Goodnight Tweetheart Page 11

  MarkBaynard: Ask me where in the world I am today.

  Abby_Donovan: Huh?

  MarkBaynard: Just do it. Ask me where I am today.

  Abby_Donovan: O-o-o-o-okie dokie. Where in the world is Mark Baynard today?

  MarkBaynard: VIEW FROM MY iPHONE: http://twitphoto.com/MB7sti

  Abby_Donovan: I can’t tell what that is. It looks like a piece of wood. And what’s that bag on the pole and that thing with the lights?

  MarkBaynard: It’s the footboard of my hospital bed. The bag is full of IV fluids and meds and that thing with the lights is a monitor.

  Abby_Donovan: Oh Mark, what happened? Are you okay?

  MarkBaynard: No. I’m not okay. And I never was.

  Abby_Donovan: I don’t understand.

  MarkBaynard: You’ve been right about me from the very beginning. I’m an imposter.

  Abby_Donovan: So you really ARE Batman?

  MarkBaynard: No, I’m really Mark Baynard, English lit professor on sabbatical from Ole Miss. But the only place I’ve traveled in the past year …

  MarkBaynard: … is to a facility that specializes in experimental treatments for non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

  Abby_Donovan: Lymphoma? As in … cancer?

  MarkBaynard: I’m afraid so. I beat it as a teenager, but it recurred a couple of years ago when I turned 33.

  Abby_Donovan: I’ve always heard non-Hodgkins lymphoma was one of the most treatable kinds of cancer.

  MarkBaynard: It can be.

  Abby_Donovan: What are you trying to say?

  MarkBaynard: That you can’t always believe what you hear.

  Abby_Donovan: That’s becoming painfully obvious. So let me get this straight—there was never any Paris? No Tuscany? No Loire Valley?

  MarkBaynard: No. Just me sitting in this hospital room with my laptop in semi-isolation waiting for the mad scientists to come and harvest my stem cells.

  Abby_Donovan: What about all the pictures you sent? The Eiffel Tower? Neptune’s Fountain? Blarney Castle?

  MarkBaynard: Just .jpgs I pulled off the Internet of the places I never took the time to see before I relapsed.

  Abby_Donovan: So our entire relationship, such as it was, has been based on a lie.

  MarkBaynard: And some of the most profound truths I’ve ever shared with anyone. I just left out the parts about the chemo and the vomiting.

  Abby_Donovan: Why? Why would you do such a thing? Did you think I wouldn’t be able to handle it?

  MarkBaynard: It wasn’t your problem. Why should you have to handle it?

  Abby_Donovan: You could have trusted me enough to let me make that decision for myself. You didn’t have to lie to me.

  MarkBaynard: I wasn’t just lying to you. I was lying to myself …

  MarkBaynard: … I wanted to pretend it wasn’t too late to travel to all the romantic places I’d always dreamed of seeing …

  MarkBaynard: … to believe I might actually start that novel I’ve been plotting in the back of my brain since I graduated from college …

  MarkBaynard: … to flirt with a smart, funny, irresistible woman.

  Abby_Donovan: You left off stupid and gullible.

  MarkBaynard: I never saw you that way. Not for one tweet.

  Abby_Donovan: You let me drone on & on about my pathetic case of writer’s block while you were fighting for yr life? How do you think that makes me feel?

  MarkBaynard: At the moment I’m guessing really pissed off. But “fighting” might be too strong of a word. It was more like swinging wildly.

  MarkBaynard: Abby?

  MarkBaynard: Say something, Abby. Anything.

  MarkBaynard: I’m guessing you only have two words for me right now. And they’re not “Br*tney Sp*ars.”

  MarkBaynard: And I’m guessing only one of them is FCC-approved.

  MarkBaynard: I was a bastard & I don’t blame you for hating me. You’re entitled to throw the mother of all Twantrums. But don’t shut me out. Please.

  MarkBaynard: Abby?

  MarkBaynard: Tweetheart?

