a deep breath and slow down,” Stephanie said. She pulled out a chair and motioned to him. He sat and furiously rubbed his head with his hands and gave a sharp groan. His unwashed hair stuck out at odd angles, the day’s beard darkened the lower half of his face, and his eyes were bloodshot and a little crazed.
“Maybe she just needs to know how upsetting this is to you. Maybe there’s a way to fix the story. She’s writing fiction, for God’s sake. It’s one story—”
“It’s not even finished.”
“Okay, so it’s just a draft. Even better. Let’s take one thing at a time.” She managed to calm Leo a bit and eventually coax him upstairs to shower and change while she ordered takeout. She reassured him that when he came back downstairs, they’d figure out how to talk to Bea who might be many things but was not cruel or unkind.
Stephanie remembered her earlier phone conversation with Bea and wished she’d known then what she knew now. She could have set the stage for discouraging her, warned her that Leo was not happy. Shit. Her announcement would have to wait for another day. This was not the night to talk to Leo about fatherhood, not when he was already feeling paranoid and trapped, blindsided.
Stephanie started leafing through her take-out menus, annoyed. This was the part she hated, the part of a relationship that always nudged her to bail, the part where someone else’s misery or expectations or neediness crept into her carefully prescribed world. It was such a burden, other people’s lives. She did love Leo. She’d loved him in a host of different ways at different times in their lives, and she did want whatever their current thing was to continue. Probably. But she always came back to this: She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot. Or even better, how to sink in and absorb its particular comforts.
On the one hand, she knew that Leo was never going to really change. On the other hand, she knew that Leo had spoiled something for her. She wasn’t going to enter into the type of willful ignorance that life with Leo might require, but she wasn’t going to settle for less than the charge, the excitement she felt when Leo was around. She was open to love, but she was best at managing her own happiness; it was other people’s happiness that sunk her.
She realized (abstractly, she knew) that parenthood was nothing more than being responsible for someone else’s happiness all the time, day after day, probably for the rest of her life, but it had to be a little different. It couldn’t be the same as feeling responsible for another adult who came to the party full of existing hopes and behaviors and intentions. She and her lovers had always managed to break what they built between them. She never figured out how to nurture the affection so it grew; it always ended up diminished. She knew parents and children could break each other’s hearts, but it had to be harder, didn’t it?
Stephanie bent to pick up a torn page from the floor and placed it on the table with the rest, which were in disarray. She gathered the pages and put them in order. She sat and started reading from the beginning.
LEO DID FEEL BETTER AFTER A SHOWER. He’d made the water as hot as he could bear, and standing in Stephanie’s bathroom as he wiped steam off the mirror, he could see how pink and healthy his skin was. He had lost weight in rehab, and all the running he’d been doing showed. He hadn’t let himself go, that was for sure. As he toweled off, he realized that Stephanie was probably downstairs reading. Good. That was easier than explaining to her—in his own words—the details of the accident and its aftermath. Stephanie would know how to handle this; she was an expert at telling people their work needed to be euthanized—she delivered that news all the time—and she was going to have to help him bury Bea’s story.
Without even trying, Leo could come up with a list of people, starting with Nathan Chowdhury, who would be only too thrilled to write a scathing exposé about his accident, the hand job, the poor caterer