Fic: Cicatrices (part two of four) (ER; Ray/Neela)
* * * * * *
It’s an absolutely gorgeous early summer evening in Chicago, warm and clear and not appreciably humid, and Neela decides to skip the post-conference cocktail party today to take a long run along the lake. The lakeshore is packed with people rollerblading, running, walking dogs, playing volleyball on the sand courts. Neela can’t resist stopping mid-run for a few minutes to watch a group of twenty-somethings play a game of organized dodgeball. Her iPhone is in the pocket of her shorts and, on impulse, she takes a short video of part of the game and texts it to Ray. On the run back, the sun is setting and Neela stops and picks up some takeout to eat in her hotel room while she reviews her notes and readies for tomorrow.
She is just out of the shower, still slightly damp and wrapped in the fluffy white hotel robe, when her cell phone rings. Assuming it’s Ray, she doesn’t even look at the caller ID.
“Hey Neela.”
“Tony.” Bollocks. “Hello.”
There is a long pause.
“Sam mentioned you were in town.”
“Yes. I mean, just until tomorrow.”
Another long pause. Neela feels no animosity, nothing really at all for Tony anymore, except perhaps a faint guilt-by-association, as if they had been conspirators in some half-forgotten, failed caper.
“Do you have time for coffee? With an old friend?” Tony is uncharacteristically tentative. Careful.
Neela sighs. “I don’t know, Tony . . .”
“What time do you start in the morning?”
“Nine, but. . .”
“Just ten minutes, Neela. Eight a.m., Starbucks on Michigan, just across from the Intercontinental.”
Neela hesitates and Tony immediately fills the silence. “Neela. A half-hour, maximum. C’mon . . . daylight, public, crowded Starbucks….how bad could it be?”
Now she feels unforgivably rude. None of this is Tony’s fault. Not one iota. And part of her does want to hear all the County gossip, see a familiar face, reconnect. Be a bloody grownup. She forces herself to laugh lightly. “I’m sorry - I don’t mean to sound like that at all. It’s been a long day, and it’s such a short trip. But, of course, I’d love to see you. Eight o’clock.”
The next morning, there’s a sharp chill in the air, as if summer hasn’t completely taken hold yet, and Neela is grateful for a hot coffee. She settles at a small table shielded from the burst of cold that enters every time someone opens the door. Only two months away and already she is getting soft.
She’s also early. Ridiculously early, actually, so she pulls out her laptop and stares at her presentation notes for a few minutes. And checks her email. One from her sister; it looks long, so she’ll read it later. One from Abby with links to seven articles about how dogs make excellent child substitutes. Neela knew she shouldn’t have told Abby about the dog thing. Nothing from Ray since yesterday afternoon. His Facebook status is blank.
She looks at the computer clock. Still only 7:45. Bollocks.
She thinks about calling Ray, but he’s probably on his way to work so she texts him instead. “Good morning. See you tonight.” She’s never quite become comfortable with the whole text message abbreviation thing. It just makes her feel foolish.
This was a mistake, agreeing to meet Tony this morning. Neela is already struggling to focus, trying to quiet her mind and prepare to hold the attention of two hundred high-achieving, overworked professionals for an hour. What was she thinking? Now this idiotic Tony thing is just one more thing, one more thing to hide or avoid or explain and, really, aren’t there more than enough of those for a lifetime already? She closes down her laptop and is just slipping it in her bag when she sees Tony walk through the door.
Well, so much for that.
He smiles when he sees her, and is every bit as ridiculously handsome and assured as ever. The world is made for people like Tony, Neela realizes, people uninfected by self-doubt, who move relentlessly forward and smooth out complications and ambiguities through sheer force of will.
She must have hoped she could absorb just a fraction of that by osmosis.
Because most of the time, it’s hard for Neela to understand how any of it - Tony, Ray, the whole mess - ever happened. Neela was always the serious, studious girl in the front row. No time for drama or nonsense. She was never in her life That Girl, the one all the men at university openly ogled, the girl in the movie who inspired the leading man to dramatic gestures. Then suddenly, for a couple of years at County it seemed like she was the only female fish in an increasingly incestuous little pond. Neela has no illusions about herself - she knows she is fit, and young, and attractive, but also too responsible and neurotic to be the kind of girl players like Tony and Ray normally fall for. She had always pictured herself in a sweet, quiet, long marriage with someone like Michael, a good man, a solid man, more Jimmy Stewart than James Dean. Instead she somehow found herself cast in the kind of sordid melodrama that culminated in bar brawls and . . . well, and worse. The femme fatale, rather too literally. She finds it baffling.