  Abby_Donovan: #MarkFAIL

  The laptop’s hard drive whirred to a halt. Abby gently closed the screen, her fingers numb. For the first time she regretted getting the laptop with the stainless-steel casing. She wanted to slam the screen repeatedly on the keyboard until there was nothing left but shattered fragments of glass and plastic. She wanted to pick up the hateful thing and hurl it through the window, to send it crashing down onto Fifth Avenue with an impact that would bring the whole world screeching to a halt, along with her heart.

  What did it matter if Mark had lied? Or even if he died? He was nothing to her. Just some stranger she’d been foolish enough to pick up on the Internet. He was no more real than the actors on the front of the tabloids down at the local bodega. No more real than Mr. Darcy looking down his gorgeously aristocratic nose at Elizabeth Bennett from the lofty edifice of his pride.

  The intimacy they’d shared was nothing but a carefully crafted illusion. The nonsense of their little rituals. Their silly inside jokes. The secrets they’d traded. Their imaginary dates. Their ridiculous plan to meet in the basement of Macy’s a year from now.

  None of it was real. He wasn’t real.

  Why should it matter to her if he’d sent his tweets from some lonely hospital bed instead of from a sunny Tuscan vineyard halfway across the world? Why should she care if he lay awake until the wee hours of the morning watching endless reruns of The Golden Girls because it was better than listening to the monitors count out each beat of his heart and wondering just how many were left?

  She reached up to scrub at her cheeks, surprised to find them wet. She couldn’t remember the last time she had cried. Her tears seemed to have dried up during that awful week when she had been forced to break the news of her father’s death to her mother over and over again.

  Willow Tum-Tum brushed up against her leg with that peculiar empathy some cats seemed to possess, while Buffy eyed her with dispassionate curiosity from the ottoman in front of the couch.

  She glared at the laptop through her tears. Even with it silenced, she could still hear Mark’s voice:

  I’m just not convinced the poor schlub who ends his life puking his guts out in a hospital trash can would agree with you.

  Life has meaning simply because it’s … life. You don’t have to go out and wrap your BMW around a tree to find the value in it.

  There are meaningful deaths. And there are absurd and utterly meaningless deaths. Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose which one you get.

  In a John Irving novel, nobody ever dies a meaningless death.

  Death of choice? Choking to death on a Krispy Kreme.

  She shoved herself away from the desk and began to pace the length of the long, narrow apartment. She wished for the very first time that she had sublet some spacious Soho loft. Never had her apartment seemed like nothing more than the renovated hotel room it was. The tastefully painted walls seemed to be closing in around her. She could only seem to breathe in ragged gulps that made her heart feel as if it were going to explode from her chest. The shadows of twilight began to fall outside the window, crowding the last of the daylight from the room and turning the city streets below into gloomy tunnels.

  She tore open the door of the SubZero refrigerator. All it took was a quick survey of its contents to realize this was a wound no amount of Ben & Jerry’s could heal.

  She let the door fall shut and rested her throbbing forehead against the cool stainless steel. She could almost feel the laptop behind her, crouched there in the dark like some living, breathing creature. No longer able to stand its mute reproach, she snatched up her wallet and keys and fled the apartment.

  Abby would have liked nothing more than to dart across Grand Army Plaza and disappear into the shadows of the park to lick her wounds. But even in her agitated state, she knew that walking alone in the park after dark was an invitation for her unsolved mugging, rape, or murder to be ripped from the headlines and f
eatured on an episode of Law and Order or CSI: New York. So she turned left and took off down Fifth Avenue, shoving her way through the bustling crowds of theatergoers headed for the garish lights of Times Square.

  The vast and varied population of the city was both its blessing and its curse. The freedom of anonymity could be intoxicating until the moment when you realized you were surrounded by millions of people and not one of them gave a damn whether you lived or died.

  As she passed the artfully lighted windows of Saks, the ghostly white mannequins in their designer dresses looked down on her with equal apathy, as if to say, “We have nipples, but no need of them. We will never know your pain.”

  Full dark fell as she walked. The lights of the city twinkled to life around her, as cold and distant as stars from another galaxy. She walked until she could feel the pavement through the thin soles of her flats. She awoke from her daze to realize she was several blocks past Times Square and both the crowds and the lights had begun to thin.

