CHAPTER THREE
Breathe.
It’s like I can’t remember how to do it. Inhale, exhale. I look up to the ceiling as I draw my next breath. Inhale, exhale. I look back down and notice I’m still in his sweats. They’re the same ones I put on the first night we ever slept together, freshman year at UCLA. Weeks of anticipation turned into a long steamy night in his dorm room. After we snuck back from a quick shower together, he wrapped me up in his best head-to-toe fleece, then wrapped himself around me in his bed. Now his brain and call log were wrapped around her, not me. And as soon as the thought sinks in—that she was with him when the cops showed up, with him at two o’clock in the morning while I was sleeping—my once favorite sweats of his start to make me itch. I feel like I’m infested with bugs, so I strip them off in a fit of disgust. I turn on the shower, and crane my neck through the open bathroom door, like an onlooker to a horrible accident, to check the microwave. 3:45.
Okay, seven minutes. As the scalding hot water runs down my body, I feel the tough exterior I’ve built up over the past ten years begin to crumble. “Be more independent,” JR always said to me. “Be a strong woman—you don’t need me.” I always smiled and said, But I have you. Now what? I want to sink down and join the water escaping through the drain, but I know if I sit down, I’ll never get up.
Courtney’s text message is replaying over and over in my head as I furiously wash my thick, long brown hair and run through my options. I can’t call out—I just started my job at NY News Now six months ago, and I’m still trying to make a good impression. NYNN is the cult cable favorite of the five boroughs, a low-key cousin of the flashy, graphics-riddled network stations. The city as a whole seems to be in love with our little nuts-and-bolts operation, especially the morning anchor, Eric Stone. I’ve been determined to have them love me too, so showing up in tears is out of the question. When I’d interviewed there after Stanley Smith laid me off from the Miami job, my new news director, Maryann Gibson, had stressed just how many people had applied for my job.
“Who knew there’d be so many people who’d want to wake up at the crack of dawn to give New Yorkers the traffic report?” she’d chuckled, shaking her head.
I’d translated that as “You’re lucky I hired you—make sure I don’t regret it.” So for the last three months I had tried hard to prove myself. I showed up every morning with a smile on my face and some witty banter prepared for Eric. Turns out in New York, my smile was my biggest asset. Maryann always forwarded me viewer email, the most recent of which was from a little old lady in Queens who wrote in to say how much that pretty new girl on the traffic report helped jump-start her mornings. I sometimes wondered why JR didn’t notice.
So calling out and crying are off the table, as is crawling down the drain. I still have about three minutes before Marko arrives to pick me up, just enough time to jump out of the shower and grab my favorite red Diane von Furstenberg dress. It’s going to take some miracle of God to help me look TV-ready today, and I’m thinking the way its soft jersey hangs to my petite curves is the best chance I have going for me right now. I kneel down next to Zelda, who has calmed down after the hubbub of the morning. She’s curled into a perfect ball, sleeping contently at the foot of the bed. I kiss her on her cold nose.
“Everything’s going to be okay, baby girl.” She looks up at me with her eyes shining, the events of the last hour a distant pothole in her tiny brain. If only I could be so lucky. I give her another kiss and try to eke a hug out of her tiny frame—I need one—but my attempt at comfort is cut short by three concise honks outside the window.
“Marko’s here,” I say to the empty apartment, as I grab my bright pink YSL tote and head out the door.
I see the last-minute stragglers coming out of WXOU Radio Bar next door as I step out onto Hudson Street. They’re the only other people out at this hour, so I can’t help but stare; all the other storefronts are dark, with their gates down. There’s a chill in the mid-September air and the glow of last call is written all over their whiskey-filled faces. They have their coats slung over their arms as they hug each other, say their goodbyes, and stumble towards home. I see these people a few nights a week, and I always think that I’m happy to be going to work, happy I have this job, happy I’ve chosen this life. Today, for the first time, I wish I were them. I wish I were anyone but me. But I’ve got to keep going.
I slink into the back of Marko’s black Lincoln Town Car waiting for me at the curb. What I love the most about Marko is that I can be as silent or chatty as I want, and he’ll simply follow my lead—an important quality in someone you interact with before four in the morning. Most days I chat him up big-time—especially if there was any serious weather the night before, or if the Yankee game ended with a crazy play at the plate.
Today, however, I’m silent, just like the empty, lonely street ahead of us. The West Village is peaceful at this time of day. A magical feeling always comes over me each day as I look up and down the quiet, tree-lined streets at this predawn hour. It’s as if I’m in on some kind of secret. I’m up before the birds, before the bankers. I always feel like in some small way, I am setting the tone for the day, like how I feel or act or whatever vibe I give off on air will somehow permeate through the television and into the mindset of New York City’s residents.
“Guess everyone’s gonna have a shitty day,” I mutter under my breath.
“What was that, Guiliana?”
“Oh, nothing, Marko, sorry—just talking to myself.” Typically I spend the four-minute ride to work glancing through the emails and text messages I received overnight and scrolling through my Twitter feed. I email myself any important stories I want to read or interesting talkers I think Eric and I can banter about on air. But today my brain can’t process anything I see on the too-bright-for-my-bleary-eyes screen. Instead, I stare out the window as we pass the diner where JR and I always share omelets and the morning paper on weekends, the bar where we first drunkenly talked about moving in together, and the small park across from the vet’s office where we sat just a few months earlier nervously waiting for Zelda’s X-rays to come back. Every storefront and every stoop on Eighth Avenue is another notch on our relationship belt.
I feel an urge to explain my lack of chattiness to Marko, but every time I open my mouth, I just can’t do it. He’s so good to me. He always listens to my stories and wants to know every detail of the show JR’s working on, when he’s coming home, and what fabulous trip we’re taking next. I feel like I’d be disappointing him if I told him what had gone on this morning. I feel like he’d think I had been lying to him for months about my happy relationship. I’m just barely dealing with my own heartbreak; there’s no way I could break a forty-six-year-old Ukrainian man’s heart before the sun comes up. I just can’t. Plus, Marko is old-school in his beliefs on love and family. He believes that everything you do is for them. Family comes first—I don’t know how many times he’s said that to me. Family always comes first. That’s why he drives me and a dozen others everyday, sometimes working fourteen-, sixteen-hour days, just to make ends meet for his wife and kids, who all share a two-bedroom apartment in East Harlem. I know if I tell him what just happened to my family, my tears will follow. And his tears will ride the bumper of mine, like rush hour on the Long Island Expressway.
Nope, not today.
I’m not crying today—I’m going to work. I’m going to work because I’m not about to lose my fiancé and my job in the same day. So I just keep looking out the window. I occupy the silence by thinking about how I’m going to get up the energy in exactly an hour from now to start reporting on subway suspensions and overturned vehicles on the Verrazano Bridge. Then, suddenly, a question pops into my head.
“Hey, Marko. When someone’s arrested, how do you find out what jail they’re taken to? And when they’ll get out?”
Alarm sweeps across the quarter of his face I can see in the rearview mirror. “Guiliana! What happened? Who … are you … what happened?”
“Marko, I’ll explain later, can you just …”
“Oh