He wanders away and I hear his body hit the bed like a big old tree. He sleeps through the evening.
I watch the sunrise by myself the next day while he rests in a heap on the bed. The sun is coming later and later, and though Tennessee and Louisiana are close neighbors, it’s colder here in autumn than it ever is there. I think about Jack and about the heaviness. I wonder where it came from and how long it will be staying, if it’s been here all along and I’ve been too shut inside myself to notice him buckling under the baggage I gave him. I hear him get up to take a ten-minute morning piss and all I can think about is the happiness that I owe him.
There is so much to say, but over the next two days, we become experts in silence. I keep trying to show him that I’m better, that I’m fun and easy and free. I hardly mention my pain, though it rips through my body. I prove myself by staying up late, and throwing my head back in laughter. I try to prove myself with sex, but even that is just another way to avoid talking about it all.
We mash our bodies together, kissing with stiffened jaws and touching with cold hands. All the things we don’t say float over the bed above us like skywriting.
I miss you.
I’m angry.
I’m sorry.
Do you still love me?
Are you okay?
Why didn’t you call?
The night before he leaves again, we pick up food from the taco shop we love and eat it on our covered back porch. There is just enough coolness in the air for us to want to sit close but we don’t. Jack is slumped in a chair that hangs from the ceiling, crumbling bits of tortilla into his chicken soup and swaying back and forth. I sit facing him on a brown ottoman with not enough padding.
I look out at the fence the Amish built, their monument to my daddy. The lumber is strong and tall like he was and it still smells a little bit like the Kentucky forest it came from. He loved Jack. He delighted in him the same way he did in me, like a father is supposed to. I used to dream of him bouncing our babies on his knee, showing them how to stick watermelon seeds into the soil, whispering little secrets to them that Jack and I would never get to know. Shame and panic slink in next to me. I wonder what my daddy would think of us now.
The sun sets slowly, inch by inch by inch. Today is a sunset day for me, so I give it my full attention while Jack rocks himself. Violets and ambers and hot, hot reds wrap themselves a full 360 degrees around us and the music of rush-hour traffic plays.
I gasp at the sky.
“Look! Look up! It’s beautiful!” I lean forward and touch Jack’s arm but he doesn’t look.
The sun gets so wide that it stretches bigger than the skyline. I point and I stand and I crane my neck so high that I have to hold the hat on my head. He still doesn’t look.
I feel like I’m running out of time.
Show him something beautiful. Show him something beautiful. Show him something beautiful, I beg.
I sit back down on the ottoman and take a nervous too-big bite of corn on the cob covered in cheese. My chest is so tight the kernels barely make their way down. There are so many words caught in my throat, I can hardly swallow.
“Jack…” I begin hesitantly.
He brings a still-steaming spoonful of soup to his lips and immediately spits it back into its little foam cup.
“Fuck!” he sputters.
“Fuck!” he says again.
His face turns red and he sucks down half a beer.
“Fuck! Why is that so fucking hot?!”
We are not strangers to the fuck word; we have used it liberally, playfully, in sickness and in health. But this fuck is a different fuck. It is the satisfying, visceral fuck of a person who is truly angry. He abandons his soup on a table and pushes himself all the way back in his pod of a chair, and I know that this particular fuck has nothing to do with hot broth and everything to do with eight long years of pouring love into someone who doesn’t feel it. This fuck is for me.
I look out at the fence again, at the pumpkin-colored sky, and then at the man who has tried and tried and might finally be done trying. I decide to be brave, and I ask him to try once more.
I stand up in front of him, because speeches are better that way, and I tell him that I’m ready. I’m ready for all of it, the vacations and the babies and a new house and all the big promises we made to each other. His eyes get wide and white.
I’m not graceful when I speak. I’m manic and excited and terrified and I go on way too long about holistic pain management and couples counseling and what I think God is and all the different ways we can start again.
“I can do it, I can live with my pain. I can carry it now, you don’t have to carry it for me anymore. We can be happy. Jack, I’m so sorry. Everything is going to be different.”
I hurt as I say it, badly, but I say it anyway.
He picks up his soup again and looks into it like he’s reading tea leaves. Poking little pieces of cilantro and digging for shredded chicken. His face is tired. He lets me touch it, though I can tell he doesn’t want me to. It feels different, older and covered with the rind of what has become a hard, hard life.
I sit down again on the ottoman, nerves tangled and burning. I brace myself for the impact of the reply, his truth telling. I ready myself to hear all the different ways I have ruined him.
But it’s all too much.
He says nothing and absolutely everything at the same time.
I’m ready to meet his real, true, most damaged self, but he’s not ready to introduce me yet. I understand.
Not yet, not now, be patient, his face says. So I am. It’s my turn to try.
“That sounds great, babe.” He sighs. “We’ll set it up when the tour is done.”
And he goes back to his soup.
* * *
I drive Jack to the airport the next day. We hug and kiss and say “I love you.” We don’t talk about my overly enthusiastic monologue on the porch with its big plans and bold proclamations. We’re just nice to each other because we don’t know how to be any other way. But I think, I hope, that we can learn to be more.
I go back to Louisiana after he goes. Lile and Libby don’t want me to be alone yet. The morning I leave, it’s cold and rainy and our pretty yellow house looks extra yellow against the charcoal of the Nashville sky.
“You’re beautiful,” I tell it. I make myself a promise: every time I see something beautiful, I will speak it, declare it to myself and to the rest of the world.
The car rumbles underneath me, shaking out its chilly insides. There’s a strangeness, a newness sitting with me behind the wheel. For the past seven years, I’ve taken this trip laid out in the back with the seat down, but today, tomorrow, and every other day from now on, the hundreds of miles between home and there are mine to conquer. The blinker clicks, the music begins, and it’s time to get back to the business of healing.
That night, I settle back into Little Lile’s room and stay there for another two weeks. I read and do research on the internet about chronic pain and holistic healing, I worry about my marriage constantly. One night, I come across a blog by a woman who lost both her parents, and she quotes somebody I’ve never heard of before named Kahlil Gibran, who I imagine is probably dead.
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
I read it twelve times in a row and make myself a promise out loud in front of no one but Mrs. God: “This is going to be my story.”