When the Lights Go Out(81)

Aaron was happy. Aaron had found his happy place.

Unlike me, his heart had healed and he was no longer broken. He was whole.

Oh, how I wanted to be there beside him, laughing too.

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, to shatter what had already been fixed. I’d ruin him, that I knew, if I stepped foot into the chophouse, as I imagined the laughter drawing to a sudden close if I walked in, that lovely smile vaporizing from his face at the sight of me.

And so instead, when a hostess poked her head outside and asked if I’d like to take a peek at the menu, I shook my head, scurrying the other way like all the other roaches, seeking shelter indoors from the rain.

It was an upscale restaurant where I went, fine dining with a bar attached, the kind where one might have a glass of wine while waiting for their table to be set. This hostess offered a table, but I strutted straight past her and to the bar—sopping wet, leaving a trail of rainwater behind me as I walked. I climbed onto one of the tall stools and ordered a chardonnay to drink. A chardonnay! The glass came to me full to the rim, a generous pour at the hand of a bartender with cavernous dimples and sparkling blue eyes, a man who must have been six years younger than me, barely old enough to be serving alcohol at an upscale establishment. And yet here he was, and in the moment I felt suddenly old, much older than my twenty-nine years, but that didn’t matter. That was the least of my concerns.

With the wine he also brought a dish towel, which I used to towel dry the ends of my hair.

The first sip of wine tasted like battery acid to me.

It choked me on the way down, burning the lining of my esophagus so that the bartender raised an eyebrow at me and asked if I was all right. I pressed a hand to my mouth, nodding, but I wasn’t sure that I was all right. The wine settled in the pit of my stomach, and the feeling was a mix of repulsion and nausea, along with a warmth and prickling that I quite liked.

And so I had another sip, wanting the warmth and prickling to have its way with me, to help me forget about Aaron and the miscarriage, all those wasted months trying unavailingly to create a baby.

How stupid I’d been in believing that with Dr. Landry’s help we could outsmart nature. Aaron and I were infertile; that was the nature of the beast. That couldn’t be changed.

The universe was laughing at me for my arrogance and my vanity.

I took another sip of wine and this time, I didn’t choke.

I thought of my baby, of my unborn baby. Of my dead baby. I wondered what she would have looked like had she had a chance to grow full-term. Would she have looked like Aaron, with dark hair and light eyes, or would she have looked like me?

Would she have been a she, or would she have been a he?

I still think about her all the time.

Had she been a girl, I would have named her Sadie.

I raised my glass to my lips and swallowed a mouthful, wondering if she ever crossed Aaron’s mind.

Wondering if I ever crossed Aaron’s mind.

By the second glass, the wine was no longer battery acid to me. It quenched that hunger, that thirst, like nothing else in the world was able to do. It spilled through my veins, anesthetizing my arms and legs, dulling my senses. I hadn’t had a drop to drink in quite some time and so it didn’t take much for the room to start to blur at the edges, for the stool to feel insecure beneath my seat.

With every sip thereafter I became a more youthful version of myself, someone more energetic, someone more carefree.

With every sip I became blissfully forgetful, forgetting at once that I was a soon-to-be divorcée, a woman who would never have a baby.

It was a quiet night, a Tuesday night, and so the bartender happily filled his free time speaking to me—about what, I hardly remember anymore—and, after that second glass of chardonnay was poured, I plucked a credit card from my purse, one that wouldn’t be denied, and the bartender started a tab for me, telling me his name was Josh.

“You have a beautiful smile,” he said to me, and I blushed, grinning, and he pointed at it and said, “Yup, that’s the one,” while smiling his own beautiful smile. For whatever reason I dug a tube of lipstick from my purse, a light shade of pink, and applied it to my lips, leaving light pink prints around the rim of my wineglass that he filled each time with a bountiful pour.

I unbuttoned the top button of my blouse, leaning farther over the bar, fully aware of just how pathetic it was, me, a lonely, depressed woman hitting on a bartender in a near-abandoned bar.

I had become a cliché.

“What’s your name?” he asked, setting a bowl of nuts before me, a single finger brushing against my skin as he did, and I told him that it was Eden. He equated it to the garden of Eden, in other words, paradise, and I smiled and said I’d never heard that before, though of course I had, from each and every one of the lowlifes who came before Aaron when they were trying to pick me up in bars far less classy than this.

“What are you doing here all by yourself, Eden?” he asked while swirling a dishrag in circles before me.

I shrugged my shoulders and said that I didn’t know.

What was I doing here?

I reached for my glass and downed the last few drops. At once it was refilled, and I downed that too, scarcely able to recall what came next.

Only bits and pieces stayed with me until morning, a montage of what may have occurred. Sliding from the barstool with the third glass of wine. Laughing at myself as strange hands helped me to my feet, refreshing my glass. A face far too close to mine. The deep groove of dimples. Words whispered in my ear.