With Hutch, it was all about music and plants and sometimes not talking at all, just existing in the same room together, watching whatever Netflix had just delivered.
There was never a reason to call Hutch twenty minutes after he left my house.
The afternoon after the Snappy Dragon Debacle I worked at the zoo from two until closing. When I was done I changed my clothes, put some minty gum in my mouth and washed the goat smell off my hands, then drove to Noel’s house. My hands were shaking on the wheel, but I was determined not to have a panic attack. I found a parking space in front of Noel’s place and sat there in the Honda, taking deep breaths and blasting Queen’s greatest hits.1
A hand knocked on my window.
It was Sydonie, Noel’s younger half sister. “Why are you out here?” she wanted to know.
“I came to see your brother.”
“Why are you sitting out here?”
“I was listening to the song.”
“But it’s a different song now than it was when you parked,” she said.
She had me there.
“You want me to get him?”
“I—”
“I’m going to get him!” cried Sydonie as she ran into the house. “Noelie, Noelie! Your Ruby is here! Your Ruby is here, Noelie!”
Your Ruby.
Your Ruby is here.
I got out of the car and leaned against it, waiting. In a minute, Noel was standing in front of me and in another minute he was kissing me and Sydonie was dancing around us yelling “They’re kissing! They’re kissing!” and I could feel his arms, warm around my back and then his hand on my cheek and I kissed him back.
“Hey there,” Noel said finally.
“Hey yourself,” I said. Drunk with the kissing. So surprised. I had been sure he was going to break up with me.
“Sorry I’ve been hard to reach,” he said.
“Oh, that’s okay,” I told him.
It just popped out of my mouth on impulse—that lie. It wasn’t okay. “Sorry you arrived last night in the middle of my family drama,” I added.
Noel kissed me again. “Forget it,” he said. “Do you want to go to the movies?”
I nodded. He checked his iPhone for a schedule. “Lots of things will be starting around seven, seven-thirty. You want to just go to the Ave and see what’s playing?”
“Okay.”
He told Sydonie to tell his parents where he was and got into the Honda.
I couldn’t quite believe it.
I seemed to have a boyfriend, after all that.
We went to the Ave and Noel put his hand on my leg while I drove. We got popcorn and saw a movie with a lot of car chases and gunshots. It felt so incredible to hold hands, pressing my forearm against his, rubbing my thumb against his palm. I leaned my head on his shoulder and just breathed in the moment.
Noel was here.
Noel still wanted me.
I told myself I was utterly, completely happy.
“And?” Doctor Z inquired the next day, looking at me over the rims of her red-framed glasses.
“And what?”
She was silent.
I had never noticed it before, but Doctor Z had a photograph in a frame, facedown on her desk.
Had the photo always been there?
Had I really never noticed it until now?
Was it always facedown?
Like, so her clients couldn’t see her top-secret personal photo?
I tried to think whether there had ever been a photograph on her desk.
Did she have children? A dog?
I knew she had a boyfriend named Jonah, because I’d seen them together once, at the Birkenstock store where I used to work.
Maybe the photo was new. Maybe she got a pet, or got engaged to Jonah, or had a baby born in the family.
Whatever it was, it had to be important enough to her that she wanted it up in her workspace even though it meant she had to turn it facedown whenever any of her clients were in there with her, which must be most of the time.
Or maybe it was a gift from a client. Maybe some deranged neurotic thought: Oh, I’m going to give Doctor Z a photo of myself so that she can look at me always. And the client was pretty much loony, so Doctor Z had to display the photo whenever the client came for therapy because otherwise he would go berserk and have to be straightjacketed with maniacal grief. Then when he wasn’t there, she didn’t really want to look at it, so she turned it facedown.
“Ruby!” Doctor Z startled me.
“What?”
“Is this subject difficult to talk about?”
“I got distracted,” I said. “What were we discussing?”
“Your relationship with Noel.”
Oh.
Yeah.
Funny how I could forget that, even for a minute. Why is my brain like this? It just switches gears and starts obsessing about something completely unimportant.
“I’m really happy he wants to be together,” I told Doctor Z. “It’s so great to have him back. I’m so relieved.”
She stared at me.
I wasn’t lying.
I really felt that way.
I just felt a whole lot of other stuff too.
She stared at me some more. I could hear the clock ticking. I could hear myself breathing. I could hear someone out in the hallway talking.
I twisted my hair. She knew what I was going to say. And she knew I knew she knew.
“But I’m not,” I said. “Actually. Happy. Or relieved.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Why are people so crap at apologizing?” I said. “I know people feel bad about stuff they’ve done, but still they don’t apologize for it. My dad never apologizes to my mom. He just starts cuddling her or rubbing her shoulders until she stops pouting.”
“Could that be a form of apology?”
“Kind of. But also not.”
“Noel apologized to you. Didn’t you say that he did?”
“Yeah, but ‘Sorry I was so hard to reach’ isn’t a real sorry.”
“Why not?”
“He made it sound like the whole thing was out of his control. He didn’t say, ‘Sorry I didn’t call you back. Sorry I didn’t write you. Sorry I hurt your feelings. Sorry I didn’t run after you.’ ”
“It didn’t feel like a real sorry,” Doctor Z said. She does that a lot. Repeats what I’ve said.
“And when he said sorry he was hard to reach, I said, ‘It’s okay.’ But only because that’s what you’re supposed to say when someone says sorry. Not because I meant it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Or maybe because I wished it was okay. But—”
She looked at me.
“—it was a complete lie.”
“Oh.”
“I was basically acting fake the whole night, trying to pretend I was just letting everything go. Or like I hadn’t even minded how he’d disappeared on me and not called me and all that. Like I was some extra-mellow relaxed girlfriend who didn’t care about anything. Like those two poems made up for everything.” I bit my nails. “I kept thinking—all night I kept thinking that if I had never gone over to his house after work, he might never have even called me.”
“Really?”
“He would have just gone about his life, avoiding me, or forgetting about me, or meaning to call me but not just yet—whatever he’s been doing since halfway through the New York trip.”
“Mm.” Doctor Z popped a piece of Nicorette out of its packaging and put it thoughtfully in her mouth. “What did you two talk about?”
I shrugged. “The movie we saw. Whether or not Christian Bale is deranged. Why there aren’t more female action heroes.”
“Ah.”
“Why did we have to go to a movie? For once in my life, I didn’t want to go to a movie.”
“No?”
“We didn’t talk that much, even.”
“Oh.”
Noel and I had kissed in the front seat of the Honda when I drove him home, and we had held hands in the theater—but whenever I spoke I had this sense that I was chattering at him. Like some part of his brain was elsewhere.