Tony gets his coffee and sits down across from her. A mild memory of the old, electric attraction surges from her chest to her fingertips; he smells the same as she remembers, like hair gel and a touch too much Eternity for Men cologne. After the preliminary niceties - she thinks things are going well in her new job, County is as manic as ever, it sure is hot in Baton Rouge - Tony takes a deep breath.
“So Sam and I are talking about getting married. Maybe next summer.”
Neela’s a little floored.
“Congratulations, Tony. That’s . . . wonderful. I’m so happy for you.”
“Thanks. Thanks. Things are good. Really good.”
“I’m glad.” Neela doesn’t know what else to say, or what exactly she is feeling. Relief? Regret? Certainly just the tiniest bit of envy, that Tony and Sam, with all their complications and baggage and auxiliary drama, can nonetheless choose each other so quickly and decisively.
Tony breaks through her thoughts. “Don’t imagine you and Barnett will be able to come up for the wedding, but we’ll send an invitation.”
Neela nods. “Yes. Definitely.”
“How is Barnett?” Tony might, possibly, look a little uncomfortable.
“He’s great. He’s doing really well.” Neela nods rapidly, swallowing hard.
“He looked good when he was here. If you didn’t know . . . you’d never know. Dude’s damn near indestructible.”
Neela smiles tightly. “And how is Sarah?”
“Great, actually. She and Sam really hit it off.”
Hit it off? The demon child who made Neela utterly miserable for months is now fast mates with Sam? Neela is smiling so hard she thinks she may have damaged a nerve. She can feel the corners of her mouth twitch from the effort. “That’s lovely. I’m so happy for all of you.” She looks down for a moment, placing a hand on her bag. “Yes. Well. I really should go.”
As she stands, Tony reaches out a hand to hers. “It was really good to see you, Neela.” Tony can project sincerity like no one Neela has ever met. Neela stares at his hand for a moment. She can feel herself retracting, falling behind a familiar veil of frosty formality. If only, she thinks, she could somehow truly disappear and escape this whole ghastly encounter.
He is looking at her oddly. “You ok?”
Neela is irritated by how difficult it is for her to meet his eye right now. She’s angry and she doesn’t quite know why or at whom. At everyone in the world who is better at these things than she is, perhaps, for whom life seems so much simpler, clearer, more a matter of instinct than of endlessly convoluted thought. After a moment, she nods. “I’m sorry, Tony. I’m preoccupied. Just terribly nervous about this . . . presentation thing.”
Tony grins. “You’ll nail it, Neela. You always do.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
She calls Ray at the morning break, but it goes directly to voicemail.
He’s working, clearly.
Her presentation goes surprisingly well, and the whole thing is over so quickly that it seems absurd that she spent weeks fretting and preparing. Several people approach her at the break, and it pricks at her a little that they express surprise when she tells them where she works. As if anyone with anything worth saying has to be at Duke or Johns Hopkins or similar. It’s like an endless conversation with Lucien, and by the end of it she knows she’s displayed her impatience more than she should.
The conference breaks for lunch and she quickly skims the afternoon schedule. Nothing terribly fascinating. The very thought of food is nauseating, so she wanders into the lobby and flips open her laptop. She checks her email and then pulls up her travel itinerary. Her flight doesn’t leave until after five, and she won’t be back to Baton Rouge until almost eleven tonight.
She calls Ray, but, again, the call goes directly to voicemail. Neela frowns. She hasn’t heard from Ray since yesterday afternoon and it’s making her jittery for some reason. She calls again. This time, it rings a few times, but, again, no Ray, just his voicemail.
Neela suddenly can’t bear the thought of spending one moment longer in this hotel, in Chicago, than is absolutely necessary. She opens her web browser again and searches flight times on Expedia. There’s a two p.m. flight through Houston, but when she calls the airline, they say they cannot guarantee her a seat on the flight. She can, they offer, go to the airport and try and fly standby.
She looks at the time on her iPhone. Almost noon. She can make it.
She picks up her bag at the front desk and is in a cab on the way to O’Hare before she really even thinks about it. She calls Ray again. Voicemail again.
Where the hell is he?
* * * * * *
Ray flirts. It’s what he does. It’s a tic, a reflex, unpremeditated. He’s just a friendly dude; he likes people. Except when he doesn’t, but that doesn’t happen very often. In fact, it’s pretty much limited to douchebags who beat women, or ones who have seen his girlfriend naked.
And Ray instinctively knows what works, has known from the time he was a skinny twelve-year-old paper boy trying to collect tips from hassled housewives. The grin, that perfectly-calibrated mixture of Boy Scout and little devil. The head tilt, of course, with the single raised eyebrow that says You Interest Me. I’m Listening. It’s his secret weapon, his own personal superpower.
