* * *
My body may have broken parts, but I can love devotedly with it, I can celebrate, exult, and let myself be moved. I can overcome bare-naked, buzzing nerves in my side to get up and dance for just one more song. I learn in these long, stretched-out nights and tender quiet mornings with him that my body doesn’t have to be a perfect place to be a sacred one. It still doesn’t feel quite like a home, but it feels closer to one.
Liam leaves on a Tuesday. He goes to Texas or Oklahoma or one of the Carolinas. He kisses me on the forehead on the front steps of my house in the broad white daylight. I want to say something clever but I say thank you instead, and he kisses me one more time.
That night, I’m alone and Mrs. God comes to see me in a frantic thunderstorm. She makes marimba music on the gutters to wake me, and the neighbor’s wind chimes go wild, slamming into the window and tangling together. I open my eyes to the emptiness of the bed, the little rumpled shadow that Liam left behind, soft and sunken into the sheets. I reach for it, and mysteriously, it’s still warm. The tornado sirens start screaming their windy-weather song and I smile. All across the city, recent transplants will be scurrying to their safe places while those of us who know better will stay in bed, look out the window, and just listen for the refrain, the crashing and the booming, rain spilling from the sky to the ground.
A big old branch across the street falls and rapids flow against the sidewalk banks. I’m not scared. I feel safe now, safer than I ever have. The gusts whistle at the trees while they bend to pick up their leaves and the power lines spin like jump ropes, but still I’m not afraid. It gets louder and more intense, but I don’t see destruction. I see creation, the baptism of the lawn and the bathing of the asphalt. I see everything differently now. My lips curl around the glass of water that Jack used to bring me and I rub the wrinkles out of the sheets in the spot he used to sleep in. Our last therapy session comes back to me, his angry remembrance of our love story.
“I never would have been with you if I wasn’t in such a bad place when we met.”
“I’m done rescuing you.”
“You don’t want me. You just want a baby. I’m a means to an end.”
His truth hurt me so badly to hear that my brain got blurry. How could my truth be so different from his? I remember him adoring me. I remember our long, lazy afternoons in the sheets and wanting to start a family.
Mother Nature plays her instruments with everything she has now. It’s theater: the lightning makes daytime at 1 a.m. and I clutch at my heart.
Oh, Jack.
A counselor friend told me once that she could tell if a marriage was going to work. Looking back on their lives together, if a couple could only see the relationship through the lens of loss and pain, then it was over. Jack and I don’t see the same things when we look back—he doesn’t see beauty, growth, or redemption. He just sees hurt, he hears what’s screaming the loudest. Our marriage is over in all ways but paperwork. I can’t change what he sees when he looks back at us, but maybe if we look deep enough into each other, he’ll be able to look forward and find healing, peace. Maybe I will too.
19 Two Thousand Words
Jack’s lips are quivering. His beard is longer and thicker and grayer than I’ve seen it before, than I ever thought it could be. If it weren’t for the mouth, that shaky mouth that snores late at night and gets small when it’s angry and gives long, thoughtful kisses, if I couldn’t see it peeking through the salt-and-pepper terrier fur, I’d hardly recognize the only man I’ve ever loved. The air-conditioning roars as I walk into the room and little bits of late-July heat come with me. Jack’s body shudders, a chill wiggles through him, and the love seat creaks underneath his hips. We’ve sat together on the little couch before, but this time he’s in the middle and I have to find a separate space. Today is the last day, the last $150 check we write Jane, the very last moments of belonging to each other. Today, we will say goodbye.
Jane is shuffling around at her desk in the corner. I take her in one last time too. Even though it’s ninety-five degrees outside, she’s committed to a shawl the color of raw tuna, and it keeps getting caught up in the drawer handles. She smiles at me, flustered and a little sad. She’s always seemed to like us. She pushes a deep breath out of her nose as she moves a pair of glasses high up on the bridge of it. Poor Jane, she knows that today is the last day too.
“Hi,” I say to both of them, because nobody else has said anything at all.
I join them in the triangle of seats and settle into Jane’s armchair, which I suspect is there specifically for couples like us, who don’t want to be next to each other anymore. Jack looks up, he finds my face. His brownie-batter eyes are as bottomless and thoughtful and beautiful as they ever have been but they’re so full of shame. They’re deep, muddy pits in his face flanked by bloodshot membranes and blue-gray pillows of worry. I can feel how tired he is. The weight of every hour he’s stayed awake wondering if there’s another way, of every beer he’s cracked before noon, of each word he’s said to hurt me—it’s all left him puffy and pale, like a grungy, half-melted snowman. Of all the days we’ve been together, today, the day of our undoing, is the day I want to hold him the most.
Jane says something kind about us working hard and being brave, but neither one of us responds. We just sit in silence together and quietly meditate on the past six months, deciding what love is and wondering if we have enough of it. He doesn’t want to speak first, so out of mercy, I do.
“I can’t live like this anymore. You’re not going to come back—it’s been months. You left me and you need to finish this. Please, Jack, just say that it’s over.”
He’s a huge, lumbering, now heavily bearded man, but in this room, in this moment, he’s freckle-faced and has fallen off his tricycle. I could pick him up and carry him away. The sun laser-beams through a big window behind him and raises sweat on the back of his neck. His eyes are fixed straight ahead at the nothingness on the wall, avoiding mine. Phlegm rumbles in his throat and he fidgets with his hands. He’s always drumming, even if just in his imagination. The words are there but he can’t get them out.
“Take your time,” Jane says, and he does.
His lips still vibrate under his nose and I watch them, remembering all the other times they’ve done that before: the day he proposed down on one knee surrounded by Dollar Store candles and roses, the day he led me toward the stillness of my daddy’s body, the morning they took me into surgery at Mayo and I thought he was going to chase after the gurney. The day that he left six months ago. I’m struck dumb by how well I know him, the way his face moves and the sound his breath makes. Those are parts of him I’ll probably always know. I rewind a decade of loving each other and play it back to myself until I can’t anymore.
“Please, Jack, I need you to say it.”
Jane glares at me as much as someone who looks like Mother Goose can glare at you, but I ignore her. His eyes drop down and we look at each other; we look into each other, finally.
“I don’t want to be married to you anymore. I’m going to file for divorce.”
His head drops into his hands like a bowling ball and Jane quietly places a cube of Kleenex next to him on the sofa. I watch his fingers shake on his forehead and imagine all the things he must be telling himself: