Featured Fiction

Taking Leave

Sandra parked in a grotty, multistory garage a couple of blocks away. Alone, and without Will’s steadying arm because he’d had a late faculty meeting in Princeton, she hurried through Washington Square in the chill of the early March evening, picking her way around patches of black ice. Spotlights in the swanky gallery beckoned, and large gold lettering on its floor-to-ceiling windows heralded artifacts of desire: the Philadelphia biennial crafts competition

Through the glass, Sandra picked out Sam’s petite figure among the crowd. She was leaning against a window in the corner, festive in maroon pants and silky tunic, black hair cascading from a high ponytail. The chattering guests held plastic flutes, and a waiter in black circulated with a bottle of Champagne. Sam had invited Sandra shyly, or rather tentatively; nobody in her family was going to make the trip from Vietnam, because Sam would be back there next week for her wedding. After which she would move to the city, eleven time zones away from Philadelphia, where her fiancé, who had just finished his MBA at Wharton the previous May, was beginning his career in industrial management.

Sandra picked up a glossy brochure from the steel table just inside the entrance and made her way through the clusters of people. She stopped when she recognized Sam’s work mounted on teal velvet waist-high black pedestals. Bracelets and rings shone under the ceiling spotlights, along with a gold rendition of the earrings that Sandra was wearing. A rhomboid Lucite trophy nested among the objets: first prize, jewelry.

“Ooh, Sandra, you came!”

“Of course, I came. This is so exciting! Look at your work—even more beautiful than it is in the pictures. People can’t take their eyes off it.”

Sam blushed, uneasy with compliments.

“Is it all right for me to say that I’m proud of you? I mean, you’re not my daughter, but I can be proud of my young friend.”

Sam smiled.

“Come—I have something for you.” Sandra took Sam’s arm, ushered her toward an archway at the back of the gallery under signs for office and exit. The buzz of the crowd faded voices indistinct. The two women stood next to the open door of the manager’s office. Sandra could see stacks of papers on every surface, large, framed photographs leaning against the desk. She reached in her bag for the faded, red velvet pouch that cinched with a red silk cord. 

Sam looked as though she’d been offered extra dessert—as though she had to protest, to decline excess, but Sandra reached for Sam’s free hand, put the gift on her palm, and closed her fingers, wrapping her own hand around Sam’s. 

Sam looked at the pouch, hesitant, reverent. 

“Please,” Sandra said. “I know it’s selfish, but I want to see your face when you open it.” She released Sam’s hand and waited. 

Slowly, Sam loosened the cord and unfolded the tissue paper, emitting a small gasp as she saw the pendant. It was a relic of the 1970s, a sterling bottle cap with a gold S affixed on the surface between nine and ten o’clock. S—the initial they both shared, a symbol of Sam’s years in the United States.

The Cartier pendant had been a sweet sixteen present from the parents of her best friend. A trendy trinket, though it bore the name of the venerable manufacturer. Sandra loved it but had long since outgrown its quirky heft. She did not have a daughter who would cherish it, and there was no future daughter-in-law on the horizon for her and Will’s son, Jonathan. The pendant had languished at the back of a dark closet in Sandra’s old beech jewelry box, tarnished into near disappearance among other sentimentally retained pieces. She let it sit overnight in a small glass ditch coated with silver polish and worked on it with an old toothbrush the next day until it gleamed through the blackened pink glop. She found the velvet Cartier pouch from that era that had contained her long-since-broken sterling pillbox—their high school graduation gift.

“Oh, Sandra, I love it. I am going to miss you so much.” Sam caressed the circle of ridges, ran her finger across the S. She then took a step away and bowed slightly, and Sandra felt the depth of her gratitude.

🙕

Back in the exhibition space, Sandra watched Sam as she accepted congratulations on her success, answering questions about prices and availability. Although she was not called Sam here. That was not the name on the cover of the glossy brochure. 

Sam was the easy-to-pronounce name taken to make her American customers—ladies, mostly, but some gentlemen—comfortable as they sat in the quiet nail salon. Sandra asked about Sam’s real name early, maybe three or four mani-pedis into their four-year friendship. If they ever met again, Sam would be Bich, nearly forbidden to say in English but gentle in Sam’s Vietnamese. Sandra couldn’t get the phoneme quite right; it was pronounced ‘beat,’ with a barely there t. Bich meant ‘gemstone.’ Appropriate for a gem of a person, wise beyond her twenty-seven years—and for a designer of jewelry, silver and gold abstract geometries of bodies both human and celestial. A friend deserved to be called by her real name.