  Leery of venturing deeper into a part of the city she didn’t know, she ducked into the nearest subway station.

  The subway car she picked was nearly deserted except for an elderly woman wearing a babushka, a weary-looking businessman reading The Wall Street Journal on his iPad, and a pair of giggling teenagers dressed all in black with nearly every visible inch of their sun-deprived flesh either tattooed or pierced. Abby sank into one of the cheap plastic seats at the back of the car. Breathing in the all too familiar smell of stale sweat mingled with various other mercifully unidentifiable odors, she closed her eyes and gave herself over to the rocking rhythm of the train. When she opened them again, the train was arriving at the Franklin Street subway station.

  She emerged from the station at the corner of Franklin and Varick in the very heart of Tribeca. She supposed she had known where she had been going all along. She had spent the two years since her father’s death convincing herself that she didn’t need anybody. That her work and the vibrant heartbeat of the city would be enough to sustain her. But then Mark had come along at the worst possible time and proved her wrong.

  She had forgotten to grab her cell phone when fleeing the apartment so she had no choice but to cast herself on the mercy of the liveried doorman standing guard at the revolving glass doors of the luxury high-rise. With her uncombed hair and wild, red-rimmed eyes, she probably looked like some Greenwich Village crack addict who had stumbled off the train at the wrong stop. If the doorman hadn’t remembered her from past visits, he would have never let her into the building.

  Before she had time to catch her breath, an express elevator had whisked her up to the thirty-seventh floor. Feeling like a beggar at the gates, she banged on the door at the far end of the hall, already knowing that the odds of anyone actually being home ranged from slim to none.

  It was almost a shock when the door swung open to reveal Margo standing there in a short scarlet silk robe screened with an Asian print. Her feet were bare but her hair was still perfectly coiffed. The most gorgeous Hispanic man Abby had ever seen hovered in the doorway of the bedroom behind her, wearing nothing but a towel and a disgruntled expression.

  Margo’s face lit up when she saw Abby. “There you are, baby! I thought you were coming by in the morning.” Before Abby could say a word, she turned away and padded across the granite tiles to the sleek steel-and-glass desk sitting beneath the low-slung bank of windows. She rapidly shuffled her way through several file folders with her long crimson nails. “Lucky for you, I picked up the ticket on my way home from the office. At first I didn’t think they were going to let me transfer over my frequent flier miles, but by the time I was done with the airline rep, he was begging to upgrade me—I mean, you—to first class. Ah, here it is! I still think you’re a little crazy jetting halfway across the world to meet a man who might be the next Ted Bundy, but hey, at least it’ll get you out of the apartment for a few days, right? And I have to tell you, I don’t mind feeding those furry little monsters of yours while you’re gone, but that shifty little Muffy or Fluffy or Tuffy or whatever it is you call her still gives me the heebie jeebies.”

  Margo was halfway back across the room before she lifted her gaze from the printout in her hand and realized Abby hadn’t budged from the doorway. She drew closer, her regal features going taut with concern as she searched Abby’s face. “Abby? What happened, baby? Are you all right?”

  Feeling fresh tears burn her eyes, Abby swiped at her dripping nose with the back of her hand. “I won’t be needing that ticket after all, but I do need you to drop-kick somebody’s lily-white ass to the moon for me. I’ll let you be Oprah for an entire month if you won’t say ‘I told you so’ or ‘bless your little heart.’”

  Her face crumpling in sympathy, Margo opened her arms. Abby fell into them with a choked sob, still not sure if she was crying for Mark or for herself.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Watched the IQ episode of FRASIER last night. Learned I’m smarter than Frasier but dumber than Niles.

  If I were president, I’d appoint a Starbucks czar, a hot stone massage czar, and a dark chocolate M&Ms czar.

  Doctors should give out bottles of Dark Choco M&Ms labeled HAPPY PILLS. Take 30 and don’t call me in the morning.

  Dear New Age CD: This track might be more relaxing if it didn’t sound just like the music they played when TITANIC was sinking.