He usually tries not to abuse it.
Work today was good. He had a nice moment with a difficult patient, a teenaged girl named Stacee who lost her right leg above the knee in a boating accident and who had decided, for the first month of her rehab, to punish everyone within a hundred-mile radius rather than focus on her rehab. Ray sort of remembers what that's like.
This morning, Stacee had been in a particularly sour mood, so listless and sardonic that eventually her mom fled the family rehab plan meeting in tears. After her mother left the room, Ray looked down at his notes, shaking his head slightly. Stacee glared at him. “She acts like everything will be all right if I just do what you say,” Stacee spat out, “but it won’t. It’s easy for her to say that it will. But it won’t. She doesn’t know what this is like. It’s not happening to her. Nothing is ever going to be the way it was. Ever.”
Ray raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement. “No. You’re right. Nothing is ever going to be the way it was. Your life will be different. But it can be as good, and in some ways better, than it ever was. That’s pretty much up to you.”
Stacee rolled her eyes, folding her arms even more tightly across her chest. “It’s like your job to say cheesy shit like that.”
Ray grinned. “Yeah, it is. I actually have it written down on little cards. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.” Stacee looked off to the side, visibly disconnecting from the conversation. Ray walked over and leaned against the table where Stacee sat. “Look,” he said, “this sucks. It absolutely sucks. This happened to you and it’s completely unfair and there’s nothing you or I or your mom can do to change it. My job is to make sure your leg is as minimal an issue for you as you want it to be. The sooner you can work with me, the more successful that will be.”
He watched her face to gauge her reaction. She had only rolled her eyes twice, which was maybe some progress, and some of the rigidity has left her shoulders. Suddenly she turned her head towards him and said in a low voice, “Everything you say makes sense, I know it does, but it doesn’t feel like everything is going to be ok.” She looked down at the floor.
After a beat, she added, “my mom says you have a prosthetic.”
Ray closed his eyes for a moment. He still wrestled with how to talk to his patients about his legs. How to strike the right balance between frankness and something that felt uncomfortably like being the rehab center’s token role-model super-crip. Eventually the issue usually came up, but he always waited to be asked. A couple of times, the patient was actually a little bit pissed off, but it was the only way he felt comfortable handling it for now.
Finally, he responded. “Nope. Two prosthetics.”
Stacee looked up at him, her mouth such a perfect round “o” that Ray had to restrain himself from laughing. “Seriously? You didn’t know?”
Stacee shook her head, flushing slightly, and looked back down at the floor. “You must think I’m such a bitch,” she said.
“No.”
Stacee was silent for a few beats, then asked, her voice still quiet, “How long does it suck like this?”
“I don’t know.” Ray shook his head, considering his words carefully. “I think it depends. It took me a while. I made a lot of mistakes. I was a serious jerk for a long time.” He looked at her for a moment, then grinned sheepishly and added, “I’m sure my mom could give you an earful. You’re actually a lot better than I was.”
Stacee seemed to consider that for a moment. “Wow, you must have been a real asshole.”
Ray laughed. “You have no idea.”
Stacee seemed almost startled at her own smile, and, after a few moments started questioning him tentatively about his prosthetics. By the end of the meeting, she had thoroughly quizzed him on what kind he had, how long he had had them, what he could do, and overall was more engaged and animated than he had ever seen her. Maybe Ray was starting to figure this whole thing out after all.
So he is feeling good.
Although he’s a little bummed that he can’t find his cell phone.
Neela won’t be home until almost midnight tonight, so when Catrin and a couple of the guys start talking about getting together after work, Ray suggests they swing by his place later for pizza and beer, maybe watch a DVD or two. He has sort of been avoiding Catrin for the past week or so and he feels more than a little bad about it. He’s not quite sure what his deal is; he used to love hanging out with Catrin, shooting the shit over drinks after work, gossiping about the other people at LeChatlier, checking out bands at the bars near LSU on the weekends. But lately Ray feels oddly awkward around her, as if all the hundreds of things they had in common evaporated when Neela arrived and suddenly it’s a struggle to find things to talk about.
Or maybe Ray just doesn’t like the version of himself he sees reflected in Catrin’s eyes lately. Whatever.
Ray runs a couple of errands after work, hits the grocery store to stock up on beer and food. He’s in the frozen food aisle when a wave of tiredness sweeps over him; he realizes that he probably hasn’t slept more than five good hours in the last three nights. He thinks about calling Catrin and the others to beg off but realizes he still doesn’t know where his cell phone is. Wondering if maybe he left it at Mark’s last night, he stops by there on the way home. No one is there, so he leaves a note at the front door with his landline phone number and his home address and then heads back to the house.
