When I look back up at the door, no one is there.
He’s gone.
Like an apparition.
A dream.
Loaded down with my purchases, I hurry toward the door and then stop where he was standing and look toward the produce section and the aisles where he may have gone. My eyes scan various shoppers, but none of them are him.
I’ve half a mind to take off into the store, going aisle by aisle until I find him, but then I give my head a firm shake. It couldn’t have been him. Obviously. He is a figment of my imagination. It was only someone that looked like him. I hear Vivian in my mind: All those pregnancy hormones can make you feel crazy.
I have been out of sorts—forgetful, caught up in my thoughts. That must be what it is.
Still, I glance around the store one last time before exiting through the doors, into the full-blast heat of the day.
Chapter 3
I’m eating a wedge of watermelon when I hear the front door open and shut. It’s not even five, too early for Harrison to be home, and I cock my head, my heart racing.
When I hear the familiar sound of his keys hitting cardboard, his footfalls crossing the hardwood, relief courses through me, but it’s not until he actually appears at the doorway to the kitchen that I let out my breath.
“You scared me.”
“Didn’t you ask me to be home early?” he asks, shrugging out of his suit jacket and loosening the knot of his bow tie in one fluid motion.
I stare at him blankly. “Wait—is it Friday?” I really am losing it. Or maybe that’s the problem with not having a job—all the days completely run together.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Raya’s coming!” I leap off the stool and throw myself at Harrison.
He wraps his arms around me. “I’m gonna pretend all this enthusiasm is for me,” he says. “And, I’m going to start cooking, because even though Raya said she’s bringing dinner, we both know she’s going to forget.”
“No, she won’t,” I say, smacking him on the arm. He reaches for a slice of watermelon and bites into it, a pink stream of juice running down his chin. He swipes it with the back of his hand. “Is the mime coming with her?”
“Marcel’s a performance artist,” I say, chiding him.
“He’s a mime.”
I pause. “OK, he’s a mime.”
“I can’t believe she’s still with him,” he says.
“Well, better him than Jesse, right?”
“True.”
“And she really likes him, so you need to be nice.”
“I’m always nice,” he says.
“You are always nice,” I agree.
“But I can’t promise I’m not going to roll my eyes if he quotes David Bowie again. I swear it was at least three times.”
“Fair enough,” I say. “How was work? What was the middle-of-the-night emergency this time?”
“Appendectomy,” he says, and his shoulders fall, as if he’s only now allowing the weight of it to sink in.
I pause. Appendectomies are one of the most common—and easiest—surgeries Harrison does, next to gallbladders, but ever since he lost that eight-year-old boy in Philly during a routine appendectomy, they’ve been hard for him, emotionally. Not that he talks about it much. He tries to distance himself, to detach, as all doctors must if they are to survive the things they witness. But some patients, like Noah, inevitably get to him. He carries the weight of them around like rocks in his pockets. And I worry that one day he won’t be able to stand from the burden.
“How’d it go?”
“It was . . . interesting, actually. When the nurse did the ultrasound to confirm the appendicitis, she also confirmed a pregnancy.”
I raise my eyebrows. “The woman didn’t know?”
“She does now. I think she was quite surprised. Almost made her forget how much pain she was in.”
“But everything turned out OK? I didn’t know a pregnant woman could have surgery.”
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “Went in laparoscopically. It’s pretty low risk.”
“Look at you. Saving two lives at once.” I bat my eyelashes at him. “My hero.”
He rolls his eyes. “Anything else interesting happen today?”
My mind flashes to the man I saw at the Giant. The man I thought was him. I consider telling Harrison. I do have a funny story, I would say, laughing. But is it funny? I think again about how I would feel if Harrison was having dreams about the same woman.
“Nope,” I say. “I’m going to go change.”
* * *
“I thought we’d never make it,” Raya says as she sweeps past me into the foyer an hour later. “My cell reception was shit and we passed your driveway what—eight times?”
“Yeah, it’s not marked well,” I say as I hug her. She smells like Raya, a mix of acrid chemicals—from the bright red dye she douses her hair with every few weeks—and peppermint essential oil.
“Your hair’s grown out,” she says, fingering my black locks. I chopped it, my hair, on a whim after we lost the second baby. One morning I left the house with it swinging down to my midback, and by the time Harrison got home that night, it barely reached the bottom of my chin. A razor cut, the stylist called it, and I liked how raw it sounded. The edges jagged and sharp, like the way I felt.
Marcel follows and I offer my cheek for him to kiss. Though he’s freshly showered, he still retains a faint metallic scent from the copper paint he coats himself with for his street performances. His tank top reveals arms covered in tattoos—a dragon breathing fire coils up his left side while M. C. Escher’s famous hand-drawing-a-hand, various flowers, and a skull with a mustache decorate the other. His dark hair is slicked back on both sides with an impressive amount of pomade.
“Shit,” Raya says, as she’s embracing Harrison.
“What?” We all look at her.
“I was supposed to bring dinner, wasn’t I?”
Harrison gives me a look over her head.
“Oh well, we’ll order something,” she says, pulling out her phone and inspecting it. “Finally—I have one bar. What delivery app do you guys use?”
I smirk. “Nothing delivers out here. Unless you want gas station pizza.” We ordered it once in a moment of desperation, and a greasy-haired teenager came out on his moped, delivering a cardboard box that contained what appeared to be a frozen grocery store pizza heated up under a hot lamp. Harrison thought it was hilarious, and I joined in laughing, but mostly to keep from crying.