Despite my comments in our first conflict resolution session, I did have feelings. A whole fucking lot of them. So many that I had to be selective about the ones I'd let in on any given day. If I wasn't careful, I'd find myself consumed by feeling everything, all the damn time.
I wouldn't be as generous as to say I'd made peace with the fact my father fucked off when my sister Vivi and I were toddlers, or how he left my mother without child support or any means of providing for us. I'd never forgive him for the years of my life that I spent watching my mother panic-sweat her way from paycheck to paycheck, working two and three jobs to keep a roof over our heads and crying over registration forms for soccer leagues and summer camps because there was no way in hell she could afford that.
More than leaving us penniless, he discarded us like a bunch of dented cans of soup.
Except for when my mother remarried a guy with deep, real estate investor pockets and my dad had to take her to court for joint custody. Not that he'd bothered to seek us out at any point between the ages of three and seventeen. Not that he ever showed up for his legally guaranteed weekends with us. Not that he showed up at all, not until more than another decade had passed.
He showed up when Vivi was promoted to head of media relations at the University of Florida and he needed tickets to the Gators' home games.
And the time when I graduated from medical school and he had an investment opportunity to pitch to my friends.
It was funny how those "opportunities" came up every few years. There'd never been an opportunity to acknowledge my birthday, never an opportunity to show up when we were kids, but now that we had access to SEC football tickets and friends with money to blow, the opportunities were endless.
Vivi was the strong one of us. She blocked his number after he called her a spoiled bitch for refusing to cough up a block of tickets, and when he showed up at the stadium demanding them anyway, she had a restraining order filed against him. Vivi didn't take any shit and she'd make it rain fire if you tried her.
He didn't hit me up too often, but I took the call if I was in the mood to be an antagonistic prick. So, most of the time. Whenever he wanted money, I sang a song of poor doctors crushed under their student loans. That hadn't applied to me in years, but he didn't have to know that.
Those simmering cauldrons. We all had them. The only difference between me and Vivi or anyone else was I wore mine on my face and I didn't give a fuck if anyone had a problem with it.
I didn't know whether the cauldron had come first or my fuck shortage. That didn't really matter to me. It was this dented soup can situation that woke me up before my alarm and haunted me like a ghost too curious for its own good, always swirling around my shoulders and asking whether I kept that cauldron on my face to distract everyone from the dents I hadn't been able to emo-goth or therapy or work or growl away.
Chapter 10
Sara
"We'll be on the floor today," Milana announced when I stepped into her office. She gestured to the coffee table and the space she'd cleared around it. "You know how I feel about play."
"Can't forget," Sebastian muttered from his usual post at the bookshelves.
He was too busy paging through a book to acknowledge me.
It was a game in which we'd become elite players over the last week. There was no avoiding our apartment or the surgical wing but we could turn five hundred percent of our attention to reading a fire exit map, checking a pager and then marching in the opposite direction, tying a shoelace, frowning aggressively at phones, even staring at the sky when all else failed.
For a game predicated on actively ignoring each other, it came with the consequence of extreme awareness of that person's presence. I didn't have to see him to sense him, and I wasn't sure how I felt about that. Was it a skill? Some kind of defense mechanism honed from weeks of stress and bad choices? Or was my blood thrumming with an unquenched desire to win, even when winning led to only a moment of smug satisfaction and the start of another go-round of this game?
I sat cross-legged in front of the table and opened the zip pouch of trail mix I'd brought along. My white coat took some unfortunate hits this morning and it was off to the laundry, leaving me to rely on the saddlebag pockets of my scrub pants. This was not preferrable for many reasons but it would have to do in this pinch. A girl needed her snacks.
"Sebastian, if you'd join us," Milana said. She sat on an orange footstool, her arms folded on her knees and an expectant smile on her face as she watched him.
Not that I noticed. I didn't care. All I knew was I had no intention of forfeiting this round.
I dug into my trail mix while Sebastian took his sweet, scowly time crossing the room. His legs came into view first, clad in the same bruised blue scrubs as always. He eased himself down to the floor, sighing and huffing the whole way. He didn't even apologize when his huge knobby knee jostled the table.
"I have a puzzle for you today," Milana said, pointing her clasped hands at the table. "It's a special one, as you'll see, that I save for special friends."
"There's nothing on these pieces," Sebastian said. "It's a blank puzzle? That's the trick?"
"They are not blank," she said, flipping one piece over to reveal shades of green and yellow. "But we aren't relying on the colors today. We're using more subtle cues. We're using nuances."
"Fantastic," Sebastian murmured.
Since I was deeply committed to winning this round, I wasted no time in organizing the pieces closest to me. If we were smart—recent events really challenged that premise—we'd divide this puzzle up and not breathe a word to each other because we'd sooner flip this table than engage in the activity harmoniously.
Whether Sebastian had the same idea or he was content following my lead, I did not know, but I accepted the quiet that enveloped us just the same. It was the first time I'd downshifted from high-alert defensive mode inside this office. Maybe Milana was right. Maybe we were making progress all this time.
If she was right, how was I supposed to explain everything that'd happened outside this office?
Sebastian pinched a puzzle piece away from me. "The perimeter is the priority."
"There can be multiple, simultaneous priorities." Without meeting his gaze, I snatched the piece back.
Still winning. I had to win. After the stairwell, I needed this win. I'd strangle him before I let him take this round.
…said the nearly forty-year-old woman who'd once possessed interests and hobbies separate from hating a man purely because he bothered her.
"It would be more efficient to focus on the perimeter and then work our way in," he countered.
He sounded more exasperated than usual. I had to fight off a grin. His exasperation was like candy. It was terrible for me but that in no way minimized the fun of it.
I didn't respond, instead trying to make progress with a small group of pieces and steadily feeding myself nuts and dried fruit.
From the corner of my eye, I noticed Milana shift on her stool every few minutes. Clasping and unclasping her hands. She didn't know what to do with us when we weren't trying to kill each other with soft toys.