The sky is heavy with dark clouds as Ray drives home, and he hopes Neela doesn’t have problems with her flight. There hasn’t been a good thunderstorm in weeks, and the air this afternoon practically shudders with sodden electricity. Something has to break soon. Ray hopes it does.
* * * * * *
O’Hare is madness, of course, and Neela quickly loses patience with the line at security. You would think none of these people had been on an airplane before. But she finally finds herself at the gate, and she checks in with the agent, who tells her there’s a chance a seat will become available but that they will not know until it’s time to board in fifteen minutes.
Neela settles in a seat and tries calling Ray again. Again it goes directly to voicemail. Neela knows this panicky feeling is the farthest thing in the world from rational yet she can’t quash it. There was too long that not being able to reach Ray meant he was trying to blot her out of his life, that he had finally realized she was a toxin he needed to purge in order to survive.
And of course there was the other time she called Ray for days with no answer, those endless days after Abby and Luka’s wedding. But she can’t even think about that or she will most definitely go utterly mad right here in the middle of the bloody airport.
She still doesn’t quite understand what made Ray relent, why he finally called her one early spring afternoon last year. She remembers looking out the window at the graying snow against the curb below, listening to his familiar voice and praying desperately that she wouldn’t say some idiotically wrong thing that would drive him away forever. She hates the fact that she still feels more than a little bit of that fear, that cautiousness, and she wonders if she will ever feel safe. Not that she ever has.
She tries to think warm, pleasant thoughts about Ray, about all the little Ray things she loves and decided she didn't want to live without. Couldn't live without. The way her feet leave the ground when he hugs her. The way he teases and plays and provokes, which makes her feel approximately thirteen years old in all the best ways. His eyes, which she supposes are technically hazel but really are more like mood rings, melting from honey to sage to olive depending on the moment.
But instead her mind keeps going back to the day she found him in the hospital after the wedding . . . after the shock of it all, the worst part was that even though she had finally found him, even though he was there right next to her, he was still wholly unreachable. A chasm sat between them, yawning, unbridgeable. All those familiar Ray traits turned a half-notch off-kilter. His eyes dark and hard, his voice flat, his handsome face cut and bruised. How much she wanted to curl herself around him, to absorb all the hurt and wring it away. Instead she pressed her lips to his cheek and when he turned to look at her his eyes cut through her like a scalpel. Sharp, hard, precise. Cold.
She has failed him in a thousand different ways, she knows that, but she never imagined any of this. And she knows she can never truly mend it.
Dammit, why doesn’t he answer?
She checks in at the counter again. They will call her name from the standby list, the agent repeats, if there is room on the plane. Please take a seat. Ma’am.
Neela is developing an abiding hatred for the agent.
And sitting isn’t working out for Neela right now so she heaves her bag over her shoulder and heads for a nearby news kiosk, looking for the most mindless, diverting magazine she can find. She buys several - all of which seem to have headlines like “bad beach bodies” or “Jen’s heartbreak” - and returns to the gate.
She finds a seat again and flips open one of the magazines, trying to interest herself in whether some skeletal orange-skinned blonde whose name she doesn’t recognize is hiding a baby bump, but her eyes keep wandering back to the ticket agent. She pulls out her iPhone to see how much time has passed since she last called Ray. Five minutes. As she scrolls through her past calls, she is appalled to realize that she has called Ray thirty times in the past day, twenty times in just over an hour. What the hell is wrong with her? The elderly man sitting next to her is looking at her oddly, and she flushes, turning off her phone and shoving it to the bottom of her bag.
She leans back in her chair, but when she closes her eyes all she can see are bloated floating fish and long, white hallways, so she flips open a magazine again and wills herself to resist the compulsion to retrieve her phone and hit redial over and over and over. Finally she gives in and leaves another voicemail, knowing she has been utterly unsuccessful at masking the panic in her voice.
Ray will think she’s gone mad, surely. She’s not certain he would be wrong. Over the past few years she has come to realize that the quick, searching, active mind that served her so well through years of schooling and made her excel in so many aspects of her job is not always an asset in her everyday life. In fact, she’s pretty sure it’s made her - and other people - miserable much of the time and caused her to bollix up things that deeply matter to her, sometimes irretrievably.
When the agent finally calls her name, Neela is so absurdly grateful that she practically flings herself bodily over the counter to hug the woman. Instead she is so profuse with thank-yous that she’s pretty sure anyone watching thinks she is wholly unbalanced. But she doesn’t care.
