Heart Conditions (The Breakup Doctor Series Book 3) (5 page)

five

Michael and I hovered before the holy figure with upraised arms silently offering us his blessing.

In the shaft of sunlight that filtered down and lit up the weathered and pitted yellow face of Jesus, Michael’s hair seemed to glow amber as it floated around him.

Bright yellow fish flitted past our faces.

For some reason, as I drove toward Fort Myers Beach to meet my ex-fiancé, I couldn’t get those images out of my head. It had been our one-year anniversary, and Michael and the band had found themselves with a rare free four days off when a gig fell through at the last minute. It was too unusual a chance to resist—I’d rescheduled my patients from my shared practice at the clinic on Cleveland, and we threw the basics into my Accord (the last thing we wanted was to break down on Alligator Alley in his battered Jeep) and headed down to Key Largo.

I’d heard of Christ of the Abyss, the eight-foot statue of Jesus submerged near Dry Rocks, but had never done a dive at Pennekamp Park. More than once Michael had heard me talk about the oddity of the thing—a replica of an identical statue in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Genoa, cast from the same mold and brought to the Florida keys, where it was donated to the first underwater park in the country and sunk twenty-five feet deep.

It had been startling to come upon the weathered bronze Christ on our dive amid the park’s coral reef, wondrous and moving in its incongruous placement below the waves. But I couldn’t help reflecting that with his head thrown back and hands raised toward the surface, the son of God seemed to be doing nothing so much as asking someone to please throw him down a line and pull him up.

I mimed as much to Michael as we floated before it, but he was oblivious to my silent humor, beckoning me closer.

Spotted eagle rays fluffed the sand surrounding the thick concrete pedestal anchoring Jesus’s feet, the white geometric markings on their black backs looking like lace against the pale sand. I swam down, mesmerized by the balletic flapping of their wings, the tiny clouds they stirred up.

Michael touched my shoulder and pointed again to the algae-laced Jesus, as if I were somehow missing seeing the statue towering immediately over me, but I couldn’t drag my gaze from the graceful rays. He reached for me again, this time a firmer hold, and I gazed up with a silent, impatient
What?

He pointed to Jesus, and I nodded.
Yes, I see the statue. It’s amazing. Now leave me alone for a sec.

He was flipping his fins to stay close beside me, pulling at me, still pointing at Christ with an insistent finger, and finally I followed its trajectory up the statue’s arms.

Where something glittering and bright contrasted starkly with the dulled gray and yellow of the barnacled metal—something hanging from the tip of Jesus’s middle finger.

I felt my eyebrows bunch in confusion as I pushed up from the bottom and glided over to the hand to investigate, Michael close behind me.

It was a ring.

My wide eyes flew over to Michael’s, which were now squinted behind his mask with the smile that stretched so wide his lips gapped around his mouthpiece, and he nodded a confirmation.

My heart slammed into my ribs, and bubbles erupted from my mouth as I squealed, the high-pitched sound probably confusing whales for miles. I reached for the ring—gold, with a center diamond flanked by smaller ones, brilliant and sparkling in the light, even underwater.

His hand reached for mine and he took the ring from me, then swam away, back toward Jesus’s huge feet. As I watched, he paddled with his hands until he rested on the sand, one leg bent behind him, the other kneeling on the sea floor. He held the ring up in an echo of Christ’s position, raising his shoulders in a questioning shrug.

I nodded furiously, tears steaming my mask and collecting in the bottom of it.

A wet tongue on my cheek from the passenger seat yanked me out of the memory I’d avoided for years, and I wiped away a trail of Jake slime. “Thanks, buddy,” I said, tangling my fingers in the ruff of fur at his neck. I hadn’t wanted to face Michael alone.

This was the exact wrong time to be thinking of that day, I thought as we drove toward Bowditch Point. I didn’t need to be feeling vulnerable. But like trying not to think of a pink elephant, the harder I worked to avoid the memory, the more it took over my mind.

I’d eagerly held out my left hand, and Michael reached to drop the ring onto my third finger—only to fumble it.

As it tumbled in graceful slow motion he reached for it, but his hand closed only on water. He flipped to follow its path downward, the ring visible only in flashes as it glinted each time it turned over and caught the light, but his repeated flailings toward it yielded nothing. Michael was spinning in a panicked circle, searching the water around and below him for the ring, but from where I floated above him I could see where it landed and came to rest at Jesus’s feet.

I finned slowly down to the base of the statue to retrieve it, laying a hand on Michael’s arm as I passed to signal that I had it. But he was intent, still thrashing around so frantically he didn’t seem to register what I was doing as I swam by.

