“Yeah, it is. It’s at least a studio apartment.” Sam smirks. Itseems to amuse him that Taylor’s such an aspiring fashionista but chooses to wear the lumberjack coat.
“Okay, fine. But it’s more like…like a camper than an apartment. Because it travels. Trust me, you would wear that coat, too, if you had to walk to work in this weather at five thirty a.m.”
Sam scrunches his nose. It’s a nice nose, long and strong. Taylor wants to tell him that but doesn’t know if that’s a weird thing to say. Is she drunk already?
“I wouldn’t be caught dead in your coat,” he says. “Or outside at five thirty a.m., unless I’m coming home from a club.”
Taylor believes him. Sam is a senior hairstylist at one of the most well-known salons in Boston, one that Taylor can’t afford. Occasionally he’ll hold up the ends of her hair and declare it’s time for a trim; then he’ll sneak her into his salon after-hours to give her a free cut. Taylor is grateful, though sometimes wishes she could visit the salon like a normal customer during regular business hours. Sam moves in circles that Taylor wishes she did: old-money Bostonians, new-money Bostonians, influencers, local celebrities, politicians. Funny enough, he’s a bit of a homebody, which is probably one of the reasons why he and Taylor get along so well. Or, at least, he’s that way now; he’s twelve years older than Taylor and says he used to party a lot more when he was her age. Frankly, hestillparties a heck of a lot more than she does.
“Maybe the guy at the liquor store just didn’t care that you’re a nurse,” Sam says, picking up his phone to scroll through a dating app. “Even though he should. You should, like, get a nurse discount or something,” he adds, catching her eye before peering back down at his phone.
He’s always giving her credit she doesn’t feel she entirely deserves. His late mom was a nurse. Another thing they have in common: They both don’t have moms.
“Yeah, well, he better hope he doesn’t end up in my ER.”
“What do you think about this one?” Sam holds up his phone to show Taylor a photo of a young, buff man wearing only cutoff jeans.
“Seriously?”
“Is that a no?”
“Yeah, that’s one hundred percent a no. He’s too young and trying too hard.”
“Ouch. You’re right.” He laughs. “I like drunk Taylor. You say what you mean.”
“I always say what I mean.”
“You say what you mean. But you don’t always say.”
It’s funny how much he seems to know her even though they haven’t been friends for that long.
And what is shenot sayingto him?
Vivian.
Vivian, Vivian, Vivian.
Her patient swims around in her blurry head, resurfacing at any break in the conversation.
Sam must sense she’s had a rough day, but he doesn’t press her.
“I don’t know how you do it,” he remarks, with a bit of awe, and it suddenly feels like he’s snipping a suture on a laceration that hasn’t yet healed.
She doesn’t deserve his admiration. Something else she keeps to herself: Most days she doesn’t even know if she wants to be a nurse, surrounded by so much sickness it invariably seeps into the pores of her life—random ambulance sirens on the street that penetrate her thoughts, the coughs of strangers she can’t help but identify, the coffee barista whose bulging hand vein would make for excellent IV access. Before Taylor was a nurse, life was just life, bodies just bodies—hands just hands. Some days—like today—she wonders if she’s made a terrible mistake. Not justabout her choice of career, but her life. Is she working toward something or just pretending to? It often feels like she’s running aimlessly on a treadmill but deluding herself into believing that she’s outside, moving with purpose.
Taylor takes a long sip of the whiskey, letting it slowly trickle down her throat with a spicy heat. Tonight, she will drink and let Vivian, and her job, and her uncertainty sink into the deep gulfs of her mind.
A couple of whiskeys later, Taylor is in her bed and annoyingly awake. It’s the middle of the night, sometime between the hours of one and three, when time is heavy in a gluttonous way, the minutes lazy and fat.
The night demons, her dad used to call them, when Taylor was a little girl. She would appear at his bedside in her nightgown, clutching a shiny silver sequin change purse that she used like a lovey. It was her mom’s change purse she’d left behind in the near empty closet. Her dad would allow Taylor to crawl into bed next to him, and within minutes he’d easily fall back asleep, his snores cutting the quiet like foghorns. But she’d stay awake as the minutes ever so slowly ticked by, waiting for morning light to appear at the corners of the bedroom window shade.
It’s been years since she had the night demons, but ever since moving to Boston, they’ve returned.
Why is life so hard?Taylor thinks, like she does every night when she awakes between the hours of 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. Back when she was a little girl, the questions were different.Why did Mom leave?And then:Why did Mom have to die in that fire?
When her mother arrived in Boston, she sent Taylor only a handful of letters—three, to be exact—but they containedrich sensory delights: stately brownstones on bumpy cobblestone streets, magical oil streetlamps, lobster scrambled eggs, and salty oysters with the promise of pearls. Historic buildings that belonged back in time. High-society parties with women in chic attire. Taylor read the letters so many times their words imprinted on her like tattoos.
Her mother was asked to model for a local Boston designer, Taylor’s father explained one day. “She had to go, T.J. Your mom couldn’t do that kind of thing here, in the Outer Banks. The only thing she could model here would’ve been a wetsuit. Or our restaurant T-shirt.”
