“I’m just not in the headspace for any more heavy stuff right now,” she said, after I told her my husband had left me and a doctor had just diagnosed me with MS.
My best friend of twenty years told me I was too negative. A downer.
For two decades, I was her unpaid, on-call therapist. I was the one who answered the 2 a.m. phone calls about bad dates, bailed her out of trouble, and talked her off countless self-made ledges. My life was the stable ground she stood on while she set fire to her own.
She assumed that service was guaranteed for life. A bottomless well of support she could draw from forever, without ever having to put a single drop back in.
She thought our friendship was a free ride, but she never imagined the day would come when I’d finally hand her the bill—with every last favor and late-night call itemized—due in full, at the exact moment she had nothing left to pay it with.
The Unpaid Bill: The 2:17 A.M. Call
The blue light of my phone is a harsh little ghost in the dark bedroom. It’s 2:17 a.m. on a Tuesday, and Jessica is crying so hard I can hear the wet catch in her throat.
“He just has this… this energy,” she says, the words hiccuping out of her. “And his profile said he was six-one, Karen. Six-one. He was five-ten, tops. It’s the principle of the thing. It’s a lie. The entire foundation is a lie.”
I make a low, sympathetic noise. My husband, Mark, rolls over with the tectonic groan of a man whose sleep has been murdered. He yanks his pillow over his head, a gesture I know as well as my own reflection.
“You deserve someone who’s honest from the very beginning,” I say. My voice is a smooth, practiced murmur. It’s my ‘Jessica voice.’ I’ve been using it since college.
On the other end, 300 miles away, Jessica’s sobs begin to subside, replaced by the hot hiss of indignation. “Exactly! It’s about respect. I give so much, you know? I’m a giver. And to be treated like my time isn’t valuable…”
I glance at the clock. 2:24 a.m. I have a 9 a.m. deadline, editing a technical manual for a company that makes industrial-grade conveyor belts. It’s soul-crushingly dull work, but it pays the bills. It requires a level of detail-oriented focus that is currently being siphoned out of my brain and poured into validating a grown woman’s outrage over a two-inch discrepancy on a dating app. For the third time this month.
A faint tingling starts in my right hand, a pins-and-needles sensation that’s been visiting more frequently lately. I flex my fingers, trying to shake it out. Probably just the way I’m holding the phone.
“He doesn’t see your worth, Jess,” I say, the words on autopilot.
“No,” she agrees, her voice firming up now. “He really doesn’t.” The crisis has been downgraded to a mere injustice. My work here is almost done. The call lasts another nineteen minutes.
A History of Fires
I try to fall back asleep, but my mind is buzzing. It’s like a fluorescent light that won’t stop humming. I keep thinking about the time, maybe ten years ago, when Jessica was desperate for a job at a high-end marketing firm. Her resume was… creative. Her references were a minefield of burned bridges.
She called me in a panic. “They want to speak to my last manager from the gallery. Karen, you know he hated me. He’ll tank me.”
“What do you want me to do, Jess?” I had asked, already knowing the answer.
“Could you just… be her? Just for one call? Her name was Susan Albright. She was British.”
And so I did. I spent an entire afternoon studying YouTube videos of Judi Dench interviews, practicing a posh, clipped accent. I sat by my phone, my heart hammering against my ribs, until the call came. For fifteen minutes, I became Susan Albright, lauding Jessica’s “proactive, out-of-the-box thinking” and “unflappable grace under pressure.” She got the job. She celebrated by taking a trip to Cancun with her new signing bonus. I celebrated by drinking a bottle of Pepto-Bismol to settle my roiling stomach.
She called it our “little caper.” I called it felony-adjacent. That was the dynamic. Her life was a fast-paced adventure movie, and I was her loyal, slightly terrified, behind-the-scenes crew. The one who rigs the explosions and makes sure the hero’s hair looks good. The one no one ever sees.
I roll over and look at Mark. His back is a rigid wall. We haven’t really talked in weeks. Not really. Our conversations have become a series of logistical check-ins about our daughter, Lily, or who’s taking out the recycling. The space between us in this bed feels wider than the 300 miles separating me from Jessica. The tingling in my hand is back.
The Note on the Kitchen Island
I must have drifted off, because the next thing I know, my alarm is chiming. It’s 6:30 a.m. Mark’s side of the bed is empty and cold. That’s not unusual; he often leaves for the gym before I’m up.
I shuffle into the kitchen, my body feeling heavy and used. The house is silent except for the low hum of the refrigerator. My daughter, Lily, is still asleep. She’s sixteen, and her ability to sleep through anything—including her mother’s late-night therapy sessions—is a superpower I deeply envy.
I go to the coffee maker, and that’s when I see it. A single sheet of paper from his legal pad, sitting squarely in the middle of our granite island. It’s weighted down by the salt shaker.
My heart does a strange little stutter-step. His handwriting is neat, clinical.
Karen,
I can’t do this anymore. It’s not one thing, it’s everything. It’s the silence. It’s the feeling that I am a distant second place in my own home. You have spent fifteen years with your energy focused on putting out Jessica’s fires, and there’s never been any left for us. I’m tired of being the quiet, understanding husband.
I’ve gone to stay at my brother’s. I’ll call about Lily later. Don’t call me.
Mark.
I read it twice. Then a third time. The words don’t seem to connect to my brain. It feels like I’m editing someone else’s horrible, badly written story. Second place in my own home. The phrase hangs in the air, glittering and sharp.
The coffee maker finishes its cycle with a final, pathetic gurgle. The kitchen smells like burnt coffee and the end of the world. My first coherent thought is a tidal wave of pure, uncut panic. My second thought, a reflex honed over two decades, is: I have to call Jessica.
The Shadow on the Scan
Two days pass in a blur of hollowed-out shock. I tell Lily that Dad is on a work trip, a lie so thin it’s transparent. She gives me a look that says she’s sixteen, not stupid, but she lets it go. The house is a museum of our life, every object a little artifact of a happiness I hadn’t even realized was gone.
The tingling in my hand has been joined by a strange, buzzing numbness in my left foot. I have an appointment with a neurologist that I made weeks ago, thinking it was a pinched nerve. Now it feels like a cruel joke on top of a catastrophe.
I sit on the crinkly paper of the examination table, my hospital gown gaping at the back. Dr. Evans is a kind-faced woman with tired eyes. She pulls up an image on her computer monitor. It’s a black-and-white scan of a brain. My brain. It’s dotted with small, ghostly white splotches, like someone spilled milk in the cosmos.
“These are what we call lesions,” she says, her voice soft. “They’re areas of inflammation where your immune system has been mistakenly attacking the protective covering on your nerves.”
She says a lot of other words. “Myelin sheath.” “Demyelination.” “Unpredictable.” Then she says the two words that land like stones in my stomach.
“Multiple Sclerosis.”
She hands me a pamphlet. The cover has a picture of a smiling woman hiking up a mountain. It feels like a mockery. My own personal mountain just erupted, burying me in ash.
I drive home, the pamphlet on the passenger seat next to the wedding ring I twisted off my finger an hour ago. My two new realities. An empty house and a body that has declared war on itself.
I sit on my bed, the same spot where I coached Jessica through her dating-app drama just a few nights ago. My turn. It’s my turn to be the one who needs help. I am entitled to this call. I’ve paid for it a thousand times over.
I find her name in my contacts and press the button. It rings once. Twice. Then the ringing stops, and Jessica’s voice, impossibly cheerful and pre-recorded, fills my ear.
“Hey, you’ve reached Jess! Can’t talk, living my best life in the city! You know what to do. Leave a message!” Beep.
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