Hello stranger, p.28
Hello Stranger, page 28
All I had to do was make it to the end of dinner—when, with any luck, Joe would suddenly realize that even though he’d been invited, he wasn’t really welcome.
With any luck, he’d be just as eager to leave as I was to see him go.
Then I could relax.
Then I could dance the night away with Daniel and his adorable friends.
Then I could let this whole weird chapter of my life go at last—and move the hell on.
Thirty-One
BUT JOE DIDN’T leave. He stayed.
He lurked around the party long after dinner and well into the dancing—watching me with such purpose as I boogied defiantly with Sue and Daniel and all their cousins that he felt like a predator stalking his prey.
I didn’t care that he was here.
I didn’t care that he was here, damn it.
He couldn’t just stare me down into giving up all my joy.
I had moved on. And bounced back. And if he didn’t understand what he’d lost, then I was better off on my own.
I was fine, I was fine, I was fine.
But you can dance your ass off with bold, hysterical, can’t-touch-this energy for only so long.
Eventually, you have to take a breather.
As soon as I stepped off the dance floor, Joe moved in for the kill.
I didn’t want to talk to him. That should have been perfectly clear. What other message could ignoring him all night possibly convey? And yet there he was, as soon as I’d separated from the herd, moving toward me—with purpose.
But I didn’t have to just stand frozen there like a gazelle and let him pounce. I wasn’t some prey animal. As soon as I saw him making his way toward me, I started making my way toward … what? We were on a roof. It wasn’t like I could catch a city bus and disappear into the night.
But I had to try, anyway.
I headed off toward the far corner, like maybe if I could dart around behind the mechanical room and break his line of sight, he might lose me.
As I sped up, he sped up.
I’d gotten pretty good at speed-walking in these postsurgery weeks, so for a minute there, I was actually starting to lose him … until he broke into a run.
“Sadie!” he called, like that might slow me down.
Wrong. It sped me up.
“Sadie! Wait!” he called again as I rounded the corner.
Rounding the corner did help—for about one second.
Until, as soon as I got there, I realized it was a dead end. A dark dead end with—actually—a fabulous view of the downtown skyline.
I didn’t come to this side very often.
I slowed down, defeated, and then walked to the far edge of the roof, leaning against the railing as if gazing at the view had been my urgent purpose all along.
No escape now, I thought as I heard Joe’s running footsteps approaching behind me.
I took a long-overdue deep breath, felt it swirl in my lungs, and willed it to give me peace.
And then … Joe showed up next to me at the railing.
I felt him land before I turned.
“Hey,” he said, a little breathless.
I pretended I didn’t hear him. Like that glittering skyline had so enraptured me that commonplace things like human interaction didn’t even register.
But he wasn’t deterred. “Could I talk to you for a minute?” he asked, standing so close and looking at me so hard, I had no choice but to respond.
He wanted to talk to me? Hadn’t this night been agonizing enough? “Do you have to?” I asked.
He frowned like he wasn’t sure how to answer.
“Why are you even here?” I asked. “Sue’s not your friend.”
“Mr. Kim invited me.”
“That was an accident.”
“Okay,” Joe said, not too interested in Mr. Kim. “But I’m also here because I got your voicemail.”
I held still. My best wishes voicemail.
Joe waited for a response while I kept my eyes on the city.
“Did you listen to it?” I finally asked.
“Yep.”
“All of it?” I asked.
“Yep.”
Why was he bringing this up? “And?”
“And … I didn’t realize you were going through such a hard time. I’m sorry.”
Wow. So little and so late. I made my voice flat. “It’s fine.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“I thought for sure you’d ignore it. Like you ignored all my other voicemails.”
Joe let that dig go as he edged closer to me.
So I turned toward him. He wanted to do this? Fine. We could do this. But once we were facing each other, I realized there was a lot more to that verb than I’d ever noticed before.
“So…” he said. “Can you not see me right now?”
“I can see you,” I said, maybe a tad more irritated than I needed to be. “You’re standing right there.”
“My face, I mean, though.”
I sighed. “I can actually see your face tonight. For the first time ever.”
Joe frowned. “For the first time ever?”
I thought maybe he was having a hard time with the idea that I’d been looking straight at him all these weeks—had touched him, talked with him, even kissed him—and had never seen his face. It was a tricky thing to comprehend, to be fair. I was just about to launch into a whole neurological explanation of how acquired face blindness worked when he jumped in.
“You never saw me before your surgery?” he asked.
I thought back. “There was that one time. In the elevator. When I overheard you talking about your one-night stand with the bulldog.”
Joe shook his head. “But I’ve lived in this building for two years.”
Okay. “But I only moved in not long before the surgery. So I was new.”
“But you’ve been using that space on the roof as a studio for a year.”
I frowned. “It’s weird that you know that.”
“I know that,” Joe explained, “because I helped you carry up your art supplies when you first moved in.”
I thought back. “You did?”
“All this time, you didn’t know that was me?”
I shook my head. “Was that you?”
“Are you sure you weren’t face-blind all along?”
