I WENT HOME that afternoon and painted like crazy.
I had two days before the portrait had to be delivered to the gallery before the show.
I had never tried to complete a painting in such a short time frame before. My old method could take weeks. But I didn’t have weeks. I had two days.
I’d do what I could do and let the rest go.
I’ll be honest and say: I liked this painting. I couldn’t entirely vouch for the face, but everything else was strong, compelling work. The curve of his shoulder. The slant of his collarbone. The shadow around his Adam’s apple. Plus, the colors, which were just the right combination of bright and muted
—happy and sad. The whole thing had an energy about it—a frisson of emotions—that was just … appealing.
It wouldn’t win, of course. A faceless portrait was the last thing these judges were looking for.
But it would be something true. Something I could be proud of.
When I texted a snapshot of it to Sue—now a married woman in Edmonton, Alberta—she texted back. Wow!
Do you like it? I asked.
It’s phenomenal!!! she texted back. That torso!! Then after a pause,
This might be the best thing you’ve ever done.
That made me kiss the phone. Think it’ll win? I texted back.
Not a chance, Sue replied. Then she added, But if anybody can win while losing, it’s you.
I FINISHED THE painting a day early, emerging from a blissful state of flow and texting Joe: Your portrait’s done.
When I didn’t hear back, I decided to get more explicit. Want to come see it?
Still no response.
Maybe he was busy? Was this the busy season for pet sitters? Could some of Dr. Michaux’s snakes have escaped the den? Was everything okay with Joe’s hundred-year-old grandmother?
I told myself not to text Joe all these questions, but then I texted them all, anyway.
Plus a few more.
Where the heck was he?
I demanded that Sue call me from Canada, and then I said, “I think I just dumped my fantasy fiancé for a guy in my building who’s now ghosting me.”
“I’m sure he’s not ghosting you,” Sue said.
“I’ve sent him seven texts in the past twenty-four hours and he hasn’t replied to one of them.”
“For god’s sake, stop texting him! Have some self-respect!” “I just want him to text me back.”
“He’s clearly unavailable.”
“I want to show him the portrait before I take it to the gallery.” “Can’t always get what you want.”
“But why isn’t he replying?”
“Just give the poor man the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his grandmother’s sick.”
“You think they don’t have cell service where his grandmother lives?” “Maybe! You don’t know! Maybe she’s an ancient Sicilian lady on a
remote island where there are no phones. He could be stomping grapes right now, trying to keep the family vineyard going while she fights for her life in a charming Italian ICU.”
“Why does that not feel likely?”
“If you’re so worried, go knock on his door.” Knock on his door?
I hadn’t thought of that.
Cut to me: Sixty seconds later—knocking on his door.
No answer.
Could he be stomping grapes in Sicily? I mean, it wasn’t impossible.
But as the silence wore on, even optimistic Sue had to admit it wasn’t looking good. “I’m losing hope on the Italian grandmother,” she said, during yet another processing session.
“Right?” I said. “This is not a friendly miscommunication. Plus, I know he’s in town because I saw him in the elevator, and he saw me heading for it
—and he did not hold the doors.” “Maybe he didn’t see you?” “He definitely saw me.”
“Looks like it’s time for interpretation B,” Sue said. “Which is?”
“He hates you.”
“But why would he?”
“Maybe he overheard you saying something mean about him?” “I haven’t said anything mean about him in weeks.”
“Not holding the elevator door is definitely a maximum-hostility move.”
“Maybe he just got his eyes dilated at the doctor, and he couldn’t tell it was me.”
“That only works for close objects.” “Oh.”
“There’s no way of knowing if he won’t talk to you,” Sue said. “My point exactly.”
“But if I had to guess? He’s an asshole. And he went after you for the thrill of the chase. But then he caught you and lost interest.”
I didn’t want that to be it.
But of all the options, this one seemed the most likely by far. Certainly more plausible than the sick grandmother. But here were the bare facts: 1. He was still in the building. 2. He was not responding to any of my attempts at contact. 3. He did not hold the elevator doors.
