Jack isn’t waiting for me when I open the door. I don’t know where he is or if he’s ever coming back. Allie stops returning my calls. I feel like I lose them both in the same instant. It hurts, but what hurts most is that the end of us isn’t about Jack and Allie, it’s about Jack and me. We haven’t been in love in a long time. It would be easier if there were a wild affair, if this were about the power of their love, but it’s about the tiredness of ours. I feel tired.
The sounds my sneakers make on the floor float through the dead air and reverberate on the wall. I’m alone. I think of my list and I cling to it once again.
17 A Come-to-Justin Meeting
The forest in South Louisiana is a giant stick monster that crawls up from the swamp. There are creeping plants and brambles and long-limbed trees that can never quite pull themselves from the muck, so they grow sideways instead. There are snakes that can swim and gators and beautiful brown deer, birds that cackle at you when you walk and thick, buzzing gnat clouds that smack you in the eye. Some people are scared of the forest, but it was my playground; I could explore it for hours with just my juice box, a dog or two, and a walking stick, climbing, digging, and swinging from tree to tree.
The vines are everywhere. They hang down in long, skinny car-wash curtains, leathery and strong. I’d stand on a stump, beat my xylophone ribs like Tarzan, grab ahold, and just soar, howling back to the jungle that howled to me, called me out from the house and reminded me that I could be wild and free. Flying forward was euphoric; everything blurred into a brown, manic swirl of leaves and limbs and noises. Flying the other way was terrifying. The motion slowed, the sweat on my hands became a slick grease, the sickness from taking flight settled in my stomach. Then, blindly, faster and faster and faster, I’d go backward.
When Jack leaves, everything that’s good, moving ever forward, begins to slow. A sickness comes, and I fall back, blindly, faster and faster and faster. I land in bed, the most comfortable and dangerous place in the world.
I wake up alone in the big blue house. My lips are dry as tree bark and there’s brown sludge on my face. Long muddy streaks stretch across the perfect white pillow that Jack abandoned one week ago; it looks like dried blood. I touch my face, search my mouth for the nickel-y taste of a bitten cheek. Instead, I find a sweetness in the back of my mouth that jolts me. The night comes back to me: sobbing, sleeplessness, loneliness, the heating pad to help with my back and to stand in for the warm body that went away. Chocolate. A shard of Skinny Cow wrapper peeks out from the long gaps of my left hand; a tiny ball of nougat is curled up in my palm. Just because I’m not on fentanyl doesn’t mean I don’t medicate.
There are things I love in the world, but today I don’t choose them. Yesterday I didn’t choose them. Jack is gone and the future is an empty place now. The little list that held my hand is sitting under a mug next to a stack of mail that belongs to the man who may not come back. It stays there because it’s easier to anesthetize myself with Cosmic Brownies from the gas station, extra pillows, and season seven of The Millionaire Matchmaker than it is to put on my pants and open the door.
My phone blinks at me. Obediently, I roll to it and let rainbow sprinkles clatter onto the floor from inside my T-shirt.
8:00 a.m. Get out of bed.
I obey, but only because all the snacks have melted. Blood flies dizzily up to my brain and the pain says good morning the way it always does, rushing up my side in a big hot blaze. I walk to the shower where Jack and I joked we would make a baby and I feel myself swinging backward, body scared and stiff, through the brown, swirling forest, faster and faster and faster.
The most terrifying thing about Jack being gone and Allie being gone is that I’ve lost my “people,” the other heartbeats that bump alongside my own and confirm to me that I’m not alone sixty-five times per minute. I see my reflection best when it bounces off the ones I love, I always have, and without them, I don’t really know who I am. Amber comes over in the evening to watch an episode of The Bachelor with me. She’s a new friend. She lives with my massage therapist, who works from home, and though I hardly know her from anything other than making small talk in the waiting room/living room, I invite her over because she mentions that she’s going through a breakup too.
Amber is familiar, a tiny blond hummingbird with glowy ice-blue eyes and a heart that’s too big for her body, just like Tim’s wife, Laura. She plops down next to me on the couch, and together, we watch in inexplicable awe as a nervous boy from Texas ogles girls in slinky dresses pulling their slinky bodies out of limousines. Either everything we’re watching is fake or all a person needs to find love is an application and an adult-size quinceañera dress. We eat four cupcakes between us and roll our eyes while we think about it.
A commercial for Cymbalta comes on. A happy, pain-free woman sits with her dalmatian, stares at the sky, and thinks about how wonderful life has been since the little pills showed up. I don’t really want to talk, but it comes out of me anyway.
“Jack’s gone.”
The Texas boy is back on the screen now. He talks with a schoolteacher with no eyebrows left, then a bartender. He pulls at his bow tie and drinks a sweaty drink as a line of sequins and boobs forms behind him.
“I know. I’m so sorry,” Amber says.
She tilts her beautiful, familiar face and looks me in the eyes. She reminds me so much of Laura, I forget that she’s not and ask her a hundred questions she can’t answer.
“Should I get a lawyer?”
“Can I get a job?”
“Am I ever going to be a mother?”
“Is it really over?”
The boy from Texas blushes in front of a fountain and I fall to pieces. She holds on tighter and I let her sister me awhile.
“Ruthie, my husband left me too. He had an affair.”
I think about Allie and Jack and wonder if they’re together right now, if they’re curled up on a couch somewhere, her head resting in the spot on his shoulder that mine used to. The picture of it makes my stomach twist and shrink. In a measured, calm, and loving tone, Amber continues.
“It was terrible for both of us. Nobody wants a marriage to end. Nobody wants to hurt the person they swore to God they would protect. It wasn’t what either of us imagined. We loved each other, just like you and Jack.”
She talks about her ex with grace and care; there’s no anger, no judgment, only empathy. Her glacier eyes melt a little bit and her soothing sisterly voice gets quieter. She’s sad but she’s gracious, she’s hurt but she’s healing. She doesn’t make a monster of him or a saint of herself.
The Texas boy sends a gaggle of long-necked women back to their Midwest marketing jobs and they cry all over their sequins.
If Jack and I really do split up, I want to see our ending just like Amber saw hers. I don’t want to be bitter. To be angry at somebody who has loved the most faded version of you, held you as you buried your father, changed your dressings so that your wounds are allowed to become scars, somebody who sat quietly on their own mountain of hurt until they knew you were able to climb down from yours, feels cheap and empty, a betrayal of its own. Whatever happens, I want it to happen with love.
They play the clips from next week. A girl with gigantic hair gets a kiss and the cameras try to make chemistry where it doesn’t exist. Out of bravery or desperation, I ask Amber a question I’ve never asked anyone before.