The Nanny

Days after talking to Iris, I find myself feeling strangely less mopey. I’m still mostly miserable and a lot angry at myself, but I don’t feel like the sky is falling. Most of the time. I think it’s because I’ve chosen to let myself daydream that talking to Iris will lead to something good for the little family I left behind. That somewhere in all the hurt they will find their happily ever after. That I won’t be a burden for anyone. Not ever again.

I’m still on Wanda’s couch, but I’m not on my way to achieving complete homeostasis, at least. I’ve showered (multiple times, thank you), and I’ve brushed my hair. I’ve even put away my depression sweats and opted for a slightly less sad outfit of leggings and an oversized T-shirt, which is clean, I might add. That’s a definite plus.

I’ve spent most of the day working on assignments that I’ve fallen into the habit of putting off until the last second to allow for more crying time, and by the time that I’ve gotten fully caught up with my lessons—the first time in weeks that I’ve done so earlier than the night before my labs—I’m feeling almost like myself again. Almost.

I can hear Wanda stepping down the hall from her bedroom as I close my laptop, pulling her robe closed as she peers at me over her glasses. “Look at you,” she says, sounding impressed. “There was an actual woman living under all that funk.”

I roll my eyes. “Again, so happy to have you in my corner.”

“I’m just pulling your leg. I’m happy you look more like yourself. I was starting to consider calling an exorcist or something.”

“Yes, we are all very amused by your haunting jokes.”

“Dialed that old Ghostbusters line at one point,” she deadpans. “Got some poor schmuck in Kentucky.”

“Isn’t it time for you to get ready for bingo?”

“I’ve got time.” She moves over to her chair to plop down into it, studying me over the tops of her glasses. “You do look much better. You think that mean broad heard anything you said?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. I want to think she did though. It makes me feel better to think that.”

“You’d probably feel even better if you go check yourself.”

“I’m not having this discussion again.”

“We haven’t actually had it to begin with. You’re always skulking off to the bathroom or burying yourself in my couch like a real squatter.”

“Wow. A couple months ago you were begging me to stay here.”

“Yeah, well. That was before you had a whole-ass family out there wishing you’d come back.”

There’s a squeezing sensation in my chest. “They don’t. Trust me.”

“You think they’d write you off after a few weeks?”

“I told him I didn’t have time for them. I told him I didn’t sign up for any of that.”

“Yeah, well. We all do dumb things sometime when we love people.”

“Yeah,” I laugh. “We do.”

“I don’t want you to end up with any regrets.”

“Maybe I’ll be like you,” I chuckle. “New boyfriend every week. Sounds like a dream to me.”

“It’s not,” Wanda says flatly. “You think that sounds like a dream to you?”

I rear back. “What?”

“You think I like living in this tiny apartment all by myself?”

“I . . .” I feel at a loss for words. “I don’t understand.”

“Cassie,” Wanda laughs. “You are too smart to be this dumb. Of course I’m not living the dream.” She clucks her tongue. “The dream is coming home to someone who loves you every day.”

“But, if that’s how you feel, then why do you—”

“Because I had my chance at that once, and I ruined it. Just like you’re trying to do.”

I have no idea what to say. In all the years I’ve known Wanda, she’s never given me any indication that she had any qualms about her life. Sure, it’s a little out of the box that she could get to this age without having ever settled down, but I assumed that was the life she chose. It had never occurred to me that she might want anything different.

“Why is this the first time I’m hearing about this?”

Wanda shrugs. “You’ve never needed to hear it until now.” She crosses one leg over the other as she sighs deeply, looking down at her foot that’s tapping the air as she considers. “I wasn’t much older than you were, when I met Henry.”

“Henry?”

Wanda smiles, remembering. “Your typical surfer beach bum living in La Jolla in the seventies. Blond hair, blue eyes . . . way too pretty for his own good. And of course, since I was such a looker, he obviously couldn’t stop thinking about me after we met.”

“Naturally,” I say with a grin.

“I thought I was hot shit in those days. I’m telling you, Cassie, if booby cams were a thing back then, I’d have made a killing.”

“I have no doubt.”

“So there I was, this stacked little brunette who thought her shit didn’t stink, and along comes Henry. I tell you, Cassie. He knocked me right on my ass. He bought me an ice cream on the boardwalk that first day, and I can’t even remember what we talked about, but I was just”—she claps her hands in a shooting-off motion—“gone. Right from the start.”

“What happened?”

“We were together every day that summer. We would lie on the beach, we would make out in his car, we’d do . . . other things.” I make a face, and Wanda snorts at me. “Oh, shut up. You and I both know neither of us are strangers to a penis.”