Plus, racking my brain did not yield anything—at all—that I might have done to him to push him away. I’d been worried that seeing his final portrait might make him run off screaming—but he hadn’t even seen it yet. And
other than that, I hadn’t yelled at him or lied to him or—god forbid—asked him for help.
Wait—I hadn’t let myself need him, had I?
I’d let myself want him, but that wasn’t the same thing. Unless asking him to sit for the portrait counted.
But wait—I hadn’t asked him to do that! He’d offered! Weren’t those different things?
Should I never have accepted?
I could have asked these questions all night.
But Sue needed to get off the phone. She and Witt were headed to the dinner car for a jazz concert. “Guess what the Canadian cocktail of the day is called?”
“What?” I asked glumly. “The Angry Canadian.”
“Joke’s on you,” I said flatly. “There’s no such thing.”
“That’s what I said!” Sue responded, maybe hoping we could talk about something, anything, else.
But no luck.
At last, in conclusion, Sue said, “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe he’s got a terminal illness.”
BUT I KNEW better than to hope for a terminal illness.
And I just couldn’t seem to believe that he was a bad person, either. It had to have been me.
Desperation over the art show had made me needy. I should’ve kept my distance. Stayed aloof. Said no when he offered to be my model. What was I thinking? Of course he’d glimpsed my life and bolted. Who’d want to get anywhere near it?
In the end, I took the portrait to the gallery without ever showing it to Joe—or seeing him at all. And then I spent the next two days being ignored and obsessing over why that was happening.
In the meantime, I rearranged my paints. Organized my canvases. Restacked the dishes in my cabinets. Painted Peanut’s toenails with glitter
polish. Watched a video tutorial about how to make one large T-shirt into twelve different outfits.
And stewed. Emotionally.
Oh, and I googled “Why men don’t text you back.” But it wasn’t very helpful.
I also had another brain scan to check my edema. And that wasn’t helpful, either.
Dr. Estrera reported that, shockingly, according to the scan, the edema had now largely resolved. He compared last week’s scan with this week’s scan—both of which looked quite similar to me. “We’re seeing an eighty- one percent reduction in swelling in the area,” Dr. Estrera said proudly.
Big news, I guess—but it didn’t do me much good if nothing else had changed.
And nothing else had changed.
After the scan, Dr. Nicole gave me a battery of facial recognition tests to compare to my baseline. And I was exactly the same on those as I’d been a month ago. The same identical numerical score.
I knocked my head against the table at the results. “Please don’t do that,” Dr. Nicole said.
“How can I be exactly the same?” I whined.
“These results are to help you—not make you pound your head on the table.”
“Well, they don’t feel very helpful.”
“Now that the edema is resolving, you should start to see some changes in your facial perceptions,” she said, like that might cheer me up. Then she added, “No guarantees.”
But I wasn’t in the mood to be cheered up. I flopped down on her sofa in despair. “Nothing is going right.”
“Maybe you need to broaden your definition of right.”
“Don’t throw that cheery nonsense at me. My life is a shit show.”
This right here felt like my lowest moment so far. I thought I was supposed to be getting better, not getting worse. Learning to cope, at least. What the hell was going on?
“Tell me what has you feeling down,” Dr. Nicole asked.
“Everything?” I asked. Like, did she really think she could handle that? “Sure. Everything.”
Okay. She asked for it. “I still can’t see faces. I submitted a portrait to this competition that I should have won—handily—that’s guaranteed to come in dead last. I’m being menaced by my evil stepsister. I’m embarrassed to go back to my favorite coffee shop. My best friend eloped to Canada and left me dateless for what’s sure to be the most humiliating event of my life. My stepmother wants to build a relationship with me and she’s coming to the show over my vociferous objections. My dog is a thousand years old. I broke up with my fantasy fiancé. And the very cute guy in my building who I might genuinely be in love with kissed me senseless the other night and then fully disappeared.”
“Ah,” Dr. Nicole said. “That’s all you’ve got? Ah?”
“Of all of those,” she asked next, “which one is the worst?”
