A Deal with the Devil by Elizabeth O’Roark

37

The next morning, I sit next to my mom on the couch for an online meeting with Dr. Shriner to discuss Charlotte’s transition home.

I know I need to focus for my sister’s sake, but it’s hard to hear anything when my head and heart hurt like this. When, every few seconds, I find myself thinking I can’t believe he didn’t write back. Even if it was simply to politely decline, to tell me he didn’t see it working...I really thought he’d leave me with something.

Dr. Shriner is reviewing ways to help Charlotte when she’s struggling. I feel overwhelmed, listening to it—mostly because I suspect it’s all on me. Liddie nods along from Minnesota, and my mom seems focused primarily on throwing out objections as if Dr. Shriner is asking too much of us when nothing matters except what Dr. Shriner’s asking.

“She’s supposed to be applying for college,” my mom says now. “She’s not going to have a lot of time for therapy over the next few months.”

Dr. Shriner, who has remained almost entirely expressionless during the time I’ve known her, stops just short of rolling her eyes. “Therapy needs to be a priority right now,” she says to my mom.

“But college—” my mother begins.

“I’m not even sure Charlotte will be ready to go away for college in a year,” Dr. Shriner says.

My mother sits up straight at this, ready to do battle. “She will definitely be going to college.” I love how she thinks she can pull off the concerned parent routine at this late date. “It’s not like she has to be off in a dorm alone. Tali could get an apartment and live with her there off campus.”

My head jerks toward her, and for a moment, I wonder if I heard what I did. I paid for Charlotte’s time at Fairfield, I’m paying my mom’s mortgage, I gave up my life in LA to take care of her and Charlotte this year and now...she wants more?

She didn’t even ask. She just assumed it would happen, as if I’m some chess piece to move around their board, protecting or attacking when called for.

I wait for someone—Liddie or Dr. Shriner—to object. To say enough is enough. But Dr. Shriner simply looks at me with that placid face of hers and Liddie nods, looking toward me on the computer screen, as if my agreement is a given.

I laugh, and the sound is distinctly unhinged. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I demand.

“What?” my mom asks, turning toward me. “You’ll be fine. You can work anywhere.” Her tone is so dismissive. As if I’m needlessly whining.

“Let Tali take care of it. Let Tali pay,” I reply, my hands pressing tight to my scalp. Hayes was right. I’ve been shouldering all the weight...and I’m officially done. I lost Hayes, and I’m not giving up anything else. “Your only plan for this family going forward appears to be me. Has it ever occurred to you maybe I deserve a life of my own? That I’ve been living in an eight-by-eight room and eating ramen for a year to pay for everything you all need? What have any of you given up?”

My mother and sister are both open-mouthed, undoubtedly preparing their arguments. And I already know what they’ll be: It’s easier for you. You don’t have a child, you can work anywhere, you’ll figure it out. And all that may be true, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy. It doesn’t mean I should have to do everything.

“Have you expressed these feelings to everyone before?” asks Dr. Shriner.

“I didn’t think I had to!” I cry. “I thought maybe they already knew I’m a human being with wants and needs of my own, but apparently that has to be pointed out. And I also thought things would eventually sort themselves out. But they don’t seem to be.”

There is absolute silence. Even Dr. Shriner looks a little shocked by my outburst, and there’s a part of me that feels as if I should back down and apologize, but...no. Hell no. I’m here, and I’ve lost Hayes, and I’m so sick over it I no longer care about adding my hurt to theirs. I just don’t care.

“Families—” begins Dr. Shriner.

“Things always work out for you, though,” argues Liddie. “You get scholarships. You date and dump celebrities. You move from coast to coast and get book deals. You just...always land on your feet.”

“How is this landing on my feet?” I ask. “I’m alone and living in my childhood home taking care of our mother, a woman who doesn’t want to work and doesn’t want to stop drinking and is perfectly willing to throw me under the bus. You behave as if everything is so easy for me when the biggest problem you have is that you aren’t getting pregnant fast enough.”

