The Girl He Used to Know (Page 4)

“Sure.” She takes a step toward the doorway, hesitating when she sees the size of the crowd packed tightly inside the small coffee shop. She picked the venue, but I’m the one who chose the time and maybe she would have preferred to meet earlier or later to avoid the rush. If memory serves, this particular location has a spacious outdoor patio, so maybe it doesn’t matter. Instinctively, I stretch my hand toward her lower back to guide her, but at the last minute I pull it away. I used to be one of the few people whose touch Annika could tolerate. In time she grew to love the feeling of my arms around her, my body becoming her own personal security blanket.

But that was years ago.

Slowly, we make our way to the counter and place our orders. In college, she would have asked for juice, but today we both order iced coffee.

“Have you eaten breakfast yet?” I ask, pointing toward the pastry case.

“No. I mean I didn’t know if you’d already eaten so I ate a little but not really enough to count as a full breakfast, but I’m not hungry now.”

* * *

As the words tumble from her mouth, she looks down at her shoes, over my shoulder, toward the barista. Anywhere but at me. I don’t mind. Annika’s mannerisms are like slipping into a comfortable pair of shoes, and though I feel bad admitting it, even to myself, her nervousness has always made me feel at ease.

I try to pay, but she won’t let me. “Is it okay if we sit outside?” she asks.

“Sure.” We sit down at a table shaded by a large umbrella. “You look great, Annika. I should have told you the other day.”

She flushes slightly. “Thanks. So do you.”

It’s instantly cooler due to the umbrella, and the color on Annika’s cheeks fades away. When I lift my glass to put the straw in my mouth, she tracks the movement of my left hand and it takes me a second to realize she’s checking for a wedding ring.

“How’s your family?” I ask.

She looks relieved that I’ve started with something so neutral. “They’re fine. My dad retired and he and my mom have been traveling. Will’s still in New York. I saw him a few months ago when I flew out to see Janice. She lives in Hoboken with her husband and their six-month-old daughter.”

“So you’ve stayed in touch with her?” Janice was always more than just Annika’s roommate, so it shouldn’t surprise me that their friendship is still going strong.

“She’s my closest friend even if I don’t get to see her that often.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “Do you live around here?”

“West Roosevelt.”

“I’m on South Wabash,” she says.

A ten-minute walk is all that separates us. “I wonder how many times we’ve come close to running into each other.”

“I wondered that too,” she says.

“I wouldn’t have pegged you for an urban dweller.”

“It’s only a twenty-minute walk to work, and if the weather’s bad, I can take the L. I have a driver’s license, but I don’t own a car. It’s not like I really need one to get around.”

“How do you like working at the library?”

“I love it. It’s all I ever wanted to do.” She pauses and then says, “You must like your job, too. You’re still working there ten years later.”

“It’s a solid company, and they’ve made good on all their promises.” I’m even a bit further along on the career path they laid out for me during the interview process, and most days I like my job just fine. Some days I hate it, but then I remind myself that, just like Annika said, it’s all I ever wanted.

“Do you still swim?”

“Every morning at the gym. What about you? What do you like to do in your free time?”

“I volunteer at the animal shelter when I can, and I have a part-time position at the Chicago Children’s Theatre. I help teach an acting class on Saturday mornings. I wrote a play.”

“You wrote a play? That’s amazing.”

“It was just a fun thing to do. The kids did a great job with it. I’m working on another one right now, for them to perform at Christmastime.”

“How old are they?”

“I work with several different age groups. The youngest are four and five and the oldest are in the nine-to-eleven range. They’re a great bunch of kids.”

“Do you have any of your own?”

Her eyes widen. “Me? No.”

“Are you married? Or in a relationship?”

She shakes her head. “I’ve never been married. I was seeing someone, but we broke up. Are you married?”

“I was. We divorced about a year and a half ago.”

“Were you married to that girl? The one you told me about on my answering machine?”

So, I guess she did get the message after all. “Yes.”

“Do you have kids?” She looks apprehensive as she waits for my answer.

“No.”

Liz had very clear goals in mind when it came to her career, and she wasn’t going to stop climbing the corporate ladder until she shattered the glass ceiling. Her passion for business was like a homing beacon when I first arrived in New York, beckoning me toward her. I was all for Liz climbing the corporate ladder, but each rung had a timeline attached and when she informed me she wouldn’t be ready to start a family until she was forty-one, and what did I think about freezing her eggs—I thought she was kidding.

She wasn’t.

It’s funny how the very trait that attracts you to someone is the same trait you can’t stand when you’re untangling yourselves from each other. And not funny ha-ha. Funny like how in the world could you not have seen it?

I’d agreed to meet with Annika today because I’d hoped for some answers, but by the time we finish our coffee we’ve progressed no further than idle small talk. She is in no way prepared to revisit what happened between us, at least not yet, and it would be unnecessarily harsh to push her.

“Ready?” I ask when nothing but melting ice remains in our cups. She stands in response and as we walk, she mentions how much she loves her apartment’s proximity to the park and museums, and points out her favorite places to grab takeout or go shopping. Her neighborhood provides everything she could ever want, and Annika the urban dweller makes perfect sense now. She lives in a bubble where nothing takes her out of her comfort zone, and everything is within her reach.

I should have realized it immediately: Annika is doing fine. There’s no one here to save.

As we approach her apartment building, her bouncing stride and nervous chatter ramps up as her anxiety reaches a fever pitch. Has she been waiting for me to say something and now that we’re almost home, she’s afraid a confrontation is imminent?

I grab her hand because I don’t know how else to still her, and the memory that slams into me stops me in my tracks. We’re not on S. Wabash anymore but rather the doorway of her college apartment building. Her palm is small and soft in mine, and it feels exactly the way it did when I held it for the first time.

“We don’t have to talk about it.” She stops moving and the look of sheer relief on her face tells me I was right. There won’t be any explanations today, but I’m not sure I have the fortitude to keep peeling back Annika’s layers in order to obtain them. “I just wanted to know if you were okay.”

She takes a deep breath. “I’m okay.”

“Good.” I glance toward the entrance of her building. “Well, I should get going. It was great seeing you again. Thanks for the coffee. Take care, Annika.”

Though she has trouble deciphering other people’s facial expressions, her face is an open book and no one would ever have trouble understanding hers. I’ve always wondered if she exaggerates them to help people understand what she’s thinking, the way she wishes they would for her. I find it endearing. When she comprehends that one coffee date is the extent of our reunion, she looks crushed. Though it isn’t intentional and it’s certainly not retaliatory, I have the fleeting thought that this is the first time I’ve ever done anything to hurt her.

And it feels awful.

But maybe my failed marriage isn’t far enough behind me. That’s the thing no one tells you about divorce. No matter how much you and your spouse agree that the relationship is broken, it hurts like hell when you go your separate ways, and the pain follows you around until one day, it doesn’t. It’s only recently that I’ve noticed its absence, and I have no desire to gamble on replacing it with more heartbreak.

I don’t want to leave.

I want to pull Annika close, twist my fingers in her hair and kiss her the way I used to.

Instead I walk away from her feeling more than a little lonely and very, very tired.

6

Annika

THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

1991

One week after I beat Jonathan at chess, Eric sat down across from me a few minutes before Sunday night’s club meeting began, thus restoring order to the chaos he’d inflicted upon my world.

“Tell me this is the year you’re going to agree to compete,” Eric said.

“You know it’s not.”

“You could if you wanted to.”