The Foreseeable Future Read online

  “Where’d you get your degree?” I asked Maureen, as it dawned on me that she could not have become a Registered Nurse without leaving Steeds County.

  “Portland,” she answered.

  “You couldn’t find a job up there?”

  Maureen frowned. “I had a job up there. I wanted to come home.”

  “Why?” I was already too tipsy to rein in my disgust.

  “What could be better than Crescent Bay?” She sounded almost sardonic. The jukebox was playing an old Steve Earle song, and now the man with the beard was swaying atop his barstool, in definite danger of capsizing. I wondered, dimly, whether it was even legal for Dot to serve alcohol at six in the morning. “Actually, though,” Maureen continued, “Portland was fine, but I moved back home to be with my hubby. We’ve been together since high school.”

  Dot delivered two more beers to the table before I’d finished my first. Maureen challenged me to keep up, which—regretfully—I did, all the way through rounds two and three. Mostly my supervisor talked while I listened. She had a lot of complaints—about her fellow RNs, about the director of the nursing home, about the residents, including Tamora, whom she considered to be a particular pain in the ass. At the high point of my drunkenness, Maureen struck me as entertaining. But gradually I grew tired and headachy, and her whole routine started to seem unnecessary.

  Toward the bottom of her fourth beer, Maureen sensed my dwindling enthusiasm and changed the subject. “Did Mr. Leary give you any trouble tonight?”

  Seconds after my argument with Seth, my pager had gone off. Maureen had been busy outfitting Mrs. Lu with an IV and needed me to assist Mr. Leary with the vicious symptoms of a stomach virus. I’d pushed through the door to Mr. Leary’s room and found him curled like an apostrophe at the edge of his mattress. The smell of industrial strength disinfectant just barely masked the smell of vomit.

  His eyes had opened and he’d looked at me warily, unsure if we knew each other. A lot of the residents in the Health and Rehabilitation wing had trouble remembering me from night to night; most of our interactions took place while they slept.

  I smiled at him. At some point over the last few weeks, my on-the-job smiles had stopped feeling so fake. “Long night?” I asked him.

  No answer. His eyes went glassy and he shifted his body even closer to the edge of the bed. In one movement I threw open a cabinet, grabbed a clean metal basin, and held it under Mr. Leary’s chin.

  When Mr. Leary had finished, he’d looked at me—more resigned than embarrassed—and replied, “Not as long as yours, I bet.”

  Now I assured Maureen that my patient and I had gotten along fine. “I changed his sheets and stayed with him until he fell asleep.”

  “It’s a lot easier to clean up in that situation if you move them into the bathroom,” she said.

  “He wanted to stay where he was.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “So you let him?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Okay, but in the future, just make him move into the bathroom.”

  “Why?” I should have known better than to argue. “What difference does it make?”

  “Trust me, it makes a world of difference. Wait until you’re on day shift and you’re trying to take care of seven people at once. You won’t have time to change anyone’s sheets for the hundredth time. Then again . . .” Maureen had a habit of staring pointedly at her own hands whenever she was about to insult me. “Maybe you’re not ready for day shift. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Right,” I mumbled, wondering at what point in this conversation I’d ceased to be the best CNA she’d ever trained.

  “Anyway.” She slammed down her empty glass, missing the cardboard coaster by about a mile. “Not all of us have tomorrow off.” Maureen rummaged around in her oversized purse until she found her cell phone. I listened, somewhat incredulous, as she called her husband and baby-talked him into picking her up. When she rose from the booth, I arranged my features into a what about me? face, trying to salvage whatever camaraderie had formed between us and vanished so soon.

  “Can’t stay mad forever,” she advised me, leaving a crumpled twenty on the table. “Time to call that boy, don’t you think?”

  * * *

  * * *

  I called a different boy. I called Elliot Slate. He arrived promptly enough, bright-eyed behind the wheel of his mom’s car, puffy vest zipped straight to his throat. When I went to pull open the passenger-side door, I was surprised to find Sara already riding shotgun. She raised her eyebrows at me through the glass and gestured, patronizingly, toward the backseat.

