And I’m slowly working on mine. It’s been six weeks since the fire, and my life doesn’t look anything like it did that night.
For one, I got the hell out of Wyoming for a while: the first thing I did when the police dismissed me was take my own trip to Hawaii … the following day. I left the police station, took a cab to a hotel in Laramie, booked my trip, and then slept for almost fifteen hours straight. When I woke up, I had four missed calls from James, two from Melly, and one from Rusty. I sent Melly a text letting her know I would send a formal resignation soon, and then left for the airport.
Five days and four nights in Kauai, and after arriving and sleeping for ten solid hours, I had no idea what to do with myself. I only read half a book. I took a lot of naps. I went for long walks, and then came back to the resort and was generally bored out of my mind. I realized I have no idea how to unwind because I hadn’t had two consecutive days off in a decade.
You’d think with all that time on my hands, I’d spend some of it thinking about Melly and Rusty. You’d assume I’d take some time to process everything that happened with James. But it was like a brick wall went up, and every time I tried to bring forward the chaos of the previous week, some protective instinct would kick in and I’d literally fall asleep. On the chaise by the pool. In the chair on my balcony. Once even at the table in the hotel restaurant.
When I got home, I immediately wanted to turn around and head back to the airport. I didn’t know if I was stressed about returning to Jackson, stressed because the emotional untangling was still ahead of me, or stressed about facing the blank page of my professional future, but all of those thoughts made me want to vomit. I upped my therapy schedule to twice a week.
Debbie told me to make a list of all the things I want—to focus on making plans rather than beating myself up about the past—and to start finding a way to make each of them happen. Some would be easier than others, she said. Some would take more time. The goal, of course, is to just keep working on making my life what I want it to be.
So, a week later, with a “bonus” from my work on New Spaces, I bought a house.
It’s better than anything I ever pictured myself living in, let alone owning—a beautiful wooden three-bedroom house in Alpine, just outside Jackson. It has green shutters, a sharp A-frame structure, and a long gravel driveway off a small country road. My closest neighbor is a quarter mile away. Out back there’s a wide porch, and a creek big enough to swim in is only fifty feet down a steep grade. I love it more than I think I’ve ever loved anything in my life.
Debbie did her best to congratulate my impulsive purchase and not look like she was questioning every bit of advice she’d ever given.
Contentment comes in a trickle, though. It’s like a faucet dripping; slowly, my bucket is filling. I talk about Melly and Rusty a lot in therapy. I’ve started a tradition of Sunday dinners with Kurt, Peyton, and Annabeth. Sometimes Rand comes, if he can peel his backside from the bar and come drink beer at my house instead. Sometimes Kurt’s best friend, Mike, comes, too. I’m no James in the kitchen: I make spaghetti or tacos, and no one ever complains that we eat my shitty cooking on folding chairs in an empty dining room. The irony of my life at the moment is my complete inability to decorate my own home.
I’ve met with a financial planner who told me I have enough saved for private insurance premiums and treatment and can take a year to figure things out and still be fine. I don’t want to take a year to figure things out, but I don’t know what I want to do, either. I’m slowly building those personal connections I’ve been missing—and although I don’t want to date Mike like I think Kurt hopes I will, I can actually imagine a life where dating would be possible. Meaning, I have time to myself. Turns out I like to sleep in, stay up late, exercise midday, and sketch over my morning coffee. Turns out my hands do much better on this schedule, too.
But every time I start to think about a career, I get that drowning feeling of stress rising inside my chest, so I push it aside. My first instinct is to call James to talk it out, but for obvious reasons I haven’t. Instead, I call Kurt, or Peyton, or Annabeth, and we go for a hike, or they come over and we sit on the floor in my living room and do nothing but look out at the view of the thick, craggy trees and jagged mountains.
I might not be ready to think about work, but after three weeks of doubled-up sessions with Debbie, I sure think about James all the time. I think about his voice, and the way his eyes clocked nearly every one of my movements—with interest and, later, adoration. I think about his ambition and his brain and wonder what he’s doing now that Comb+Honey has effectively dissolved. I think about how easy he was to talk to, and how I wish I had that with someone else.
Sometimes I think maybe I’ll find it if I just keep looking, but part of me knows that what we had was a once-in-a-lifetime thing and I’m lucky to have had it at all. I think about his laugh, and his sounds, and yeah, I think a lot about his body, especially at night. But I also think about what happened at the very end, what sort of bullshit nontrust we had if he could listen to all of my truths but couldn’t tell me that he’d found a stairway to the top and was happy to leave me on the ground floor.
He left the police station at some point that day, I’m sure, but I don’t know if it was before or after me, because I didn’t see him after my interview. I didn’t see any of them. No one was charged with a crime. I assume the Tripps paid for the enormous damages the fire had caused, and the whole thing was swept under the rug.
By now, my brother correctly interprets my lost-in-space expression. “Is James coming tonight?”
I stall. “What?”
Kurt looks across the dining room. Though I have them over regularly, I’m attempting an actual cocktail party and have managed quite a spread: cheese plates, veggie trays, and assorted drinks. They’re arranged on the lone piece of furniture there—an enormous handmade table delivered by Rusty himself two days ago. He brought it to the door unannounced, with two burly examples of Wyoming’s finest behind him holding the mammoth piece. There was a novel’s worth of words to share—about the fire, how were they doing, was Melly really searching for the girl she used to be, were they staying married—but our interaction was characteristically simple:
“Hey, Russ.”
“Hey, kiddo.”
They set the table by the giant window in the dining room, the one that overlooks the downslope of a hill carpeted in green conifers. With a kiss to my forehead and a simple “Been thinkin’ ’bout you,” he left, and my heart seemed too big for my body.
The walnut gleams in the late-afternoon sun; the top is the most beautiful cross-section of wood I’ve ever seen, with vibrant striations in golds, reds, and deep browns. I was with him when he found it at a lumberyard in Casper, nearly five years ago. I remember standing there with him, staring at the slab of lumber, wondering if we were trying to create the same thing in our head—a piece worthy of it.
He’s had so many chances to transform it into something breathtaking for the entire world to see on television, but that’s Rusty, I guess: waiting for the perfect reason to use it. Never rushing and never caring about impressing anyone. Because I know he used to love to hide messages, I knew to look: on the underside, the words We love you, Carey-girl are inscribed in Rusty’s unmistakable carving style.