The Zero

“Excuse me,” said the man. Remy turned and looked down at him, leaning on the railing in the kitchen. “Listen, we’re kind of… we’re worried about losing this place. If she’s okay, do you think you could tell her that we want to move on it before someone else gets it?”

“Okay,” Remy said.

He walked up the stairs and found her in the bathroom, sitting in the dark against the counter, still holding her cell phone. “April?” Remy turned on the light. He stared at the phone in her hand, wondering if Nicole had called her and said something. His stomach felt tight, as if it were folding up on itself.

“You think, at first,” she said, distantly, “that it’s a kind of penance you’re being forced to pay. You think that after you’ve suffered long enough, that the people you’ve lost can just… come back.” April’s eyes drifted down. “But they don’t. They never come back. That’s the trick. They die all over again for you, every few months.”

Remy removed his coat and tried to put it over her shoulders but she held up her hand.

“I dream about them… sometimes. I keep expecting them to say something profound or comforting. But they’re too busy to talk. They’re ru

She looked up and met his eyes. “There’s something I probably should have told you. The reason I don’t like to talk about Derek. Do you remember the night we met at the bar and I told you all about him?”

Remy nodded, even though he didn’t.

“I said that when he died, I hadn’t spoken to him in four months…” she trailed off. “Well… that wasn’t entirely true. I don’t know why I lied about it… I guess I wanted you – or maybe me – to believe that I totally was over him.”

April rubbed her mouth and stared at a fixed point above Remy’s head. “Right at the end of summer, he called… he said he missed me. He wanted to get back together. So we talked about it… all through August and the first week of September. And then, one night…” She trailed off.

“You slept together,” Remy said.

She nodded.

“You were still married,” Remy, said and he shrugged as if it were no big deal, which it shouldn’t have been, and yet he could feel a tug in his chest, like he was snagged on a fishing line. He thought of Nicole again and stared at the floor.

“A couple of nights later he spent the night again.” She cleared her throat. “And it was… nice. The next morning… The next morning was that morning…”

She looked at him pleadingly, hoping he wouldn’t need any more information, and he didn’t. It seemed to him sometimes that that was the last morning; every day now started at noon.

“He left for work. I was lying in bed, thinking about him, and about us getting back together, and I saw that he’d left his cell phone on the bedstand. The light was blinking. There was a message. I wasn’t going to listen, but I was curious about whether he’d changed the password on his phone. Of course… he didn’t, the big idiot.” She smiled. “So I listened.”

Remy remembered the meeting with the lawyer. “It was the other woman,” he said. “The one from his office?”

“Yes.” April nodded.

Outside the room, Remy could hear someone climbing the stairs. Then he heard the Colorado guy’s voice: “Excuse me?”

“Just a second,” Remy said to April. He went out into the hallway and saw the man’s head, just peaking at the midpoint of the stairs.

“Sorry,” the guy said, “but my wife is really freaked that we’re going to lose this place. Do you think you could tell your girlfriend that we’re going to call someone else from her office about it?”

“Sure,” Remy said. “Go ahead.”

When he returned to the bathroom, April was staring out the window. After a moment, the cell phone slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor. April stared at it as if she’d never seen one before.

She took a deep breath. “The lawyer called,” she said quietly. “While I was showing this place. He got my settlement. Six hundred twenty thousand.” Her body seemed to hang from her spine like a robe on a hook. “I guess that’s what you get for a slightly used, cheating husband these days. Six-twenty. I guess that’s fair.” She looked down. “I should’ve asked, just for comparison, what a sister was worth.” But the joke was flat, and she covered her mouth with her fist and spit a kind of self-loathing laughter.

He began to move toward her, but bent and picked up her phone instead.

“I’m sorry, Brian,” she said. “But the worst part has always been how much I miss him. I don’t want to… but I do.”

“I know,” Remy said, and he handed her the-

BAR IN an Upper West Side restaurant, where he sat alone, staring through a full glass of whiskey, caramel colored and distorting everything in the room. Behind him, couples sat in red-tucked booths beneath beaded floor lamps; it was a jointy and comfortable place and Remy felt at ease here. He looked out the window. It was dark outside, that surprising early winter darkness that descended like a drawn blind. He looked back at the small glass of amber liquid on the bar in front of him, lifted it, hesitated, then brought it to his lips and downed it. So warm. He wondered if April was meeting him tonight. He pulled out his phone and thought about calling her and realized that he couldn’t come up with her number.

“That’s a fane whiskey, boyo.” The bartender spoke with an affected Irish accent, but Remy didn’t mind because it was, indeed, a fane whiskey. “D’ya know what you want to ate, than?”

Remy put his phone away and picked up the menu. Sure enough, there it was. He could take comfort in that, at least. “I’ll have the wasabi duck marinated in red wine.”

“Have way goat that?” The bartender took the menu and opened it. “Aye, thar ’tis. Moost be new, eh?” The bartender took the menu and snapped it against his leg. He winked, and slid another whiskey in front of Remy, who drained it.

“Excuse me. Mr. Remy?” There was a man at his shoulder, wearing the white shirt of a chef, buttoned at his shoulder.

“Yes?” He looked up, wondering for a moment how the chef knew his name.

“Brian Remy?”

“Yes. That’s me.”

“I have been instructed to tell you-” the man looked around the restaurant before bowing even closer. “This is reather embarrassing.” He stared hard into Remy’s eyes: “There is no wasabi marinated duck.” When Remy didn’t answer, he said, “Do you understand?”

“I think so,” Remy said, pulling away from him. “Can I get something else?”

“You do understand what I’m saying?” the chef asked.

“There’s no duck.”

“Actually-” The man shuffled his feet nervously. “It’s begi

“O-o-okay,” Remy said. “Can I get… a steak, maybe?”

“Of course,” the man said, relieved. “Is that the course you’d like us to take?”

“I… I guess so. Yeah.”

“Excellent,” the chef said. “What kind?”

“I don’t know,” Remy said. “A ribeye?”

The man’s eyebrows shot up. “A ribeye!”

“Yeah… I think so.”

“I’ll tell them,” the chef said. He slipped Remy a matchbook and spun to walk away. Remy looked at the matchbook. He opened it. Written on the lip of the matchbook was one word: WALK.

Remy reached in his pocket, found the bottle of pills from his psychiatrist, and fumbled with the lid. Finally he got two out and swallowed them with a long drink of lemon water as he read the matchbook again.

“How did you want that?” The man was at his shoulder again.

Remy jumped. “What?”

“The ribeye, sir? How do you want it?”

“I don’t know.” Remy looked around for help. “Medium…” he said, but when the waiter looked concerned, he added, “…rare? Medium rare?”