The Anti-Heroes

Chapter Twenty LIV

Chapter Twenty

L IV

“Did I fall asleep?” I sit up quickly and pay immediate consequences. My equilibrium is way off. The room is spinning, and I have to cling to the narrow bench I’m draped across to make it stop. Thank you, Olive Garden’s finest midpriced red.

“No,” Michael says. He hands me a bottle of water. “You passed out. Big difference.” For all his bluster, I notice that he used his suit coat to blanket me while I slept. The jacket has the same comforting citrus-and-spice smell as my dad.

We’re in the waiting room at the ER. It was packed last night when we got here. People do careless things when the weather gets warm. As a veteran, thanks to my mom, I possess all kinds of ER info. For example, you’d think cuts on the head would be expedited due to all the blood, but they can often be the most superficial wounds. I hate that I’m here enough to understand how the hospital triages cases. I hate everything about this place, from the magazines I’ve already read to the flat-screen in the corner with its endless loop of game shows. I hate the Spanish moss that surrounds the plants. I hate the way the nurses’ shoes lightly squeak against the linoleum. I hate the shitty coffee and how there are never Oreos in the vending machine. I hate how many nights and weekends I’ve sacrificed to this waiting room. Mom’s never once been admitted during one of these runs. Not once. I feel such impotent rage that if I allowed myself to scream, I’d never stop.

The waiting room has largely cleared out, winnowed down to a couple of people. The only ones left here are the cute red-haired boy with his hand stuck in a vase and a middle-aged man with a barbecue fork protruding from his shoulder. Ouch.

Vishnu approaches us, and his head looks a lot less round now. He must have been treated. “Vishnu! Are you better?” I ask. I know we ran into him here last night because his head was swollen to the size of a BOSU ball, but I don’t recall why. Last night is rather hazy.

“Oh, yes, thank you, good as new.” He takes a seat next to us. “Shall I wait with you? Michael told me what happened with your mother while you were asleep.”

“Passed out,” Michael corrects him.

“Or would it be more helpful if I were to pick up some breakfast ... or perhaps a toothbrush?”

I’m just mortified. “This is not who I am,” I explain.

“I know that, Liv. You’re allowed to have a bad day. We all have them. Being human is what makes us ...” Vishnu trails off, looking for the right word.

“Human?” Michael suggests.

“Exactly,” Vishnu replies.

We sit in companionable silence, broken only when Michael asks the vase kid’s mother, “Did you tell him to release whatever he’s holding in there?”

The mother is furious at his suggestion. “Are you kidding? How would I not have said that first, before spending the entire night in the emergency room? Are you implying that I’m a bad mother?”

Michael neatly crosses one leg over the other, still impeccably polished and unwrinkled. I don’t know how he does it. “No, honey, I’m implying that your child might be a dullard.”

Uh oh. The mother draws a breath like she’s getting ready to yell, and I can’t say that I blame her. But before she can get a word out, the kid sheepishly withdraws his arm from the vase. “Look, Ma, no hand ... in vase!”

After an awkward silence, the mother hustles the child out in such haste that they leave the vase behind.

“I wasn’t wrong,” Michael says, picking a bit of lint off his trousers.

The guy with the shoulder wound peers expectantly toward Michael, who says, “I’ve got nothing for you, Forky.”

“So, have you seen Jay yet?” Vishnu asks. “He should just be getting here for the early shift. He starts at 6:00 a.m. today.”

“No, he told me he was working an overnight—that’s why he couldn’t answer my calls,” I say.

A strange look flashes across Vishnu’s face. “I must be mistaken, so sorry. If you’d like to say hello, go down one flight of stairs, and then left, then left, and a third left.”

“You are an absolute peach,” I tell him. I kiss him on the cheek, and for good measure, I kiss Michael’s cheek too. That they both allow me to do this despite whatever died in my mouth feels like tremendous progress.