“All of them,” I answered. Then I had an idea. “Any chance you could be my date to the art show? So I don’t have to go alone?”
It was a long shot, of course.
But she didn’t budge. “I find our work goes better in here,” she said, “when we don’t see each other out there.”
BY THE SATURDAY of the art show, it had been a full four days, fourteen hours, and twenty minutes since I’d had any contact from Joe.
It seemed pretty clear at this point that he’d moved on. Though I continued to hold out hope for Sue’s Sicilian grandmother scenario. Or maybe an unexpected car accident, like in An Affair to Remember. Or maybe some kind of head injury-induced amnesia?
There were still a few possible explanations that were forgivable. Sort of.
Oh, well.
He was out of my life now, which was probably a good thing, I kept telling myself.
But I missed him anyway, is what I’m saying. Against my better judgment. I confess: I had moments when I felt tempted to call in sick to the art show.
I mean, how could you go to an art show that you were guaranteed to lose without any hope at all?
But on the other hand, how could I not go?
It’s one thing for dreams to shift slowly—for you to evolve and long for different things. It’s another thing to abandon your dream out of spite.
I thought about my mom. My courageous, kindhearted mom. She would have given anything to go to this exact show fourteen years ago. She would give anything to be here right now, fully alive, facing whatever life threw at her, and just cherishing it all.
Maybe the best way to hold on to her wasn’t to obsess over her paintings or wear her skates or listen to her music or copy her style or worry over what would happen when I finally lost Peanut. Maybe the best way to keep her with me was to embrace her spirit. To emulate her courage. To bring the warmth and love to the world that she always—fearlessly—had.
She had loved us without reservation. She adored us wildly. And laughed. And danced. And soaked it all up—every atom of her life—every moment of her time
She felt it all. She lived it all.
That’s what I loved about her. Not just that she was a great mom or a great wife or a great dog rescuer. She was a great person. She knew some divine secret about how to open up to being alive that the rest of us kept stubbornly missing.
She’d wanted me to know it, too. She’d wanted me to say yes to everything. She’d wanted me to go all in.
But when she died, I went the other way.
I’m not judging myself. I was a kid. I didn’t know how to cope with losing her—or any of the hardships that followed. But I guess that’s the great thing about life—it gives you chance after chance to rethink it all. Who you want to be. How you want to live. What really matters.
I did want to go to the art show. I’d earned my right to be there. I didn’t, of course, want to be humiliated. But it was looking like I couldn’t have one without the other. And I just wasn’t going to let the things I was afraid of hold me back anymore.
I had no idea how that decision would turn out, but I knew one thing for sure:
My mom would approve.
As the time approached, I zipped myself into her pink dress—much tighter and slinkier now. Sue had gifted me a makeover from her cousin who worked at Macy’s and a hair blowout from her cousin’s roommate.
I did it all.
If I had to go to this art show all alone, I would do my damnedest to look good.
There was, of course, still a chance that Joe might show up in a surprise twist and whisk me off like Cinderella. But as I clanked down the metal stairs from the rooftop in a set of gorgeous but actively painful heels, he was running out of time.
I walked down our long hallway, hoping to see him. I rode down in the elevator, hoping to see him.
I walked out to the street in front of our building to meet my Uber, still hoping to see him.
Waiting there in the late-afternoon light—my hair done, a daisy behind my ear as an ode to my mother, and with so much mascara on that I could actually see my own eyelashes—I decided to try to text him one last time.
This would be it. My final attempt.
And then, when he didn’t reply, I’d call it: Time of death for my thing with Joe. Saturday night, seven P.M.
Then I’d go ahead and let myself mourn. But after the art show.
And then, right there near the streetlamp by the crosswalk, as if the decision to give up had called forth some kind of magic from the universe, I saw him.
Joe. In his bowling jacket and his glasses. Coming out of our building.
With a suitcase.
“Hey!” I shouted, my body walking toward him without my brain’s permission.
My Uber pulled up as I was walking away. “Hey!” I called again.
Joe looked up, took in the sight of me in by far the fanciest getup any of us had ever seen, and held very still.