Words I would never like to hear again, thank you very much.

“Anyway,” Wanda goes on. “Of course I loved Henry, and of course he was obsessed with me—”

“Obviously,” I tease.

“Damn right,” she huffs. “But . . .” She sighs, shaking her head. “I was foolish. Twenty-seven years old, and I still didn’t know anything about anything. I was always looking for the next party, the next big thing, and Henry, surprisingly enough, well . . . he wanted more.”

I notice the slight furrow in her brow now, the sad quality of her eyes that tells me this isn’t a wound that’s ever healed for her, whatever it may be.

“He asked me to marry him,” she says in a faraway voice. “At the end of that summer. Got down on one knee and everything. He had . . .” Wanda smiles, but again, there’s a sadness to it. “He even had this ring. It was tiny and pitiful, but I know he had to have saved all summer to buy it.” She closes her eyes, and I can tell she’s remembering this moment like it was yesterday. Like she’s never stopped thinking about it. “He’d gotten this job with a construction company in San Francisco, and he wanted me to come with him. Wanted to start our lives together all the way across the state.”

I know what happened, of course I do, since Wanda is here and Henry isn’t, but the way she goes quiet then tells me that she has trouble talking about it even now after all this time, and I find myself stating the obvious, anyway.

“You said no,” I say quietly.

She nods. “I said no.”

“Why?”

“Why,” Wanda laughs dryly, turning her eyes up at the ceiling and shaking her head. “I thought I needed the party. That I wasn’t ready to settle down and play the housewife. I thought that somehow this life Henry was offering would hold me back.” Wanda breathes in deep just to blow it out, that same sad smile at her mouth. “So he left. Packed his bags and took that job. He left me behind just like I forced him to.”

“Wanda, I—”

“Don’t.” She waves me off. “It was damn near half a century ago. I made my bed.”

“But I had no idea.”

“Because you didn’t need to then, but you do now. Do you know why?”

I shake my head. “Why?”

“Because,” she says. “Eight months after Henry left, I found myself miserable. I missed him so terribly that I could barely get out of bed in the morning. It took me eight whole months to realize that I had made the worst mistake of my life, and that I didn’t want to keep chasing the parties. I wanted Henry.”

“So what happened?”

“Tracked him down.” She nods. “Yes, I did. I flew all the way to San Francisco with this grand plan to win him back. I was determined to do whatever it took. Grovel, beg . . . anything.”

“But?”

The pain in Wanda’s expression is palpable, and it’s astounding that it could still be so fresh for her, even after all this time.

“But he’d moved on,” she tells me softly. “He’d married this pretty little thing who was a receptionist at the place he worked. I saw them on one of the job sites I’d run off to trying to find him. She was handing him a sack lunch in a white dress, and they looked . . . they looked so happy. I couldn’t even bring myself to confront him. I turned around and went right home.” She looks me in the eyes then, pointedly, like this is the most important part that she wants me to grasp. “And I never felt anything close to what I felt for Henry. Not for the rest of my life.”

“Wanda, I’m—I’m so sorry. I always thought you loved your life.”

She blows out a breath. “I make do. I have fun, I do. And I have you now, and that’s been enough for me. But I see you sitting there, making the same mistakes, and I can’t sit by and watch my life play out all over again with you. Trust me, Cassie. You don’t want to see Aiden someday with his pretty blonde in a white dress. You don’t forget pain like that. You don’t ever forget loving someone that could have been yours if you hadn’t pushed them away.”

I look down in my lap, trying to think of a response. I feel horrible for having spent so much time with Wanda without having any idea about this part of her past; why hadn’t she ever told me about this before now? Maybe if I’d known this story, maybe I’d have been less likely to . . .

No.

I can’t sit here and try to blame someone else for my choices. I’m the one who said those things to Aiden, and I’m the one who made the decision for us both that he was better off without me. I could have talked to him, and we could have tried to find a solution together, but I robbed him of that option when I lied to him and told him I didn’t want him. I have no one to blame but myself for the hell I’ve been through these last few weeks. Is this what the rest of my life will look like? Will I always regret what could have been between us?

I already know the answer to that. I know it because even before I ever knew Aiden’s name, before I knew what he looked like or where he came from or about his smiles and his kisses and everything else—I missed him. I missed him for a year when I knew nothing. I know that I will miss him forever now that I know so much.

“God,” I mutter, hanging my head. “I fucked up.”

“Mm-hmm,” Wanda agrees. “But you still have time to fix it. You can go and apologize. Tell that man you love him and that you’re a complete idiot.”

“Just like that, huh,” I chuckle, peeking up at her.