She’s going home.
Part three
It’s an absolutely gorgeous early summer evening in Chicago, warm and clear and not appreciably humid, and Neela decides to skip the post-conference cocktail party today to take a long run along the lake. The lakeshore is packed with people rollerblading, running, walking dogs, playing volleyball on the sand courts. Neela can’t resist stopping mid-run for a few minutes to watch a group of twenty-somethings play a game of organized dodgeball. Her iPhone is in the pocket of her shorts and, on impulse, she takes a short video of part of the game and texts it to Ray. On the run back, the sun is setting and Neela stops and picks up some takeout to eat in her hotel room while she reviews her notes and readies for tomorrow.
She is just out of the shower, still slightly damp and wrapped in the fluffy white hotel robe, when her cell phone rings. Assuming it’s Ray, she doesn’t even look at the caller ID.
“Hey Neela.”
“Tony.” Bollocks. “Hello.”
There is a long pause.
“Sam mentioned you were in town.”
“Yes. I mean, just until tomorrow.”
Another long pause. Neela feels no animosity, nothing really at all for Tony anymore, except perhaps a faint guilt-by-association, as if they had been conspirators in some half-forgotten, failed caper.
“Do you have time for coffee? With an old friend?” Tony is uncharacteristically tentative. Careful.
Neela sighs. “I don’t know, Tony . . .”
“What time do you start in the morning?”
“Nine, but. . .”
“Just ten minutes, Neela. Eight a.m., Starbucks on Michigan, just across from the Intercontinental.”
Neela hesitates and Tony immediately fills the silence. “Neela. A half-hour, maximum. C’mon . . . daylight, public, crowded Starbucks….how bad could it be?”
Now she feels unforgivably rude. None of this is Tony’s fault. Not one iota. And part of her does want to hear all the County gossip, see a familiar face, reconnect. Be a bloody grownup. She forces herself to laugh lightly. “I’m sorry - I don’t mean to sound like that at all. It’s been a long day, and it’s such a short trip. But, of course, I’d love to see you. Eight o’clock.”
The next morning, there’s a sharp chill in the air, as if summer hasn’t completely taken hold yet, and Neela is grateful for a hot coffee. She settles at a small table shielded from the burst of cold that enters every time someone opens the door. Only two months away and already she is getting soft.
She’s also early. Ridiculously early, actually, so she pulls out her laptop and stares at her presentation notes for a few minutes. And checks her email. One from her sister; it looks long, so she’ll read it later. One from Abby with links to seven articles about how dogs make excellent child substitutes. Neela knew she shouldn’t have told Abby about the dog thing. Nothing from Ray since yesterday afternoon. His Facebook status is blank.
She looks at the computer clock. Still only 7:45. Bollocks.
She thinks about calling Ray, but he’s probably on his way to work so she texts him instead. “Good morning. See you tonight.” She’s never quite become comfortable with the whole text message abbreviation thing. It just makes her feel foolish.
This was a mistake, agreeing to meet Tony this morning. Neela is already struggling to focus, trying to quiet her mind and prepare to hold the attention of two hundred high-achieving, overworked professionals for an hour. What was she thinking? Now this idiotic Tony thing is just one more thing, one more thing to hide or avoid or explain and, really, aren’t there more than enough of those for a lifetime already? She closes down her laptop and is just slipping it in her bag when she sees Tony walk through the door.
Well, so much for that.
He smiles when he sees her, and is every bit as ridiculously handsome and assured as ever. The world is made for people like Tony, Neela realizes, people uninfected by self-doubt, who move relentlessly forward and smooth out complications and ambiguities through sheer force of will.
She must have hoped she could absorb just a fraction of that by osmosis.
Because most of the time, it’s hard for Neela to understand how any of it - Tony, Ray, the whole mess - ever happened. Neela was always the serious, studious girl in the front row. No time for drama or nonsense. She was never in her life That Girl, the one all the men at university openly ogled, the girl in the movie who inspired the leading man to dramatic gestures. Then suddenly, for a couple of years at County it seemed like she was the only female fish in an increasingly incestuous little pond. Neela has no illusions about herself - she knows she is fit, and young, and attractive, but also too responsible and neurotic to be the kind of girl players like Tony and Ray normally fall for. She had always pictured herself in a sweet, quiet, long marriage with someone like Michael, a good man, a solid man, more Jimmy Stewart than James Dean. Instead she somehow found herself cast in the kind of sordid melodrama that culminated in bar brawls and . . . well, and worse. The femme fatale, rather too literally. She finds it baffling.
