Page 37 of Escape Girl

It was Bobby. I hadn’t answered his calls in months, but he’d never called in the middle of the night before. If something was wrong with my father, he’d be the one to know and call, wouldn’t he?Shit.

“Hello?”

A pause. Then Bobby’s voice, unforgotten despite months of trying. “Em. Em! Oh m’God, is ashually you, na yer voice mail thing.”

My fears about my father faded. Bobby wasn’t calling me in the middle of the night because of a medical situation. He was slurring his words. I’d never actually seen Bobby after too many cocktails, but I supposed at this stage in our separation, it wasn’t that surprising to get a drunk dial.

“How many drinks have you had?” My voice was calm and even, like I was giving a deposition.

“All of them!” He laughed, and I could picture the expansive arm movement that accompanied his charming hyperbole.

I sighed. Sometimes I wanted to talk to Bobby so much that the craving crawled over my skin like an itch. Even now, hearing the deep pitch of his voice made my breath uneven. But if he was going to ask, again, why I’d left, I had nothing new to say.

“I miss you so much,” he said, adding space between each word in a clear effort not to slur. “What did I do to make you leave? What did I do to make you not want me anymore?”

I leaned back against my pillows, flattened by the pain in my chest. “Nothing. You did nothing,” I whispered. “I told you before. I made a mistake. I thought I could balance a marriage and my career. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t make it work.”

Bobby groaned. “And I toldyoubefore that I don’t believe one word of that excuse. I know your face and I know your voice. I know when yer peddling bullshit, Em. You don’ need to protect m’ feelings, but I wan’ the truth.”

I did the math in my head; it was only 7:00 p.m. in San Francisco. So early for him to be so drunk. No wonder he’d forgotten the time zone change. “It’s really late here, you know,” I said softly.

“I know!” He sounded proud. “It’s three-ish where you are. It’s your insomnia time. I called to keep you company.”

There were huge watery discs in my eyes now, blinding me to anything that wasn’t his voice. “You woke me up, actually, and I need to go back to bed. Long day tomorrow.”

There was a pause so long I thought he’d hung up. But then I heard a liquid swallowing kind of sound and wondered if he was chugging water or something stronger. When he spoke again, his voice had grown wilder. “You can’t keep doing this. You left me and your explanation is ridiculous. You’ve been giving me the silent treatment for months. This isn’t fair. It’s cruel.”

On the bed, my face crumpled and I sagged under the comforter. He wasn’t wrong.

“I just don’t understand how we got here from where we started.” He sounded bewildered, sharing the sentiment of anyone in the world who’s ever been dumped. “After the wedding, I knew you weren’t exactly happy, but I thought it was just growing pains. That we’d jumped in so fast, you needed time to adjust to sharing your life.”

Thatshouldhave been all it was.

“I would have tried anything to make it better, but you stopped talking to me!” Bobby’s voice was a half yell now, and I welcomed the change in tone. Anger would make us both feel stronger instead of shattered.

“You stopped talking to me,” he said again. This time it was muttered with sad confusion.

Again, he wasn’t wrong. Last winter, something in me had shattered. I wasn’t unaware; I was just mentally unable to express my feelings. Physically unable to get the mess out of my chest, my brain, my body. So everything just steeped in my veins, like a toxic tea.

A tea that had only grown thicker and more bitter. “I’ve got to go.”

“Damn it, Em.” Angry Bobby was back. “You know, maybe I won’t be here if you change your mind and want me back! I know I’m no prize, but some women do find me attractive.”

I almost laughed. Bobby was the very definition of a prize, and he literally turned heads when we walked into any public place. If a straight woman told me that she didn’t find Bobby attractive, I wouldn’t have believed her.

He let out a sort of moan that transitioned him from angry back to sad. “I almost did something bad, Em,” Bobby whispered. I caught my breath, climbed halfway out of my covers. This was new.

“I was at a bar in Napa. This ridiculously beautiful girl started talking to me. Flirting with me. I didn’t tell her I was married. When she asked me for my email address, I gave it to her. We wrote each other a few messages.”

My body froze still, my emotional core divided into two parts.

The first part leaned back and nodded approvingly. Wasn’t this exactly what I’d been waiting for? Some sort of sign that it was time to let him wholly go and move on?

The problem was that the emotional core had not divided into two equal parts. The accepting, approving part wastinycompared to the large rage ball that threatened to burn my face and larynx.

“What the fuck?” I hissed into the phone, completely against my better judgment. My brain knew that it wasn’t fair to expect anything from Bobby at this point, but the rage ball saidmineand didn’t care about fair.

Silence in my ear. I wished it were a video call. Was Bobby blinking in bewilderment because this was the first time I’d expressed emotion in months? Or was he angry and about to point out that I had no right to judge him since I was the one who’d walked out? Maybe he was about to tell me that he wasactually interested in the “ridiculously beautiful” girl, and since I wasn’t around, he was going for it.

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