Page 53 of Sublimate
“Why did you switch, then?” I asked.
“I had a crash and the car wasn’t repairable,” he said. “It was the week before I went to rehab.”
“Did you get hurt?” I asked anxiously.
“No. I went off the road and hit a tree but miraculously, I was completely fine.”
I thought of my mom’s boyfriend, the one who had walked away from the rollover accident that we’d had when I was a kid. “Sometimes you get lucky,” I said.
“There were a few things that convinced me to go to quit drinking and that was one of them. I realized that I had been very lucky, but it couldn’t last.”
“You could have gotten hurt or the worst thing could have happened. You could have been killed,” I told him.
“Is that the worst?” He shook his head. “I think it would have been if I’d hurt someone else. I checked myself in three days later.”
This conversation might have been distracting but it also probably made him feel terrible. I called his attention to something very positive. “And now, how many months sober do you have?”
“Nine.” He was quiet for a moment before he said, “I’m not counting the days as much. At first, I was getting through each minute, then the hour, then the night. Now, a week will pass before I think about drinking and it’s a different thing when I do. I don’t feel the same desperation.”
“It’s not, ‘Holy bells, I have to do something?’”
“No. It’s more like, that was something I used to do and I enjoyed it at times. I resented the hold it had over me and I’m glad for the freedom. I’ve been talking to some of my old friends,” he mentioned.
“Oh.Really?”
“Don’t get worried. I had started to feel bad about the way I acted, how I didn’t say goodbye and I ghosted them. Not a real ghost,” he added. “No one is actually dead, except…I guess thatI was dead to them. They were happy to hear from me but didn’t seem to have cared that I’d been missing for nine months, and they all wanted to pick back up at the same place. I can’t do that. I blocked them.”
“That was one of the reasons I stopped contacting my mom,” I said. “She would talk just like no time had passed at all. She would tell me about going out, her boyfriend problems, her rent problems. Sex stuff I didn’t want to know. I realized that she never wondered how I had been or asked me questions about my life. She wasn’t worried when I didn’t call, either. So I stopped, and she didn’t make an effort back. I didn’t have to block her.”
“Maybe we won’t visit Nevada when we go to Hawaii,” Nolan said. “You’ve never been in the ocean, right?” He talked about snorkeling and seeing all the sea creatures, and he did a much better job at distraction than I had been doing. We stopped for snacks and I didn’t drive fast, but we seemed to be making good time to the hospital. Along the way, he called his mom for information and they got into a very heated discussion in French.
“What did she say?” I asked when he dropped the phone into the console.
“She has a meeting with an important client, which I was delaying with my questions. My dad was already transferred to the cardiac care unit. I asked if it was usual to move out of the ER so quickly and she let it slip that he had symptoms last night and drove himself to the hospital then. She didn’t think to let me know.”
“Why? Why didn’t she want to tell you? I could see my own mom forgetting if a boyfriend or ‘husband’ was in the hospital, but your mother is cut from a different cloth,” I said.
“She’s not careless like that,” he agreed. “I’m not sure. It’s to punish one of us, I suppose. They hate each other and I’ve never believed that they cared much for me.”
“But she wanted to see you,” I said. “Remember? She wanted you to come down to pick up my paperwork. I bet her law firm has an extra-special delivery service that could have brought everything up north and then she could have billed eight times the actual cost. But instead, she wanted you to come. That sounds like caring.”
“No. She wanted to see you,” he corrected. “She was evaluating you.”
“Like it was a test?” I shook my head. “Why?”
“She assumed that the reason I asked for her help with your paperwork issue was because you and I were in a relationship, and I let her think so. I let her believe that you’re my girlfriend and we’re living together. So, she needed to evaluate you for suitability.”
“No offense, but it doesn’t seem like she’s a great judge of relationships. She’s married to a guy who’s in the hospital and she’s not even visiting him,” I said. “But why didn’t you tell her the truth?”
“I don’t know. I should have,” he answered. “For the last few months, things have been different. My mom and I haven’tdiscussed anything important in years, but when I went to rehab, it set something off. She acted strangely.”
“How? What did she do?” I asked.
“She called a lot. She would say that she wanted to talk.” He said that slowly, like he was working through the idea.
“You told me that you don’t do that,” I reminded him. “When you called her about working on my paperwork problem, you didn’t chitchat. You stuck to business.”
“Yes, because that was the relationship we’ve always had. In college, after she hired detectives to track me down, I started calling once or twice a semester but we stuck to facts. I told her that I was passing my classes and later, I let her know that I had left my job in LA and had moved up north. But since I got back from rehab, she seems to be interested in more than just the facts. She seems…” He thought, pursing his lips a few times and then frowning. “Interested?” he asked. “She suggested that I should meet someone. Someone sober.”
