The Seven Year Slip

THE LABOR AND DELIVERY floor of New York Presbyterian didn’t expect an entourage of well-dressed twentysomethings rushing in after their friend, only to be turned away at the door by an overworked nurse and told to stay in the waiting room. Juliette and I did, and we claimed a corner of the beige room to wait it out. We could have gone home, probably, but that never crossed our minds at all. We sat there and we waited, because Fiona and Drew were as much my family as my parents—we saw each other more often, anyway. We complained over wine together, and we spent New Year’s and Halloween and the odd government holidays together. We celebrated birthdays and death days, and they were the first people I called when the worst day of my life happened.

It was only natural that we were together for the best days, too.

So it was no surprise that I was in the waiting room. Juliette, on the other hand, was new.

“You can go, you know,” I told her, but she shook her head.

“No way, I stick things through,” she replied. I wanted to point out that she really didn’t have an obligation to Fiona or Drew, but then I thought better of it. If she wanted to be here, who was I to say no?

After an hour, I stretched and checked my phone. It was almost 10:30 p.m. Juliette was nervously scrolling Instagram while I sketched in my travel guide, outlining the waiting room in the section titled Quiet Reprieves. The sleepy sofa. The tired-looking chairs. The family on the other side, the dad having gone back with his wife, the grandparents hunched in chairs to wait, two kids watching a Disney movie on their dad’s phone.

“Crap,” Juliette muttered, pausing at a photo.

I sat down and cracked my neck. “What is it?”

She sighed. “Nothing.”

I glanced over at her phone, anyway. “Is that Rob?”

“He had a show tonight,” she replied, but that wasn’t what was wrong with the photo. He was kissing another woman. “She’s probably a groupie,” she said, as if to explain it away. “He’s very good to his fans.”

I gave her an appalled look. “Really?”

“. . . It doesn’t matter. He’ll make it up to me,” she replied, putting her phone to sleep and shoving it into her purse. “It’s fine.”

But it wasn’t. I turned to her and gathered her hands in mine. “We’re friends, right?”

“I should hope so. You see my private stories on Instagram, and if we aren’t friends, I really need to reconsider that.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “We’re friends, so I just want to tell you: fuck Romeo-Rob.”

She blinked at me. “What?”

“Fuck Rob,” I repeated. “You are way too smart and way too beautiful and way too successful to have some D-list guitarist from a no-name band treat you like you’re replaceable. You aren’t.”

“He plays bass, actually . . .” she muttered.

“Fuck him! Why do you keep getting back with him if he makes you so miserable?”

Her eyes widened and she opened her mouth, and then shut it again, glancing at the family on the other side of the waiting room, who had covered their children’s ears, scandalized. I didn’t care, this was my movie moment.

I went on, “I get it, he’s hot. He probably gives you the best sex of your life. But if it doesn’t fill you with tinglies to be around him every second you’re around him—if he doesn’t make you happy—then what the hell are you doing? You only live once,” I said, because if I’d learned anything about living in a time-traveling apartment, no matter how much time you get, it’s still never enough. And I wanted to start living my life like I was enjoying every moment that I had it. “And if you do it right,” I said, remembering the way my aunt laughed as we sprinted to catch our connecting flights across the airport, how she flung her arms wide at the top of Arthur’s Seat and the Parthenon and Santorini and every hill with a beautiful view she came across, as if she wanted to embrace the sky; the way she always took her time to decide what she wanted on a menu; the way she asked everyone she met for their stories, absorbed their fairy tales, and chased the moon.

“If you do it right,” I repeated, “once is all you need.”

Juliette was quiet for a long moment, and then her face scrunched in tears. “What if I n-never find anyone else?”

“But what if you do?” I asked, squeezing her hands tightly. “You deserve to find out.”

With a sob, she flung out her arms and pulled me into a tight hug, burrowing her head into my shoulder. I was not expecting it, so I stiffened at the sudden contact, but if she noticed, she didn’t let go, because she held on as she cried into my shoulder. I wrapped my arms around her awkwardly, and patted her back.

