Chapter 72
Willa couldn’t help but be amused as she listened to the First Aid instructor run through the basics of resuscitation, not because breathing life back into a little old lady who had been hit by a cement mixer was inherently funny, but because he took himself and this fleeting moment of authority so very seriously.
“I wanna see your eyes on my eyes,” he said, as if he were in the White House Fallout Bunker, prepping a rattled and injured Designated Survivor for a post-apocalyptic presidency.
Willa couldn’t quite bring herself to follow the teacher’s directive, unsettled as she was by the fact that he never seemed to blink (“Flies don’t blink,” James told her once. “Same with spiders, moles, and octopus.”). The rest of the students — a 35-year-old nanny-in-training who had approximately 1,102 questions every five minutes; an acne-covered, 19-year-old lifeguard who wanted to work as a waterslide attendant so he could meet MILFs (the wink at Willa showed he meant business); and a 35-year-old Dungeons & Dragons cosplayer who seemed to have signed up just for the fun of breaking the teacher’s balls — were looking every which way.
“But how can we watch your mouth-to-mouth technique if we are staring into your eyes?” the D&D Dude challenged, nasally.
“This is not a joke,” the teacher said, crossing his arms over his Red Cross T-shirt. “It’s a matter of life and death. Literally.”
He motioned for the group to gather around the practice dummy.
“Fun fact,” he said, signaling to Willa that the fact he was about to share would, in fact, not be fun. “When Austrian physician Peter Safar and Norwegian toy maker Asmud Laerdal invented the first CPR mannequin in 1958, they made it a female because they thought men wouldn’t want to put their mouths on a male mouth, even if it was plastic. I guess they were cool with some girl-on-girl action, though.”
Willa shuddered.
“That won’t be on the test, ha, ha, ha,” the teacher said. “OK, let’s talk compressions.”
Willa’s certification in First Aid and CPR had lapsed three years ago, which FitFams either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared about. But in about a month she would start her job as studio manager at Ryde or Die. As a tiny, family-owned cycling studio with limited resources, the owners were, understandably, very concerned about safety and liability.
So Willa was spending her Saturday in a YMCA conference room that smelled like chlorine, bear-hugging a nanny from behind to dislodge an imaginary chunk of unchewed steak from her windpipe.
When the teacher decided they’d done enough pretend-bandaging and pointing while yelling, “you — call 911!” to earn a five-minute break, Willa headed outside and walked down the block to get away from the cosplayer and his clove cigarettes. She quickly scanned her texts. None from Pete.
When her flight from New York City had landed in Atlanta that Sunday night, Pete hadn’t answered her texts about picking her up, so she took MARTA home. Before she could even roll her bag through the front door, he was lighting into her — about her drinking, about succumbing to peer pressure, about how stupid she’d been for ending up in that alley (why she’d shared with him that particular detail, she wasn’t sure, but she certainly regretted it), and telling her it was time to grow the fuck up.
So of course this was the perfect and most productive and rational time for Willa to ferociously fire back what she knew about him and Beth. He looked stricken at first, and then: “You were never here. You cared more about FitFams than you cared about me. You didn’t care about being a mother.”
Willa felt so wounded by that last part, she pushed her way out of the house and broke into a run, not stopping until she was two miles away on the Freedom Parkway Trail. She sat down on the grass, head between her knees, red-faced and panting and ugly-crying into her hands.
When she got back home, Pete was asleep, or pretending to be. Since then their marriage had been like Wile E. Coyote after he’d stepped off a cliff — not plummeting into the gaping canyon below, not yet, but hovering in mid-air.
So yeah, no texts from Pete during the Red Cross training session. There was, however, a message from Jeremy.
“This Friday night — drinks?”
“Sure.”
She needed a fucking break. From Pete. And definitely from FitFams, where she was inundated with ridiculous busywork (alphabetize the coded parking validation tickets?) and emotional responses from the coaches and clients who, unfortunately, received the news of her departure from corporate instead of from Willa.
If corporate hadn’t beat her to the punch, Willa would’ve told the coaches and clients how much she cared about the place and the people and this special thing they’d all built together. She would’ve said the reason she was staying on for two weeks was because she appreciated the trust they’d placed in her, and how they’d allowed themselves to be vulnerable with her and in the studio.
Instead, Dee had presented it as though Willa was abandoning the FitFams community. She’d also posted several more incriminating photos from the New York City trip, just to top it all off.
Jamie had taken Willa’s news the hardest, worried about whether a rail-thin model was going to take over and decide Jamie was no longer on-brand — this despite the fact that Jamie herself was now 20 pounds lighter than when she had started at the studio. And she hadn’t had 20 pounds to lose.
Willa wished she knew what to say and how to help Jamie feel better about herself, about her body, about her value.
Thinking about this while back in the conference room after the five-minute break, Willa was struck by something the First Aid teacher was saying: “You have to put on your own oxygen mask before you put on someone else’s.”
Wise words, Red Cross guy, she thought. Wise words.
Even if we’re not flight attendants.