I gave him a look, like, Very funny. But then I thought about it. “I remember the guy from that day. But he had a huge crazy beard.”
“Yeah. That was me.”
“Hell of a beard, bro. You could park your Vespa in that thing.”
“My wife had just left me. I’d abandoned all grooming.”
“Hence the baseball cap.”
“Exactly.”
But I was calling it: “I don’t think you get to mock me for not recognizing you from that day. You were basically ninety-eight percent beard.” I reminded myself to stay bitter. We were not friends.
“I’m just amazed that you didn’t know who I was,” he said. “That whole time.”
I conceded. “I did not know you were Art Supply Guy.”
“I said hi to you sometimes, even—but nothing.”
“Did you?”
“I’m just thinking about how it wasn’t until after you got face blindness that you started to recognize me.”
“I recognized the bowling jacket,” I corrected. “Not you.”
“How are you doing now?” he asked. Like he really wanted to know.
How was I doing now? “Better, maybe?” I said. “I had swelling in my brain right near the area that recognizes faces. They kept telling me I might get the ability to see them back once the swelling went down … but it kept not going down. Until recently.”
“And did you get the ability back?”
“Sort of?” I said. “Partly. I can see some faces, but not others.”
“But you can see mine.”
“Weirdly, yes. Even though I’ve never seen you before.”
“But as we’ve just established, you’ve seen me a lot.”
“Apparently so.”
“I guess your brain remembers me, even if you don’t.”
“I guess it must.”
“Well,” Joe said then, like maybe he was winding it down, “I really am sorry. I would have been nicer to you if I’d known.” And then, like an afterthought, he added the most wrong thing I’d ever heard anyone say. “Even after you dumped me.”
Even after I—what? What was he saying? “I didn’t dump you, dude. You dumped me.”
Joe looked at me like I was nuts. “I didn’t dump you.”
“You fully did,” I said. “You ghosted me.”
“I ghosted you,” Joe admitted, “but only after you dumped me.”
Wait.
Hold on.
“Joe,” I said. “I did not dump you. I’m madly in love with you. So, A, I would never do that. And B, I would definitely remember.”
But Joe stepped closer, looking into my eyes in wonder. “You’re madly in love with me?”
I looked away. “Was,” I corrected. “Past tense. Was.”
“Why did you break up with me if you were madly in love with me?”
“I didn’t break up with you!”
“You told me you liked someone else.”
Someone else? Fine. Okay. Full confession time: “I did like someone else—briefly. And by ‘like,’ I mean I briefly decided I had a desperate, obsessive crush on my veterinarian. And okay, whatever, I may have spent some time googling Nordic locations for our destination wedding and fantasizing about taking his last name. But I really think it was more about trying to manufacture something to look forward to during the craziest low point of some very crazy weeks. It was never real, you know? It was just a fantasy.”
But Joe was shaking his head. “Your veterinarian?”
“Yes, okay? My dashing veterinarian.”
“Who?”
“Who? Are you, like, going to give him trouble or something? It doesn’t matter—”
“Who?” Joe demanded.
I blinked for a second. “He saved Peanut for me, okay? He brought him back from death’s door. His name is Dr.—”
And then, in unison, we both said, “Oliver Addison.”
I frowned. “You know him?”
But Joe had already slapped his forehead and spun around to start pacing the roof. “Oliver Addison?” he said, almost more to himself than to me. “You dumped me for your veterinarian, Oliver Addison?”
My voice got quieter. “Sounds like you do know him.”
I mean, obviously he did. What exactly had I done? Was this Joe’s ex-bully from high school? Or his best friend from college? Or maybe his secret twin brother?
He was clearly somebody important. Joe was still pacing around.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Joe was taking deep breaths now. Then he came over to me and put his hands on my shoulder. “You broke up with Oliver Addison…”
I nodded.
“At his vet clinic … during a workday … out in the side yard…”
I nodded again. How did he know this? Were they friends?
“And you told him that you liked somebody else.”
Another nod from me.
“Was the somebody else that you liked”—even as he was saying it, he was shaking his head—“me?”
I sighed. Was he really going to make me say it? I met Joe’s eyes. “Yes. Obviously. Of course it was you.”
Joe let go of my shoulders and dropped his head, in a gesture like, Unbelievable.
Then he reached behind his neck and rubbed it absentmindedly as he looked around the roof like nothing made any sense.
A gesture that looked oddly familiar.
I felt compelled to explain. “Broke up is too strong!” I said. “I wasn’t even dating Dr. Addison! Honestly! We just had a plan to go on a date. We never really went. He stood me up, actually. It was that day we bumped into each other at Bean Street and I was covered in spilled coffee—remember? And he never called after that or apologized, so I couldn’t technically have dumped him because we weren’t even dating. But after—you know—after that epic, life-changing kiss with you … I just wanted to make things really clear with him—that nothing was going to happen—because I really, really liked you, and I wanted to keep all the boundaries totally clear.” I could feel my chest welling up, but I kept going. “I felt like…” I took a breath. “I felt like, with you, I’d found something genuinely special … and I just wanted to protect that. You know?”