Sandra and Will planned—hoped—to travel around the globe someday. Perhaps they could pay a visit to Sam. See the successful boutique she would no doubt open. It would be in the hippest neighborhood of whatever city her husband’s job required. It would have to be a long and leisurely trip in order to make the grueling travel tolerable—a journey to be taken after retirement, when she would no longer have to withstand her patients’ punishing anger and panic during the weeks before and after her departure.

Thoughts of retirement stirred up the usual troubling ambivalence. Sandra was over sixty, old enough to give a noncommittal answer whenever the occasional patient asked her about her plans. Most of the time, she felt bound to say that she had no intention of retiring anytime soon, but that these matters were often not under one’s own control. In fact, she no longer accepted serious personality disorders—ten-year cases—into her practice. Some of her colleagues worked into their nineties, but she thought that unethical and even selfish, no matter how much one might love the work. 

Sandra could not imagine inflicting the unimaginable pain of abandonment on patients who still needed her—those who wouldn’t be ready to end, those who did not yet have a durable internalized mental representation of a loving, dedicated therapist to sustain them when the going got rough. It would be wrenching for her as well. Her psyche was crowded with decades of internalizations: after all, you can’t help patients if you’re not willing to give them permanent time-shares in your mind. It was like marriage, really: till death do you part. She sighed: retirement was a conundrum with no good solution. Like Scarlett, she decided to think about it tomorrow.

🙕

Four days after the exhibition, it was Sunday, with its leap into Daylight Saving Time. In the slight haze of the sprung-forward lost hour of sleep, Sandra drove south from Gladwyne to Wynnewood through the melted snow on Gypsy Lane to see Sam for possibly the last time. 

Today was a mani-pedi day. Since the salon was only ten minutes from home, Sandra had worn black vinyl flip-flops, whose thickish rubber soles would protect her from any remnants of last night’s snow in the parking lot while her polish was still drying. Her toes were cold, but the sun was bright, giving a greenhouse feel to the car’s interior, a hopeful harbinger of truly warm days ahead. Her coat was unbuttoned, and for the first time in months she hadn’t bothered with gloves. She tightened her fingers around the heated steering wheel, giving herself a perfect view of her badly chipped nail polish. As usual, she had not yet decided between pink-beige, mauve-beige, cream-beige, or into-bed red. Sam would know which color would suit her mood.

It was almost four years ago when Sam was the technician available at Sandra’s usual Sunday, four o’clock appointment time. In the weeks and months thereafter, Sam’s greeting was predictable: “Cut or file?” she would ask, only her eye-smile visible above her surgical mask. After that the conversation would move onto Sandra’s indecision about colors. Finally, with fond impatience: “Sandra, it’s only a one-week commitment!”

That Sam was seriously smart was clear when she admitted having been the only student in her MFA class to solve the professor’s weekly riddle, the double murder of Antony and Cleopatra. The single clue was that there was broken glass on a wet floor. The answer? Antony and Cleopatra were goldfish. Sandra could not resist games of wit and logic, and so each week, she and Sam would prepare riddles to be presented at the next appointment; the last brushstroke of topcoat was the deadline for supplying the puzzler’s solution. 

Puzzler. That word from Car Talk, another long-gone love. She could use Click and Clack’s advice now: would the heater warm up faster with the fan on high or on low? Her feet were still chilled.

At first the sparring over those riddles was excited, loud; the other workers and customers in the salon joined in the laughter. But the talk between Sam and Sandra gradually became quieter, intimate. Talk of Sandra’s husband and son. The death of Sam’s beloved grandfather. Sandra’s work. The activities sponsored by Sam’s church. Sandra’s foray into fiction writing. How Sam’s family would feel about her newfound Christianity. Sam’s boyfriend, then fiancé. Sandra had even bought the pair of Sam’s earrings she wore to the opening, airy silver freehand circles reminiscent of the hollow globe held by Atlas at Rockefeller Center. She even helped Sam edit an application for the teaching fellowship that had kept her in the United States during the months after she earned her degree. 

Sam was a more accomplished artist than Sandra, so she appreciated her friend’s venture into the world of imaginative writing. When Sandra said one Sunday that she’d been up since 4:00 a.m. so full of ideas she could not sleep, Sam recognized a kindred spirit, albeit in a different medium: ‘Welcome to the world of an artist.’ 