Liddie’s jaw falls. I probably went too far with the pregnancy comment, but at present I’m too irritated to care. She can’t selectively name the high points in my life while ignoring the lows.

“Families tend to assign each child a role—” begins Dr. Shriner, but she is cut off my mother.

“Is that really how you see this?” she asks, her voice tight. She is staring at her lap, her hands tightly clasped.

“How could I not, Mom?” I ask. “You take and take, but don’t seem to have any plan for yourself. You won’t stop drinking even when you know it means I have to move home. How could it possibly be seen any other way?”

She covers her face with her hands, and I feel a tiny pinch of guilt. A voice says she lost her husband, Tali, cut her some slack. But what about everything I’ve lost?

“You always seem so strong,” she says quietly. “And I’m not. I’ve never held a job in my life. Who’s even going to hire me? And with the drinking...I wasn’t trying to force you to come home. But I thought Dr. Shriner was wrong, and it felt like you were taking her side. Why didn’t you say anything?”

I try to come up with an answer, but my mind is blank. “I have no idea,” I reply. “It just seemed best to keep it to myself.”

This is the point where I’d normally apologize. I’d tell Liddie my comment was insensitive. I’d assure my mother that it’s fine that I’m here, that I’m happy to help as long as she needs me. For once in my life, though, I stay silent.

“Tali, it sounds like your role in the family is ‘the competent one’,” says Dr. Shriner, finally able to get a word in edgewise. “The question is whether you want to keep playing it.”

I think of Hayes again at the airport and that lost, crushed look on his face I refused to acknowledge. For the past year, I’ve shoved down everything I felt, like I was a soldier in the trenches just trying to survive. And I took Hayes down with me. “No,” I reply, rising, my voice rasping. “I don’t.”

I walk out of the house and down the street, trying not to cry as I picture Hayes’s face at the airport, or the way he looked at me that last time we were together. My hatred for Ella could fuel the state’s power grid, yet I was hardly any better to him, in the end. I go up and down the street until Mrs. Deal next door calls out to me from her garden to ask if it’s good to be home.

I feel myself gearing up to fake a smile and give her the answer she wants, but quell it.

“At the moment,” I reply, “not especially.”

I return to the house, fully expecting recrimination from my mother, now that Dr. Shriner is no longer online to witness it. But her shoulders slump when she sees me.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I had no idea you wanted to stay in LA that much. And I did try...I tried to get a job. I sent out resumés, but when I studied marketing, there was no Twitter or Facebook or Google. My degree is useless, and I’m not sure there’s anything I can do about that. But I’ll try to pull myself together. I promise.”

I nod, but my eyes pinch with tears. It no longer matters. Without Hayes to go back to, LA is just a city with better weather and shopping, and I may as well stay here.

* * *

In the afternoon,I leave for Topeka to pick up Charlotte, trying to get my head in a better place. For her sake, I need to find a way to fake good cheer.

There is paperwork to be filled out when I arrive, and they tell me—like the vultures they are—I’ll need to talk to finance about the billing issue. I’m not in the mood. I wish I hadn’t been avoiding their calls.

I’m ushered to a desk where someone named Lisa looks up the chart. “We’ve called you a few times. There’s a credit on the account,” she says.

“A credit?” I repeat. It must be a mistake. There’s a desperate part of me that is already considering letting them make it—my family needs the money more than they do.

“Right. We were wondering if you wanted it to apply toward the rest of your sister’s stay, but I suppose if she’s leaving, we’ll cut you a check.”

I sigh. As desperate as I am, having them actually give me money would be taking it too far. “I...think there must be a mistake. I haven’t even paid for Charlotte’s last month here yet.”

She taps something on her keyboard and peers at the monitor for a moment. “No, her entire stay was paid in full two weeks ago. We were told to credit back to you what you’d already paid.”

I blink at her. It takes me longer than it should to realize who paid it. Even after I left Hayes at the airport, saying I wanted nothing to do with him, he still spent almost fifty grand helping me get out of debt.

I’m swallowing hard as she submits a request for the reimbursement check. In an ideal world, this wouldn’t be the end of our story. But at least I know he cared.

