Perfect Strangers

I try to write, but my muse is in a snit and refuses to show up. So I spend a few hours cleaning the apartment, trying as best I can to keep busy and keep thoughts of James from invading my head.

I’m more successful at one than the other.

After the apartment is spotless, I occupy myself with a trip to the corner store. I come home with enough cheese to last several lifetimes and a poufy baguette so large it could double as a futon. I have to wrestle it through the front door.

Finally, I give up, go into the master bedroom, and flop onto the bed, where I spend hours spacing out and staring at the ceiling, occasionally thinking about my work in progress but mostly about James.

I must doze off, because when the house phone on the nightstand rings sometime later, I jerk upright in a panic. Disoriented, I look around.

The light has changed. The afternoon sun paints glowing golden streaks along the walls. For a moment I don’t recognize where I am, but the insistent ringing of the phone finally tugs me back into reality.

“Hello?”

“Babe, it’s me.”

Yawning, I rub a fist into my eye. I gave Kelly the house number on our last call, because it might be several days until I can get my cell fixed or buy a new one if the old one’s too far gone. “Hey.”

“You sound like you were sleeping.”

The somberness of her tone makes me pause for a beat. “And you sound like you have bad news.”

“I do.”

My stomach tightens. My pulse starts to pound. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and grip the phone tighter. “Oh God. James is in the mob, isn’t he?”

Kelly sighs, and it sounds sad. “No, babe. He’s not in the mob. Nothing like that.”

“He’s married.” If she says, yes, I’ll kill him with my bare hands.

“No.”

When she stays silent too long, I break. “Jesus, Kelly, what the hell is it? I’m dying over here!”

“Let me start with the good stuff. Your boyfriend’s got great credit. He pays his taxes on time. He’s clean as far as the law is concerned: no felonies, criminal history, outstanding warrants, blah, blah, blah.”

I’m breathless with impatience. “Yes? And?”

She clears her throat. “He grew up in San Francisco. Got a scholarship to the Art Institute in Chicago, then continued his education at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris.”

So he’s an American, like me. Why are my hands shaking? “What else?”

“Do you want to know how much he’s got in his bank account? Because I was surprised how loaded he is, considering the whole starving artist stereotype—”

“Kelly! No, I don’t want to know how much money he has! I want to know whatever it is you’re stalling to get to!”

After a beat, she answers. “He’s got ALS.”

I frown, searching my memory for any clues about what ALS is, but come up empty. “I have no idea what that means.”

“Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

I can tell by the tone in her voice that it’s bad, but I don’t know exactly how bad until she adds, “You know, the thing the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking died of.”

I picture the shrunken and twisted figure of a man in a motorized wheelchair. A man completely paralyzed, who cannot speak, move, or do anything independently. A man trapped in a useless body, but with the full capacity of his brilliant brain.

A man entombed in his own flesh.

I gasp in horror, then clap my hand over my mouth.

“I’m sorry, babe. I know that’s a lot. Especially after…after everything you’ve already been through.”

“Are you sure?” I whisper.

“Unfortunately, yes. When Mike didn’t find anything in James’s credit or criminal records, he decided to look into his medical history in case he had herpes or something worse he might be trying to hide from you. He was diagnosed last year. Apparently, he’s been involved in several clinical trials.”

Oh sweet Jesus, that’s why he had to go to Germany. “What’s the prognosis for this disease? Is the progression slow? Is there a cure?”

Kelly’s voice grows quiet, but her words kick me right in the gut. “There’s no cure. It’s always terminal. Most people die within three to four years of being diagnosed.”

It makes sense now. It all makes perfect, awful sense.

James’s elusiveness. His melancholy. How he said he doesn’t have time for small talk, and that sometimes ignorance is the wiser choice. His strange intensity. His portraits of people in pain.

His obsession with death.

It all meshes seamlessly like the pieces of a puzzle fitting together, until I can see the complete picture revealed in its awful truth:

James is dying.

I think I might throw up.

My voice shaking, I plead, “What do I do?”

Kelly’s answer is instant and firm. “Break it off.”

“What? God, I can’t be that ruthless!”

“He already gave you an out. You wouldn’t have to explain yourself. Just don’t call him again. Walk away and save yourself a lot of heartbreak.” Her voice gentles. “Haven’t you already had enough?”

That idea feels completely wrong. I shake my head, insisting, “No, I need to talk to him about this.”

“You can’t talk to him about it, babe! What would you say? ‘I had my friend in the FBI take a peek at your entire life history because I thought you might be a psycho?’ How do you think he’d feel about that? Violated much?”

I stand and start to pace the length of the room, chewing on my thumbnail and trying to think, but my thoughts are so scattered it’s impossible.