  “Thank you both for coming,” I said, trying to sound dignified as I climbed inside the car and fastened my seat belt.

  Apparently the effort was obvious. Elliot smirked at me in the rearview mirror. “Beer for breakfast?”

  “It was a long night.”

  “Where’s O’Malley? Facedown on the bar?”

  “Seth had nothing to do with any of this.” I waved my hand at the sloped, mossy structure of Dot’s Tavern. Pulling a wide U-turn in the parking lot, Elliot grimaced—he didn’t believe me, but wasn’t going to argue—and Sara’s silence struck me as increasingly suspect. What were they even doing together, so early in the morning?

  “Did you guys hang out all night?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Sara said. “Elliot stayed over.”

  “You stayed over?” I leaned forward, speaking obnoxiously close to Elliot’s right ear.

  “We sleep at Sara’s all the time,” he reminded me. “What’s the big deal?”

  “Usually it’s the three of us. Not the two of you. Alone.”

  Sara shuddered. “Stop accusing us of incest. Elliot slept in one of the guest rooms.”

  Now my voice contained a lilt of excitement; it had long been my dream to sleep in one of the guest rooms at Sara’s house. “Did you use the eucalyptus shampoo?”

  “Um,” Elliot said. “I took a shower. . . .”

  Sara leaned over the gearshift and sniffed Elliot’s head. “He used the shampoo,” she confirmed.

  “I didn’t know you guys were having sleepovers without me.” I pouted.

  “Well, we can’t do anything with you,” Sara said, revealing the reason behind her icy demeanor. “You’re never around.”

  I was around. I could have done things aside from work and kiss Seth and sleep, if only I had kept conventional, sunlit hours. “Our schedules are opposite. That’s all. You’re asleep when I’m awake.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sara intoned, unconvinced. And I wanted to remind her that she was the one leaving home at the end of the summer; I was the one staying exactly where I’d always been. I would, by default, miss her more than she missed me. But picking a fight—after the nonfight I’d had with Seth, plus the sudden tension that had tightened between Maureen and me when I’d stopped giggling at her beery diatribe—was the last thing I wanted to do.

  “Hey, Elliot,” I said abruptly. “Have you been to see Cameron at the hospital?”

  “Yeah, I finally went the other night. I brought her some flowers.”

  I tried to say, “Chivalrous,” but struggled with the second syllable.

  “I mean, we were kind of on a date when it happened, so . . .”

  “You should go on more dates with Cameron. A hundred more dates with Cameron.”

  Elliot looked over at Sara, who shrugged her shoulders. She was through with my antics. She was sober, superior. “I think, for now, I’m just going to leave Cameron to her recovery,” Elliot said.

  “But you belong together. You were made for each other.” I had entered the phase of drunkenness wherein I could hear exactly how drunk I sounded—was, in fact, getting on my own nerves—but I was also powerless against my need to continue being an idiot.

  Sara swiveled around, gripping the back of her seat so she
could look me square in the eye. “Audrey. Even if Elliot thoroughly seduced Cameron Suzuki and they fell helplessly, head-over-heels in love, nothing will change the fact that Cameron and Seth used to date.”

  “I know that,” I said, petulant.

  “Would you even want to be with a guy who felt indifferent toward his hospitalized ex-girlfriend?” Sara demanded.

  The correct response was no. My actual response was to groan and claim, “He cares more about her than me.”

  In a gentler tone than Sara had employed, Elliot asked, “Is it possible that it just seems that way? Because Cameron almost died a couple weeks ago?”

  Heaving a dramatic sigh, I told them about Seth getting mad at me mid–make out session—about how, instead of actually yelling, he had gone stiff and silent and judgmental. How I’d tried to kiss him, and how he had pushed me away.

  “Wait,” Elliot said as I started to defend my right to appear on regional television. “You told him you weren’t going to do the interview, and then you did?”