It will need to be enough.

* * *

Charlotte emergesfrom the inpatient area with a wide smile, pretty as ever. She seems more like her old self, instead of the pale, destroyed girl who arrived here. A guy is on the other side of the door, watching her with lovesick eyes.

“Who’s that?” I ask, nodding toward him.

She waves goodbye to him. “Just a guy who was here,” she says. I suspect she has no idea of the effect she has. Of the three Bell sisters, she definitely got the looks.

We stop for Slurpees on the way home. It’s what my father used to do with us on the first and last days of school. “Do you think he did it because he wanted to celebrate?” I ask. “Or was it an excuse to have junk food without Mom yelling at him?”

Charlotte laughs. “It was totally about the junk food. Mom said they found like fifteen bags of Skittles in his desk at work. He was dead, but she was still so mad.”

We start exchanging stories, recalling the time when he couldn’t figure out Uber and ended up walking home ten miles because he didn’t want to admit it. The way he would demolish half a tub of ice cream and then later claim he’d barely eaten all day. The time he couldn’t get the hood of his car open and took a saw to it, destroying it in ways even the autobody shop couldn’t fix later.

It’s good being able to talk about him like this. Not in hushed, sad tones, and not as if he was infallible. But as the funny, loving, flawed man who raised us. It feels a little bit like getting him back, in an odd way.

Too soon, we arrive at home...to find a tiny orange Ford in the driveway.

“Who’s that?” asks Charlotte.

For a single, heartbreaking moment, I wonder if it’s Hayes. If he flew out here like the hero of some Nicholas Sparks movie to declare his love for me. And then I laugh at myself. There’s no way Hayes would rent an American car. Certainly not an orange one.

The door opens, and my niece Kaitlin comes running outside to us, throwing her arms around Charlotte and then me.

“We’re here for a whole week, Aunt Tali!” she shouts, squeezing my legs as I lean down to pick her up. I laugh. My chest still aches, but it’s hard to be entirely sad when you have a three-year-old wrapping herself around you like you’re her favorite teddy bear.

Liddie, who followed Kaitlin out, hugs Charlotte and then gives me a tentative smile. “It was last minute. I hope that’s...okay?”

I wince. I took things too far this morning if Liddie feels like she has to ask permission to be in her own home. “I’m sorry about what I said. I know the pregnancy thing matters to you.”

She shoves her hands in her back pockets. “Dr. Shriner asked me about it, after you stormed out. She says sometimes people create a problem or throw themselves into a project in order to avoid their own grief. It’s possible that’s what I’ve been doing.”

“But you’re allowed to create projects or problems,” I tell her. “Especially if it’s what you need to move forward.”

She shrugs and wraps an arm around me. “I can probably do it without acting like I’m the only one suffering, though. I’ll do what I can to get down here. We’re going to figure this out, but all of us, not just you, okay?”

I’m too choked up to do anything but nod.

It’s not a perfect resolution, but it’s...a better one, and sometimes better is all you can hope for.

My mother starts making cookies with Kaitlin, and I order pizza for dinner. There is noise and light in the house for the first time in ages, and it feels as if we might have all turned a corner, even my mom.

“Should I open a bottle of wine?” she asks.

Liddie and I both turn to her, jaws open.

“Oh, lighten up, girls,” she says with a wave of her hand. “It was a joke.”

I’m grabbing cash for the pizza when I hear my phone ping, and though I know it’s probably not Hayes, hope is a defiant little thing. It goes on about its business, no matter how vigorously you insist it shouldn’t.

I see Sam’s name and my stomach drops a little. A few more moments like this and the hope will start to fade and so will the ache. Eventually, I’ll be able to smile at the memories of Hayes the way Charlotte and I did today about my dad. Maybe it will even feel as if it’s for the best.

How’s Charlotte doing?Sam writes. Did the trip go okay?

He really is a keeper. Thoughtful in ways Matt wasn’t, and with far more common interests.

It went well, I tell him. And Liddie is here all week, which should be fun.