  Abby groaned out loud, earning a faintly annoyed look from the man skimming the Times and nursing a Caramel Macchiato at the next table. She was doing it again. Tweeting in her head. Collecting observations of 140 characters or less to share with Mark. She desperately wished there was some way she could flip the stubborn switch in her brain to off so it would stop tweeting. It was almost as if it was sending out some sort of distress signal to a tower that was no longer receiving.

  She took a sip of her latte, then grimaced. The coffee had grown stone cold while she sat absently watching the traffic pass by on Fifth Avenue and chatting up a phantom. Before she had “met” Mark, she hadn’t wanted to leave her apartment. Now she only returned there to sleep. She just couldn’t bear to be trapped in the same room with her laptop, much less think about actually turning it on. She’d let it sit cold, dark, and silent since she’d signed off of Twitter for the last time nearly a week ago.

  During that week she had learned there were a lot of places in New York where you could loiter all day without being arrested for vagrancy—the public library, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral. One sunny afternoon she had even laid claim to one of the benches that lined the Poet’s Walk. But the sight of all the happy couples had driven her out of the park to wander the bustling streets until she was so exhausted she had no choice but to return to her apartment and fall into bed. She had slept all night without dreaming a single dream.

  After that she had returned to her old familiar stomping ground. Fueled by caffeine and righteous indignation, she had been writing at various Starbucks all week, scrawling page after page of her new book on a yellow legal pad in her barely legible handwriting. Judging by the superior smirks of her fellow Starbucks customers, with their sleek iPads and vibrating BlackBerries, you’d have thought she was using a chisel to carve her words into a stone tablet.

  She might be able to escape her apartment and her laptop, but there was nowhere she could go to escape her own brain. She was still haunted by the ghost of a man who had never even really existed. She would have almost sworn they had actually strolled the Poet’s Walk hand in hand while trading semi-serious quips about what they were looking for in a relationship.

  Do you think you’ll ever remarry?

  No.

  She might know the truth about Mark’s medical condition, but she had no way of knowing if he had responded that way because his divorce had left his heart so badly scarred or because he didn’t believe he would live long enough to marry again. He had lied to her with effortless charm, yet it was those heartbreaking
moments of honesty she couldn’t seem to forget.

  She still couldn’t believe she’d only been a tweet away from revealing that she had already purchased a ticket to Dublin. From telling him that her mother’s unwavering faith in love—a faith that transcended even death—had inspired her to take a chance. To tear down the walls she’d built around her own heart, even if that meant risking everything by offering it to a man she barely knew.

  But before she could do that, he had sent his own wrecking ball crashing through them.

  She didn’t want to think about how difficult his confession must have been for him or picture him lying in that hospital bed the entire time they had been tweeting. She couldn’t afford to feel sorry for him. She didn’t have any room left in her heart to grieve another loss. She wanted to hold on to her anger for as long as she could. She was afraid of what she might feel when she no longer had its jagged edges to protect her.

  She scribbled another line on the yellow pad, hoping to occupy her brain with something more productive than brooding. A familiar chirp sounded behind her. She froze, the cheery sound cutting through her heart like a blade. She slowly turned to look over her shoulder, as if fearful any sudden move might sever some essential artery.

  A twenty-something girl with a bright magenta pashima draped over one shoulder had claimed the high-top table behind her and flipped open her laptop to reveal Tweetdeck’s distinctive columns. The laptop chirped again, signaling the arrival of another tweet. The girl grinned as she read it, then sent her fingers flying over the keys to craft a response.

  Only a week ago that might have been her, Abby thought. But as she had discovered since that night when she had abandoned Mark in mid-tweet, a week could be an eternity.

  Or it could be only the blink of an eye in the life of a man battling lymphoma.

  Seized by a sudden rush of panic, Abby jumped to her feet and stuffed her legal pad into her portfolio with shaking hands. She started for the door, stumbling over the outstretched legs of the man nursing the Caramel Macchiato.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, rushing past him as he gave her a disapproving glare over the top of his newspaper. “I’m so very, very sorry.”