After I’ve fixed my hair and repaired my raccoon eyes in the bathroom, I realize I’ve completely forgotten where the lab is. A helpful young nurse directs me to radiology once I get downstairs. I suspect I’m still a little bit drunk. When I get to the office, I spot Jay through the open door. That cute nurse lingers with me a second, looking from Jay to me before leaving.

Jay is staring at his phone. He doesn’t notice me in the doorway. I bet he just had his first chance to text me back. I check my phone, but there’s nothing yet.

“Knock, knock,” I say.

Jay practically throws his phone face down on his desk. “I didn’t think I’d see you here . What’s going on? Are you checking up on me?” he says. He’s smiling, but that familiar grin doesn’t seem to have reached his eyes. Something is missing. And if he worked an all-nighter, why is his thick, dark hair still damp with comb tracks, like he’s just out of the shower? You know what? I’m not going to ask questions I don’t want answered.

“My mom’s in the ER again.”

“Now what? Yellow fever? Ebola? Is her prostate acting up again?” His tone doesn’t have its usual teasing quality, and I’m so ashamed.

I can’t even look at him. “She thinks it’s polio.”

His level of disgust cuts me to the bone. “You can’t let them run you around like this. You have to take a stand.”

He’s not telling me anything I haven’t told myself a million times. “I know.”

“Did you even try to object? Reason with her? Maybe just flat out say no?”

“I wanted to.” I have gotten better at this, I know I have. I mean, I let her deal with the drywall on her own. And I haven’t let myself get roped into babysitting in weeks.

From the look on his face, I know what’s coming, because I’ve seen it and heard it before, again and again. “Liv, I like you, but between your family, your clients, and your class, there’s no time for us. You say yes to everyone but yourself.”

His words hit me like a dead weight. They are devastating. Why am I perpetually trapped in this Groundhog Day loop? I thought I was making some progress. Am I just making the same mistakes over and over again? “I’m so sorry. I would—”

He points to a screen. I can’t be sure, but it looks like an outline of a My Little Pony stuck in a pelvis. “Listen, I can’t do this with you right now. I’ve gotta go see a man about a horse. Literally. But I wish you well, I really do. If you ever learn to say no, you have my number.” He gently whisks me out into the hall and closes the door behind me.

Standing here alone—again—I’m reminded of a Karl Marx quote I learned in college: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

I have to figure out how to break this farcical cycle.

Michael drops Ma and me off at home. She doesn’t even thank me for sacrificing my entire night in the ER. Weary, I climb the stairs, then chug a glass of water, swallow a couple of ibuprofen, and collapse face-first into my couch.

I wake a few hours later when I hear someone pounding at my front door. The seeds of hangover I felt earlier have fully taken root. I drag myself to answer. It’s Michael. He’s daisy fresh and nattily dressed. He pushes past into the apartment.

“You. Toothbrush. Now.”

I’m so confused. “Why are you here?”

“For some tough love. I’m here to help you because you clearly refuse to help yourself. You can’t live like this.”

“That’s not true—” He cuts me off with a whistle (why do I want to call it a whoostle ?) blast.

He guides me over to my favorite gold-leaf antique mirror. It’s from a cute vintage shop in Winnetka. “Look at yourself in this God-awful mirror. What do you see, other than someone who desperately needs an interior designer?” He takes my chin in his hands and makes me look when I demur. “Look. I mean it. Look at yourself and see what everyone else sees.”

What I see is a mess, wrapped in the doormat that everyone steps on, cloaked in the inability to prioritize myself.

“Now, I need you to say, ‘You is kind, you is smart, you is important.’”

That’s not what I expected to hear. “You want me to quote The Help ?”

“Yes. It has ‘help’ right in the title. Because I am your help. Say it,” he instructs.

I feel silly, but I do it anyway. “You are kind, you are smart, you are important.”

“Excellent. To make sure you don’t forget, I’ll be with you all day. Whatever shame spiral or cycle of sadness you’re in? It ends here.”