Now it was time for Sam to begin her own professional life. Sandra had utter confidence that Sam would succeed, and succeed anywhere, for jewelry was an everywhere language. It was time for her to do more than lacquer mini-Mondrians on the toes of unappreciative teenagers. 

Besides, being the consumer of Sam’s intimate labor—pumicing, washing, massaging of feet—felt increasingly awkward to Sandra, not reflective of the evolved nature of their relationship. So, relief lightened her sadness, at least a little. If Sam had stayed, Sandra thought she would need to find another manicurist, a way to remove money and hierarchy from the friendship. Although, she didn’t know whether she would have had the strength to cancel this precious weekly interlude. Sandra had a number of close friends, but no one she spent an hour with each week.

🙕

It was ten to four, and the salon was only five minutes away. Sandra might have been able to make it through the yellow light at the intersection of Gypsy Lane and Montgomery Avenue, but it was not a workday, and thus there was no need for her to get to the office before her first patient arrived. This was a taste of retirement, she thought. Not having to rush to make a light.

She stopped an untidy ten feet or so before the patchy white paint strips of the crosswalk and waited, basking in the sun through the windshield and enjoying the songs on her playlist. Tom Petty’s bass beat gave way to Simon and Garfunkel’s percussive harmony: ‘I Am a Rock.’ The roads seemed almost deserted for a Sunday afternoon in Wynnewood, considering that people were out shopping and preparing for the week, savoring their privilege—as she was, she thought. She would be entirely off duty at six o’clock, when she would check voice mail for that last time that day, and then it would be martini hour with Will. Her mind turned to the patients on Monday’s schedule, especially to the one who’d be beginning the final week of his psychoanalysis. The first years of the treatment had been stormy, but his provocativeness had mellowed into ironic humor. She would miss him.

The sedate traffic passed in front of her. A glistening black car came to a stop at the intersection across the avenue in the opposite lane. A two-door BMW, with tinted side and rear windows, its distinctive grille facing her. She saw the driver’s lips moving. Years ago, such a person would have been thought to be psychotic. Well, not always, she realized—her lips were moving, too, as she was singing along: A fortress deep and mighty that none may penetrate.

The light was still red. Suddenly there was movement across the avenue. The BMW was accelerating in order to make a right turn. Later, Sandra remembered thinking that he was going much too fast. 

But he wasn’t making a right turn. He was coming straight across Montgomery Avenue, through the red light! No, he couldn’t—

She inhaled sharply, horrified, but a peculiar detachment and slowing of time had descended upon her, as though she were watching a video game in which the goal was to manipulate an avatar across a perpendicular flow of something—asteroids, grenades, phaser bursts. It was all happening at lighting speed and in slow motion simultaneously.

Sandra craned her neck but could only see partway around the corners of the intersection. A stand of utility poles amid tall leafless trees obscured the view to the right, and the Episcopal church hulked on her left, its haute Main Line fieldstone bulk blocking her view from the other direction. 

A low-slung racing-green Jaguar coming from the right was on a collision course with the BMW, now already halfway through the intersection. The Jag swerved sharply, missing the Beemer’s bumper by inches.

Just then a light blue minivan entered the intersection from the left—with too much momentum to stop. It crossed right into the Beemer’s path. The driver was a young woman. Sandra could see the silhouette of two large child seats in the back outlined by the late afternoon sunlight. 

Hiding in my room, safe within my womb, I touch no one and no one touches me.

Shit! Shit! Shit! The minivan wasn’t going to make it. There was helpless panic on the face of the driver, which Sandra could see in profile. 

Sandra gasped. The BMW smashed into the minivan, then bounced away like a cue ball.

The minivan skittered over the road toward Sandra, behind the crosswalk—exactly where she would have stopped on an ordinary day. It skidded across the narrow sidewalk and crashed into the traffic-light pole with such force that entire tubular steel structure bent by a few degrees. Its massive pendant of green, red, and yellow lights swayed, threatening to collapse. 

The minivan’s front end was crumpled in half. The airbag was already deflating, but the driver was moving, alive. 

The danger was over.

Only then did the light turn green, but no one reacted; traffic had come to a halt. 

Sandra didn’t feel anything at first; it was like the delay between stubbing one’s toe and the pain. Her gaze was still riveted on the woman in the minivan, whose arms were shaking on her steering wheel, her mouth open in what must be a scream. The woman’s terror went straight to Sandra’s heart, to her deepest desire to relieve pain. She turned off her ignition, and rushed out of the car. She felt ridiculous in her summer footwear.

