Leave Me

“Me, too,” Oscar said, following his sister.

Elizabeth stood. “Jason,” she said, greeting him with a cordial kiss on the cheek.

“Elizabeth, so good to see you,” he replied.

Jason went to check his e-mail. Liv returned in her costume, which was less a pretty witch than a slutty one. It was also about five sizes too big so it would need to be altered. Well done, Jason.

“She looks like one of those awful child beauty queens,” Maribeth whispered as Liv admired herself in the mirror.

“I was thinking more dwarf prostitute,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, god. You’re right.”

For a second, they laughed, easily, like before.

“Mommy had a operation and she said it hurts to laugh,” Oscar said. He was dressed as a policeman, which made his protectiveness even sweeter.

“It’s okay, Oskie. It’s Elizabeth. You remember her?” Maribeth said.

“She’s Mommy’s best friend and now she runs the magazine where Mommy works,” Maribeth’s mother explained, returning with wine. She turned to Elizabeth. “It was so generous of you to give her that job.”

“I had to snap her up before someone else did,” she said. “She’s the best in the business.”

Maribeth admired, as she always had, how well Elizabeth handled her mother. Like now, Maribeth’s mother was placing a wineglass in front of Elizabeth and Elizabeth was covering the rim with her fingers until the moment her mother looked about to pour right through her hand and then she accepted the wine as if she’d asked for it all along.

“Do you think you could get us some mineral water, Mom?” Maribeth asked.

“Of course!” her mother chirped.

“Speaking of work, I’ll probably be able to start back next week,” Maribeth said, though that seemed optimistic. Taking a shower was still an enormous exertion. “Working from home maybe.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I know you must be scrambling. But I think I’ll be able to dig out of the hole.”

“Don’t give it another thought. Take as much time as you need.” Elizabeth waved her hand, a perfect expression of noblesse oblige.

When Elizabeth said things like that, Maribeth felt, not for the first time, that she didn’t know her at all anymore. Elizabeth had once been as broke and hungry as Maribeth, but now she seemed to regard jobs as something one did not for necessity but for fulfillment, like a hobby. Though maybe that wasn’t fair. Elizabeth probably took her hobby more seriously than Maribeth took her job.

“Next week,” Maribeth repeated. “I have some ideas about who to farm the work out to. And I think I can probably do big-picture edits now even.”

“It’s taken care of.” Elizabeth’s tone was not sharp, exactly, but definitely authoritative, bosslike, and Maribeth felt put into place.

Elizabeth grimaced. “I only mean the important thing is for you to get better,” she added in a softer tone.

“I appreciate that but I still have to pay my bills, Elizabeth.”

She hated herself for saying that. It made her sound petty and jealous of Elizabeth’s life, of her money, of the job. When if she was jealous of anyone, it was of her old self, the one who could rightfully call Elizabeth her best friend. The one who still had ambition and focus and wasn’t so harried all the time. The one who had a heart that worked properly.

Elizabeth looked so mortified that for a second Maribeth feared she might do something hideous, like try to loan her money. But she only whispered, “Please don’t worry.”

Liv reappeared, changed back into her clothes, carrying a set of paper dolls. “Want to play?” she asked Elizabeth.

In the early days, Elizabeth had been, if not a constant presence in the twins’ life, a regular one. In the past few years, however, as Oscar and Liv slowly animated into actual humans, Elizabeth had receded. So Maribeth wasn’t entirely surprised when she stood up and told Liv that she’d love to but she had to get back to work.

After she was gone, Maribeth offered to play paper dolls. Liv looked at her as if she were the consolation prize, which was basically how Maribeth felt about every friend she’d made since Elizabeth. But Liv said okay.

7

A week after she got home, Maribeth had her follow-up with Dr. Sterling. Her mother offered to take her, but the thought of the tag-team assault of Mom and Dr. Grandpa was more than she could bear. Still, she knew she shouldn’t go alone. Couldn’t go alone, really. What if she couldn’t get a cab home? What if the elevators stopped working? Things that had never occurred to her before now kept her up at night.

“Do you think you could maybe take me?” she asked Jason the night before the appointment. He had been working from home, but long, frantic hours—he was still monitoring the migration of thousands of audio files in advance of that planned database upgrade. She heard her tone, like a supplicant’s. It made her angry, though she wasn’t sure at whom. “You can bring your laptop with you.”

“Sure,” Jason said.

She felt it then: the gratitude, the resentment, seemingly competing emotions that these days twined together like strands of DNA.

She was glad she’d suggested he bring his laptop because they waited nearly two hours for her appointment with Dr. Sterling. All the while Maribeth seethed. And worried about what the seething was doing to her heart, which made her seethe more. Shouldn’t a cardiologist know better?

She had disliked Dr. Sterling from the moment she’d met him in the ER. His bedside manner had not improved during her week in the hospital, when he treated her with an obsequious condescension, always talking about getting “Mommy” back home to her babies. Jason said he was scared she was going to sue, but Dr. Sterling hadn’t performed the angiogram, and he’d faulted Maribeth’s own arteries for the rupture—they were tortuous, he said—and anyhow, everything else had turned out fine and she wasn’t going to sue. But she did need to find herself a new doctor, one she would choose and not simply get assigned to.