F*ck Marriage(64)

“Did they arrest the driver?”

“Yes,” I say.

An officer came by this morning to let me know. The driver’s name is Rey and he claims he had a seizure and didn’t know he hit the women and child until ten minutes later when he woke up in his car a block away. The police aren’t buying it. I told him I was her husband and now all of the nurses are calling me Mr. Tarrow.

“Pearl and I are leaving for Missouri tonight.” He rubs a hand along his jaw while staring at Billie.

“I’ll be here,” I say. “I’ll stay with her.”

Jules grabs onto my arm and squeezes slightly. She’d suggested canceling her trip home, but I told her not to. Billie would be mortified if she knew Jules had forgone Christmas with her family to sit at the hospital.

“Somehow that doesn’t comfort me,” Woods says.

His eyes leave Billie and suddenly he’s studying my face. I clench my fists. The fact that he’s here infuriates me. Forty-eight hours ago he was having sex with Billie while his fiancée waited at home for him. I am sick of Woods and his inability to make a choice in life and stick with it.

“Satch…” Jules, who can sense my anger, looks up at me, her eyes searching my face.

The hospital room shrinks around us. Jules is relaying a look that says this is neither the time nor the place, but I’m so angry I shrug her hand off my arm and take a step toward Woods.

“You have no right to be here,” I tell him. “You’re nothing to her. You left her.”

Woods snickers. “I have more of a right than you do … oh wait…”

He has a sick smile on his face and I know what’s coming next.

“You’ve always wanted to be that person for her, haven’t you, Satch?”

A thick silence fills the room. I feel Jules stiffen beside me, then inevitably, the heat of her eyes bores into me. But I can’t look at her because Woods and I have locked eyes. For twenty years I’ve loved my best friend, when things got bad, when he broke Billie’s heart—I loved him. But now as I look at the man I used to skateboard with, then go to keg parties with, I feel nothing but contempt. Even as a boy, Woods was fickle. Our brown bag lunches at school were a perfect example. Every day my mother packed the same lunch for me: a ham sandwich, a banana, two Capri Suns. Woods would go through phases, swearing by roast beef sandwiches and then saying he’d never eat another and switching to turkey. He could never decide what he liked or wanted. That went for his extracurricular activities too: switching from football, to baseball, to piano lessons—all in the span of four months. He’d want to be a pro athlete and then he’d decide he’d rather be a musician. I can’t even imagine the amount of money his mother lost every time he decided to take up a new hobby and then drop it. Before Billie, he’d dated a hippie named Zion for nine months. Zion had dreads and wore skirts with bells sewn into the hem. During their relationship, Woods grew a beard, got his nose pierced, and joined a yoga studio. He told me that he envisioned himself buying a ranch and growing his own vegetables (he was vegan now). We’d moved to New York together because we hated the suburbs, hated the slow drawl people from Georgia spoke with, and all of a sudden, he was talking compost piles and sustainable energy. He told Zion he loved her and they’d started looking at sapphire engagement rings (no blood diamonds for Zion), only to break things off as soon as Billie stepped into the picture. I’d thought he’d finally found himself when he got together with Billie. Hippie beard-wearing Woods transformed into New Yorker bar-hopping Woods. Suddenly, he was wearing a leather jacket that he pilfered from a thrift shop and talking about living in a loft. The first time we all went out to dinner together he ordered an eighteen-ounce ribeye.

“I thought you were a vegan,” I’d said.

“Was being the keyword,” he’d responded, sawing at his steak with a knife.

I thought who he was with Billie would stick. He was twenty-four walking around the Upper East Side with hearts in his eyes.

Woods doesn’t know who he is and he slaughters hearts in his attempt to find out. It hasn’t made a difference to me ... hell, I’ve even found it amusing, until he hurt someone I love—more than I love him.

“You should leave,” I hear Jules say to him.

I hardly acknowledge his exit, choosing to stare at Billie’s still form instead.

I hear the door click closed softly and then Jules comes to stand in front of me. I don’t want to do this right now, I think. This is about Billie, not petty jealousy and pissing on each other for ownership. I think she’s going to ask me about what Woods said, but instead, she smiles weakly and tells me she’s going to get going.

“Sure,” I say, still a little dazed.

I lean down to kiss her cheek, which makes her look even sadder than she did a minute ago. She doesn’t ask me if I’m going to stay, or offer to bring me a change of clothes, and when she leaves, I’m so relieved I feel guilty.

“Mr. Tarrow?” A nurse steps in, jarring me from my thoughts. “Your mother is here to see Billie.”

“Let her in,” I say.

A minute later, Denise walks through the door.

“Hello, son,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “Just coming to sit with Billie and her husband…”

I stare at Denise, who was like a second mother to me growing up. We still have the type of relationship where she smacks my arm if I give her attitude, and she kisses me on the cheek affectionately every time she sees me. This time, however, I don’t get a kiss.