Which was undoubtedly why, as I calmly headed toward the ring, my hand outstretched, he plowed into my field of vision in the mask like the Man from Atlantis, darting ahead of me, his adrenaline-fueled kicks creating powerful eddies in the water.

One of which caught the ring and swept it off the pedestal and down to the sand below.

Bubbles funneled up from my mouthpiece again as I shouted, but it was too late—the ring had disappeared.

There ensued a good panicked fifteen-minute session of the two of us combing every inch of sand around the pedestal, patting it, sifting through it, sending so many particles of it flowering up around us that the water seemed viscous and dull. Until finally Michael held his arm up in triumph, the ring clutched so firmly in his clawed hand that I could see his whitened knuckles. The sparkling sunlight off its brilliant gold and diamonds seemed to glitter like a disco ball, drawing me to it like a moth to flame.

Or a barracuda to anything shiny, I amended, as a long dark threatening shape hove into view from behind Christ.

I’d dived enough to know that barracuda attacks on humans were rare, yet even so, seeing the four-foot long fish with its bristling prehistoric teeth stalled my heartbeat for several long seconds. He’d come to a halt about five feet behind Michael’s oblivious figure and was just hovering there, his horrifying mouth open as if he were smiling—or ready to take a bite of Michael’s fist, still clutching the shiny ring.

If Michael saw it he might panic again, and thrashing was only going to stir the barracuda up. Slowly, smiling reassuringly, I eased closer to him, until I was near enough to close my hand over his—over the glittering prize the barracuda was so fascinated by—and pulled the ring into my own clenched fist to hide it. Still smiling like the village idiot and nodding, I gently tugged Michael’s hand and headed toward the surface, until we finally made it back to shore. When I opened my hand, the ring had left a circular indentation in my palm above four half-moons from where my nails had dug in, in my kung fu grip.

For months afterward he’d loved to tell the story of our underwater engagement, making a joke of the near loss of the ring and his heroic treasure hunt for it—all part of the lore of us that he created.

I always smiled along as he regaled everyone he met with the tale, and never revealed my interpretation of the true moral of the story: Despite his good intentions, Michael never thought things all the way through—case in point, a four-thousand-dollar engagement ring nearly lost at sea in his ill-thought-out romantic gesture.

Or his asking me to marry him when he clearly hadn’t been ready for that.

Or, I thought, my anger rekindling as my tires crunched into the Bowditch Point parking lot and I caught sight of his achingly familiar figure, his coming back here and opening up a can of worms I’d long since sealed.

Michael stood from the picnic table he’d been slouched over and waved as soon as I stepped out of my car, but I didn’t bother to wave back. I went around and opened the passenger door for Jake.

Why had Michael come back here, anyway? I brooded, stalling by letting Jake pee on every weed in the gravel lot at the tip of Estero Island. To clear his conscience? And what could he possibly say that would make me feel any better about the worst thing I’d ever experienced?
I’m sorry, I freaked out
? That seemed obvious.
I’d met someone else
? My heart twisted at that one—it had entered my mind more than once that maybe Michael had been cheating on me and left me for her. But I’d made peace even with that. There was nothing I could do about that if it had happened, and it said more about Michael than it did about me.

It wasn’t you; it was me?

That one caused a bigger pang in my chest, but not because of Michael. Those were the words I’d said to Ben after I’d stupidly slept with Chip Santana.

I’d meant them—I hadn’t been ready for what Ben had been offering me at the time. But I could see now how hollow and useless they must have sounded to him.

Ben had been all the things I’d ever hoped for in a partner…and I hadn’t been ready for it because of what the man still standing beside the picnic table, hands by his sides and patiently waiting, had done to me two years ago.

No, there was nothing that Michael could say that I needed to hear anymore. And I wasn’t going to help him salve his conscience by letting him apologize and wheedle and excuse his actions. All I needed, I realized as Jake took a really impressive poo in the grass bordering Estero Boulevard, was to tell Michael how I felt. What I thought of him and what he had done.

I unrolled a baggie from the holder on Jake’s leash and leaned over with it to pick up his mess. The most eloquent possible statement of my feelings would be to bring it over to Michael’s table and leave it in his lap.

But my days of unbalanced broad gestures—another grim legacy of the Michael fallout—were finally behind me. I’d simply say what I needed to say and leave.

Jake didn’t seem to pick up on my state of mind, nearly pulling my arm from the socket as we neared Michael in his efforts to offer him his most unreserved affection.

“Hey, big guy! Well, you’re not so vicious after all, are you?” Michael said, car-washing the dog’s huge head as Jake buried it in the vee of his legs.