Tony gets his coffee and sits down across from her. A mild memory of the old, electric attraction surges from her chest to her fingertips; he smells the same as she remembers, like hair gel and a touch too much Eternity for Men cologne. After the preliminary niceties - she thinks things are going well in her new job, County is as manic as ever, it sure is hot in Baton Rouge - Tony takes a deep breath.
“So Sam and I are talking about getting married. Maybe next summer.”
Neela’s a little floored.
“Congratulations, Tony. That’s . . . wonderful. I’m so happy for you.”
“Thanks. Thanks. Things are good. Really good.”
“I’m glad.” Neela doesn’t know what else to say, or what exactly she is feeling. Relief? Regret? Certainly just the tiniest bit of envy, that Tony and Sam, with all their complications and baggage and auxiliary drama, can nonetheless choose each other so quickly and decisively.
Tony breaks through her thoughts. “Don’t imagine you and Barnett will be able to come up for the wedding, but we’ll send an invitation.”
Neela nods. “Yes. Definitely.”
“How is Barnett?” Tony might, possibly, look a little uncomfortable.
“He’s great. He’s doing really well.” Neela nods rapidly, swallowing hard.
“He looked good when he was here. If you didn’t know . . . you’d never know. Dude’s damn near indestructible.”
Neela smiles tightly. “And how is Sarah?”
“Great, actually. She and Sam really hit it off.”
Hit it off? The demon child who made Neela utterly miserable for months is now fast mates with Sam? Neela is smiling so hard she thinks she may have damaged a nerve. She can feel the corners of her mouth twitch from the effort. “That’s lovely. I’m so happy for all of you.” She looks down for a moment, placing a hand on her bag. “Yes. Well. I really should go.”
As she stands, Tony reaches out a hand to hers. “It was really good to see you, Neela.” Tony can project sincerity like no one Neela has ever met. Neela stares at his hand for a moment. She can feel herself retracting, falling behind a familiar veil of frosty formality. If only, she thinks, she could somehow truly disappear and escape this whole ghastly encounter.
He is looking at her oddly. “You ok?”
Neela is irritated by how difficult it is for her to meet his eye right now. She’s angry and she doesn’t quite know why or at whom. At everyone in the world who is better at these things than she is, perhaps, for whom life seems so much simpler, clearer, more a matter of instinct than of endlessly convoluted thought. After a moment, she nods. “I’m sorry, Tony. I’m preoccupied. Just terribly nervous about this . . . presentation thing.”
Tony grins. “You’ll nail it, Neela. You always do.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
She calls Ray at the morning break, but it goes directly to voicemail.
He’s working, clearly.
Her presentation goes surprisingly well, and the whole thing is over so quickly that it seems absurd that she spent weeks fretting and preparing. Several people approach her at the break, and it pricks at her a little that they express surprise when she tells them where she works. As if anyone with anything worth saying has to be at Duke or Johns Hopkins or similar. It’s like an endless conversation with Lucien, and by the end of it she knows she’s displayed her impatience more than she should.
The conference breaks for lunch and she quickly skims the afternoon schedule. Nothing terribly fascinating. The very thought of food is nauseating, so she wanders into the lobby and flips open her laptop. She checks her email and then pulls up her travel itinerary. Her flight doesn’t leave until after five, and she won’t be back to Baton Rouge until almost eleven tonight.
She calls Ray, but, again, the call goes directly to voicemail. Neela frowns. She hasn’t heard from Ray since yesterday afternoon and it’s making her jittery for some reason. She calls again. This time, it rings a few times, but, again, no Ray, just his voicemail.
Neela suddenly can’t bear the thought of spending one moment longer in this hotel, in Chicago, than is absolutely necessary. She opens her web browser again and searches flight times on Expedia. There’s a two p.m. flight through Houston, but when she calls the airline, they say they cannot guarantee her a seat on the flight. She can, they offer, go to the airport and try and fly standby.
She looks at the time on her iPhone. Almost noon. She can make it.
She picks up her bag at the front desk and is in a cab on the way to O’Hare before she really even thinks about it. She calls Ray again. Voicemail again.
Where the hell is he?
* * * * * *
Ray flirts. It’s what he does. It’s a tic, a reflex, unpremeditated. He’s just a friendly dude; he likes people. Except when he doesn’t, but that doesn’t happen very often. In fact, it’s pretty much limited to douchebags who beat women, or ones who have seen his girlfriend naked.
And Ray instinctively knows what works, has known from the time he was a skinny twelve-year-old paper boy trying to collect tips from hassled housewives. The grin, that perfectly-calibrated mixture of Boy Scout and little devil. The head tilt, of course, with the single raised eyebrow that says You Interest Me. I’m Listening. It’s his secret weapon, his own personal superpower.
