Learning to Stay (27 page)

“I’m sorry,” I mumble, because I’m not sure what else to say. I am, after all, an adult. The firm contracts with me to do work for it, but it doesn’t own me—technically speaking, of course. Susan shakes her head, biting the edge of her lip. It’s a disgusted look if I ever saw one.

Then I see what she is holding in her hand along with a manila file folder: last month’s billable report, nicknamed “the Rainmaker,” which breaks down by attorney, division, and case the hours billed and hours worked, and how much money each attorney has made the firm that month. I haven’t seen a copy yet—partners are the very first to receive them—but considering everything that’s been going on with Brad for the past couple of months, I don’t need to see the report to know what my numbers must look like. Had Susan felt inclined to show me the report, I’d half expect to find a little picture of a desert where my effective rate should be.

I’m not sure how to break out of this little scrum of ours in the hallway. I could ask Susan if there’s anything she needs help finishing and tell her I’ll do the same with Gordon and Crane, but I’m afraid all that will earn me is a snide look or comment instead of a clear answer as to how she’d prefer I proceed. Or, I could apologize once again and provide an excuse of somewhere I need to be—a dentist or doctor appointment, an outside meeting or board obligation, dinner, or, more plainly, anywhere but here.

And that’s precisely when my phone rings. I reach into my bag, pull it out, and see that it’s Brad. Or, it’s someone calling from a 906 area code—Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I need to take this.”

As she walks past me, Susan says, “If you managed your professional
life as vigilantly as your personal life, you’d be one hell of an attorney, Counselor.”

By the time I’m able to answer my phone, it’s stopped ringing. And by the time I make it down the elevator to where I get enough reception to call back out, all the phone on the other end does is ring in response.

As I leave the office, every last nerve in me is on edge.

I started out wanting to be a lawyer because, as a newly orphaned adult, it seemed to offer the best combination of good-paying and interesting work that could, as my mom used to like to say, support me “in the manner to which I have become accustomed.” This always made me laugh, because as the daughter of a line worker and a teacher, I hadn’t become accustomed to much more than a safe place to live and a new outfit from JCPenney at the start of every school year. I knew that was much more than a lot of other kids in southern Michigan had, but it was still a far cry from a car on my sixteenth birthday or a trust fund set up in my name.

I liked law school well enough (as much as one can like law school) and even my first year at Early, Janssen, and Bradenton. But something has started to change. Now I’m unsure I want Susan’s job, and I’m doubly unsure I really want to turn into someone like Susan.

Added to that professional doubt is a future with Brad that’s blurry with uncertainty—all of which equals an Elise who is in desperate need of someone to lean on. So I stop at the store just off Capitol
Square that specializes in coffee, wine, and chocolate, and I pick out a gourmet candy bar with bacon in it and a highly recommended bottle of cabernet—Darcy’s favorite. It’s a peace offering of sorts, given that we haven’t talked in weeks and haven’t seen each other in twice that time.

Darcy’s porch light is on and I can see her moving around, a shadow beyond the curtains, as I park in front of her house. Normally I’d walk right up to the door, rap twice, and open it, but I’m out of the routine of coming here. I’ve been wallowing in my own life, too taxed to take on the problems of someone else’s. But as Darcy opens the door, I wish I had set aside a handful of minutes here or there to check in on her. She looks thin and drawn and tired.

She waves me in and asks if I’d like anything. I hold up the bottle of cabernet and the bar of chocolate. “You’re a lifesaver,” she says, but she doesn’t seem to mean it, and I don’t believe it, either. One look at Darcy and I feel guilty for coming here to dump my problems onto her, rather than out of concern for her or a pure need to spend time with my friend.

I settle in on the couch as Darcy opens the wine and brings two glasses—mine poured about half as full because she knows it’s not really my thing, but that I like to have whatever she’s having.

“It got cold out there,” she says.

“It was nice before, but yeah, as soon as that sun went down,” I say, fake shivering and rubbing each hand on the opposite shoulder. We chat about Mia and how big she’s getting and what she does and says now, because it changes by the day. We discuss Darcy’s plans to return to teaching in the fall, and the summer trip her whole extended family is taking to Florida. Our stilted conversation strikes me as ridiculous—probably it does Darcy, too. We’re out of practice with each other and it shows. But it’s like wading into cold water: No one wants the shock that comes with a sudden dunk. Instead, you
insert a toe, then a foot, and then let the rest of the leg and torso follow slowly behind.

So that is what we do. After a while, Darcy asks me how work is going. It’s a generic, predictable, ace-in-the-hole question. Any other night I’d say that it was fine, that it’s keeping me busy, or I’d supply some other rote response.

“I don’t know if I can do this, Darce,” I say, and to my surprise, I have a sudden urge to cry. My eyes well. I bite my lip to stop them from spilling over.

“Your job?”

I shrug. “Everything, I guess. My job. My life.”

I don’t know how to come out and reveal what’s ricocheting around inside me—all of the thoughts and feelings and second guesses—to Darcy. She doesn’t know how scary it is when Brad goes a million miles away and leaves his body here with those black, black eyes. She can’t know how it feels to have to tell myself, “He didn’t mean it,” after he clocks me in the face when I startle him awake; and how saying it doesn’t make it all hurt any less. Or how it feels to have sent the man I loved off to war, only to have a different one returned to me. And sitting here, I realize that I can’t tell her. For Darcy, even eyes like tar would be better than ones made only of memory. Arms of flesh and bone are easier to wrestle than a ghost’s.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

I am the wife of a man who went off to war and never came back,
I want to tell her.
I am, more or less, just like you—something like a widow
. But looking at Darcy—at the circles under her eyes and the lip that quivers now and then—I know that I am not that, either. I am not a wife, and I am not a widow. And I’m not sure how to play the role in between. That’s what’s wrong.

