Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

"There's been an accident."

But she was supposed to bring the sour cream.

"Her husband was with her in the vehicle. He's unconscious. You were listed as her next of kin."

If she doesn't bring the sour cream, I can't make Crazy Chocolate Cake.

"Ma'am, I don't know what --"

Did I say that out loud? "If you know her next of kin, you ought to know her birthday, right?"

A pause. "Says here September 10th, 1991."

"And today is September 9th. So I am making her favorite cake, because it's her birthday, but I forgot the most important ingredient -- the sour cream, that's what makes it Crazy -- and she stopped at the store on her way over here to get it --"

"Ma'am, please -- if you could just come down here, I'm right here with her. The hospital on Queens Street, do you know it?"

Dinner is already cooked. I just need that sour cream to get the cake started too. Won't take long. Not quite the order of events I'd planned, but Kate has never minded my perennial lateness. She'll walk into my apartment and throw the tub of sour cream at my head and accept the glass of wine Carrie will offer her, and we'll eat our dinner while we wait the 45 minutes it will take to bake the cake. As is tradition, we'll sing a solemn rendition of Birthday Sex until Kate laughs -- she's always the first to laugh.

#

Carrie drives. Trevor comments on how dystopian it is that our best friends are in the hospital, we're all in shock, and yet we have to drive ourselves there because we'd never financially recover from taking an Uber twenty minutes away -- not in this economy. I ask him what he thinks is the alternative -- should we have called our own ambulance? Should a stork have come to carry us to the hospital wrapped in individual rucksacks, like babies in nursery books?

Trevor says, "I mean, I'm just saying."

Carrie says, "Isn't that the real dystopia?"

And she points to Rob's car, crushed, litter on the shoulder of the highway. It reminds me of an empty beer can, which reminds me of how bad Kate is at beer pong and how she always claims she'll get better after a few drinks but then she never does. Trevor wants to know what on Satan's unholy earth I'm smiling about.

#

We are at the hospital, and then we follow the nurse to the morgue, and then we are back in the car. They wouldn't let us see Rob. Not that I wanted to face him, not now, but it had seemed like the right thing to ask.

I clutch the reusable grocery bag and its precious contents. A policeman who looked about nineteen had offered it, questioningly. He probably figured I was poor, a starving artist. I was, but it didn't matter. He couldn't have understood my longing for that shred of her. I stare out the window at the falling snow, the first of the year, but I can't see anything except Kate's face floating above her white-draped body. Pale, like when she'd had mono our senior year. Gray, so much worse than that.

#

It's 8 a.m. and my phone is ringing. Salt crusts my eyes, my cheeks, down into my ears. I rub at it and squint at my phone. It's Trevor. I let the call go to voicemail.

For breakfast I eat a slice of the Crazy Chocolate Cake. I baked it last night, after convincing Trevor and Carrie that I could be trusted to be left alone. It seemed an injustice not to use Kate's sour cream, or not to open the bottle of red wine she'd also procured for us. Finishing said bottle may not have been strictly necessary, however, my pounding head informs me. The cake tastes like dust in my mouth.

My phone rings again. Now it's Carrie. "Morning. Do you want cake," I say by way of greeting.

"You still baked that cake for her? That's dark, Liv."

 Yes, I did. I offered it up to her, held it over my head as I bowed before the oven in my galley kitchen like the cake was a sacrifice to an ancient and vengeful god. An atonement for my sins. But I lie. "It wasn't for her, it's for us. Come get some."

#

I blocked Rob's number over two weeks ago, after we said that it could never happen again. A masochistic part of my brain drives me to check my voicemail inbox for his calls anyway, even though the hospital will call me when he wakes up. If he does.

But Rob beats the nurses to the punch. His voicemail simply says, "Unblock me." I do, but I don't call back.

His text appears on a blank page. Our message history has been deleted, restored, and deleted again too many times to count. I need you, Liv.

You can't be serious rn, I reply.

Oh, but he is, he says. My stomach turns, and Kate's pale gray face floats to the surface of my mind.

Delete my number.

That would be strange, he says.

I read between the lines, and he's not wrong. She was my best friend and he is her husband. We should have each other's numbers.

We'll come check in on you. I know he'll catch my deliberate use of the plural form. I call Trevor, and then I call Carrie.

#

At the hospital, we crowd into Rob's room. Trevor shoves into the bed beside him. Carrie's tearful hiccups interrupt our stilted conversation. I strategically position myself at an angle to the window so I can pretend to participate while I imagine the snowflakes outside soothing the burn in my throat, smothering the words surging from my chest.

When the quiet between delicate questions becomes too much to bear, I make a suggestion. We agree to take turns here, so that Rob won't be alone. I have first shift.

I instantly regret volunteering. Rob's cold eyes bore holes in my head -- I can feel them tearing into my body. "I missed you."

"God --" He might as well have sucker punched me. "Don't say that, Rob."

"I'm glad you're here."

"But Kate's not. What the hell is wrong with you?" I keep my voice low, but against my will, it trembles.

"It was an accident. I'm lucky to be alive. I'm practicing gratitude," he says, but it's all too cool, too light.

"Listen, I -- I'm glad you're alive, too, but you can't talk to me like --"

"Like what?" He sits up in his bed, and despite the gown and the hospital sheets and the needles in his body, for a moment, I don't know what he will do. "Like this isn't fate?"

"Like there's not an active police investigation into your wife's -- my best friend's -- death."

A snort. "This isn't Law & Order, Liv. It was an accident. There's nothing to investigate. It'll be over soon."

Something about the sharpness in his tone makes my words taste dishonest when I say, "Yes. Right."

"And I'm alive. You can't tell me that doesn't mean something." The light in his eyes is -- I've never seen this zeal in him.

"Rob, I don't -- I can't --"

"It'll be over soon," he repeats. He thinks I'm only worried about the police. He talks of fate, but he didn't have to touch Kate's cold, gray skin. Her sealed eyelids will not haunt every memory she ever touched.

"And then?" I dare to ask. Backed against the window, the icy glass sends a chill down my spine.

"And then it's you and me. Forever, baby."