I was done with the speech before I realized how much I’d accidentally confessed.
Damn it.
Joe took a step closer. “Sadie,” he said, meeting my eyes, “the person you dumped … was me.”
Hadn’t we been over this? “I’m telling you, I didn’t dump you!”
“Sadie,” Joe said again, waiting this time until he had my full attention. “I am Dr. Oliver Addison.”
But that didn’t make any sense.
“Um,” I said, like I was awkwardly correcting him. “You’re Joe.”
“I’m not Joe,” Joe said. “You’ve been calling me Joe for weeks, but that’s not really my name. My name,” he said again for posterity, “is Dr. Oliver Addison.”
He was going to have to give me a minute for my brain to explode.
“I’m sorry. Wait. Are you Joe—or Dr. Addison?”
“I am both,” Joe said. “Those two people are the same guy.”
Now it was my turn to pace around like nothing made any sense.
“Hold on,” I said. “You’re saying … you’re saying the guy who lives downstairs—the guy who fed me dinner at his place when I got locked out, and talked me through a panic attack during a party, and kissed me senseless not that long ago … that guy is the same person as the guy at the vet clinic who rescued Peanut?”
Joe nodded. “The same guy.”
“You,” I said, pointing, “are both Joe and Dr. Addison?”
Joe nodded again.
“How is that possible that you’re only one person?”
“How is it possible that you thought I was two people?”
I frowned. Good question.
Joe gave me a minute to try to puzzle it out.
“This isn’t the first time this has happened,” I said, thinking of Hazels One and Two. “Apparently, the brain is an ecosystem. If one part isn’t doing its job, it can throw other things off, too.”
But this much? Really?
We tried to take in the impossibility of it all.
“But … Joe has glasses and floppy hair.” I mimed with my hand the way Joe’s hair flopped over his forehead, even while suddenly noticing that the Joe I was talking to was not wearing glasses and did not have floppy hair. In fact, he had … Dr. Addison’s hair. “And Dr. Addison has”—I reached up to touch it—“this hair.”
Very gently, at my touch, Joe nodded some more. “No glasses at work. Just contacts. But they make my eyes tired, so I take them out before I go home.”
I was trying so hard to make it make sense. “And you slick your hair back for work, but you don’t bother with it at home?”
“It doesn’t stay neat very long,” Joe said.
I was vacillating between struggle and acceptance. “But aren’t you”—and I felt how goofy the words were, even as I said them—“a freelance snake sitter?”
“You think that I’m a snake sitter, and that’s all I do?”
I tried to picture Joe in a white vet coat. “So you’re a veterinarian who … does snake-sitting as a side hustle and also … rescues homeless bulldogs?”
“Broadly speaking, sure—that works.”
“But you don’t look like a veterinarian.”
“I get that a lot. Hence the lab coat.”
I shook my head, like, What does that mean?
“Most vets just wear scrubs. But when I started, nobody ever thought I was the vet. So I decided to cultivate a more professional look. I committed to the coat. And the contacts. And the hair.”
“You sure did.”
“There’s a psychological component to health care. People need to feel like you’re qualified before they’ll do what you tell them to. People need a lot more bossing around than you’d think.”
“So…” I said. “I only ever saw Dr. Addison in his lab coat, and I only ever saw Joe in his bowling jacket.”
“I wore other jackets sometimes,” Joe said.
But I shook my head. “Almost never. It’s how I recognized you.”
“That’s why you called me Joe?” Joe asked.
“Why else would I call you Joe?”
“I thought you were kidding. I thought you were making fun of the jacket.”
“I was making fun of the jacket. But I also thought you were a guy named Joe. Who really, really liked bowling. Enough to buy a reproduction vintage bowling jacket and have his name embroidered on it.”
“Okay,” Joe said, like now we’d gone too far, “that’s a lot of mental leaps.”
There wasn’t much to say to that.
Joe and I took a minute to stare at each other in disbelief.
How was this happening?
“You never dumped me,” Joe said in amazement as it sank in. Then, correcting: “I mean, you did dump me. But you dumped me … for me.”
“And you never ghosted me. Or—you did, but only after I had broken up with you … without realizing it was you.”
Joe nodded. “It’s like an M.C. Escher drawing.”
I nodded, too. “It’s like a Rubik’s Cube.” Then after a pause, I added, “You must have thought I was nuts to keep calling and texting you like that.”
“I really, really wanted to respond,” Joe said, his voice more tender now. “I had to lock my phone out on the balcony.”
“I guess I should call you Oliver now,” I said, looking up into his face and trying out his name for real.
“I’ll be Joe for you, if you want.”
And then I couldn’t resist. I reached up to touch that face that had caused all this trouble, and my palm cupped his jaw. Then I ran the pads of my fingers up to touch all the pieces of it—cheekbones, nose bridge, brow—so neatly put together now, satisfying like a finished jigsaw puzzle.
He held his breath at the touch.
I could feel his stubble against my palm like sandpaper. I traced down his neck and let my hand rest on his collarbone. “So … I thought you were breaking my heart, but I was also breaking yours.”
