Steven James - Opening Moves

“Pat, it was on CNN.”

“I get that, but-”

“No one’s saying much at the medical center. Is she going to be okay? You can tell me that much.”

I didn’t even know she’d been in to work already this morning. “It looks like it. Yes.”

“Good.”

Silence, then: “Are you any closer to catching the guy who’s doing this?”

“Really, I can’t…” I caught myself. Even after being together for a year and going through this type of thing before, I knew it was natural for her to ask these sorts of questions. I had the sense that I should avoid addressing them entirely, but I decided I could answer this one without necessarily divulging too much.

“Honestly, I don’t know how close we are. There was some evidence there at the train yard that I think is going to help us; some things to follow up on, so that’s good. But right now we don’t have a name, a face, anything specific. Now, really-”

“You can’t talk about it.”

“Right. I’m sorry. I can’t.”

For a few minutes we both ate our breakfast in a sort of strange, quiet limbo. The light mood that’d been present when we first met seemed to have been smothered by our discussion about doing the unthinkable.

Finally, I decided to just go ahead and get to the point. “So, you mentioned…There was something else, something you wanted to talk about?”

“Yes.” But instead of telling me what it was, she was quiet once again.

She looked toward the counter and scoffed lightly, but it wasn’t derision I heard. When she went on, I sensed it was her way of, perhaps subconsciously, avoiding addressing what she’d come here to say. “See her? Over there? The tag sticking out of the back of her shirt? I’ll never understand that. A woman will spend an hour putting on makeup and getting her hair right and won’t bother to take three seconds to make sure that the tag isn’t sticking out the back of her shirt. It’s…” Her voice trailed off.

“What is it, Taci, really? What’s wrong?”

She set down her coffee, looked at me with a thread of sadness in her eyes, and said eight words, “I do love you, Pat. You know that.”

Oh, that was not good.

“Why did you put it that way?”

“What way?”

“Why did you say ‘I do love you’ and not just ‘I love you’?”

She took a deep breath and it seemed as if she was about to say something, but then she must have changed her mind, because she closed her mouth and just sat there, quietly staring past me at a spot on the wall that didn’t exist.

The longer the moment stretched out without her replying, the less I wanted her to. Instead, I wanted to take back my question. I had the strange sense that finding out the truth was going to be far more painful than just pretending everything was okay.

But in the end I had to ask. I had to find out. “What’s going on, Taci?”

“I do.”

“Love me?”

“Yes.”

“Then stop putting it that way.”

She brushed her hand across the table, slowly sweeping a few bagel crumbs to the floor.

“What is it you’re trying to say?” I watched her. Didn’t lean any closer to her; didn’t edge any farther away.

She strung the next words together, as if they were something she needed to say in one breath or she wouldn’t be able to say at all: “I love you, but being with you is only going to hurt you.”

I felt the bottom drop out of the moment.

“How is it going to hurt me? Your being with me?”

Silence.

“Taci, I have no idea where all this is coming from. We love each other. We’ve been in a relationship for nearly a year. We’ve talked about getting-”

“Don’t say it.”

“About getting-”

“Patrick-”

“About getting married, Taci. C’mon, don’t pretend we haven’t. Don’t try to rewrite our past. Things are good, they’ve been-”

“I’m not pretending anything. And I’m not talking about how things have been or how they are. I’m saying…it’s about who we are.”

Despite myself, I could sense my words becoming sharper each time I spoke. “What does that mean-‘who we are’?”

“Who I am.”

I’d seen so many of my friends in the department struggle in their relationships, in their marriages, so many who’ve ended up apart, separated, divorced, alone. It’s the tired cliche of crime novels-the cop who struggles in a relationship because of-wait, here comes the big shocker- the pressures and obligations of his job!

Wow. What an unexpected plot twist that was.

Taci and I had talked about all that early on and I’d told her that if we ever came to the place where we were thinking about taking things to the next level, if it looked like I’d have to choose between her and the force, I would either leave her before we got serious, or I’d leave the force so I could be with her. And we had gotten serious. And she’d never asked me to choose.

And it didn’t even sound like she was asking me to do that now.

“Taci, if you’re saying my job is doing this, hurting us, I’ll quit.”

She shook her head.

“No. I mean it.”

“I know. But that’s not the thing.”

“Listen to me. I will. I love you more than-”

“It’s not you, Pat. It’s me. That’s what I’m trying to…It’s…me.”

Her words seemed like solid objects that were wedging their way between us, pushing us apart.

“How is it you?”

She touched away a stray tear and I wasn’t sure at all how to respond to that.

I asked the question I had to ask. “Is there someone else?”

She shook her head firmly. “No. It’s not that. There isn’t anyone. There’s never been. Not since we got together.”

“Then what are you saying?”

Then, like the proverbial floodgates opening, she finally told me what she’d come here for: “I was in the hospital yesterday, on rounds with my attending physician. I hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before and I was on my fourth or fifth cup of coffee, I don’t know. Well, the doctor, he asked how everything was going and I said good, that things were good, and they were…They are. But he could tell how both tired and wired I was. ‘Get used to it,’ he told me. ‘It doesn’t get any easier.’”

And with that, a weight lifted from my shoulders.

So that was what this was all about. Work had gotten to her. The long hours of residency and the stress of putting in twenty-four-hour shifts, hundred-hour weeks, that’s what’d brought all this up.

“But it will get easier, Taci. You know it will. When your residency is over.”

“Pat, that’s the thing. I don’t want it to get easier. I want it to stay the way it is. With the adrenaline and the hours, the stress, and the trauma of life and death right there in front of me every day. The rush. Living on that sharp edge. That’s what I realized when the doctor said that. I’m not made for having kids and going to soccer games and chaperoning field trips. I don’t want the weekends off to go antique shopping. I don’t want to come home to a safe little life every day after work.”

I stared at her. “And you think that’s how it would be with me? A quiet, safe little suburban life? Are you kidding me?”

“I’m saying I don’t have what it would take to make our relationship work. It wouldn’t be right to treat you that way.” She paused as if to gain the courage to go on. “You’d always be in second place. There. I don’t know how else to say it. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry. It took me a long time to figure this out, I know it did. Too long. I’m really sorry. I am.”

I could feel the moment splintering apart like a piece of china that’d just been tipped off a table and shattered on the floor.