see the outlines of my creation sitting there in the sand—and the ghost of what I’d once wished my life could be kept making me want to try to build it up into something again. At some point, I’d let myself believe it was too late to make something different, to build a new life.

I was cheating myself out of a fair chance at happiness.

Erik’s hand reached for mine, and habit and hope and a little bit of fear propelled me to let him take it, but there was a distance in our touch unlike anything I’d ever felt before. It was as though a great crevice had split the floor between us, miles deep, that would never allow either of us to cross the divide from him to me and back again.

We stepped out of the room after a few minutes, giving the immediate family some time to reconnect.

“I’m so glad you were here for us all this time, Stella.” He paused. “It meant more than you’ll ever know. To me, especially. I—” He cleared his throat, picking at his top button, pushing it open, closed, open, closed. “I know we have a lot to figure out, and now that things are going to go back to normal, I hope you’ll consider coming home?”

Home. To his house. To the way things were.

“Stella?” he asked, pressing on before I had a chance to say anything. “I was thinking, if you really want to get married…” He laughed. “I know you do want to get married, but—well, if you still want to get married, we can do that, you know.”

“Get married?” I asked, stunned. “Are you proposing, Erik?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. Of course, I’ll ask you properly, too, but I just wanted to let you know I’m willing to do that for you. I don’t want that to be the only thing keeping us apart. It’s stupid, and there’s no reason for us to break up over a formality.”

“Erik, there was so much more that was wrong with us than just a ‘formality.’ It wasn’t just the marriage thing.”

“I know there were other little things, and I get that you needed some time to find yourself or whatever, but a wedding was the biggie, right?” He smiled. “Because we can fix that.”

“I’m sorry, Erik, but we’re beyond repair.” I knew then that it was true.

“But you’ve seemed so happy the last few weeks. We’ve been so good! I thought you’d figured it out, and that you were getting back to normal.”

That’s normal for him?
I wondered.
No feeling or connection, just sort of generally
being
in the same place?
“You’re right. I
have
figured it out,” I said.

As I strode out of the hospital, walking away from Erik for the last time, I was absolutely certain if I wanted to have any hope of living a life less lonely, I needed to leave a sure thing. I may have been walking out alone, but I knew I’d never let myself feel so lonely and forgotten again.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“I’m starting to realize it’s actually sort of easy to leave someone, but it’s not quite as easy to find yourself again.” I looked up from the ever-growing pile of apple slices on the counter in front of me. “How many do you think we need? Is this enough?”

“Are you kidding me right now?” Lily shook her head and ignored my apples. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” She snagged an apple slice and popped it in her mouth.

“I’m reading self-help,” I said with a shrug. “It’s soothing. They write poignantly in quotes—it’s actually really clever.”

Lily groaned. “It’s stupid. Stop reading self-help. You don’t need soothing. You need to get laid and just move on already. We went over this the first time you left Erik. Do we really need to have the same conversation again?”

“I do need soothing. I’m busy liberating myself, and someone has to tell me how to do that.” I pushed the pile of apples to the middle of Lily’s kitchen island and set my knife aside. I was supposedly teaching her how to bake apple crisp, but so far the tutorial had involved me chopping up all the apples and mixing the ingredients for the topping, while Lily took tiny bites and helped with nothing. “I know I made the right choice—”