One True Loves (22 page)

As I do, my father comes back into the room, in sweats, and sits on the other side of me. He grabs my hand.

They listen.

At the end of it, when I've said everything that's left in me, when I get out every piece I have, my mom says, “If you want my two cents, you have the unique ability to love with your whole heart even after it's been broken. That's a good thing. Don't feel guilty about that.”

“You're a fighter,” my dad says. “You get back up after you've been knocked down. That is my favorite part about you.”

I laugh and say, in a jovial tone, “Not that I run the bookstore?”

I'm joking but
I'm not joking.

“Not even close. There are so many things to love about you that, honestly, that's not even in the top ten.”

I put my head on his shoulder and rest there for a moment. I watch my mom's eyes droop. I hear my dad's breathing slow down.

“OK, go back to bed,” I tell them. “I'll be OK. Thank you. Sorry again about scaring you.”

They each give me a hug and then go.

I lie on my old mattress and I try to fall asleep, but I was a fool to ever think that sleep would come.

Just before six a.m., I see a light come on in Marie's house.

I take off my engagement ring and put it in my purse. And then I throw on some pants, grab my boots, and walk right out the front door.

M
arie is with Ava in the bathroom with the door open. Ava is sitting on the toilet and Marie is coaxing her to relax. The twins are potty trained, but as of a few weeks ago, Ava has started backsliding. She will only go if Marie is with her. I have decided to hang back and stand by the door, as is my right as an aunt.

“You can go ahead and take a seat,” Marie says to me as she sits down on the slate gray tile of the bathroom floor. “We're gonna be here a while.”

The girls' cochlear implants mean that they have learned to talk only a few months behind other children. And Marie and Mike both use sign language to communicate with them, too. My nieces, whom we were all so worried about, may just end up speaking two languages. And that is in large part because Marie is a phenomenal, attentive, unstoppable motherly force.

At this point, she knows more about American Sign Language, the Deaf community, hearing aids, cochlear implants, and the inner working of the ear than possibly anything else, including all of the things she used to love, things like literature, poetry, and figuring out what authors use what pseudonyms.

But she's also exhausted. It's six thirty in the morning and she's both talking and signing to her daughter to please “go pee in the potty for Mommy.”

The bags under her eyes look like the pocket on a kangaroo.

When Ava is finally done, Marie brings her to Mike, who is lying in bed with Sophie. As I'm standing in the hallway, I get a glimpse of Mike under the covers, half asleep, holding Sophie's hand. For a moment, I get a flash of what sort of man I'd want to be the father of my own children and I'm embarrassed to say that the figure is only vague and blurry.

Marie comes back out of the bedroom and we head toward the kitchen.

“Tea?” she says as I sit down at her island.

I'm not much of a tea drinker, but it's cold in here and something warm sounds nice. I'd ask for coffee, but I know that Marie doesn't keep coffee in the house. “Sure, that sounds great,” I say.

Marie smiles and nods. She starts the kettle. Marie's kitchen island is bigger than my dining room table. Our dining room table. Mine and Sam's.

I am, instantaneously, overcome with certainty.

I don't want to leave Sam. I don't want to lose the life I've built. Not again. I love Sam. I love him. I don't want to leave him. I want to sit down together at the piano and play “Chopsticks.”

That's what I want to do.

Then I remember that way Jesse looked when he got off that plane. All of my certainty disappears.

“Ugh,” I say, slouching my body forward, resting my head in the nest I've made with my arms. “Marie, what am I going to do?”

She doesn't stop pulling various teas out of the cupboard. She pulls them all out and puts them in front of me.

“I don't know,” she says. “I can't imagine being in your shoes. I feel like maybe both options are equally right
and
wrong. That's
probably not the answer you were looking for. But I just don't know.”

“I don't know, either.”

“Does it help to ask what your gut tells you?” she says. “Like, if you close your eyes, what do you see? Your life with Sam? Or your life with Jesse?”

I indulge her game, hoping that something as simple as closing my eyes might tell me what I want to do. But it doesn't. Of course it doesn't. I open my eyes to see Marie watching me. “That didn't work.”

The kettle starts to whistle and Marie turns toward the stove to grab it. “You know, all you can do is just put one foot in front of the other,” she says. “This is exactly the sort of thing people are talking about when they say you have to take things one step at a time.” She pours hot water into the white mug she's set out for me. I look up at her.

“Earl Grey?” she asks.

