In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (33 page)

The Sinatra song ends, but neither Phoebe nor Cole immediately let go. She feels dots of sweat on her brow from the exertion, sees them on his forehead, too. Her hand still in his, Cole meets her eyes and smiles.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey.” She grins back.

“Don’t go; let me make you dinner.”

“It’s two in the morning.”

“Let me make you breakfast.”

“Okay.”

“For serious?”

She laughs at his confused look. “For serious.”

Her hand still in his, Cole leads her through the swinging doors to the kitchen. When Phoebe’s had occasion to go back there during the day, it’s always buzzing—line cooks, expediters, and waiters shouting back and forth in cooking shorthand and Spanglish, lively music blasting from an old boom box. Now everyone’s gone, everything clean and silent. Her footsteps and Cole’s echo on the linoleum.

“Do you like eggs?” he asks.

“Who doesn’t like eggs?” She giggles, feeling light.

“Good answer.”

In a smooth swoop, he lifts her at the waist and sits her on the counter. Telling her he’ll be right back, Cole disappears into the walk-in refrigerator, emerges with arms full of vegetables, cheese, and pancetta. It’s the first time she’s ever seen him cook, and she’s entranced by the rapid, sure movements of his hands as he dices, chops, and sautés.

“What are we having?” she asks.

“Frittata Florentine.” The dish already assembled, he slides it in the oven to bake and starts working on a creation in a saucepan.

“Can I help?”

“Well, we
do
need a taster.” He dips a wooden spoon into the pan, holds it to her lips.

The sauce, paradoxically rich and airy, is delicious, and she tells him so. Thinks he might kiss her; he doesn’t.

Instead he tells her to pick her favorite spot in the restaurant, and she selects the little banquette in the back corner. The table’s already set with silverware rolled in cloth napkins, but she relights votive candles as Cole brings out the food and a bottle of wine, lamenting the restaurant’s limited selection.

They don’t turn on the dining room lights, instead relying on the glow from the candles and the moonlight glare off the snow through the windows. He serves her, and she’s amazed at how he can make such simple things taste so divine. She’s reaching for more of the sauce, but he puts his hand on hers, holds it.

“I really, really want to kiss you,” he says.

She may respond, or maybe she simply doesn’t object. The space between them disappears. Lips and tongues and breath. Her hands are in his hair, his in hers. Wanting more of him, she pulls his shirt up and reaches for his chest, feels the soft layer of curly hair.

Maybe it happens because the skin of his torso isn’t smooth and waxed the way Adam’s is when he’s filming, or perhaps it reminds her of what Adam’s chest used to feel like. Either way, Phoebe explodes into tears and pulls away.

Cole freezes, his expression so much like a wounded dog it makes her cry harder. Unsure, he reaches out to her and asks what’s wrong, but she cashews farther into the corner.

“I can’t,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

A part of her wants to let him wrap her in his arms and offer comfort, but that seems doubly unfair. Sliding out of the banquette, she reassembles her clothes.

“I’m sorry,” she says again.

“Is it something I did?” he asks, and she vehemently shakes her head. “Then please, sit down. We don’t have to do anything.”

“You’re wonderful, I promise, I … have to go. I’m sorry.”

By the time he’s on his feet, she’s retrieved her coat and is out the large blue door. Then she’s in the cold, realizes it’s the first night since she started at Virgil’s that Cole hasn’t walked her to her car. And the parking lot
does
feel dangerous and foreboding. As soon as her engine turns, she’s barreling toward her apartment, tires skidding on ice, windshield still frosted.

Phoebe doesn’t check her phone until she’s in bed, Kraken licking her face with a worried, wet tongue. Cole left three messages. And there’s one from hours earlier in the night: Adam wanting to know if she’s still coming to LA for spring break next week. Only he doesn’t call it Los Angeles, he asks if she’s “coming home.”

*   *   *

The next day Phoebe should probably be working on her thesis but instead watches
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
on the classic movie station and DVR’d episodes of
E&E: Rising
that she hasn’t had time for between school and flirting with Cole at Virgil’s. She plays with the dog she’s probably been neglecting.

