The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(141)

He laughed. “See?”

“The artist formerly known as Opie. We were going to the same master class and it was totally random, but totally wonderful at the same time. I felt really lonely and it was good to see an old friend. After class we went for coffee. You know. The four-hour cup of coffee? And it just went from there…” Her voice trailed off. She bit a corner of her lip as she sat down.

“I always liked him,” Erik said, wanting to put her at ease.

“He was good to me,” Daisy said, stirring her spoon around her bowl. “And he was there when the window broke.”

“The window?”

She was in a diner with John, one evening in the hard winter of 1995. Manhattan was getting pummeled with its umpteenth snowstorm. As they sat eating in a booth, a sanitation truck came down the street, perhaps a little too fast. The load of snow in its plow flew up against the front of the diner and broke one of the windows.

“Right behind where I was sitting,” Daisy said. “So one minute I’m eating an omelette, the next minute I am under the table, curled up in a ball, screaming your name.”

She looked at him and he looked back, not making a connection.

“I was screaming your name,” she said. “Because of the broken glass.”

His spoon clattered into the bowl. “The glass,” he said, a hand to his head.

She nodded.

“You saw James shoot the glass of the lighting booth.”

She kept nodding. “I’ve never experienced something so surreal in my life. As soon as the window shattered, it came back to me. Being on the floor of the stage, hearing shots. Knowing I’d been hit. Knowing Will was shot, too. I didn’t know it was James. Just someone with a gun was in the theater. I couldn’t get up. I pushed on my elbow, twisted my head and looked over my shoulder. I saw him shoot out the windows of the booth. And I screamed your name. Then the memory stops. My brain pauses until I woke up in the hospital the next day and they had cut my leg.”

“Holy shit.”

“You remember the nightmares I had? Just vast, dark silence. No people, no sound. Just terrible space?”

“I remember.”

“After the day in the diner, the dreams had imagery. They went from being a black cavern to a crazy hall of mirrors.” She glanced at him. “Your dreams were filled with blood. Mine were filled with broken glass. And then the real breakdown started.”

She took a bite of sandwich and he ate some more of his own dinner. Her silence was thoughtful but she didn’t speak.

“Go on,” he said. “Please.”

“I was obsessed,” she said. “With glass. This horrible compulsion to smash mirrors or break windows.” She smiled at his raised eyebrows. “I wasn’t doing those things. I was just thinking about it. All the time. And listening to Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. You know, just before the track ‘You May Be Right’ starts?”

“It’s a breaking window.”

“Right. I’d listen over and over. I made a mix tape once. The sound clip of the breaking window was in between every song. It was crazy. And then one night I smashed a wine bottle in the sink.” She put her forehead in her hand. “God, I haven’t talked about this in a while. I cringe telling it now, it sounds really sick.”

His heart twisted in his chest. He wanted to gather her to him, hold her safe and make it all go away, even the memory of it. But he only made his hand gentle on her arm, and kept his voice calm as he asked, “What did you do?”

She reached to ladle some more soup into her bowl. “Took a piece of the glass and tried to cut my fasciotomy scars open. It wasn’t a conscious thought at the time, of course, but later in therapy we talked about how the surgical procedure had been necessary to relieve the pressure building up in my leg. And in a real sense, pressure was building up again in me. My entire body, my entire being was suffering from compartment syndrome. And I tried to release it.” She looked at him. “I didn’t do a good job. It’s harder to cut through scar tissue than you would think. Plus in my line of work, my legs tend to be visible. It wouldn’t be something I could keep secret. So I started just making these little cuts. Like on my lower back or along my waist or stomach. And then I’d…” She put her hand to her head again, laughing a little. “Oh boy.”

“It’s all right.”

“I’d put straight alcohol on the cuts. Or I’d get this lotion—it was anti-itch and it had menthol in it.”

He cringed himself, his face screwing up in imagined pain. “Jesus, you’d put that on your cuts?”

“Yeah. Anything to make them sting. The harder the better. I used vodka once. Salt another time—how about that metaphor?”

“You were feeding the hurt,” he said. “Just like you and I used to do.”

“If I made it sting bad enough I could actually get off on it. It was just a really deranged time. I was in trouble.”

“Did John know this was going on?”

“Well, naturally he found out.” She glanced at him and her face colored behind an apprehensive smile. “I’m sorry. I’m acting like a teenager.”

“It’s all right.”

“I’ll eventually stop blushing when I talk about the other men in my life.” She ran her fingertips beneath her eyes. “It’s just… When there’s no official breakup, it’s hard not to feel every other man is cheat—“