“Do you mind if I stop by?” Lila asked him on the phone early one Sunday evening, and from the noise of traffic in the background, Randolph knew she was calling from her car. His ex-wife, never ex- enough. “I’m just around the corner. I have something I need to ask you. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

     He tried in vain to dissuade her from coming over. There had been too many bitter exchanges between them already, the same accusations heaped against him each time, the same guilt deposited once more on his doorstep. But she promised that she wasn’t angry this afternoon and that she wouldn’t be long. Randolph barely had time to take down the photographs of his girlfriend before she arrived. “Princess Samantha,” his ex-wife had often smirked—still better than other names she’d tried. During the most venomous stages of their divorce, Randolph had more than once endured Lila’s attacks on “that husband-snatching whore.”

     “I was wondering if you could take care of Nutmeg for a while,” Lila asked after she settled down on the sofa. Nutmeg was their cat, or had been, and the object of vicious discussions when they divided their possessions. “She misses you.”

     Lila had apparently been to the beach for the day, and the smell of suntan lotion now spread through the living room—cocoa butter and ripe bananas. But she hadn’t applied enough of it, and the places where her fair skin had reddened—the tips of her nose, the tops of her cheeks—were already threatening to peel.

     “If you want me to take care of her, you must be going somewhere,” he replied, confident already about how Lila was trying to trick him.

     “Somewhere,” she said with a wry smile and a shrug, and he knew he was right. Next, he was expected to ask about her vacation plans and then who she was going with—her way of telling Randolph that she had a new man in her life, letting him know that she’d moved on. Catching a glimpse of her swimsuit top through the thin white t-shirt, he wondered what the man looked like, how serious it was, what their sex life was like.

     But as he continued pressing her about where she was going, she became increasingly vague, evasive, contradictory. Soon, her speech began to slur and a smoky glaze eased over her eyes. “Someplace where you won’t need to worry about me anymore,” she finally said, and he knew then that something truly terrible was happening.

     The night Lila had found out about the affair, she had threatened to cut her wrists, and Randolph had refused to leave her alone even for a minute, keeping his arms wrapped tight around her as she wailed and spit, a Gillette razor clutched tightly in her hand. Weeks later, after he’d moved out, she told him on the phone that she despised him, that she despised herself, that she simply didn’t want to live anymore. That time, as he paced the floors of his new apartment, a mutual friend went over to their old place to find Lila in the kitchen and the garage filling with fumes. She claimed to have forgotten the car was on. She began seeing a therapist after that. It had been over a year since then.  

     “Tell me where you’re going,” he demanded now, keeping his voice firm but calm. “Tell me what you’ve done.” But she didn’t answer, just smiled and waved, then lay down on the couch. “Lila!” he called loudly, moving over to shake her shoulders. “Talk to me, Lila!” Her body felt heavier than he remembered, her arms loose and her skin moist. Up close, she smelled sweaty and tropical and he was briefly reminded, despite the urgency of the moment, of their own trips to the beach, those easier times. Then drool began to seep from one corner of her lips, dripping onto the cushions of the couch.

     “Why do you do this to yourself?” he said, snatching up her purse. “Why do you do this to me?” He dumped the purse’s contents on the floor: several tubes of lipstick, her cell phone, a condom, her rabbit’s foot… an amber pill bottle, nearly empty. The pharmacy’s number was listed on the label. He grabbed Lila’s cell phone, punched in the number, listened as the line rang again and again. When he slammed down the phone, Lila shifted on the couch, pulled herself into a fetal position, the same smile still on her face. He rushed to the phone book next, searching out the number for the doctor who’d prescribed the pills. “My wife,” he screamed to the woman who picked up the phone, an answering service. “She’s taken some pills. My ex-wife. I don’t know what kind. I don’t know how to help her anymore.” And when the ambulance and the fire truck and the police car crowded into the small cul-de-sac, the neighbors all came outdoors to watch.