“I gave him his stand-down command,” I lied stiffly. “No need for a lawsuit.”

“What’s his name?”

“Spike.” I pulled Jake back harder than I needed to.

Michael looked up at me with the grass-colored eyes I’d gazed adoringly into so many times.

“Thank you for coming, Brook,” he said softly. “It’s more than I deserve.”

“I’m not staying. I just came to tell you some things.”

“None of it can be worse than what I’ve said to myself. But first will you let me tell you one thing?” he asked. “Not because I need it for my own peace of mind…although I do. But because you deserve to hear it. Please?”

I had loved this man so deeply that there were times it actually physically hurt my chest. He stood in front of me now with a nakedly pleading expression, those verdant eyes I knew so well meeting mine directly, intensely. Whatever had happened between us at the end, what we once shared was real.

“Fine,” I clipped out. “I’ll listen.” I took a seat on the bench across the nicked wooden table from him, pulling Jake in close beside me, and Michael settled onto his bench.

We sat in silence for a long moment, just looking at each other in a gaze that went on long enough to become painfully intimate. But he did not look away, and neither did I.

Finally he nodded once, cleared his throat, and then he spoke.

“Walking out on you was the best thing I ever did.”

six

For a moment I sat there, sure I’d misheard him.

But within a flash the words sank in, and brought up a surge of rage so strong and long-held I shook with it. He’d conned me into letting him talk first so he could
gloat
? I shot to my feet.

“You repulsive son of a bitch,” I said, my voice trembling with fury. “How
dare
you say that to me.” I shoved my way out from where I was sandwiched between the table and bench, Jake scrambling out of my path, and rounded the end to stand over Michael like an avenging Fury. “I may not have been perfect, and I may have done a lot of things wrong. But I
loved
you. I gave you everything I could, and maybe it wasn’t enough for you, but that was the best I had at the time. And you weren’t perfect either, you selfish piece of garbage.”

Michael was leaning back from my unmasked venom, his eyes stricken, but the words were fountaining out of me like pea soup out of Linda Blair, and I couldn’t stop.

“But I loved you for who you were, imperfections and all, because people are
flawed
,” I bit out. “We’re messy, and we can be assholes, but you know what? We
grow
. And love means growing
with
someone, encouraging every little seedling and
nurturing
that and cheering it on, not stomping out the first tendrils because they aren’t perfectly formed. Love is a
living
thing, not stagnant. And you were a shallow child who couldn’t see that, wasn’t willing to trust it—and didn’t have the courage to tell me that you couldn’t handle it.”

My chest felt as if it were on fire, and I didn’t realize I was starved for oxygen until I finally sucked in a breath.

“So you come here,” I said, fury still throbbing under the words, “and make all this effort to talk to me not even as some kind of bandage to your conscience—but to let me know how
unaffected
you are by what you did to me—to us? How
grateful
you are for it?” I pinned him with a gaze I hoped was filled with all the contempt I could muster. Michael’s hands clutched the lip of the table so hard the skin had whitened, but he made no move to leave or to defend himself. One tiny point in his favor.

“You may have hurt me, Michael,” I went on. “You broke my heart so badly I didn’t think I’d ever get over it. But I have. And you did me a favor, because I’m
glad
I felt all of that for you—even if it was a lie. It taught me that I’m alive, and I’m human, and I can be vulnerable. And I
wasn’t
foolish to love you, even though everything about your love was phony. It taught me how to really love someone, and someday I’ll find someone worthy of that.” My heartbeat stuttered as a picture of Ben flitted into my head, but I pushed it away. “I feel nothing for you anymore but pity. You’ll never even know what love is.”

I had nothing left to say to him. I stood there breathing heavily, Jake’s warm head pressing into my thigh as if in solidarity. My rage was gone, evaporated as if it had never been, except for an exhaustion left behind, and an inexplicable lightness so complete I thought I might just float up and away from him and be gone.

As if a burden I hadn’t realized I was still carrying had lifted.

“Goodbye, Michael,” I said, and somehow the words felt almost tender. I turned to go.

“Walking out was the best thing I ever did because it woke me up to what a dipshit I was,” he called out behind me.

I stopped, then turned around, my eyes narrowed. “Say more about that.”

He stood, watching me. “It’s true. Leaving…being away from you…it showed me exactly what I’d left behind.”

“And yet you stayed gone.”

“I did,” he agreed. “Because I didn’t know how to undo it.”

“There was no way to undo what you did,” I said.

