Love and Other Words

  Phoebe giggles. “He snuck away from me.”

  The sound of the shower turning on drifts into the kitchen, and I feel like I’ve just been given a game-show challenge with a buzzer counting down: Get out of the house in the next two minutes!

  I pour Phoebe’s cereal, jog into the bedroom, pull on a clean set of scrubs, pour my coffee, yank my shoes on, and plant one more kiss on Phoebe’s head before I’m out the door.

  It’s crazy – at least it makes me sound crazy – but if Sean asked me about my day yesterday, I know without a doubt it would all come tumbling out.

  I saw Elliot Petropoulos yesterday for the first time in almost exactly eleven years and I realized that I’m still in love with him and probably always will be.

  Still want to marry me?

  Unfortunately, a couple of days of distance doesn’t appear to be in the cards: Elliot is waiting outside the hospital when I walk up the hill from the bus stop.

  It isn’t accurate to say that my heart stops, because really I feel its existence intensely, a phantom limb. My heart pinches in, and then roars to life, brutally punching me from the inside out. I slow my steps and try to figure out what to say. Irritation flares in me. He can’t be faulted for showing up at Saul’s when I happened to be there yesterday, but today is all him.

  “Elliot.”

  He turns when I call his name, and his posture deflates a little in relief. “I was hoping you’d show up early today.”

  Early?

  I look at him as I approach, eyes narrowed. Stopping a few feet from where he stands, hands deep in the pockets of his black jeans, I ask, “How did you know where and what time I was supposed to work?”

  Guilt drains the color from his cheeks. “George’s wife works in reception there.” He lifts his chin, indicating the woman who is sitting just inside the sliding doors, and whom I’ve seen every morning for the past few months.

  “Her name is Liz,” I confirm flatly, remembering the three letters etched into her blue plastic name tag.

  “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Liz Petropoulos.”

  I laugh incredulously. Under no other circumstances can I imagine a hospital administrative employee giving out information about a physician’s work schedule. People turn pretty unreasonable when a loved one gets sick. Make that loved one a child and forget about it. Even in the short time I’ve been working here, I’ve seen parents go after doctors who failed to cure their kid.

  Elliot stares at me, unblinking. “Liz knows I’m not dangerous, Macy.”

  “She could be fired. I’m a physician in critical pediatrics. She can’t just give out my information, not even if it’s her own family.”

  “Okay, shit. I shouldn’t have done that,” he says, genuinely contrite. “Look. I work at ten. I…” Squinting past me down Mariposa, he says, “I was hoping we would have time to talk a little before then.” When I don’t say anything in reply, he bends to meet my gaze, pressing, “Do you have time?”

  I look up at him, and our eyes hook, tunneling me back to every other time we shared an intense, silent exchange. Even this many years later, I think we can read each other pretty fucking well.

  Breaking the connection, I glance down at my watch. It’s just after seven thirty. And although no one upstairs would complain if I showed up to work an hour and a half before I was scheduled, Elliot would know that if I said I had to get inside, I’d be lying.

  “Yeah,” I tell him. “I have about an hour.”

  He tilts his head, slowly leans to the right, and, as a smile curves his mouth, he takes one shuffle-step, then another, as if luring me with his cuteness.

  “Coffee?” His smile grows, and I notice his teeth, how even they are. A flash of Elliot at fourteen, wearing headgear, pulses through my thoughts. “Bakery? Greasy spoon?”

  I point to the next block and the tiny four-table café that has yet to be overrun with residents and family members anxiously waiting for news postsurgery.

  Inside it’s warm – bordering on too warm, the theme of my morning – and there are still two tables empty up front. Seating ourselves, we pick up the menus and peruse in tight silence.

  “What’s good?” he asks.

  I laugh. “I’ve never had breakfast here.”

  Elliot looks up at me, blinks leisurely, and something in my stomach melts into a liquid heat that spreads lower. What’s weird, I realize, is that Elliot and I ate out together only a handful of times, and never alone.

  “I usually scarf a muffin or bagel from the cafeteria.” I break eye contact, and decide on the yogurt and granola parfait before putting my menu down. “I bet everything is pretty tasty.”

  Covertly, I watch him read, his eyes scanning quickly across the words. Elliot and words. Peanut butter and chocolate. Coffee and biscotti. Love matches made in heaven.

  He reaches up, idly scratching his neck as he hums. “Eggs or pancakes? Eggs or pancakes?”

  As he leans forward on an elbow, his shoulder muscle bunches beneath his cotton T-shirt. He rubs a finger back and forth just below his bottom lip. His phone buzzes near his arm, but he ignores it.

  Have mercy. The only thought I have – bewildering and breathless – is that Elliot has become a man who knows how to use his body. I didn’t notice it yesterday, couldn’t have.