  “I never told him anything. I told myself I wasn’t going to go on the news, and then I changed my mind.”

  “Just because?” Sara asked.

  “Just because.”

  “Maybe Seth finds you overwhelming,” she theorized. “Not that I really know the guy, but he seems pretty . . . even-keeled.”

  “Are you saying I’m not even-keeled?”

  Sara snorted.

  “You can be kind of impulsive,” Elliot said.

  I endeavored to focus on this word, impulsive, to connect it to my recent behavior, to the infuriating nonfight I’d had with Seth. Was it a bad thing to be impulsive—to make quick, heart-pounding decisions? Was it really a problem I needed to solve?

  Too wasted to solve any problems, big or small, I let my mind wander. Elliot was driving down a stretch of highway with an unencumbered view of the ocean. Early in the morning, the ocean always looked gray and foamy and miserable.

  “I should get out,” I announced.

  “Do you feel sick?” Elliot glanced toward the road’s shoulder.

  “No, I mean I should get outta town.”

  “Get outta town . . .” Sara echoed my sloppy cadence as she fiddled with the heat settings on Ms. Slate’s car. “What about Whedon?”

  “Screw Whedon.” I spoke with more conviction than I felt. I couldn’t renounce Whedon College without renouncing the Professors Nelson, whom I still loved, even if my mother had recently lost her marbles.

  “What about Seth?” she asked.

  “He hates me. He thinks I’m a fame whore.”

  “Seth O’Malley did not call you a fame whore.” Elliot nearly growled.

  “Correct.” I sighed. “He doesn’t use bad words. Or degrade women.”

  Finally, my best friend threw a smile toward the backseat. “Maybe you should get some sleep before you drop out of college, break up with your boyfriend, and split town. You never know. You might change your mind, again.”

  Elliot had turned off the highway and onto the forested gravel road that wound its way to my house.

  “How did you know?” I asked Sara. I had referred to Seth O’Malley as my boyfriend exactly once, in the break room with my supervisor, hours earlier.

  “Know what?” Sara asked as we idled in my driveway.

  “That he’s my boyfriend?”

  “Um.” Sara and Elliot exchanged a look. And the way they sat up there, sharing eye rolls and shrugs, neither of them drunk or desperate—they might as well have been my parents. “Because he’s all you ever talk about,” she said.

  * * *

  * * *

  Overturned in the hallway was a plum-colored suitcase.

  At some point in the late nineteen-nineties my parents had dubbed this particular piece of luggage “Old Purple,” and in my mind it had always been the emblem of both family vacations and those unsettling periods of time when Mom traveled alone, abandoning the rest of us.

  Old Purple had flown to Italy in March. Most likely, the suitcase had not returned by itself.

  I crept down the hall and through the kitchen, on high alert for further evidence. The empty coffee cup in the sink could have been Dad’s, or Jake’s. The crumpled paper towel containing the uneaten, unfrosted corners of a strawberry Pop-Tart had definitely been left behind by Rosie, a big believer in midnight snacks. But the sound I could now detect coming from the living room—the asthmatic snore of a woman who had forbidden all pets, even gerbils, from crossing the threshold of the Nelson family home—had only one possible source.

  I didn’t know whether I should feel relieved that she had come back, or upset that she was sleeping on the couch.

  But because I was still in unwashed hospital scrubs—with beer on my breath, Seth on my mind, the potential for impulsivity coursing through my veins—I tiptoed past her and went to bed.

  SIXTEEN

  Lately, my little sister only ever wore two facial expressions: complete indifference or alarm. When she woke me up a few hours later—the noon sun filling every corner of our room—her eyes were wide.

  “You need to report to the kitchen,” she said.

  I squinted at Rosie through the film of my hangover. “Says who? Mom?”

  “You already know?”

  “She was sleeping—” I stopped short of revealing that our mother had entered our house in the dead of night and chosen to crash on the couch rather than join her spouse in their bed. “She was asleep when I got home from work, but I saw her suitcase.”