Darcy isn’t strident with me. She’s not accusatory. She just doesn’t understand. She can’t. From her vantage point, I have a great job, a
flesh-and-blood husband, and a future full of possibility. Darcy’s own future is chock-full of what-might-have-beens.

So I push everything back down inside and cork it. “No, it’s fine,” I say, brushing my original volley aside. “Just a bad day at the doughnut factory is all.”

“Everyone has ’em,” Darcy says.

I nod. I sip my wine. I think of Susan’s cutting comments and Brad curled up with a dog on the floor of his dad’s barn, sleeping closer than he has to me in months.

“Everyone does,” I say.

“Hey,” she says, “how’s Brad doing?”

I fix her with a smile. “Oh, he’s doing great,” I say. “Really good.” Because this is what she needs to hear.

The next day, at the weekly status meeting, the partners direct all of their questions on
Rowland
to Susan and Zach while I follow their exchange across the conference table and back like a Ping-Pong match. Zach doesn’t even try to loop me into the briefing. Based on a few Fridays I’ve taken off and a couple months of subpar Rainmakers, it’s as though they’ve already determined that I’m not partner quality. I am as invisible as air.

But I’m the one who has slept, eaten, and breathed
Rowland v. Champion Construction
for the past few weeks. Even if I didn’t before, I now know this case better than anyone in this room—perhaps better than anyone in this room and the conference room for the opposing counsel combined. Nicky Rowland’s medical history? That’s in the red binder. The history of Champion Construction’s inspection violations? Black binder, Tab F. Motion in limine? Blue binder, Tab C. I have even gone so far as to treat Judge Cianflone’s law clerk to lunch on my own dime in order to get a read on the propensities, peccadilloes, and disposition we’ll be dealing with in court, and I typed that
up, along with summaries and verdicts of similar cases he’s heard, into a comprehensive, ten-page memo. All that, and I might as well not even be sitting here.

“What about summary judgment?” Crane Early asks Zach.

Zach starts to talk, but I jump in. “Actually,” I say, “we do have a motion on that prepared. I think it’s at least worth submitting.”

The three partners and Zach all turn to stare at me as though I’m a child who’s inserted herself into a conversation at the adult table.

Crane doesn’t even acknowledge that I’ve spoken. “Zach, Susan,” he says, “what do
you
think?”

Zach and Susan answer, but I don’t hear what they say because my pulse is drumming a hard, angry beat in my ears. My face is hot and, I’m sure, flushed red. I stare out the window and count the columns adorning the Capitol dome, which is a dingy gray in the fading late-afternoon light. It does this—changing color and degrees of brilliance with the weather—as though its surface were the live skin of a chameleon instead of inanimate white granite.

Zach tries to stop me as we file out of the conference room at the meeting’s end, but I pretend I don’t hear him, and slip ahead of some of the other associates and then into the restroom, where I hide long enough to ensure he isn’t lying in wait for me in the hallway. Then I head out.

I cut through the State Capitol building to State Street. My stomach is grumbling and I realize I haven’t eaten yet today. One of my favorite eateries—a little Nepalese place that’s supposedly one of only a handful of its kind in the country, though that could be local urban legend because it seems like a tough fact to try to substantiate—is still serving lunch.

I duck inside and order chicken palau, which I proceed to push around on the plate with the dal when it arrives, my thoughts on the
status meeting, my run-in with Susan, and the number listed under my name and effective rate on the Rainmaker, released to the associates this morning—a paltry twenty-three dollars in comparison with nearly every other associate’s rates, most of which fall in the one-hundred- to one-hundred-fifty-dollar range.

I look out at the bustle of State Street. The sun is shining, the air is blowing warm, and energy radiates from college kids walking, biking, and running to and fro. Though this is all nearly enough to convince a person that anything is possible on this fine day, I feel trapped. Stuck. I am a good attorney. I know this. But since yesterday, all of Crane Early’s complaints about the junior associate who had the nerve to ask for a Friday and an entire weekend off for her own wedding keep echoing in my head. From what I remember, she was a good attorney, too. And from what I remember, she worked every day up until the hour she quit, trying—and failing—to convince the upper ranks of that.

I look at the crowd streaming in either direction past my table. The college students and young, smartly dressed politicos—mostly Democrats at the moment, though that could easily change come November—heading back and forth from the Capitol and important lunches or afternoon shopping, are only a handful of years removed from where I am now. It might as well be light-years. Their auras drip with possibility. They can still do anything, be anything. Most of them don’t have mortgages or spouses or any real responsibility that can’t be shrugged off at will. They can quit jobs and boyfriends or girlfriends and take off to work on a cruise ship or teach English in some far-flung country. They are still eligible to try out for
American Idol
or
The Real World
—both of which have an upper age limit that I’ve already passed.

My BlackBerry buzzes and I check it to find an e-mail from Sondra—her weekly lobbying effort to get me to visit her in California. This one contains only the subject line,
Come clear your head by
the sea
, and an attached picture of a clapboard cottage on a sandy beach, saved with the name,
Sondra’s_summer_rental_Carlsbad
.

I wish I could take Sondra up on her offer. I wish I could walk away from my life as I could have done ten, even five, years ago. But somewhere along the way, things have gotten complicated. Not so long ago, I was one of these people walking by my table—promise incarnate. Now, I have a job that I feel slipping from me the tighter I try to hang on to it—and a job that I’m not sure I even want to hang on to; a best friend who might not be that anymore; and a husband who is gone in more ways than one.

I feel like I’m being buried under a mountain of snow: Each flake on its own is falling light and fluffy, but taken together, the weight is immense. It blocks out the sun.