The driver stumbled from her ruined vehicle. Her light brown curls quivered as she stood in the sun, fists held to her snow-white cheeks, keening. Sandra ran to her through the pieces of shattered windshield strewn across the road, sparkling like diamonds in the sunlight.

“Thank God, oh, thank God my children weren’t in the car. My children, oh, my God, oh, my God!” She swayed, her body rigid, looking from the crumpled engine to the passenger compartment and the deflated airbags.

Sandra moved between the woman and her car and reached for the trembling arms, holding them gently yet firmly in that urgent instant. 

“You’re all right.”

“Thank God, my children!”

The driver of the BMW watched them as he slowly walked toward the Main Line Reform Temple, diagonally across Montgomery Avenue. 

“Yes, your children weren’t there. They’re fine. You’re fine.” 

The woman stared at Sandra. 

“What’s your name? I’m Sandra.” Bring her into this moment, away from that one.

“Gabby . . . Oh, thank God, thank God!” 

Other drivers were rushing over to Gabby. One of them was calling 911. Leave us alone—I’m the one who knows how to take care of her now!

“Gabby, I saw the whole thing. He ran the red light. There’s nothing you could have done.”

Imprint these facts alongside the traumatic memory—inoculate her against PTSD. 

Gabby was calming down, and she’d stopped trembling. 

“Where do you live, Gabby?”

“Over there.” She gestured back and left with her head, then started to cry. “A block and a half away.” 

“You’re okay now. You’re safe.” 

Gabby relaxed her arms, lowered them, closed her hands around Sandra’s wrists.

“My husband—I need to call my husband.” Sandra thought of Sam, waiting, readying puffs of cotton and a fresh emery board.

Two other drivers, both men, were beside them. One said, “I’ll call him. Tell me the number.”

While he was calling, a police car pulled up, an ambulance half a block behind. They arrived quickly: though the station was just a mile away, it still must have otherwise been a quiet afternoon. The BMW driver, a stocky man in his late thirties, wearing jeans and a black leather jacket, had taken refuge on the grounds of the synagogue. Sandra realized that he might be in shock as well, in need of somebody’s ministrations, but she felt afraid of him. What sort of obliviousness, impulsiveness could had prompted him to run the red light? Why had he made no attempt to brake as he sped through the intersection? She had seen his neutral expression during the accident. There was only indifference on his face now as he watched the drama he had instigated. As though this had nothing to do with him.

A policeman hurried over to Mr. BMW and ushered him to the ambulance. The EMTs made him sit down, and Sandra heard him say that he was fine. She and Gabby still held each other. The other policeman came over to them.

“She’s all right,” said the taller of the two good Samaritan drivers. It was the Main Line, rotten with medical professionals: he was an orthopedic surgeon, and the other was a physician assistant. “I’m a psychologist,” said Sandra. “Everything you could need.”

“And I’m a nurse,” said Gabby. She had recovered enough by then to join the ironic chuckling. Gabby’s husband arrived then, rushed to her. She released Sandra’s hands and folded into him. Sandra then wondered if she would miss her final hour with Sam.

The policeman pulled out a notebook and asked if anyone had witnessed the accident. “I saw the whole thing,” Sandra said. “That’s my car; I was waiting at the light and saw it.” She gestured toward her bare feet. “I was just headed to get my nails done. Could I make a call to tell them I’m going to be late?” Would Sam be worried about her? And Will—but he did not yet know that there was anything to worry about.

After the officer finished taking down her report, Sandra returned to the little group now dissipating. The doctor and the PA had been stopped at a traffic light a long block away from the accident when it happened, so the officer did not need to interview them. He turned his notebook to a fresh page and walked toward Mr. BMW, who remained unmoving on the muddy grass. A second policeman was already sweeping broken glass from the road. 

Gabby’s husband reached for Sandra’s hand. “I can’t thank you enough for how you took care of my wife.” 

“Yes,” Gabby said. “Your face was so kind.”

“You’re so welcome.” Sandra suddenly felt self-conscious. The wind blew the hair away from her head, exposing her large ears, which were probably bright red from the cold. She looked down and fumbled in her bag. “I want to give you, my card.” She glanced at the ambulance. “If you need to talk to anyone, I can get you to the best people. If you have flashbacks, intrusive dreams, anything that lasts longer than it should. Please call me, let me know if there’s anything I can do.” Gabby tucked the card in the pocket of her coat. 

