Page 135 of Backslide
“Move to Cali and be near us?” Sabrina says, her eyes brightening. “You need a new job anyway! You guys seemed so psyched together yesterday. Before it all happened. I haven’t seen you that lit up in years.”
And I know they both just want me to be happy.
“I just can’t,” I say gently. “It requires more faith than I have left.”
30NOAHTODAY
She wasn’t wrong. Nell.
Well, she was. But not about this.
I’m a surgeon. Better not to hurt my hands. Not over some asshole I outgrew decades ago.
Maybe at some point I would have seen something worth saving in my friendship with Damien. Some relic of a boyhood brother who deserved a chance, simply because of our shared history.
But I’ve learned a lot about history this week. A lot about the past. There are things worth saving. And there are things it’s wiser to let go.
Now I realize he was never who I wanted him to be, who I told myself he was despite all evidence to the contrary, because it was convenient. Because he presented a certain version of himself to me—one that flattered my weakest parts. Made me feel secure.
He was always two people. At least two. And I don’t like any of them.
So, when I see him seated near the Japanese stall at SFO’s food court, eating ramen out of a red plastic to-go bowl, I just keep walking. And later, when he rolls into the Hudson News as I’m leaving and puts a hand out for a pound, I keep walking too. No fuss, no foul. Just like I don’t know him.
Because I don’t.
“C’mon, Noah!” he calls after me.
But I’ve got nothing to say.
“Stupid fuck,” he mumbles, loud enough for me to hear.
I shake my head and keep on moving.
And, honestly, it doesn’t haunt me. It’s like it’s something I’ve known for a long time that I have finally looked at in the light.
Anyway, I have more important parts of the past to ruminate over. Parts that are harder to leave behind. Parts that I revisited and proved even more valuable than I could ever have imagined, notless.
I board the plane. I wait patiently while people try to force their enormous bags—the ones weallknow are too big—into small overhead compartments. I stand up twice to let others into the middle and window seats. I try to work. I fail to work. I watch a third of aSpider-Manmovie I’ve seen twice before. I put my seat back in the upright position.
And all the time all I can think about is her.
And it doesn’t stop after we taxi and I deplane. Or after I grab my car from the airport parking lot, settling back into something that at least feels familiar, and pay the obscene long-term parking bill via the person in the booth. Or when I drive up La Cienega toward the green hills in stop-and-go traffic, past billboards for movies that will come and go.
It doesn’t stop back at my house, up in the hills. Where I gaze out my picture windows at the canyon below—and it feels empty instead of full like it did before. Or even the next day, when I go to the office and leave a box of Sonoma County lemon cookies in theshared kitchen as a peace offering for having temporarily abandoned my staff. Or when my administrators, Peggy and Marco, tell me the gossip that I missed—how Carl at the radiology practice down the hall mixed up the chartsagain.
Nell is everywhere and she is nowhere. And I can’t escape this feeling, like somehow I failed. Like, for a second, I had something precious in my grasp but I let it drop. Wasn’t quick enough to save it.
I think about the baggage claim area and that stupid green suitcase and her crazy hair. I think about making iced coffee and walking in on her in the sauna and shucking oysters—or not shucking oysters. I think about arguing and getting soaked and making terrible pasta. I think about her citrus perfume lingering on my clothes. I think about her body in the dim light, how she groaned when she bit into that Charleston Chew. The way eventually she fell asleep on her side, her forehead almost touching mine.
I think about her. And it’s eating me alive.
I am a fucking wreck.
Because she could have tried! And this is the same problem as before. Years and years ago when she opted to leave without me. Not to find a new plan for our new life, together. I fucked up, sure. But she could have tried;wecould have tried. To find a solution, an answer, at least some attempt at seeing if this thing could withstand our respective stubbornness this time.
And, sometimes, if I’m honest, I’m even confused about who I’m angry at—is it the Nell from now or the Nell from before?
Who is the most frustrating Nell?