He usually tries not to abuse it.
Work today was good. He had a nice moment with a difficult patient, a teenaged girl named Stacee who lost her right leg above the knee in a boating accident and who had decided, for the first month of her rehab, to punish everyone within a hundred-mile radius rather than focus on her rehab. Ray sort of remembers what that's like.
This morning, Stacee had been in a particularly sour mood, so listless and sardonic that eventually her mom fled the family rehab plan meeting in tears. After her mother left the room, Ray looked down at his notes, shaking his head slightly. Stacee glared at him. “She acts like everything will be all right if I just do what you say,” Stacee spat out, “but it won’t. It’s easy for her to say that it will. But it won’t. She doesn’t know what this is like. It’s not happening to her. Nothing is ever going to be the way it was. Ever.”
Ray raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement. “No. You’re right. Nothing is ever going to be the way it was. Your life will be different. But it can be as good, and in some ways better, than it ever was. That’s pretty much up to you.”
Stacee rolled her eyes, folding her arms even more tightly across her chest. “It’s like your job to say cheesy shit like that.”
Ray grinned. “Yeah, it is. I actually have it written down on little cards. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.” Stacee looked off to the side, visibly disconnecting from the conversation. Ray walked over and leaned against the table where Stacee sat. “Look,” he said, “this sucks. It absolutely sucks. This happened to you and it’s completely unfair and there’s nothing you or I or your mom can do to change it. My job is to make sure your leg is as minimal an issue for you as you want it to be. The sooner you can work with me, the more successful that will be.”
He watched her face to gauge her reaction. She had only rolled her eyes twice, which was maybe some progress, and some of the rigidity has left her shoulders. Suddenly she turned her head towards him and said in a low voice, “Everything you say makes sense, I know it does, but it doesn’t feel like everything is going to be ok.” She looked down at the floor.
After a beat, she added, “my mom says you have a prosthetic.”
Ray closed his eyes for a moment. He still wrestled with how to talk to his patients about his legs. How to strike the right balance between frankness and something that felt uncomfortably like being the rehab center’s token role-model super-crip. Eventually the issue usually came up, but he always waited to be asked. A couple of times, the patient was actually a little bit pissed off, but it was the only way he felt comfortable handling it for now.
Finally, he responded. “Nope. Two prosthetics.”
Stacee looked up at him, her mouth such a perfect round “o” that Ray had to restrain himself from laughing. “Seriously? You didn’t know?”
Stacee shook her head, flushing slightly, and looked back down at the floor. “You must think I’m such a bitch,” she said.
“No.”
Stacee was silent for a few beats, then asked, her voice still quiet, “How long does it suck like this?”
“I don’t know.” Ray shook his head, considering his words carefully. “I think it depends. It took me a while. I made a lot of mistakes. I was a serious jerk for a long time.” He looked at her for a moment, then grinned sheepishly and added, “I’m sure my mom could give you an earful. You’re actually a lot better than I was.”
Stacee seemed to consider that for a moment. “Wow, you must have been a real asshole.”
Ray laughed. “You have no idea.”
Stacee seemed almost startled at her own smile, and, after a few moments started questioning him tentatively about his prosthetics. By the end of the meeting, she had thoroughly quizzed him on what kind he had, how long he had had them, what he could do, and overall was more engaged and animated than he had ever seen her. Maybe Ray was starting to figure this whole thing out after all.
So he is feeling good.
Although he’s a little bummed that he can’t find his cell phone.
Neela won’t be home until almost midnight tonight, so when Catrin and a couple of the guys start talking about getting together after work, Ray suggests they swing by his place later for pizza and beer, maybe watch a DVD or two. He has sort of been avoiding Catrin for the past week or so and he feels more than a little bad about it. He’s not quite sure what his deal is; he used to love hanging out with Catrin, shooting the shit over drinks after work, gossiping about the other people at LeChatlier, checking out bands at the bars near LSU on the weekends. But lately Ray feels oddly awkward around her, as if all the hundreds of things they had in common evaporated when Neela arrived and suddenly it’s a struggle to find things to talk about.
Or maybe Ray just doesn’t like the version of himself he sees reflected in Catrin’s eyes lately. Whatever.
Ray runs a couple of errands after work, hits the grocery store to stock up on beer and food. He’s in the frozen food aisle when a wave of tiredness sweeps over him; he realizes that he probably hasn’t slept more than five good hours in the last three nights. He thinks about calling Catrin and the others to beg off but realizes he still doesn’t know where his cell phone is. Wondering if maybe he left it at Mark’s last night, he stops by there on the way home. No one is there, so he leaves a note at the front door with his landline phone number and his home address and then heads back to the house.