I didn’t know that no one had ever told her that she deserved more. I didn’t know that she had been thinking about calling it quits for a while. I didn’t know how unhappy she had been. How miserable. She said she hadn’t realized it until I said she deserved better.

A cold, hard realization curled in my stomach, because as she finally let go of me and told me that I was right, I thought about my small cubicle, the paintings of landscapes I hung up across my corkboard, and the piles of travel guides I had stashed in my desk drawer. I thought about coming home to my aunt’s small apartment, and catching the train every morning, and planning someone else’s adventures in an Excel spreadsheet for the rest of my life.

And I realized that I was unhappy, too.

The waiting room doors swung wide, and Drew swooped in, a smile so wide and bright, it was contagious, and whatever answer I could’ve had was erased by that moment. “Come on, come on!” Drew said, grabbing us by our wrists, and pulling us to our feet and out of the waiting room and down the hall. “You have to meet her! You have to. She’s amazing.”

And Penelope Grayson Torres, born at eight pounds and ten ounces, was, in fact, amazing. Even when she spit up all over me.

THAT MONDAY MORNING, RHONDA’S office was warm and quiet as I came in and set the letter down on her desk. Work was quiet without Drew and Fiona, but they’d be gone on maternity leave for the next few months, and I hated that I’d be gone by the time they came back. A soft pop playlist hummed from Rhonda’s speakers as she lounged back in her chair and flipped page after page of a bound manuscript, her glasses low on the bridge of her nose. She glanced up at me, her eyebrows knitting together in confusion at the letter. “What’s this?”

The end, the beginning.

Something new.

“I realized something over the summer,” I began, twisting my fingers nervously, “and it was that I’m not very happy anymore. I haven’t been in a while, but I didn’t know why until an old friend came back into my life.”

Rhonda sat up a little straighter, taking the letter and opening it.

“I’m sorry that this comes as a surprise—it was a surprise to me, too. I’m not sure what I want to do,” I went on as she read the resignation letter, her face growing grim, “but I don’t think it’s this. Thank you so much for the opportunity, and I’m sorry.”

Because I felt like I had wasted her time for seven years. For shaving off parts of myself, over and over again, to squeeze into the expectations I thought I needed to set for myself. I was never going to wear heels and blazers—I didn’t want that anymore, and it was scary to think about, but a little thrilling, too.

I couldn’t look at her as I turned to leave, but as I did, Rhonda said, “I didn’t find out who I wanted to be until I was almost forty. You have to try on a lot of shoes until you find some you like walking in. Never apologize for that. Once I found mine, I’ve been content for twenty years.”

“You barely look a day over fifty,” I remarked, and she threw her head back with a laugh.

“Go,” she said, waving my letter at me, “and have some fun while you’re out there.”

So I did just that.

Even though I had two weeks to shift my duties to Juliette, and to help Rhonda start the hiring process for my replacement, I packed up my cubicle into one box—Drew always did call it a one-box walkout—and realized that a part of me, subconsciously, always knew that I wouldn’t be here forever. I didn’t clutter my desk with things from home. I didn’t decorate my corkboard with photos of friends and family. I never even changed the wallpaper on my computer.

I was simply here.

And that wasn’t enough anymore.

With my resignation turned in, work was strange. Juliette and I would eat at Bryant Park on the grass, and I slowly started handing off my authors and off-boarding, and we kept Fiona and Drew updated on all the workroom gossip.

After hyacinth’s soft opening, Drew didn’t hear back from James and his agent until the following Tuesday—and even then it was just to inform us that they would be making a final decision soon, but couldn’t quite specify when. Things, apparently, had been so busy with final preparations for the official opening of the restaurant that they didn’t have time. I didn’t have the courage to tell Drew that I was sure I’d fucked our chances pretty thoroughly—I was sure he hated me. Or at least never wanted to see me again—but Drew was so busy with her newborn that I doubt she gave James a passing thought.

And if James did want to see me, he knew where I lived, though it seemed even the apartment didn’t want me to see him again.