Wanda bobs her head. “Easy peasy.” She looks at the wall clock, checking the time before she rises from her chair. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go get ready.”

“Bingo?”

“Nope,” she tells me. “I’m going on a date.”

My mouth falls open. “What?”

“That’s right,” she says with her head held high. “A bona fide date.”

“With who?”

“Fred Wythers.”

“What? I thought you dumped him.”

“Yeah, well. That’s because he wanted to see me more. I wasn’t looking for anything like that then.”

I still feel flabbergasted by this new revelation. “And you are now?”

“A heart attack really puts things into perspective, girl. I could be dead tomorrow.” She shrugs. “Maybe I decided I might not want to kick the bucket all alone.”

“That’s . . .” I’m still trying to wrap my head around everything I’ve learned in the last twenty minutes. “That’s great, Wanda.”

“We’ll see,” she humphs. “I’ll get a free meal out of it, at least.”

I can’t help it, I grin at this very classic Wanda outlook. “Right.”

“Now, I want you to sit there on that couch—”

“No problems there,” I snort.

“—and you think about what I’ve said. Maybe you’ll figure out that you don’t want to be like me, after all.” She winks at me then. “Even if I am cool as hell.”

I laugh as she heads back down the hall to get ready for her date—that’s going to take me some time to get used to—leaving me right where she found me but with a hell of a lot more to think about.

Wanda left an hour ago, and while it was strange to see her in one of her nicer pantsuits and being picked up at her front door like she was running off to prom, I like how cute she was, trying not to seem excited. Fred had given me a friendly hello before they left, waving with one hand and holding a bouquet in the other, and I hadn’t missed the blush on Wanda’s cheeks when he’d handed over the flowers. It’s definitely new, but it looks good on her, I think.

Although, the “don’t wait up” she’d tossed over her shoulder made me feel like a loser. Seventy-two, and she still has more game than me.

I haven’t done much since Wanda left, not that anyone’s surprised, but I have been doing a lot of thinking. About Wanda’s story, about my own predicament . . . but mostly about Aiden and Sophie. I’ve gone over every possible scenario that I can think of in regard to how I might apologize, or if I even should, and every spiral only brings me right back to the same guilt and the crushing fear that nothing I could ever say to them will make any difference. How could either of them forgive me after the way I left? Like they didn’t even matter.

I know at some point I will need to drag myself off this couch and make myself something to eat if I am going to keep up the facade that I am slowly getting better, but my brain is mush after all the thinking I’ve been doing, and I won’t pretend that turning off the lights and going to bed early at—I glance at the clock and groan—seven o’clock sounds like a much more appealing option.

I’m still going back and forth between my riveting options when there’s a knock at the door, and I frown at the other side of it as I wonder who might be here. There’s no way that Wanda would be back this early, and as far as I know I’m her only real friend, so who else could it be? With my luck, it’ll be the old man from 2B again with my package he “accidentally opened after they delivered it to him by mistake.” Right. He was just disappointed there wasn’t anything good in there. I huff as I’m forced to leave the sad velvet throne I’ve made a home on, trudging over to Wanda’s front door and looking through the peephole, but the hall looks empty. I frown as I look again, confirming that no, there isn’t anyone out there. Are we still ding-dong ditching in 2023?

I unlock the chain before fumbling with the lock in annoyance, finally managing to get everything undone so I can wrench open the door in the hopes that I can catch the little bastard who dares to give me shit while I’m still half wallowing. I find immediately that I hadn’t been wrong, exactly, since I couldn’t see anyone out of the peephole, but I hadn’t been right either.

Because there is someone on the other side of the door, someone who is too short to spot from the peephole and who has no business being here, especially by themselves. I gape at chestnut hair and freckles and a tiny face that makes my heart hurt, stunned for a moment as I try to make sense of her being here. I turn my head down the hall to confirm that yes, she actually is alone, squashing the slight disappointment and focusing on the little girl at the door who makes me feel both elated and incredibly guilty.

“Sophie?”

—◊—

I think I feel more foolish than anything else.

I’m not a stupid girl. I don’t do things like this.

But half falling for someone whose name I don’t know and whose face I’ve never seen . . . well. It doesn’t do anything to help my case.

I stare at the settings page in the same way I’ve done so a dozen times in the last few weeks, wondering if I am a stupid girl. Would I be so hurt over a relative stranger that I was considering deleting my entire account otherwise?

But I miss him.

And it feels like I can’t do this anymore, not without thinking of him every time I log on.

I take a deep breath as I hit the delete button.

Are you sure you want to delete your account?

I lied.

I definitely feel more hurt than foolish.

—◊—