In the afternoon she has counseling hours, but it’s unusually quiet, with most students cramming for finals. This allows plenty of time to replay Cole’s devastated Labrador look when she burst into tears. Each revisitation brings nothing close to clarity, just another spin cycle of emotions.

Around three a freshman poly sci major comes in panicked about going home to Traverse City over break because a few nights ago he cheated on his long-distance girlfriend at a Kappa Sig party.

“Do I need to tell her?” he asks. “We’ve been together since sophomore year of high school, and nothing like this has ever happened before.”

As she advises Poly Sci to explore the reasons
why
he might have strayed (large amounts of marijuana appear to top the list, but also the notion that his life isn’t limited to Traverse City anymore), it’s not lost on Phoebe that, despite being nearly twice this boy’s age, her problems aren’t all that different.

She’s not on the schedule, but she heads to Virgil’s after she finishes, arrives as Cole is instructing the line cooks on preparing the day’s fish special. Speaking with so much authority, he doesn’t seem younger than she is.

Noticing her in the corner, a mix of surprise and happiness crosses Cole’s face, but it’s replaced with trepidation by the time he finishes with the staff and crosses the room to her. Asking if she wants to chat in his office, he leads her to the little room where she hasn’t been since her interview, and they take chairs at opposite ends of the old desk.

“Hey?” he says, as if it’s a question, as if she might turn and flee again if he hits some undefined trigger. “How are you?”

“I’m really sorry about last night.”

Waving away her apology, Cole tells her not to worry, glances down before meeting her eyes. “Look, we can pretend it never happened. Nothing has to be awkward. I’ll stop sexually harassing you—”

“No.”

With a weary smile, he asks, “So you’re okay with the harassment?”

“I kinda liked it, it’s not that…”

“You’re just still hung up on the guy from
Smallville
?”

“
E&E: Rising.
”

“I know, the one who’s sadly not gay.” He sighs. “Of all the restaurants in all the towns in all the world…”

“I walked into yours.” She puts her hand on his, unsure this is the right thing to do. “I really…” For some reason she thinks of Chase’s girlfriend Sharon Gallaher. “I adore you.”

“That’s good, because I’m crazy about you.”

“I kinda need to figure out a few things, though. I’m sorry.”

Squeezing her hand, he tells her to take her time. “Chicago, I suspect you’re worth the wait.”

*   *   *

Phoebe told Adam she’d take a cab from LAX, but he’s waiting for her at baggage claim.

He hugs her, and she instinctively responds. Immediately back in his world, the way she fits against him so well known. By the time she lets go, Phoebe feels overwhelmed and dizzy.

“You look great,” he says, taking her duffel bag from her shoulder.

“So do you.” And it’s true. Adam with short sandy stubble that’s grown back since filming broke for the holidays. Adam with his sinew and muscles, the dimple when he smiles, and the gray eyes she’s seen tear up only on screen.

“It’s late your time,” he says. “Wanna grab dinner?”

She mumbles something about not being hungry, the idea of sitting across the table from Adam, passing the salt, and not telling him about Cole is absolutely shattering.

Already he’s moving them toward the exits.

“Adam, wait,” she says, not clear what comes next, not at all sure the airport is the right venue, especially with two teen girls pointing at him and whispering. “I think I may have met someone.”

“Pheebs.” He puts a hand on her shoulder, massages the back of her neck. “You don’t owe me any explanation.”

When she doesn’t respond, he asks, “Did you fall in love with this guy?”

“No.” She looks down. “But I think maybe I could. I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t want to look up because either he’ll be wounded or he won’t, and either reaction will change things. And they’ve already changed so much in the past few months. Still studying the floor, she apologizes again, thinks she’s said she’s sorry more in the last week than at any other time in her life.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” His face shows nothing, but his tone is the tiniest bit off—a slight raise in his voice. “Look, you do what you need to do in Michigan, and we’ll figure this out when you’re back for real, all right?”

She feels herself nod, bites her lower lip to keep from crying.