If I had wanted him to whistle or ogle or tell me I looked great—or even longed against longing for some kind of shift in his body language at the pleasure of seeing me—I would’ve been sorely disappointed.
The man was a total statue.
Fortunately, I didn’t want any of that. I just wanted to confront him.
I’d been having imaginary confrontations with him for days, of course. Where had he been? What was going on? Who the hell did he think he was?
But once it was really happening? I panicked.
For a second, no words came out at all. Finally, I managed: “I’ve been texting you.”
Useless. Joe’s body language stayed blank.
“And calling,” I added. God, now I sounded like Lucinda. Joe just stood there.
At last I generated an interrogative: “Have you been sick?” And at last, a response: “No.”
“Have you been … out of town?” “No. But I’m leaving now.”
“You’re leaving town? Now?” I glanced down at his suitcase. “Right now?”
“Yes.”
I regrouped. “Do you happen to remember”—I felt a hitch in my throat
—“that you were going to be my date to my art show tonight?”
Joe looked away, like he couldn’t stand the sight of me. The face might be unreadable, but the body language was unmistakable.
What on earth had I done to him? Or maybe I hadn’t done anything.
Sometimes when I’m watching a movie and there’s a simple Big Misunderstanding between two people—he thinks she’s a space alien or something—I want to shout, “Just talk to each other!”
But of course nothing in real life is ever simple like that.
Every real human interaction is made up of a million tiny moving pieces. Not a simple one-note situation: a symphony of cues to read and decipher and evaluate and pay attention to.
It’s a wonder we ever get anything straight at all.
And of course for me, for most of my life, the number one go-to for deciphering any human interaction was facial expressions.
Which I couldn’t even see.
So this conversation was destined to fail from the start. But I still had to try.
I took a step closer, wanting to get really clear. “I guess the date’s not happening now?”
Joe gazed off at some far point on the horizon.
“That’s right, right? You’re not coming with me to this thing? Even though you said you would?”
Nothing from Joe.
“I guess I’m just really nervous to go by myself,” I went on, feeling my voice waver a little. “I don’t want to go at all. But I have to go, you know? My painting. My life goals. And even though the portrait is not what they want, for sure—so I’m one hundred percent guaranteed to come in dead last
—I suspect it might actually really be good. In an ugly duckling kind of way. Plus, there’s a good chance my horrible family will show up and make things a hundred times worse. And I’m going to have to do it all genuinely, totally alone.”
I held my breath for a second, trying to steady myself.
I never, ever asked for help. And if Joe’s behavior the past four days had made anything clear, he was in no mood to give it.
But I wasn’t asking for him, I realized.
This wasn’t about his answer. This was about my question. And mustering the courage to ask it.
“The thing is,” I said then, my voice feeling like a balloon I might lose hold of. “The thing is … I’m scared to go alone. And I don’t know why, but it feels like you’re the only person I can say that to. You’re the only person I want to say that to. I just want so badly to have somebody with me. Anybody. And so I just have to ask if you might stay tonight. Despite everything.” I took a step closer, like that might seal the deal. “Can you postpone your plans,” I asked, “and come with me?”
If there was any hope for us at all, he’d sense my desperation—how badly I really, truly needed him—and rescue me this one last time.
But he didn’t.
He kept his face turned toward the horizon. “Are you asking me to be your anybody?”
“I guess that’s one way to put it.”
Now, at last, he turned toward me. “I’m not going to be anybody for you, Sadie. And I don’t want to see the portrait. And I don’t know why you think I’d care about any of this.”
But I shook my head. “I don’t understand what happened.”
I could feel a flash of anger in his expression like fire. “Really?” he said. “I don’t understand it, either, to be honest. But here we are.”
I took a deep breath. “Whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry.”
But Joe shook his head like sorry was the most useless word in the world.
Worse than useless, even. Insulting.
He turned to leave. Then he stopped and turned halfway back.
“I’m moving out, by the way,” he said then. “So stop coming by my place. And stop calling me. And for god’s sake … stop texting.”