  As he grins in his decision,

  as he slides the menu gently back into the holder,

  as he reaches for his napkin and lays it carefully across his lap,

  as he looks up at me, pursing his lips slightly in happiness,

  I suddenly feel grateful for the eleven intervening years, because would I have noticed all these little things otherwise? Or would they have blended together, blurring, known as the constellation of tiny mannerisms that slowly becomes Just Elliot?

  I blink away when our waitress comes to the table and takes our order.

  When she leaves, he leans in again. “Is it possible to catch me up on a decade over breakfast?”

  Memories reel through my thoughts: Leaving for college in a fog. Living in the dorm with Sabrina and, later, in a small apartment off-campus that always seemed to be full of books and beer bottles and clouds of weed smoke. Moving with her to Baltimore for med school and the long nights I spent pseudo-praying that I would be matched at UCSF so I could live close to home again, even if home was empty. How does one condense a lifetime into the time it takes to share a cup of coffee?

  “Looking back, it doesn’t feel all that busy,” I say. “College. Med school.”

  “Well, and friends and lovers, joy and loss, I assume,” he says, hitting the nail directly on the head. His expression straightens with awareness.

  An awkward silence grows like a canyon between us. “I didn’t mean us,” he says, adding in a mumble, “necessarily.”

  With a dry laugh, I lean back in my seat. “I haven’t been marinating in bad feelings, Ell.”

  Wow, that’s a lie.

  When his phone buzzes again beside him, he pushes it away. “Then why not call?”

  “A lot happened.” I shift back a little in my seat as our drinks arrive.

  His eyebrows slant down in justifiable confusion. I’ve just told him my life was essentially rote and straightforward, but then too much happened to bother calling.

  My mind cycles through a calendar of years gone by, and another sour awareness rolls over me. Elliot turns twenty nine tomorrow. I’ve missed nearly all of his twenties.

  “Happy early birthday, by the way,” I say quietly.

  His eyes go soft, mouth curving at the edges. “Thanks, Mace.”

  October 5 has always been a tough day for me. What will it feel like this year, now that I’ve laid eyes on him? I cup my hands around my warm mug, changing the subject. “What about you? What have you been doing?”

  He shrugs and sips his cappuccino, wiping a casual finger across his upper lip when it comes away foamy. Obvious comfort in his own body causes renewed heat to ripple through mine. Never have I known someon
e so wholly himself as Elliot.

  “I graduated early from Cal,” he says, “and moved to Manhattan for a couple years.”

  This hits the stall button in my brain. Elliot personifies Northern California, with all its shaggy chaos. I can’t imagine him in New York.

  “Manhattan?” I repeat.

  He laughs. “I know. Total insanity. But it’s the kind of place I could only stomach in my twenties. After a few years there, I interned at a literary agency for a while, but didn’t love it. I came back here almost two years ago and started working for a nonprofit literacy group. I’m still there a couple days a week, but… I started writing a novel. It’s going really well.”

  “Writing a book.” I grin. “Who would have guessed?”

  He laughs harder this time, and the sound is warm, and growling. “Everyone?”

  I find myself biting both of my lips to rein in my smile, and his expression slowly straightens. “Can I ask you something?” he asks.

  “Sure.”

  “What made you decide to come here with me this morning?”

  I don’t really need to point out that he pushed his way into my schedule, because I know that’s not really what he means. What he said about Liz is true; we all know Elliot isn’t dangerous. I could have told him to go home and not contact me again, and he would have listened.

  So why didn’t I?

  “I have no idea. I don’t think I would have been able to say no to you twice.”

  He likes that answer. A small smile arcs his mouth and nostalgia floods my veins.

  “You went to med school at Hopkins,” he says with quiet wonder in his voice. “Undergrad at Tufts. I’m so proud of you, Mace.”

  My eyes go wide in understanding. “You rat. You Googled me?”

  “You didn’t Google me?” he shoots back. “Come on, that’s step one post-run-in.”

  “I got home from work at two in the morning. I fell face-first into the pillow. I don’t know if I’ve brushed my teeth since this weekend.”

  His grin is so genuinely happy, it works a creaky hinge open inside me. “Was it always your plan to move back here, or was it just where you matched?”

  “This was my first choice.”

  “You wanted to be close to Duncan.” He’s nodding as if this makes perfect sense and it stabs me. “When did he die?”

  “Was it always your plan to move back here?”

  I can see him working through my deflection, but he takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “It was always my plan to live wherever you were. That plan failed, but I figured my odds of seeing you again were pretty good back in Berkeley.”

  This throws me. As in I am a brick, and have been hurled at the glass window. “Oh.”

  “You knew that. You had to have known that I’d be here, waiting.”

  I swallow a sip of water quickly to reply. “I don’t think I knew that you were still hoping I’d —”

  “I loved you.”