“Yeah, I knew that. Which was why I…” He stopped, stepped out from behind the picnic table, running a hand through his brown hair in a frustrated gesture I knew well. “Can we talk this out a little closer than half a football field away?” His self-mocking grin tipped one side of his lips up as he held a hand toward me, palm up. “And if you’re through with them, can I please have my balls back? That was some speech.”

“Totally deserved,” I said, fighting a traitorous quirk of my lips.

“No argument.”

I could try to convince myself all I wanted that I didn’t need to know his explanation for what he did, but the truth was, now that I was right on the verge of hearing it, it would kill me not to.

Not that I was going to let him know that. I tossed up one shoulder in an unconcerned shrug.

“Fine. If it makes you feel better to tell me. Whatever.” I swanned back over to the picnic table as if I were disinterestedly checking out the four-dollar lunch buffet at Golden Corral, Benedict Jake trotting amiably over to Michael.

I sat back down across the table from him as he sank onto the other bench. And then, for the first time since he’d come back, I really let myself look at him.

Familiarity hit me with a jolt. The arch of his eyebrows, a shade darker than his ashy brown hair, fanning out at the outside edges into little individual hairs I used to smooth down with my thumb. The raised freckle on his right cheekbone I’d run my fingers over a hundred times. The shape of his earlobes—I could still remember the feel of them on my fingertips, unexpectedly tender and soft.

There were new creases beside the meadow-green eyes I’d always loved to look at, making him look a little bit older, but not in the bad way I might have wished for. Instead they lent him a hint of depth, a gravitas he hadn’t had before.

He was watching me too, examining my face with the same intentness I was no doubt training on him. I wondered what he saw, how the last two years had etched themselves into my face.

“It’s so good to see you again,” he said quietly, and I had to steel my softening heart.

“You said you wanted me to hear you out. So talk.”

He nodded. “Right. Okay. Brook…” He looked down at the table, then back up at me, shook his head. “The truth is, I panicked.”

“No kidding.” I wasn’t interested in glib explanations.

“You were…you are…so…” He gestured in the air, as if he thought he could pluck the right word out of it, and I waited with shameful anticipation, wanting even through my simmering anger to hear his compliments, his contrition, his flowery words of flattery and regret.

“Mature.”

I sat back, crossing my arms over my chest. “Gee, thanks, Petrarch.”

The indentations beside his eyes deepened as he offered a sheepish smile. “Yeah, I know—I suck at words; you know that from the band.”

It was true. It had been one of the things that always frustrated him—Michael could write music that plucked at the deepest chords of a listener’s soul, but he was unable to finish a song without his bandmate Chris, who penned the lyrics—his words the Cyrano to the beautiful but literally dumb Christian of Michael’s melodies.

“What I wanted to say…” he went on. “You’re a grown-up and you always were. And I was…well, a musician. You had it all together, and you always knew what needed to be done—and then you got it done. It made me feel like a kid, a stupid, irresponsible kid just drifting aimlessly through life.”

Something panged behind my ribs—a flutter of recognition…and guilt. That was how I’d thought of Michael, wasn’t it? A beautiful boy with his wild artist’s heart, and me, his island in a storm, his safe harbor, the anchor that grounded him.

Not the indispensable rock I thought I’d been for his flighty creative soul, but in the end, I’d bitterly admitted after his abandonment, the millstone that held him back, held him down.

Looking back I could see now how over and over I’d nagged—haranguing him about the bills, his late nights long after his gigs had ended as he jammed and rehearsed and partied with the band, finding a “safety net” job he’d never wanted to consider…Showing up on time for our cake tasting. The final straw that had sent Michael fleeing town—and fleeing me.

Shame rose up hot in my throat. “I never meant to make you feel like that,” I muttered. And I
hadn’t
meant to. But I knew now—knew all along, if I were honest—that I had done it anyway.

But Michael absolved me. “It wasn’t your fault. You were an adult wanting to have a relationship with another adult. And I wasn’t ready to grow up yet.”

“I didn’t let you be yourself,” I said to the tabletop. I wasn’t sure how I’d gone from righteous rage to apologizing. “I tried to…to shunt you into a mold that wasn’t right for you. To change you.”

“You tried to help me, Brook. I just wasn’t ready to admit I needed it.”

Finally I looked up and met his gaze, and it was steady on mine, the corners of the lips whose color and curve I’d known almost better than my own lifting slightly in a gentle smile. “I was an idiot. I freaked out and ran away like a kid because seeing how together you were all the time just made me feel like the mess I was. I hurt you…the person I loved more than anything…because I was a coward.” I was straining so hard to hear his quiet words I’d stopped breathing.