“Come here.” He folds her back into his arms, and she pulls tight with all the strength she has. “No matter what, we’ll always be friends.”

“Really?” She clings to him in the airport. Even though they’re at arrivals, not departures, a place of reunions and safe returns. Can’t let go, keeps holding him, because when she releases her grip, everything will be different.

His lips on the crown of her head, words muffled in her hair: “Always … friends.”

Maybe he’s that good of an actor, or maybe it’s true, but in his embrace, she almost believes it.

11   successful ditching

NEW YORK

Diana Collins hands her a copy of
The Atheist in the Foxhole
, and Sharon feels a tickle in her sinuses as if she might cry, glances out the window to the Hudson River twenty stories below. New Jersey on the other side.

“I think the cover turned out really well, don’t you?” With her kitschy black glasses, Diana looks a little like Alice (no longer in features) at
Cincy Beat.

“It’s wonderful,” Sharon tells her editor, and it is. Greenlee on Hudson is a smaller press, resources more limited than at the big houses, but they did an excellent job with the jacket design—shades of blue, with the Chicago skyline bleeding off the edges. Though it’s not a particularly big print run, so far the few reviews have been good. Plus Julie at
Living
promised to get it in the books section when
Atheist
comes out next month.

Still, there is something profoundly sad about this moment, about this lovely book with its lovely cover and good press.

This story is completely different than the one she wrote and burned in the Madison Plaza, but it’s still a published novel, the thing she’d thought she wanted above all else then. And now that seems a ludicrous waste—the obsessing over agents and publishers—allowing the weight of that desire to buckle her relationship with Chase.

In the rational part of her brain, Sharon knows none of that killed Chase Fisher, that
she
didn’t kill Chase Fisher. That if he hadn’t been on that plane, he probably would have died on the hardwood floor of their apartment or in the back of a cab on the way home from a night of drinking with the sell-side guys. But it jigsaws her heart so much that, even now, she still can’t let herself think too long about the tortured way Chase had looked at her when she asked why they weren’t getting married, the way he’d been so defeated when he came back to get his things before going to Chicago. To think that she made his last few weeks so incredibly miserable.

In many ways, she knows, the story she ended up writing is her apology for all of that, her wish for him, for what could have been. But it’s not enough. Nothing could (or will) ever be enough.

“You sure you don’t have time for coffee?” Diana asks, and Sharon shakes her head.

A few weeks ago, she’d left
The Eye
for a staff position on
The Enquiring Sun
’s features desk and doesn’t want to chance aggravating her new editors by being gone too long. She’d simply wanted to stop by the Greenlee office and get a few copies of the book when Diana told her they’d come in. They talk briefly about the Web site one of the designers at the paper set up for Sharon and about her scheduled readings at area bookstores and coffee shops.

“Well, I think the whole thing turned out great. Congratulations.” Diana shakes her hand.

“Thank you again for every—” Sharon is saying when something through the window catches her attention. Diana follows her eyes.

“Is that a plane on the river?”

CHICAGO

You and your sister are back at Northwestern Memorial (the hospital where your mother died nearly twenty years earlier), only now you’re here for your father. Dad isn’t dying, but two days ago, he did have bypass surgery serious enough to warrant both Karen and Natasha flying home and you taking a week off from Advantage Electric.

Since Dad came out of the ICU yesterday, the four of you have been watching TV, playing and abandoning games of Scrabble, and talking about Karen’s kids and how Natasha has to take a bus to the high school for geometry because she’s two years ahead of the other eighth graders in math. All the normal family-type things you never did before as a family.

It’s been sort of fun, all things considered, and your father keeps thanking everyone for keeping him company. Still, you can sense his restlessness at being stuck in bed with the nurses (well, not the good-looking young blonde) and doctors who poke and prod and talk about all the activities he shouldn’t do now.

He’s actually been bored and restless since June, when he turned sixty-five and had to retire from United. And you’d found yourself stopping by a couple of times a week, sometimes to watch the Bears or Bulls, but more often to share sketches of your latest compressor design or get his input on taming the machines you work to improve.