Page 4 of The Best Worst Thing

Smithereens

The transfer went smoothly.

Dr. Akhtar used a catheter and a tiny puff of air to push two genetically screened embryos—one boy, one girl—into Valerie’s uterus, told her to sit with her legs up for an hour, then sent her home to do a whole bunch of nothing for two days.

“This one’s going to stick,” an eager nurse who’d never laid eyes on Nicole’s medical records said as she wheeled a Valium-woozy Valerie through the parking lot. And Nicole, fully prepared to wrinkle her nose, didn’t.

Instead, she decided to believe. She decided to let herself forget what her doctor had said after Valerie’s second transfer failed.

That she didn’t know why Nicole and Gabe’s embryos weren’t working, but as a physician, she had an ethical responsibility to tell them it was time to stop.

That it was time to maybe start exploring other options.

But Nicole and Gabe weren’t in the business of taking no for an answer. And when they’d learned the only viable embryos from Nicole’s latest cycle had received unfavorable grades, they decided to throw a Hail Mary. They decided to transfer both.

And so Nicole—buzzing, believing—drove Valerie home, set her up with another season of Scandal, gave her a very careful hug, then headed to the airport to catch an earlier flight out of Virginia.

After all, a summer storm was set to batter the mid-Atlantic later that afternoon.

But just when she’d reached across the check-in counter for her new boarding pass, Nicole’s phone slipped through her jittery fingers and landed smack against the speckled linoleum, shattering the screen into smithereens.

And so, phoneless, Nicole settled into her newly assigned seat, closed her eyes, and let herself imagine, just for the afternoon, that in nine months, she’d have twins.

Boy-girl twins. And as she touched down in Los Angeles, wandered through the airport parking garage, drove the mindless twenty minutes home, and opened the navy door to her big white house, she was still riding that high.

“Nero, boy?” she said, setting her weekender down in the foyer. At her feet, strewn across the blond oak, a lilac sweatshirt.

That must’ve belonged to Cassidy, the dog walker. She usually came twice a day when Nicole was traveling: once in the morning and then again in the afternoon. It was too hard for Gabe to predict whether he’d make it home in time to feed Nero dinner and take him for a quick stroll around the block.

Nicole folded the sweatshirt, placed it on the console, then called out for Nero again.

His bed in the living room, empty.

The rug beneath the dining table, bare.

The armchair in the den, vacant.

He must’ve been in her office, curled up in a comma, sunbathing in his little spot on the hardwood just where the afternoon light poured in. After all, the marine layer had finally burned off today. Summer was here.

So she headed up the stairwell. That was when a voice—soft and young and too familiar—called down from the loft.

“Gabe?” it said. “I’m upstairs.”

Three little words, and that was it. The walls began to spin.

Nicole’s lungs cracked.

Her heart howled.

Her world stopped.

She clutched onto the banister and begged her body to take a few more impossible steps toward the landing.

One …

Two …

Three …

Cassidy was just lying there, headphones in, bare feet propped up on the arm of Nicole’s linen loveseat, Nero half asleep in her lap. Her wild blond hair, bronzed legs, and very pretty face—now frozen.

“I, um …” Cassidy pulled the blaring buds out of her ears. “I wasn’t feeling well, I was just laying down, I …”

Nicole nodded. She just nodded, staring at this girl, forced to picture her warm, wet lips all over Gabe’s mouth and ears and neck and throat and—

“I’ll go,” Cassidy said, pulling her ridden-up shirt over her perfect little stomach, then darting down the stairs, one long leg after another, until she’d finally disappeared. As if it made any difference. As if anything could stop the past ten years from unraveling now.

Nicole could still see him standing there—six foot three, ridiculous Patagonia vest—talking up her roommate at that dive on Waverly.

He caught her rolling her eyes right at him, then grinned from across the windowless, brick-walled basement—an ocean of pool tables and barely legals and watered-down Blue Moons separating him from her.

He parted the sea like it was nothing. All she saw was him.

The way he looked right before he’d first kissed her—his hands up her dress in the filthy bathroom of that Astor Place Kmart, smack in the middle of her reading day, a forgotten shopping basket filled to the brim with half-priced Easter candy between their twisted toes.

How, that first week, he’d fucked her maybe twenty, thirty times.

Nicole was in finals, and when she’d beg for a break to study, he’d frown, then go down on her instead.

The way he smirked when, together for two months, they’d first pulled up to his parents’ house, three stories of cream stucco and Spanish tile and wrought iron carefully perched atop the peak of Manhattan Beach.

It was the coldest home Nicole had ever entered, but in Gabe’s old bedroom, it was just the two of them, sharing a plate of microwave nachos, watching The Office under the covers, then screwing like animals until they finally fell asleep.

All of it, bullshit.

All of it, a lie.

Gabe knew every inch of her. And she didn’t know him at all. And Nicole—all the bits and pieces and broken parts of her—just stood there, frozen at the top of that stairwell, mocked by those oversize black-and-white wedding photos she’d begged him to hang for years.

You stupid idiot, they whispered. You jobless, childless, nothing little fool.

She scoured his closet.

She ransacked his office.

She hurled his tennis racket at his rowing machine.

And then she sat on the stoop of their starter home, folded her body in half, and waited for him. She just sat there and counted every last car that crawled by.

An Audi SUV, white.

A Range Rover, silver.

Another Audi—a hatchback, champagne.

And then, finally, a Tesla. Model S, black, and screeching into the driveway on a breathless diagonal.

“Nicole, I swear, nothing happened!”

“Whatever she told you, it’s not true!”

“Whatever you’re thinking, it’s not that!”

Nicole just sat there, lifeless, listening to her husband lie to her. It came easy, didn’t it? He was born to do this—to lie. Every one, more desperate than the last.

“She’s trying to get a job in finance! I told her I would help!”

“She’s obsessed with me! Please, you have to let me explain!”

“She’s just trying to get between us! I’m telling you, she’s fucking nuts!”

It was strange—an out-of-body experience, really—watching the man she’d loved since she was twenty-two scrape her insides out with his bare hands. But he was a natural. He just kept talking and pacing and pleading and lying until there was nothing left. Until he’d gutted her.

This couldn’t be Gabe. This couldn’t be the same Gabe she’d married.

Hadn’t he held her? His fingers sealed around hers during that first dilation and curettage; Nicole in shock, headphones blaring to drown the noise of their itty-bitty baby—a clump of cells whose first birthday she’d already begun to plan—being removed from her good-for-nothing body with forceps?

With a spoon? Hadn’t he slid his black card against the ivory quartz countertop of that surrogacy agency, Nicole a ghost as she clutched onto an inch-thick folder of women ready, willing, and able to carry their baby to term?

Hadn’t he promised they could try forever?

That he’d have picked her all the same even if he’d known, that Thursday at the bar, this would be the war of their lives?

Nicole didn’t know what was real. Not anymore. But she knew those memories. She had lived them. They had lived them together. And yet, somehow, they amounted to nothing. Somehow, she was just another clueless wife.

And so, Nicole—looking at him, listening to him lie—couldn’t even ask. How long? How many times? How many different women? Do you tell them that we’re over? Do you keep your ring on when you fuck them? Do they like that? Do you like that? Do your friends know? Does Kyle know? Does everybody know?

All she could muster was this:

“How could you?”

Her words—low, quiet, cracked—hung in the air for an eternity.

Gabe’s hands were in his pockets. His eyes were on the ground.

He knew. She knew.

The show was over.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

And Nicole, not sure what to do next, just sat on the stoop of her picture-perfect home, put her head in her hands, and let that first summer sun fry her broken heart like an egg.