Tom laughed. “You were probably expecting more of a ball pit concept?” She pursed that little flower bud of a mouth, unable to lie. “It’s okay. You know, Adrian threatened to put me in an aquarium lined with cedar chips if I didn’t get better at picking up after myself.”
It was dangerous to mention their mutual friend—and also, obliquely, that Tom had slept on his couch for a year after Rosie kicked him out—but Rosie mustered half a smirk even though her posture was still rattled and uncertain. “As though Adrian wasn’t always training to be someone’s fancy little pet,” she said.
Tom wanted to pick up his phone and text that cuttingly accurate observation to the group chat with Adrian and his girlfriend, but he was afraid to take his eyes off Rosie lest she vanish.
He’d been hovering awkwardly, but he took a seat at the other end of the couch, just close enough that his bare knee might brush Rosie’s corduroy-clad one. He looked at Rosie’s suitcase.
“Um. Do you need somewhere to stay…?”
Many of his fantasies about finding Rosie again had revolved around her needing something implausible from him, like a date to a wedding full of assassins or maybe a kidney.Anything for you, my love, he’d sob as the surgeon drew on him with a Sharpie, and then the third act would explore the physical metaphor of organ donation in a satisfying way.
He had a hard time coming up with other explanations for Rosie on his doorstep in Inwood at midnight.
“Oh, no, I just got off the train from Boston,” she said. She took a deep breath, as though preparing a long explanation, but her eyes landed for the first time on the painting hung behind the couch. It was a colorful abstract floral piece, and Adrian had given it to them as an engagement gift. It was one of the few things Tom had come out of the divorce owning. Rosie’s face fell, and she ducked her chin.
“This was a bad idea,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.
“What is it?” Tom said, stretching his arm out down the back of the couch in reassurance. “You came all the way here from Penn Station, you might as well tell me.”
She popped her head to the side in a heartbreakingly familiar chiding expression before she looked down at her lap. “I came to ask if you meant it.”
“Meant what?”
Rose reached into her handbag again, coming out with her phone this time. With a few clicks of her thumb, his recorded voice hissed through the room, startling and unfamiliar for the static and the distance.
Hey, Rosie? It’s me.
She stopped the recording and looked at him expectantly.
Tom wet his lips. He’d thought of that message often for the first week after the hurricane, but when it went unanswered, he’d put those thoughts away for safekeeping with every other hurt that bore her name.
“Did you mean it?” she asked again.
Mean what? That he still loved her?Like REO Speedwagon sang it: when I said that I love you I meant that I love you forever.
“Yes?” he said, incredulous that it could really be that easy. It couldn’t possibly be so easy to get her here as just calling her and telling her that. It didn’t make any sense; whether they were in love had seemed very irrelevant to her reasons for divorcing him.
She must have heard the news. About the storm, Boyd, the Broadway run. In the press or maybe from Adrian or one of their other friends. Something to make her think he wasn’t the same selfish jerk he’d been at twenty-two.
Rosie looked skeptical, catching his hesitation.
“I meant it,” he confirmed, wiping his face clean and summoning more confidence.
“Okay. Okay, so, I actually do need something…” she said slowly.
Rosie was trying to work herself up to it. Oh God, it probably was a kidney after all. Rosie’s health hadn’t ever been great, what with the asthma and the dramatic allergen encounters, and maybe some exotic inflammatory reaction meant she needed a new organ?
Well, this was the reason he came with spares, he supposed. Hopefully the recovery period didn’t take him too far into rehearsals.
“You remember the Windward Inn?” Rosie asked instead.
Tom blinked. “Of course I do. We went like ten times. And for our honeymoon.”
She winced at that last word, but she continued. “So, in the hurricane—you know, the same hurricane…you remember the hurricane.”
“Yeah, I heard it smacked Martha’s Vineyard pretty good,” he said, not sure where this was going other than not to the operating room.
“The inn got damaged in the storm. The roof and I don’t know what else. My family thinks we should sell rather than try to fix it up,” she finished in a rush.