It was wrong of me to ask Mike to look into James. No matter my reasons, it was wrong, and I can see that now. I’ve violated his privacy. If I wasn’t cool with the way things were between us—with the no-questions policy that I set up—I should’ve said so, not gone behind his back to get answers.

Answers to questions I had no right asking in the first place. Simply because we’re having sex doesn’t mean I deserve to know all his secrets.

He doesn’t owe me that.

He doesn’t owe me anything at all.

I collapse into an overstuffed armchair near the window and rest my head back, closing my eyes. “Yes, he’ll probably feel violated, but I have to tell him anyway.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“It’s the right thing to do, Kell. I won’t mention the FBI because that makes the whole thing sound ten times worse. I’ll just say I ran a background check on him because I’m a single woman trying to protect herself. Women do that with new men they’re dating all the time.”

Kelly’s tone is dry. “Sure. Great idea. Except if the man has half a brain, he’ll know you can’t just dial up someone’s legally protected medical history on the internet to find out they’re in clinical trials.”

“I could be a hacker.”

She snorts. “You, a hacker? You’re barely computer literate! You don’t even use a computer to write your manuscripts!”

“He doesn’t know that!”Còntens bel0ngs to Nô(v)elDr/a/ma.Org

“If he’s seen the bio on your website, he does.”

I groan. The bio. That stupid bio my publisher insisted had to be included on my author website, along with a picture of me sitting at my desk at home…writing longhand on a yellow legal pad like someone’s secretary from the fifties.

It’s cool to go old school, the caption under the photo reads, because I am a gigantic idiot.

“It’s possible he’s seen that,” I admit grudgingly. “He told me he asked the building manager here about me. I don’t know how much information he got, but it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out who I am and look me up.”

“So there you go.”

I think for a moment, chewing the inside of my mouth. “Maybe I’ll say I hired a private detective. They could probably access medical files, right?”

“Illegally, in theory, yes. But that would cost you beaucoup bucks. In the many thousands. Do you really want to tell the guy who’s been spanking all your lady parts like they’re naughty kids that you blew the equivalent of a mortgage payment to hire some unethical gumshoe to dig into his private dirt?”

“Gumshoe? We’re in a forties noir movie now?”

“Don’t say anything to James about what you know,” replies Kelly, ignoring my interruption. “It’s the smartest move and the best one for you. You’re not responsible for his problems, so don’t grab them on.”

I know ‘grab’ means ‘take,’ but I’m too busy feeling offended to think her word choice is cute. “I’m not taking on anyone’s problems. I’m just talking about being honest.”

Kelly’s voice goes soft. “I know you, babe. You’re a caretaker and a huge softie. There’s nothing more irresistible to you than a lost cause. Remember that time you rescued all those feral kittens from the freeway underpass?”

“They were sick! If I didn’t rescue them, they would’ve died!”

“Instead, they lived—all eight of them—in your gorgeous house, tearing up the furniture and pissing on the carpet because you couldn’t bear to take them to the animal shelter, until Chris forced you to put them up for adoption. And let’s not forget the ostrich incident.”

Ah yes. The infamous ostrich incident.

A circus came into town once when my daughter was a newborn. I refused to go, because I can’t bear to see majestic animals like lions and elephants enslaved for human entertainment. But somehow one of the ostriches escaped…and wound up in my backyard.

I smuggled it into the garage and fed it bird seed and lettuce for a week, trying to figure out how and where to release it into the wild, until Chris came home from a business trip and found the thing contentedly nesting in a bed of his clothes that I’d made for it in a corner.

Startled, the ostrich charged. Chris claimed it tried to kill him, but I think he was exaggerating. In any case, he called animal control and they took the ostrich away.

Weeks later, I was still cleaning up feathers and piles of poop.

Kelly says, “My point is that James isn’t a stray who needs rescuing. And—forgive me—you’re in no shape to be taking care of anyone but yourself.”

We both know I haven’t exactly been excelling at that, either.

“Okay. I have to go now. My mental breakdown is calling.”

Kelly pauses before speaking again. “Don’t joke about that.”

My sigh is big and deep. “Oh, Kell, if I haven’t had one yet, I think I’m safe.”

“You never know. Fate has a dark sense of humor.”

“Great. Thanks for the pep talk.”

“I love you, you know.”

I have to take a few breaths to clear the frog from my throat. “I know. I love you, too. You’re a good friend. Thanks for looking out for me.”

“That’s what friends are for, dummy. I’m gonna hang up now before our hormones snap into sync and we start sobbing. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Talk to you then.”

After I return the receiver to its cradle, I sit with my hand on the phone and stare out the window for a long time, trying to decide what to do.

I’m still sitting in the same position when the phone rings again. But this time when I pick up, it isn’t Kelly. It’s someone I haven’t spoken to in almost a year, who shouldn’t have this number, or even know I’m in Paris.

It’s my ex-husband, Chris.