  I nod quickly at this bombshell interruption, looking for the rescue of our waitress bringing food. But she isn’t there.

  “You loved me, too, you know,” he says quietly. “It was everything.”

  I feel as though I’ve been shoved, and push away from the table a little, but he leans in. “Sorry. This is too intense. I’m just terrified of not getting a chance to say it.”

  His phone hops across the table again, buzzing.

  “Do you need to get that?” I ask.

  Elliot rubs his face and then leans his chair back, eyes closed, face tilted to the ceiling. It’s only now that I realize how stubbly he is, how tired he looks.

  I lean back in. “Elliot, is everything okay?”

  He nods, straightening. “Yeah, I’m fine.” Eyeing me for a lingering moment, he seems to decide to tell me what’s on his mind: “I broke up with my girlfriend last night. She’s calling. She thinks she wants to talk, but really I think she just wants to yell at me. She won’t feel great afterward, so I’m sparing us both for now.”

  I swallow past an enormous lump in my throat. “You broke up with her last night?”

  He nods, toying with a straw wrapper and thanking the waitress quietly as she deposits our food in front of us. When she leaves, he admits in a low voice, “You’re the love of my life. I assumed I would get over you eventually, but seeing you yesterday?” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t go home to someone else and pretend to love her with everything I have.”

  Nausea rolls through me. I honestly don’t even know how to translate this heavy emotion in my chest. Is it that I relate so intensely to what he’s saying, but am far more of a coward? Or is it the opposite – that I have moved on, have found someone, and don’t want the intrusion of Elliot into my easy, simple life?

  “Macy,” he says, more urgently now, and opens his mouth to continue, but another trigger has been pulled, another game-show challenge. I dig for my wallet – racing the buzzer – but this time Elliot stops me, catching my arm in his gentle grip, his cheeks pink with anger. “You can’t do this. You can’t just continually run from this conversation. It’s been eleven years in the making.” Leaning in, he clenches his jaw as he adds, “I know I messed up, but was it that bad? So bad you just vanished?”

  No, it wasn’t. Not at first.

  “This,” I say, looking around us, “is a terrible idea. And not because of our past. Okay, yes, it’s partly that, but it’s also the intervening years.” I meet his eyes. “You broke up with your girlfriend last night after seeing me for two minutes. Elliot, I’m getting married.”

  He drops my arm, blinking a few times, and seeming – for the first time I’ve ever witnessed – to be lost for words.

  “I’m getting married… and there’s so much you don’t know,” I say. “And a lot of that isn’t your fault, but this,” I wave a finger back and forth in the narrow space separating us across the table, “between us? It sucks that it’s over, and it hurts me, too. But it’s done, Ell.”

  then

  friday, december 21

  fifteen years ago

  A

  s if Dad knew that I was delicate after the conversation about Christmas Sans Mom with Elliot, he was even quieter than usual at dinner Thursday night.

  “Do you want to go to Goat Rock tomorrow?” he asked when he finished his chicken.

  Goat Rock, the windy beach where the Russian River collides with the Pacific Ocean. It is notoriously cold, with a dangerous rip current rendering the beach unsafe for even wading into the water, and so much sand blustering in the air that it’s nearly impossible to grill hot dogs.

  I loved it.

  Sometimes, sea lions and elephant seals lazed at the mouth of the river. Dark, rich seaweed washed up on shore, heavy with salt and nearly unreal to me in its otherworldly, translucent oddness. Sand dunes dotted the shoreline, and in the center of the beach and out a narrow isthmus was the lonely giant rock jutting straight up more than a hundred feet as if it had been dropped there.

  “You could invite Elliot, if you wanted,” he added.

  I looked up at him and nodded.

  The entire drive there, Elliot was fidgety. He shifted in his seat, tugged at his seat belt, ran his hand through his hair, futzed with his headgear. After about ten minutes, I gave up on trying to focus on my book.

  “What’s with you?” I hissed across the back seat.

  He glanced at Dad in the driver’s seat, and then back at me. “Nothing.”

  I felt more than saw Dad looking in the rearview mirror at what was going on in the back seat.

  I stared at Elliot’s hands, reaching now to toy with the strap of his backpack. They looked different. Bigger. He was still so skinny, but also so at home in his gawkiness that I didn’t notice it anymore unless I really looked.

  Dad pulled into the parking lot and we stepped out, shocked at how the wind nearly knocked us over. We jerked our coats on, pulled our hats over our ears.

  “No farther down the beach than the rock,” Dad said
, pulling his own treat – a pack of Danish cigarettes – out of his pocket. He never smoked near me; he’d officially quit as soon as Mom found out she was pregnant. The wind pushed his fair hair across his face and he shook it away, squinting at me, saying without words, You okay with this?, and I nodded. He tucked a cigarette between his lips, adding, “And at least fifty feet back from the seals.”