But all I see are his two familiar orbs, so brown they’re almost black. And they’re boring into me as intensely as they do in my dreams. I know it’s because I’m gawking at him, transfixed, as if he has suddenly erupted in flames and I have never seen fire before.
I drop my eyes to the ground and try to recover, or cover up, because what could I possibly say? How could I explain?
“A cramp,” I whisper, touching my stomach. “I’m OK.”
Harrison pulls me toward him. “This is Caroline,” he says. “One of my patients.” I force my gaze to her, trying to ignore the thrumming of my heart, the bizarre, out-of-body fog I’m experiencing.
“Your husband saved my life last week.” She smiles, and I focus on her teeth—Chiclet sized, off-white—simply because I have nowhere else to look.
I offer a weak smile back.
“Hardly,” Harrison says, modestly. And then he goes into doctor mode: “Are you getting your rest? Not lifting heavy objects?”
“Yes. And here I am getting the baby checked out—doctor’s orders and all.” A memory is triggered—this is the emergency appendectomy Harrison performed last week. The woman who found out she was pregnant.
“Congratulations!” I exclaim, overenthusiastically, and Harrison squeezes my hip.
“Thanks,” she says, putting her hand on her stomach. “It was quite the surprise.” I nod, my gaze traveling back to the man beside her.
“Sorry,” Caroline says. “This is Oliver.”
Oliver.
I roll it over in my mind, my mouth. I get the sense that it should taste familiar. It doesn’t.
But everything else about him is—from his relaxed posture, one hand tucked into the frayed front pocket of his jeans, the way the worn material of his burgundy T-shirt is taut and then loose in the swells and valleys of his arms, his chest. The longer top section of his shaggy, errant nut-brown mop falling into his eyes and the way he smooths it back at intervals, a habit he no longer notices. He’s familiar in a way that doesn’t make sense. Like a picture in a magazine that suddenly comes to life. Or like an ex-boyfriend you haven’t seen in years. I know him, but I don’t know this version of him.
He’s talking to Harrison, but suddenly turns to me, and I’m busted for the second time, rudely ogling him. I know I should say something, make a lame excuse—a cliché You look so familiar—but when I open my mouth to speak, he beats me to it.
“I know you,” he says, tilting his head. My heart thuds. My skin pricks with sweat. My eyes widen. But I also feel a small sense of relief. If he recognizes me, then I must know this man—and not just from my strange dreams. I must have met him before and don’t remember it. It’s the only thing that could explain . . . any of it. I lean forward slightly, but eagerly, waiting to hear how he knows me, waiting for it all to fall into place and make sense.
“Or I guess I don’t know you—but I’ve seen you. At the Giant, I think? Last week?”
Oh.
“Sorry, that’s probably weird,” he says. His tone is friendly, but he doesn’t smile. “But I have one of those photographic memories—never forget a face.”
“Yeah,” I manage, the word coming out squeaky. “I was there. On Friday?”
Oliver dips his head. Affirmative.
“Small world,” Harrison says, amiably.
“Small town,” Oliver quips.
And then Harrison is wrapping up the conversation and everyone is exchanging customary nice-to-meet-you pleasantries and I’m being ushered out the front door, bewildered at the bizarre normalcy of the encounter.
“Sorry,” Harrison says in my ear as he opens my car door for me. “I know you wanted to get out of there.”
“It’s OK,” I say, folding my body into the bucket seat, trying to sort out what’s just happened and how it’s possible and why I feel like I just rode the world’s fastest roller coaster—exhilarated, terrified and like, at any second, I may throw up everywhere.
* * *
“Are you hungry?” Harrison asks, when we walk into the kitchen, my mind still a jumble of confusion and shock and grief.
I fixate on the lone barstool at the massive island in our kitchen. Its partner is in my studio, and it occurs to me now how cruel it was to separate them. It looks lost, like a child who’s slipped away from his mother in the mall and ended up, bewildered, in a store he’s never seen before. I need to buy more barstools. I add it to the list of things that feel impossible to accomplish.
“No,” I say. My phone buzzes and I throw it on the counter.
“Vivian?” he asks.
“Probably. Or my dad. Or Raya. I haven’t called them back since—”
“I’ll tell them,” he says.
He picks up the no-longer-buzzing phone and starts tapping the screen with his thumb. I hear him say, “Hey, Vivian, it’s Harrison,” as he walks out of the kitchen.
I know I should go after him, that I’m copping out. That Vivian will call me anyway, and then Dad, and then Mom, and then my phone will keep obnoxiously and cheerfully ringing and dinging until the end of time. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that miscarriages make people uncomfortable—even the people that love you the most. They never know what to say, so I somehow always end up being the one comforting them. It’s OK. I’m fine. We’ll try again. And I can’t comfort anybody right now.
I need to be alone. I slip out the back door and walk toward the studio, so I don’t have to overhear him say the words I’ve been avoiding.
Tubs of my paints and various art supplies litter the floor of the garage, canvases holding up the walls like middle school boys at a dance. Waiting. The garage still has the faint smell of wood chips. The previous owner used it as a woodworking studio to hand-carve his own boats, and a large canoe on two sawhorses greeted us when we first looked at the garage. I suddenly wish he had left it behind. I want to run my hands down its smooth edges, curl up in its curved basin.
Instead, I lie on the hard cement where the boat used to be.
And I think of Oliver.
Oliver.
It’s as if learning his name has unlocked some treasure trove of stored dreams that I assumed had been lost forever, dissolved like sugar in water by the morning light.
They come rushing in like memories: Oliver sitting in a desk next to me in Mrs. Piergiovanni’s class, loudly whispering while I’m trying to find the cosine in an isosceles triangle and hushing him, terrified I’ll get in trouble. Oliver, my copilot in a biplane, laughing when I realize neither one of us knows how to fly and it starts falling from the sky, my stomach going with it. Oliver lying next to me in a cornfield, his hand hot between my legs, gripping the inside of my thigh—