I’d invited Chris to dinner on a whim, one I didn’t know until now whether I’d regret. We were texting last weekend, me with the TV on, some innocuous HGTV show to stave off my boredom. My loneliness, too. He made a publishing industry joke, and . . . I don’t know. When a little light flickered into my mood, it was enough. Nathan will think I did it to hurt him. I don’t think I did.
He grins, pleased by my compliment. “Can I just say how thrilled I am we’re finally doing this?” he asks.
I hope my eyes shine back at him. Seeing him has steadied me some. I’ve stopped focusing on the interview. With the candle glowing in the middle of the table, I feel something new, something I could get used to. It’s not the empty calm of every day in the months since I returned from Florida without Nathan. It’s different. This feels firm under my feet instead of like floating in endless fog.
“Me, too,” I reply. I think I mean it. This is going to be better, I tell myself.
It has to be.
58
Nathan
• PRESENT DAY •
With our fight echoing in my ears, I don’t follow Katrina off the porch. I don’t even watch her stalk off into the sunset, doing what she does. Pushing us apart for flimsy, worthless reasons and hiding from the damage. Instead, I head directly up the stairs, hitting each step heavily. Whether I’m running from or chasing my feelings, I don’t know.
I ignore the discomfort of being in this house without her. It’s our space but not mine. Even though I’ve been living here for two months—waking up in the bed down the hall, brushing my teeth over the sink— right now, I feel like I’m intruding. The windows feel watchful, like they’re looking in instead of me looking out.
While the sunset is starting to shock the sky orange, I reach my room. It’s instinct to drop into my chair and open my laptop. I’m ready to write everything raging in me, to put this heartache into words. To process and move through these feelings using this psychological bloodletting onto the empty white page. I open the document with ritual focus. Preparing myself, I fix my eyes on the unwritten first line.
I can’t put my fingers on the keys.
I just can’t do it. Resistance I’m unfamiliar with holds me in place, keeps me from writing. This hurt is mine and Katrina’s. It belongs only to us. No one else. For once, I want to live the pain instead of dressing it in fictional clothing. It might heal cleaner. It might make me better.
Resigned, I close my computer and sit alone with the wound in my heart.
59
Katrina
Under the red sunset, I step out of my car. The beach opens in front of me. It’s the same one where Nathan and I got rained on four years ago, where I realized how much I wanted him to kiss me.
Pulling off my shoes, I walk onto the soft sand. It pools over my toes welcomingly, like it remembers me. The wind plays weakly with my hair. I drop down, sitting with my knees bent, hating how pleasant the evening is. There’s no sign of storms. The few clouds in the sky have caught the violent colors of the sunset, gashes of pink on an orange backdrop. It’s perfect.
I’m not the only one here. There’s a woman doing yoga in the corner of my view, a couple walking hand in hand close to the water, families packing up umbrellas and beach bags. In moments like this, it’s so hard to reckon with everyone else’s life just continuing on, independent of mine, of how I feel I’ve pushed myself once more right to this familiar crossroads.
I find I’m crying, tears streaming down my face. I could just leave, I realize. Not to return to my home in Los Angeles with Chris, but I don’t have to be here. I don’t have to finish this book. The only reason I’m in Florida, writing with Nathan, was to save my relationship, which is gone now. If I want out, there’s finally nothing forcing me to stay.
Wiping my eyes, I feel without flinching the weight of what I’m considering. It’s not every day you reevaluate everything. The breeze blows over the sand, shifting the sea of footprints into new shapes. For years, I chased dreams of literary success, then realized how fragile they were once I’d caught them. I put my dreams elsewhere, into a relationship that would become a marriage that would become a life. Now, I’m not chasing anything. I sit, letting the emptiness envelop me.
Nathan’s words fill it. You’re afraid of your own happiness. He said it like an insult. He doesn’t understand how not ridiculous my fear is. Happiness is terrifying. I’d hurt much less in the long run if I pushed Nathan out of my life, deleted our book, found something safer to chase. I imagine my modest, frictionless existence. With the earnings from Only Once, I could move to the city of my choosing. I could go to grad school, spend my time reading, surround myself with people who aren’t writers.
I press my forehead to my knees. I’m really considering this. It’s the second time I’ve walked right up to the promise of what our career could be, what we could be. It feels like it’s going to be the second time I don’t take the final step.
But it has to be this way. For me, it does. I just need to sort out how I’ll keep from coming back to these frightening heights again and again.
I’ll just change, I promise myself. I’ll learn how to more carefully keep what I want most out of the corners of my vision.
It needs to start now. Quietly, I pack up my unfurling feelings for Nathan.
I focus on the sounds of the wind and people splashing in the water. The minutes pass. Despite the calm I feel, I’m not convinced it will last. Like I’m not out of the woods, only closing my eyes to them.
Then, in my head I hear—first words, then sentences.
I don’t know that happiness is the goal, really. Not always. It’s a woman’s voice. The reply is in a man’s. If we’re not doing this to be happier, then why, Evelyn?
To find out who we are again, Evelyn says.
I laugh to myself. It’s dialogue. I’m writing dialogue.
The realization is so funny to me that my laughter shakes my whole body. My tears turn sweet.
The calm dissipates. What replaces it is surer, stronger. It’s something innermost finding its way forward, uninvited. Even with nothing left, I’m writing. Writing remains. Maybe it’s my own answer. Maybe it’s simply me. I’m doing it not because it promises an unfraught future, because it’s free of pain or peril—I’m doing it because it demands to be done.
For the first time, I contemplate the possibility of reconciling myself with those consequences. Instead of imagining paths of retreat, I try to put my writer’s mind to work imagining paths forward.
I understand, genuinely, that I can’t avoid crashing after feeling joy. It’s just the way I’m made, I know. Depression and anxiety will be there. I can’t simply choose to live without them—like I can’t simply choose to live without writing.