Maybe they can spare you for a night, he replies. Let’s go out for dinner. I know you’re not ready for more, but I’m still your friend. And I hate how sad you looked last night.

I stare at the phone. I’m not ready for more. At the moment it feels like I never will be. But it’s one of those times where you see how your story will turn out. Like Aisling, I’ve learned about love—what it is and what it is not—and I will carry that lesson forward into the next chapter of my life. Someone like Sam is probably the right choice for me. Maybe the day will come when I can look back to this moment and see it was for the best, how things fell apart with Hayes. Right now, though, it just makes me want to weep all over again.

The doorbell rings, and I grab the cash and jog to the front door, where both Charlotte and Liddie already stand.

“Wow.” Liddie’s got her hands on her hips. “I don’t know about this.”

“That’s fascinating,” comes the drawled response. “But it’s actually her opinion that matters.” The voice is deep, arrogant. British.

Hayes.

I push my sisters to the side and the sight of him—thinner and more tired than he ever was before—cracks me wide open. He’s suffered every bit as much as I have, and it was all my doing.

I burst into tears, and throw myself against his chest. His arms come around me and I’m lifted off my feet. “I’d hoped you’d be a little happier to see me,” he says with a small laugh, burying his head in my hair.

I cling to him as if I’m drowning. “Why didn’t you reply?” I ask. “I tell you I love you and then there was nothing. I thought...I thought…”

He takes my jaw in his palms and kisses me. He kisses me as if he’s starved for me, and that makes sense. I’m starved for him too. It feels as if I’ll never get full.

Behind us, though, my family is offering a steady stream of commentary. “Maybe we shouldn’t be watching this,” says Charlotte, still standing right there in the doorway.

“I knew she was sleeping with him,” says Liddie. “Little liar.”

“Isn’t that her boss?” asks my mother. “And why’s he wearing a suit?”

Hayes flashes them his most charming smile. “I look forward to explaining everything. But a little privacy, for now?” He raises a brow, and Charlotte finally shuts the door.

He pulls me close. “I’m sorry I didn’t reply right away. I had to think.”

“How…romantic?”

He laughs. “It wasn’t a question of what I wanted. I just had to figure out what could be done, how it would work. Because I’m not waiting a year for you to come back to LA.”

My mouth trembles. “Things are improving, but I really do have to stay here. Even if my mom sticks with AA and is able to keep her license, I still can’t leave Charlotte with her alone.”

“I know,” he says. He wipes a tear off my face with his thumb, his mouth curving into a soft smile. “I spoke to the other doctors in my practice this morning. I’ll need to be in LA half the month, but the rest of the time I’ll be here with you.”

I’m speechless, half waiting for a punchline or amendment that doesn’t seem to be coming. “But your job is everything to you,” I finally say.

“Tali, I’m so in love with you it terrifies me,” he says. “And you’re the only thing that’s mattered for quite a while now. Do you really think I’d take off work to go to an amusement park otherwise?”

No, I guess not. I saw he was changing, but it’s only now I realize he was changing for me. I go on my toes to kiss him.

“Hayes Flynn living in Lowden, Kansas, population three hundred,” I say, with a laugh. “It sounds like the premise of a bad sitcom. One in which you’re constantly expressing dismay about the quality of the sushi and wearing Tom Ford suits to Chili’s.”

His hands palm my ass, pulling me against him. “I’m not eating at Chili’s. One of us may need to learn to cook, probably you. But that can wait. Right now, I would like, very much, to go somewhere without your family listening.” He nods at the door behind us, where my sisters have their faces pressed to the glass. “It’s going to be loud tonight, I assure you.”

My body goes taut at the very idea of an entire night having Hayes to myself. But a Prius with a pizza logo is pulling up in front of the house, and I suppose if we’re really doing this, we better start now. “Yes,” I tell him. “But first, you should probably meet everyone. And get used to our version of fine dining.”

“Hey there, Tali,” says the kid coming up the porch steps. “Heard you were back. Good to be home?”

I look up at Hayes, blinking back tears. “Yes,” I tell him. “It really is.”