The sky is heavy with dark clouds as Ray drives home, and he hopes Neela doesn’t have problems with her flight. There hasn’t been a good thunderstorm in weeks, and the air this afternoon practically shudders with sodden electricity. Something has to break soon. Ray hopes it does.
* * * * * *
O’Hare is madness, of course, and Neela quickly loses patience with the line at security. You would think none of these people had been on an airplane before. But she finally finds herself at the gate, and she checks in with the agent, who tells her there’s a chance a seat will become available but that they will not know until it’s time to board in fifteen minutes.
Neela settles in a seat and tries calling Ray again. Again it goes directly to voicemail. Neela knows this panicky feeling is the farthest thing in the world from rational yet she can’t quash it. There was too long that not being able to reach Ray meant he was trying to blot her out of his life, that he had finally realized she was a toxin he needed to purge in order to survive.
And of course there was the other time she called Ray for days with no answer, those endless days after Abby and Luka’s wedding. But she can’t even think about that or she will most definitely go utterly mad right here in the middle of the bloody airport.
She still doesn’t quite understand what made Ray relent, why he finally called her one early spring afternoon last year. She remembers looking out the window at the graying snow against the curb below, listening to his familiar voice and praying desperately that she wouldn’t say some idiotically wrong thing that would drive him away forever. She hates the fact that she still feels more than a little bit of that fear, that cautiousness, and she wonders if she will ever feel safe. Not that she ever has.
She tries to think warm, pleasant thoughts about Ray, about all the little Ray things she loves and decided she didn't want to live without. Couldn't live without. The way her feet leave the ground when he hugs her. The way he teases and plays and provokes, which makes her feel approximately thirteen years old in all the best ways. His eyes, which she supposes are technically hazel but really are more like mood rings, melting from honey to sage to olive depending on the moment.
But instead her mind keeps going back to the day she found him in the hospital after the wedding . . . after the shock of it all, the worst part was that even though she had finally found him, even though he was there right next to her, he was still wholly unreachable. A chasm sat between them, yawning, unbridgeable. All those familiar Ray traits turned a half-notch off-kilter. His eyes dark and hard, his voice flat, his handsome face cut and bruised. How much she wanted to curl herself around him, to absorb all the hurt and wring it away. Instead she pressed her lips to his cheek and when he turned to look at her his eyes cut through her like a scalpel. Sharp, hard, precise. Cold.
She has failed him in a thousand different ways, she knows that, but she never imagined any of this. And she knows she can never truly mend it.
Dammit, why doesn’t he answer?
She checks in at the counter again. They will call her name from the standby list, the agent repeats, if there is room on the plane. Please take a seat. Ma’am.
Neela is developing an abiding hatred for the agent.
And sitting isn’t working out for Neela right now so she heaves her bag over her shoulder and heads for a nearby news kiosk, looking for the most mindless, diverting magazine she can find. She buys several - all of which seem to have headlines like “bad beach bodies” or “Jen’s heartbreak” - and returns to the gate.
She finds a seat again and flips open one of the magazines, trying to interest herself in whether some skeletal orange-skinned blonde whose name she doesn’t recognize is hiding a baby bump, but her eyes keep wandering back to the ticket agent. She pulls out her iPhone to see how much time has passed since she last called Ray. Five minutes. As she scrolls through her past calls, she is appalled to realize that she has called Ray thirty times in the past day, twenty times in just over an hour. What the hell is wrong with her? The elderly man sitting next to her is looking at her oddly, and she flushes, turning off her phone and shoving it to the bottom of her bag.
She leans back in her chair, but when she closes her eyes all she can see are bloated floating fish and long, white hallways, so she flips open a magazine again and wills herself to resist the compulsion to retrieve her phone and hit redial over and over and over. Finally she gives in and leaves another voicemail, knowing she has been utterly unsuccessful at masking the panic in her voice.
Ray will think she’s gone mad, surely. She’s not certain he would be wrong. Over the past few years she has come to realize that the quick, searching, active mind that served her so well through years of schooling and made her excel in so many aspects of her job is not always an asset in her everyday life. In fact, she’s pretty sure it’s made her - and other people - miserable much of the time and caused her to bollix up things that deeply matter to her, sometimes irretrievably.
When the agent finally calls her name, Neela is so absurdly grateful that she practically flings herself bodily over the counter to hug the woman. Instead she is so profuse with thank-yous that she’s pretty sure anyone watching thinks she is wholly unbalanced. But she doesn’t care.
She’s going home.
Part three