I offer up a quick prayer to God or Zeus or whoever inspired Michael to help me out of a lifetime of yeses and I’m sorrys.

I always assumed Emily would be the one to coax me out of my bad habits, but she’s too gentle with me, and she’s mired in her own shortcomings. Deandra has no compunction about being unkind, and likely she could have helped inspire me to make different choices. But it occurs to me it’s not to her benefit for me to change. My being stuck makes her life easier.

I wish I wasn’t actively trying not to vomit on the day someone’s decided to help me change my life, but perhaps that’s the cost of doing business. Still, I hate the idea of being a burden. I search for excuses. “But ... don’t you have to go to work?” I ask.

He shrugs. “My company, my rules.” I am so overcome with gratitude that I wrap him in a hug. He immediately makes a face.

“You. Shower. Now.”

We make it in time for my noon staff meeting. It took some spackling with my heaviest foundation and an extralong shower, but I manage to look like a close approximation of myself. The plan is that Michael will shadow me today, pointing out when I allow people to take advantage of me. He doesn’t think I realize how often it happens, so he’ll be with me to document the process. When I asked Michael how I was supposed to explain his presence in the office he said, “You don’t owe anyone jack shit.”

I begin the meeting and breeze through the usual housekeeping pieces. When it comes time to assign the open houses, I can feel that lump of dread forming in my stomach. “We need someone to run the Wilson condo open house. Who can help?”

Apparently speaking for the group, Trevor says, “You’re, like, so good at selling condos. We feel like it should be you.”

Michael, who has been sitting unobtrusively in the corner, examining his manicure, blasts his whistle. Everyone jumps, including me. I thought he was going to document instances like a quiet observer, not a pissed-off hockey referee.

“No, I need someone else to manage it.” Okay, it felt good to say that. “I can’t. I have back-to-back showings that day on more valuable properties. Who can please step up? Trevor, do you have other showings this weekend?”

Trevor is the most notorious about getting out of open house duty. He looks around at his buddies for support. “It’s less of a can’t , and more of a don’t want to .”

Michael blows the whistle again and Trevor looks rattled. Everyone does. The more the whistle throws off the team, the more empowered I feel. “Who’s this dude, anyway?” Patrick asks. “Cool suit, though.”

“My new real estate coach. It’s a Tom Ferry thing. Now, Trevor, I’m not asking. I’m telling you I need your help,” I say. I try one of the power poses Michael showed me earlier, feet hip-distance apart, hands firmly on hips, chin lifted, spine straight.

“And I am telling you , I don’t want to,” he says, mimicking my pose from his seated position. He laughs and throws a couple of peace signs at Darren and Party Marty. Those two also laugh, but more out of discomfort than mirth. They both glance over their shoulders at Michael, trying to size him up. Michael blinks back at them, with serial-killer cool, before slowly, deliberately raising that whistle to his lips. This time, the blast is longer and sharper and louder. Then he gives me the briefest of nods, like he’s paved the way and now it’s time for me to get behind the wheel.

This is it.

This is my time to claim my power.

This is my chance to take a stand. You know what? I don’t need to leave this brokerage. Heck, I helped build this brokerage; my sales are one of the reasons it’s on the map and my management is why it remains there. Why would I walk away and try to start over? I need to make this place work for me instead of me working for it. I need to ask for what I deserve. I always knew I didn’t have to take it, but now I know know.

Things are about to change around here.

“Trevor, you’ll do it or you’re fired.”

Oh my gosh, did those words just come out of my mouth? Everyone is stunned, including me. Mostly me. The room goes dead silent, and the team is poised, ready to renounce their allegiance to whoever backs off first.

Spoiler alert: it’s not going to be me.

“Fine, whatever, I’ll be there,” he concedes. Victory! “But you don’t have to be such a—”

Before Michael can even react, I form my thumb and index finger into a V and whistle so powerfully there are probably cabs stopping out front right now.

Trevor is completely cowed. “Standard cheese plate okay?”