  “She says it’s time for you to get up.” Rosie tugged on my arm, and I pretended her efforts had sent me spinning out of bed, onto the floor. I was maybe still a little drunk.

  “Any idea why she came home early?” I asked, as if I had no special insight into our mother’s personal life.

  Rosie nudged my rib cage with her bare foot. Her toenails were painted to resemble watermelons. “She says she got lonely.”

  I laughed.

  “Why is that funny?”

  “No reason.” I rose from the carpet and followed her out of the room.

  In the kitchen, the two of them occupied their old places at the table, twin cups of coffee resting on loose sheets of Dad’s manuscript. Dad was leaning forward, on the edge of his seat, looking at Mom like she was responsible for everything beautiful in the world. He did that sometimes. It always made me feel squeamish, and safe.

  “Look who it is,” Jake said. “Our resident vampire.” He was perched on the counter, cheerfully eating a banana and swinging his heels against a cabinet door. Too distracted by my entrance to reprimand my brother, Mom pushed back her chair and wrapped me in her arms. She was tan, but otherwise unchanged—same gray, androgynous hairstyle. Same khaki shorts and T-shirt advertising Yale University, where she’d gone to grad school and met Dad.

  “Audrey,” she exhaled. “I missed you so much.”

  I let myself enjoy her embrace for a count of three before disentangling my arms and moving toward the coffeepot.

  “Missed you, too,” I said quickly.

  It wasn’t my intention to be mean, but Mom wasn’t just Mom, anymore. She was the sole author of Sprung Free in Italy! She had let some guy gaze at her the way Dad was gazing at her now. They had eaten shellfish with their hands, like semiaquatic mammals in love.

  “You can always count on your offspring for an enthused greeting,” Dad said.

  “I’m overwhelmed,” Mom agreed. “I would never have expected such a warm reception after a mere four months abroad.”

  “And why would you? What would give you the right?”

  “Not carrying her in my womb for two hundred and eighty-nine days—that’s for sure.” Suddenly swept up in nostalgia, Mom cut the performance short. “God, remember how big I got with Audrey? It was practically obscene.”

  Da
d’s sigh was much too deep. “I remember.”

  The two of them made lingering eye contact.

  “Get a room,” Jake said.

  “Please,” Rosie whimpered.

  I was hiding my face behind a Whedon College mug, concentrating on the delivery of caffeine to my bloodstream. It felt like someone had cinched a wire around my skull and was pulling it tighter and tighter. I needed to go back to bed, or else I needed to call Seth and make things right. Anything but this Nelson family kitchen theater.

  Mom had crossed her arms and was appraising me from a distance now. I could feel her scrutinizing the shadows beneath my eyes, the way my hands—wrapped tight around the mug—trembled slightly.

  My mother was known for her sweetness—for bringing doughnuts and coffee to her students, for hosting other people’s retirement parties, delivering speeches that made her guests laugh and weep in equal measure. Within our family, she was the first to notice when someone looked nice, or seemed sad. A part of me was always surprised when other people’s moms were awkward or preoccupied or cold.

  But occasionally, Mom changed her mind about being nice. When she transitioned to a side of her personality Rosie called “Officer Mom,” the switch was absolute. She did not waver.

  “You’re hungover,” she announced.

  “Nah,” was my halfhearted protest. “You’re mistaken.”

  “I am not mistaken.” Mom turned to Dad. “Is this the new norm? Our daughter comes home drunk, sleeps until noon?”

  Bewildered, Dad turned up his hands. “Audrey works nights!”

  “Apparently she drinks nights, too.”

  “How is me getting drunk Dad’s fault?” I asked.

  “I left your father in charge,” Mom said. “I thought he could handle three reasonably well-behaved adolescents by himself for a summer.”

  “He handles us fine,” Rosie said. She had joined Jake on the countertop and was resting her head against his shoulder. With each other, my siblings had an uncomplicated relationship that both annoyed me and filled me with envy.