“And I’m sorry for that,” he said, the smile chased off his face. “Sorrier for that than anything I’ve ever done.”

The words undid me. A strangled noise rose out of my throat, and when Michael stood and came around to sit beside me, to wrap me in his arms, I didn’t even try to stop him. I clung on to him like a piece of floating flotsam after a shipwreck.

For the first time in two years I felt at peace.

It was dark by the time I drove back home, Jake curled into an impossibly tight ball on my passenger seat, his head wedged at an unnatural angle up the passenger door and his paws poking straight out almost to the dash.

Michael and I had talked for hours, sitting side by side on a rickety swing set rusted at the joints that groaned out a protest as we swayed gently back and forth, overlooking the placid gulf at low tide. We stayed away from the immediate aftermath of our broken engagement—it was still too tender a wound—but we caught each other up on the last two years of our lives, words pouring out of us. Making our peace together felt as though a part of me that had shriveled up was regenerating, tender spring leaves shooting from a withered brown branch. It was healing and comforting and soothing—but I didn’t know what it all meant.

I knew who would help me figure it out, though.

I was dialing Sasha before I even waved goodbye to Michael as I pulled out of my parking space, but the call went to voicemail—just as it had when I’d called her on the way here. Did she have a late interview today? I couldn’t remember. But it bothered me that I still hadn’t spoken to her since family dinner last night.

“Sasha…call me. I need to talk to you,” I said to her recording.

When I pulled into my garage I had to coax Jake inside the house—he seemed perfectly content to sleep where he was all night if only I’d agree to stay there with him, worn out from a taxing evening of trotting back and forth as we’d sat on the swing, trying to keep his head beneath our hands. When he saw me get out and open his door, though, he pulled himself wearily up and lumbered out his side of the car. I tried Sasha again, rolling into voicemail. “Sash, where are you? Please call me as soon as you get this.”

I fed Jake and myself, and as we both ate—him from his bowl beside the sliding door to the patio, me at the kitchen island beside him—my phone finally rang, and I lunged for it, hungry to talk things over with my best friend.

“Hi, Brook,” came the familiar voice, and my heart thumped involuntarily in my chest.

“Ben,” I said, and then promptly choked on the food I hadn’t bothered to swallow.

After a hacking fit that lasted at least close to thirty embarrassing seconds, during which my watering eyes didn’t allow me to find the “mute” button on my phone, I brought it back to my ear from where I’d tried to muffle it under my armpit. “Hey…how’s New York?” I said, as though there’d been no interruption.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh, fine,” I replied breezily. “Just a…a frog.” Ben was calling me on his romantic getaway with Perfect Pamela? Things couldn’t be all
that
romantic if he was thinking of me. “It’s really good to hear from you,” I said.

“I just wanted to make sure everything’s going okay with Jake. He being a good boy?”

“Oh…Yes, of course—wonderful. I love having him ba—having him here,” I corrected myself. “Are you guys having just the best time
ever
?”

“Well, I guess,” Ben said after a moment, seemingly taken aback at my overcompensation. “It’s not really all fun and games, of course.”

“It’s not?”

“Well, she’s been prepping for the interview, which is tomorrow, so we’ve pretty much stayed close to the hotel. But hopefully we’ll get out and see some of the sights after that.”

“The…the interview?” Was Pamela up for a job in New York? Was she moving away?

As quickly as I seized on that thought, a shard of ice slid into my chest. Was Ben planning to move
with
her?

“Well, yeah,” he said. “That’s why we came. For Doctors Without Borders?”

I didn’t know which was worse—the idea that Ben might have been moving away with Perfect Pamela, or that she wasn’t just perfect…she was saintly.

“Wow, well, that’s…Wow. Well, good luck to her. And to you. I mean, you’re not interviewing, of course. I just mean…Um, that’s…quite impressive, isn’t it? She’s…amazing…” I trailed off miserably.

“How are you doing, Brook?” Ben said into my self-pitying silence. “I mean with Jake?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Jake’s fine—I’m taking good care of him, and you have nothing to worry about. I promise.”

“I never worry about him when he’s with you.”

I blinked at his words. “That’s…Thanks,” I said quietly. After everything that had happened between us, I was floored that Ben could say he trusted me again.

“So we’ll be back Thursday,” he went on. “How about we meet somewhere dog-friendly, and I can buy you dinner that night to thank you?”

The idea of sitting through dinner with Ben and Pamela to hear all about their trip and her attempts to save the world practically triggered my gag reflex. “Why don’t I just swing him by your house when you two get back? I’m sure you’ll want to…you know…um, get unpacked.”