“Thank you, thank you. Enjoy your mani-pedi.” Gabby said. The two women embraced.

Sandra could scarcely bring herself to leave this stranger to whom she now felt bound. She felt a desperate need for them to become friends, overwhelmed by the intensity of a desire to—to what? To take Gabby into her life? To become an auntie to the children whose forms were imbricated in those padded and reinforced seats? 

🙕

Sandra carefully made her way back to her car through remnants of windshield that had been too small for the policeman’s broom. The car was freezing again, and the light was red. She was shocked by the sudden emptiness, the letdown after her immersion in this stranger’s existential crisis. Then a tsunami of absence washed through her. She lowered her head onto her hands at the top of the steering wheel.

Hundreds it had to be who’d passed through her life. Hundreds whose middle names she might not remember, hundreds she’d cared for, treated, serially loved. They left, one by one, when they were ready to go, mostly because they were all right, some for the first time in their lives. A few left abruptly before she was prepared to let go, leaving her unbalanced and in a state of shock. Certainty crashed into her, unavoidable: she would have to take her own leave one day. She would have to make this decision. To accept that the days of deploying specialized skills and instincts honed over decades—a hard-won but now easy expertise—would come to an end. The car behind gave a brief honk; the light was green.

The roads were now filled with traffic. People must be on the way home from Whole Foods, from the mall and the gym. When Sandra finally entered the welcoming salon, with its tall ceiling and aroma of green-tea lotion, she exhaled with relief. Classical music while silent TVs on the long mauve wall displayed CNN and a home decorating show. Her legs suddenly felt weak, and she stood still for a moment at the coat hooks before crossing the room to Sam’s station.

“Sandra, are you all, right?” Sam took Sandra’s hands in her own and held them a little longer than usual. 

Sandra turned her palms up so that she could return the hold. “Oh, Sam. I’m going to miss you terribly.” 

“Me, too! I know! But so scary to see an accident! Do you want to talk?” 

Sandra did. “I don’t know what to do now. Will I never see that young nurse again? After I took care of her? And it’s not just this woman. It’s everyone. More than thirty years of not knowing what’s happened to the people I took care of people I cared about. What’s happened to them?”

“Don’t they call you? Or write sometimes?”

“Sometimes, and that’s wonderful. Sometimes I get cards with pictures of children. Or even a book, maybe with my name in the acknowledgments. Sometimes.” 

They fell silent. Sam finished filing and began to apply cuticle remover.

“And one day, I’m really going to have to leave everyone. Before I die on them and traumatize them. Before I rob them of the chance to be angry at me. But then I won’t know how they’re doing.” 

She paused, watched Sam push her cuticles back. For the first time she imagined, really imagined, what it would be like. 

“I won’t know who I am. When the accident happened, I barely felt the danger. Only for a second. And then all I could think of was what I could do to help. Who will I be when I don’t get to take care of people every day?”

Sam thought for a moment. “I think you will always take care of others—you can’t help it. It is who you are.” She patted Sandra’s hand. “And you will always be a writer.”

Sandra shook wistfulness away. “At least I won’t have to wonder about your future!” 

“No, you won’t, my friend!” They fell into one of their companionable silences until the base coat was finished and the moment of commitment was upon her. It would be red, Sandra decided. Sam’s favorite red.

Sandra was always Sam’s last client on Sundays. While Sandra’s nails were drying, Sam sat next to her, showing Sandra her initial drawings for the wedding rings she would make for herself and her husband-to-be: wide bands of white and rose gold, the colors blended like the last moments of sunset. 

Sam then picked up Sandra’s heavy leather pocketbook—the client must leave without a dinged nail, the nail salon equivalent of the de-rigueur hospital wheelchair departure. At the door, she took a thick pink envelope from her smock and tucked it into the bag. Sandra was about to reach for it, but Sam checkmated her. “No, not now! When you get home, when your nails are dry. And then you can text me.” Then their final hug.

In the parking lot, Sandra used her car key to open the envelope. Inside was a parchment card with words of affection and, wrapped in red tissue, an exquisite silver necklace, not exactly a pendant but a twisted open form whose contours, like those of her earrings, evoked the touch of Sam’s slender, strong, fingers. It clasped with a simple rounded loop and hook, easy to close without ruining her polish. It felt smooth on her neck, comfortable and precious. 

Sandra drove home through the dusk. She shuddered as she passed the dented traffic-light pole now davening, genuflecting in the windy intersection of Montgomery Avenue and Gypsy Lane.

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