Page 95 of Isn't It Obvious?
“I can’t believe it.” Yael shoves an entire chip in her mouth, chewing slowly. “Thank you, Gina. I promise I’ll be at your next show.”
“You better,” Gina says, smiling. “I’m spending an extra three hours a week at my job because of you.”
Over the next hour, they eat and drink and Gina even manages to make Yael belly laugh a few times. It’s good. So good, Yael starts to feel the ache of her empty apartment long before Gina actually drops her off on her street corner.
She climbs the stairs with heavy legs, leaning into the door to urge the old latch loose after she unlocks it. The quiet inside is cavernous, stretching deeper than the walls allow.
Yael toes off her shoes at the door, then drops her tote vaguely near the shoe rack, too tired to lift it to the hook. Her coat ends up in a pile next to the bag. It’s thick, her sadness. Filling. She gets herself to her bedroom, strips out of her clothing in a path to her shower. She runs the water hot and doesn’t stuff her hair into a cap, just tries to keep her head out of the direct range of the spray. It’ll frizz; she knows that. But it’s effort she doesn’t have in her.
After, she stands dripping on her bath mat and forces herself to brush her teeth, avoiding eye contact with her own reflection. She stares at the bottles of nighttime skin products arrayed on her vanity for probably an entire minute, wondering how she’ll possibly be able to get through all four of her usual steps. Eventually, she convinces herself on the moisturizer.
The walk to her bed is underwritten by similar agonizing. Picking up the pieces of clothing and carrying them to the laundry hamper in the corner seems a herculean task, but if she doesn’t do it, she’ll feel disgusted at herself for the mess in the morning. The disgust always makes things worse.
She finds herself staring again, paralyzed by indecision, the disgust already encroaching.
Do it now, she tells herself as she bends to retrieve her sweater,and you won’t have to tomorrow.
She shuffles to her bed, nestling into the pillows and pulling the duvet up to her neck. It feels… if notgood, thenrightto be swallowed. On her phone, she navigates to the sub requestsystem to put in her sick day, then to the Clock app to turn off her alarm.
When Yael wakes up, the paperwork from Jami is in her inbox, Ravi copied, and she forwards it along to the lawyer she found last week before rolling over and staring at the strips of light that peek through her curtains.
It’s a good thing she cleaned up after herself last night, she thinks, because she hardly leaves her bed the rest of the day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Ravi waits to open theCatcherrough cut until the following Tuesday afternoon, around when he’d usually be getting ready to head to Kennedy for book club. The contract was reviewed, DocuSigned, and sent off to Jami without a single word exchanged between him and Yael. The audio file has been taunting him from his email attachments since it reached his inbox. It’s seemed too painful to download it.
But now, with his thumb itching reflexively to swipe to TransitTracker, it’s clear that he’s going to be in pain tonight regardless. Might as well be productive about it.
He clicks Download, watches the blue line trace out the circle as it saves, then drops the file into his audio editing software. A deep breath, and he presses play.
The first phrase, a simple “In today’s episode, I’ll be discussing” that he’s heard from her so many times before, makes the hairs on his neck stand on end. It’s difficult, listening now, to believe he ever didn’t realize this was her. The edges are sanded off, her usual variations in speed tamped down, her vocal fry diluted, even her pitch is a whole level deeper. But her cadence, her word choice, the way she ends up on tangents about sociological research when she’s just trying to land a joke? All Yael.
It makes him desperate to hear her real voice. It makes him mourn the fact that he won’t.
Ravi passes a throat clear followed by several seconds of dead air, and she’s halfway through her next point before he realizes. He has to scrub back and forth for a minute to figure out where he needs to start the split.
He rubs at the nape of his neck, telling himself to focus. This one will be the first with theRenegadename attached to it. It’ll be featured on their website, plastered across their socials. The tens of thousands of listens Yael has rightfully accrued will multiply in an instant, and she can’t afford for him to be sloppy.
By the time Suresh and Mia get home, he’s only halfway through. He gives up for the night, hitting save and powering down his computer before heading downstairs to be swallowed up in the whirlwind that is Mia and give Suresh the space to make dinner.
Last night was the first since they returned from the vineyard that Mia hadn’t shown up at his door looking for comfort. He’s happy she was able to sleep on her own. He’s happy she came to him in the first place, because it was the reminder he needed for why he’ll spend tonight at home, miserable, instead of at book club with Yael. The misery will fade soon. He hopes.
He wins and loses at Connect Four a few times before relenting to Mia’s demands to rewatch one of the Field Museum videos (they’ve already exhausted the content available), and then they sit down around the table for Suresh’s curried channa and roti they got frozen from the closest Indian grocer.
“How was your day?” Suresh asks, passing Ravi an uncapped beer.
He’s surprised by the question—Suresh has grunted andthree-word-answered his way through every dinner this week. “It was okay,” he says slowly. “I did some editing on the podcast I told you about.”
“I listened to it,” Suresh says before taking a bite.
Ravi tries not to gape at him. “And?”
“It’s funny,” he says. “I see why you like working on it.”
“Yeah,” Ravi says, watching Suresh take another bite. “How was your day?”
“Too many meetings, but otherwise good.”
