* * *
Nashville is a gray slab covered in wet leaves and pumpkin guts when Jack finally comes home. I hope that through the bad weather and empty, Sleepy Hollow streets, he’ll be able to find something beautiful here, that maybe I could be the something beautiful. I’ve been weaning myself off the drugs alone for more than three months now and I know I’m doing a good job. The anxiety is real, the new-old pain is real, but I survive them. I don’t let them steer me anymore. I take control of our life too. I pay bills, buy fresh produce, and get the oil changed in the cars, making painstaking preparations for the unveiling of me.
I clean the house from top to bottom the day he gets in. It’s a strange museum tour, traveling slow down the hall, wiping down artifacts of our life together that I can hardly remember. I dust the spot on the bedside table where the orange pill canisters used to live; I pull up the cover on the red rolltop desk and find a grainy picture of my daddy when he was a little boy, pants pulled up high, hair parted on the side and slicked down. I stare into the lumpy glass of the big, lagoon-colored jars on the kitchen counter that have been waiting years for the sugar, flour, and coffee beans they were made to hold. I pick one up and smile at my funny, Smurf-ish reflection, just one empty vessel looking into another. Feeling peaceful and flooded with gratitude, I untack the garbage bags from the window as gently and intentionally as Jack placed them there. I wave to God as she blows through the buck-naked branches of the dogwood trees.
Landed.
He texts at 4:30 p.m. and the sun’s already setting. I put on new clothes that don’t smell like Scrubbing Bubbles and wait for him on the porch, goose bumps rising on my arms when I open the door. It’s cold, I’m nervous, and I hope he likes the tower of decorative gourds I stacked up under the mailbox. Small teardrop-shaped leaves tumble down in corkscrews to blanket the sidewalk in yellow and I say a prayer with my hands tucked under my armpits. Let it be enough, let me be enough.
The headlights approach. It’s not his car, but somehow, I know he’s inside. The glow gets closer and brighter and I just wait for what’s happening to happen. The passenger-side door opens, he climbs out all scruffy and perfect, and the car drives away.
“Hey.”
A too-big breath of air pushes down my throat and makes an ache in my chest.
“Hey.” I can hardly get it out.
I’m not sure what I want him to see, a new person he can love, the old person he used to love, hopefulness, healing, something different from what he left behind. I pull him into my arms before he can decide what I am to him.
I’m not numb anymore.
I don’t say it. I want to, but I don’t. It can’t be about me anymore, not the way it has been. We stand there for a minute in the wetness while the cars whiz by. I soak up the weight and the warmth of him and let his long, wordless exhale tickle my earlobe. It takes a minute, but he curls his big long arms around me and holds on to me. He’s still holding on to me.
The next few days are full of trying. We go on dates and stay up too late and visit our therapist, Jane, in the suburbs. She tries to help us navigate all the different ways we’ve hurt each other. Jack says he’s tired and angry and confused by me, that I’m a totally different person now. Quietly, I let it crush me because I thought that’s exactly what he wanted. I forgive him for everything I possibly can in that room because I want him to forgive me, too, I want to force the transaction, settle the settlement and move on, but he isn’t ready for total restitution.
We want to make it work, but we don’t know how to.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
It’s the only thing we can agree on, but neither of us really knows what it means anymore. Jane just stares at us, nodding and making notes. She doesn’t know what it means either.
* * *
We’re lying on top of the covers of our big sleigh bed when he says it, matter-of-factly.
“I’m going back out.”
It’s only been a week, but Jack wants to leave again.
The beginnings of rain start in. I close my eyes, swallow hard, and listen.
“They’re counting on me.”
He rubs my arm and we both look up, searching for words on the ceiling.
But I’m counting on you. Again, I just think it, but he pops his head up from the pillow like he knows.
The raindrops keep coming and we stay silent, listening to the water smack against the windows in intervals, watching it slide down to the ledge in pretty rivers. I wonder if he’s noticed that I took the trash bags down. I wonder if it means anything to him. The weather gets louder and time to speak shrinks away. I feel my pulse rise up to my temples. We need more time.
“Please don’t go. You’ll miss Thanksgiving.”
I’ve never asked him to stay before. It surprises both of us.
“We need this.” It crackles out of me, I’m a pitchy sixth-grade boy. “I’m almost off all the pills. I’ve never asked you to stay before. The kids will be there. It’ll be our first—”
“Babe, I can’t. I’m sorry.”
I put my head on his chest and let a tear roll across the bridge of my nose and down onto his T-shirt. It’s been a long time since I’ve let him come close enough to hurt me. I let another one drop and another. His arm rises and he rolls my body into his. The wanting-to-love-me seeps out of him, but so does the impossibility. He’s going away again. I can’t make him stay. I can’t make him do anything.
He tries a fix of his own.
“Hey, let’s get out of town. Just for a few days.”
* * *
Allie and Gabriel stay at our house to dog-sit for the weekend while we drive five hours to Asheville, North Carolina, a village of delicious restaurants in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We wander around the antique shops and eat tapas and have sex that feels better than I remember sex feeling before. We try to remember the picture of life that we drew when he first put his great-grandmother’s ring on my finger and add onto it in frantic scribbles: we could adopt a baby, we could go on more vacations, get a bigger house, get a bigger dog, the ideas go on and on. I say yes to all of them, and eventually, as we dream at each other across restaurant tables, the scribbles start to look something like a picture, a future, the answer.
I call Allie from the hotel to check in and tell her about all the big plans. My heart is beating in the back of my throat and I’m talking too fast.
“That’s awesome, Ruthie,” she says.
I can hear Gabriel overfilling Ellie’s bowl in the background; kibble tumbles from the bag out onto the floor. Giggles tumble out of Gabriel.
“Shit!” Allie whisper-shouts.
She remembers something. “Hey, I’m so sorry but I broke one of those blue jar things in the kitchen last night.”
For a reason I can’t name, I see the jar in big blue chunks in my mind and there’s grief. I shove it away.
“It’s totally fine. No big deal,” I promise, and we say goodbye.
I cry about it while Jack showers. It’s a silly and embarrassing, bulldozing sadness. I wipe my eyes with a corner of pillow and try not to sniff too hard, but Jack notices. I tell him about the jar and make my tears into a joke about hormones. He smiles, looks at me like I’m crazy, and kisses my head.