*****

     Everything was shades of white in the room just off the E.R.—the room to which Lila had been rushed when they’d arrived. The doctor, a small man with a manner as calm and antiseptic as the décor, soon stepped out and allayed Randolph’s fears. Lila would be fine, the overdose wasn’t life-threatening, had never been. Even if Randolph had just left her there in his living room, the bottle of antidepressants she had taken would have caused little more than a long, long nap and, in the doctor’s words, “a prolonged bout of constipation.” A few precautions would alleviate those troubles, the doctor assured him, welcoming Randolph to wait with her. A couple of hours of observation, and soon all would be back to normal.

     The sheets were crisp at the far edges of Lila’s bed, but damp beneath her body from the sweat seeping through her shirt. She was awake now but barely, still bleary and unfocussed, and hovering between delirium and sleep, she told Randolph about a new man she’s been seeing and a fight they’d had at the beach, about how the house was so empty when she came home. After she’d taken the pills, she hadn’t known who else to turn to.

     “Well, you know I’m here for you,” Randolph told her, the old habits quickly returned—trying to say the right thing, whether it was true or not. When they were married, she might have asked him, with pointed sarcasm, exactly where here was, or attacked him again for all the times he hadn’t been there for her at all. Now, she simply nodded up at him from the examining table and mouthed the word Thanks.

     One of the nurses brought Lila a Styrofoam cup filled to the brim with an ashen liquid, vaguely chunky. “Better than the pump,” the nurse warned. “Drink at least half.” It smelled like charcoal, and Lila offered a trembling hand to Randolph as she drank the first mouthfuls. Her grip tightened as she vomited into the basin they’d provided, and then relaxed as she lay back on the bed. 

     Already, her sunburned skin had truly begun to peel, and small shards of her face and shoulders flaked onto the pillow. Sweat plastered her wispy blond hair limply against her head, and her cheeks had grown even more pale. Tendrils of gray mucous nestled in the corners of her lips.

     Randolph stared down at the frail fingers resting absent-mindedly on his arm— surprised by the warm, tender touch and then by Lila herself, suddenly all the more desirable for his having betrayed her. 

*****

     Randolph went almost directly to Samantha’s place after he left the hospital, stopping only briefly to check on the cat at the house he’d once shared with his ex-wife.

     As Samantha undressed for bed, she laughed about how the suicide attempt would merely have “stopped Lila up” for a few days, and then laughed at Randolph too for taking those photographs down, for caring at all about what his ex-wife might have said. He shouldn’t have gone to the hospital, she chastised him lightly, shouldn’t have stopped to feed that cat. “Sometimes I think you enjoy that knight in shining armor bit,” she said, then reminded Randolph about all the ways Lila’s damsel in distress routine had made his life miserable. The way she used her unhappiness to coax Randolph to get married, promising that even a simple wedding would make everything better. Then nagging him about a baby and when they were going to start their family, because she felt things weren’t quite complete. Then withholding sex when he told her it wasn’t the right time for children yet. You can have me again anytime you’re ready, Randolph remembered Lila saying, and you know you’ll need it before I do. But Randolph had found Samantha instead.

     “Hell,” Samantha said, unclasping her bra. “Lila couldn’t keep her man then and she can’t kill herself now. What can she do right?” She shook her head, tossed the bra onto the chair in the corner of her bedroom. Her breasts were taut, her stomach sleek. “How you ever got mixed up with someone so needy, I’ll never know.”

     Standing in the doorway of the room, Randolph watched Samantha smooth lotion across her abdomen, sliding her fingers under the waistband of her panties and then shimmying out of them completely before climbing into bed. Samantha never mired herself in any melodrama. She was always clear-eyed and clear-cut. She hadn’t even asked how he felt about his ex-wife’s latest attempt on her life.

     “So are you coming to bed or are you going home?” she said then, one hand on the pull switch of the lamp, and though he’d always been captivated by her mix of willingness and indifference, he now wondered if she would always remain just out of reach.

	About the Author: A native of Richlands, NC, Art Taylor graduated from Yale University and has earned creative writing degrees from North Carolina State and from George Mason University, where he is now as an assistant professor of English. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, North American Review, and The Rambler. He is a contributing editor for Metro Magazine in Raleigh, NC, and a regular reviewer for the Washington Post Book World. He blogs at www.artandliterature.wordpress.com and is currently completing his first novel, First Loves, Second Thoughts.

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