“It’s just an empty jar. There wasn’t even anything in it.”
“I know.” I smile and I picture it. Clear and blue, it stood ready for years to be filled up. Now it’s too late.
When we get home, we start over immediately and furiously before doubt has the slightest chance to creep in. The first thing we do is sell the pretty yellow house. The neighborhood has gone from hovel to hot spot over the past eight years and with the sale, there’ll be more than enough money for us to find a new place for our new beginning, its babies and dinner parties, for its big, tall Christmas tree.
* * *
Jack has to go back out on the road, but this time I feel like he might miss me. I drop him off at the airport, kiss him, and promise that I’ll take care of everything, the house stuff, the bank stuff, the decorating, and that’s exactly what I do. I beam as I sell the pretty yellow house and the furniture that we don’t need, as I diligently hire a cleaning company, pick up rolls of packing tape, and throw a yard sale. Best of all, on one of December’s darkest, most blustery afternoons, I peel off my very last fentanyl patch, which has taken four months for me to wean myself from. Allie and Gabriel keep me company while Jack is gone. They help me wrap the bits of our life we want to take with us in soft strands of newspaper and we place them into sandy-brown boxes. It doesn’t cross my mind that some of the boxes will never be unpacked.
* * *
Just in time for New Year’s Eve, Jack and I move into a big blue “beginning again” house. All our beautiful things come with us: the remaining blue jars (I fill them with cookies and cereal bars right away), the red rolltop desk, and our old sleigh bed. The ugliness stays behind: not a single orange canister of pills or medical bill is allowed through the door. We slow-dance between the boxes, singing the New Year’s song they sing at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life and looking around at our new space. Flat white paint covers the walls, the fridge is wrapped in plastic, and the lawn is still green even though it’s winter. The rest of the street is a jealous patch of stringy brown stalks and mud. Jack likes the ceilings the best. They’re so high, we could have church in the living room. I like the upstairs study—it’ll be a bedroom for our oldest.
Over the next two weeks, I try to make our new space look like “us,” even though we’re still trying to figure out what “us” looks like. There’s a big fiddle-leaf fig plant and clearance wallpaper from Anthropologie, a comfortable chair and flat-screen television. I gather enough linens and living room furniture to last us a lifetime, but our life together only goes on for another month.
Jack and Allie are making a record together. He’s always wanted to produce something, and when I introduced them back in November, I hoped that they would work together. Gabriel stays with me while they’re in the studio. We play trains on the shockingly new floors and eat Teddy Grahams for dinner because I’m still not very good at cooking. My body aches more and more these days, but I can’t resist lifting him up, spinning him around, and dreaming of my own child. As I watch his long, feathery lashes come together and his wiry boy body settle into sleep, I find solace and purpose and peace. I know that I’m ready to be a mom. On these late nights of trains and bear-shaped cookies, Gabriel and I grow close. So do Allie and Jack.
At first, I hardly detect it. I watch Jack’s entire body lift off the ground when she knocks at our front door, I watch him tell Gabriel jokes and carry him on his shoulders, I watch his face grow softer when he says her name. It’s so unimaginable, I think the new joy in him must be for me and I welcome it. Allie’s china-doll cheeks grow pink when he looks at her; she starts to dress up for recording sessions and put lipstick on. I watch all of it happen, but I never believe in a world where Jack isn’t my devoted, patient husband and Allie isn’t my closest friend, where I’m not the link that joins them together.
In February, Katherine and I go to watch Allie play a show at 3rd and Lindsley, the same old club near the interstate where Jack and I began our life together. For the second time I see him illuminated in that dank little room, resurrected from his heaviness. He watches her on the stage like she’s levitating; he laughs and drinks and comes to life. I feel happy for him, for us, and I wonder if we need to get out more often.
“I don’t like this,” Katherine says, her denim-colored eyes getting small and angry, darting from Allie, drenched in perfect golden light, to Jack, drenched in Allie, to me. Still, I don’t believe it. He runs over to the stage after the show and helps her lift her guitar from her shoulder; they stare at each other and whisper. I don’t know what they’re saying, but their mouths are open wide in laughter. I laugh along with them like I’m a part of it all.
“Do you guys want to come out with us?” Jack’s eyes are so molten chocolate they’re giving off heat. He stares at Katherine and me, waiting for an answer. He’s so consumed that he doesn’t even realize he’s inviting his wife to go out with him and another woman. I’m so unthreatened that I hardly notice either and don’t think twice about heading home so they can enjoy the rest of the night together. Katherine does, though.
“I don’t like this,” she says one more time as their shadows grow closer in the doorway behind us. I begin to feel nervous, not because I think Jack would be unfaithful, he never would be, Allie wouldn’t either, there are lines neither one of them would cross, but because the look of happiness in both of them seems so pure. Jack and I haven’t been that way in a long time. That night, Jack comes home late and sleeps in the guest room.
About a week passes. Jack and I sit facing each other in the big blue house we bought so that we could begin again, and we end there, badly, painfully, in tears.
“I know you want to be a mom more than anything in the world. I’m going to be a dad one day, I’m going to be an amazing dad.”
It comes out of nowhere and he can’t even look me in the eye. Every single syllable reverberates off the ceilings he loves and makes a hard landing under my ribs. The admission feels so deliberate, an expertly engineered final straw. I don’t try to stop myself from crying. He doesn’t need to continue, but he does.
“You want a child more than you want me,” he continues. “And I’ll never do it. Not with you.”
There is a silence, a quiet, empty nothingness, where neither one of us can speak or move. Our breaths drift into each other and in our very last moments together, I’m broken wide open. The pain is real and visceral, it has a pulse of its own. I listen to him as he dismantles our life beside the new fiddle-leaf fig plant, but his words don’t make any sense. I thought he wanted all of it as much as I did. All I ever wanted was to be able to give it to him. My voice shakes for just a second and then I erupt. He’s wrong, he’s being ridiculous, he’s cruel, he’s an asshole. Nothing I say can touch him.
I get up from the couch and I leave. There isn’t enough air in the house we bought so that we could breathe again. I spend the night at Katherine’s, crying into her hair.
It’s evening the next day when I return home, and before I go in, I stand out in the crunchy, frost-covered yard and stare at the sky. It’s a “sunset” day and the most beautiful tangerine blob is melting over the cold city; it all goes from orange to purple to blue. I’m in shambles, sharing the lawn with our perfect new home and looking up at it with longing because even six feet away it feels so out of reach.