“English Breakfast?” I ask in return and then I start laughing and say, “I'm just messing with you. I have no idea what tea names mean.”

She laughs and picks up an English Breakfast packet, tearing off the top and pulling out a tea bag. “Here, now you'll know what English Breakfast tastes like for next time.” She puts it in my mug and hands it to me. “Splenda?” she offers.

I shake my head. I stopped drinking artificial sweeteners six months ago and I feel entirely the same but I'm still convinced it's for a good cause. “I'm off the sauce,” I say.

Marie rolls her eyes and puts two packets in her tea.

I laugh and look down toward my cup. I watch as the tea begins to bleed out of the bag into the water. I watch as it swirls, slowly. I can already smell the earthiness of it. I put my
hands on the hot mug, letting it warm them up. I start absent-mindedly fiddling with the string.

“Do you think you can love two people at the same time?” I ask her. “That's what I keep wondering. I feel like I love them both. Differently and equally. Is that possible? Am I kidding myself?”

She dips her tea bag in and out of the water. “I'm honestly not sure,” she says. “But the problem isn't who you love or if you love both, I don't think. I think the problem is that you aren't sure who you are. You're a different person now than you were before you lost Jesse. It changed you, fundamentally.”

Marie thinks, staring down at the counter, and then tentatively starts talking again. “I don't think you're trying to figure out if you love Sam more or Jesse more. I think you're trying to figure out if you want to be the person you are with Jesse or you want to be the person you are with Sam.”

It's like someone cracked me in half and found the rotten cancer in the deepest, most hidden part of my body. I don't say anything back. I don't look up. I watch as a tear falls from my face and lands right in my mug. And even though I was the one who cried it out, and I saw it fall, I have no idea what it means.

I look up.

“I think you're probably right,” I say.

Marie nods and then looks directly at me. “I'm sorry,” she says. “It's important to me that you know that. That you know I regret what I did.”

“Regret what? What are you talking about?”

“For that day on the roof. The day that I found you looking out . . .” It feels like yesterday and one hundred years ago all at once: the binoculars, the roof, the grave anxiety of believing I could save him just by watching the shore. “I'm sorry
for convincing you Jesse was dead,” Marie says. “You knew he wasn't . . .”

Marie isn't much of a crier. She isn't one to show how she feels on her face. It's her voice that tells me just how deep her remorse is, the way some of the syllables bubble up and burst.

“I was the wrong person to be up there that day. I hadn't supported you, at all, really, in any of the years prior. And suddenly, I was the one telling you the worst had happened? I just . . . I thought he was gone. And I thought that I was doing you a kindness by making you face reality.” She shakes her head as if disappointed in her old self. “But instead, what I did was take away your hope. Hope that you had every reason to hold on to. And I . . . I'm just very sorry. I'm deeply sorry. You have no idea how much I regret taking that away from you.”

“No,” I say. “That's not what happened. Not at all. I was crazy up on that roof. I'd gone absolutely crazy, Marie. It was irrational to think that he was alive, let alone that I could save him, that I could spot him up there, looking at that tiny piece of the shore. That was madness.

“Anyone thinking clearly would have made the assumption that he was dead. I needed to understand that the rational conclusion was that he was gone. You helped me understand that. You kept me sane.”

For the first time, I find myself wondering if facing the truth and being sane aren't the same thing, if they are just two things that tend to go together. I'm starting to understand that they might be correlational rather than synonyms.

And then I realize that if I don't blame Marie for thinking he was dead—if I don't see her belief that he died as a sign she gave up on him—then I shouldn't be blaming myself for doing the same thing.

“Please don't give it another thought,” I say to her. “What you did on the roof that day . . . you saved me.”

Marie looks down at her tea and then nods. “Thank you for saying that.”

“Thank you for what you did. And I'm glad it was you. I don't know if you and I would be as close . . . I mean, I think we would have just gone on . . .”

“I know what you mean,” Marie said. “I know.”

After all of our shared experiences and our parents' cajoling, it has been our hardships that have softened us to each other. Losing my husband and the challenges of raising Marie's twins are the things that have brought us together.

“I'm just glad that things between us are the way they are now,” Marie says. “I'm very, very glad.”

“Me, too,” I say.

Instinctively, I grab Marie's hand and hold it for a moment and then we break away.

It is hard to be so honest, so vulnerable, so exposed. But I find that it always leads you someplace freer. I feel the smallest shift between my sister and me, something almost imperceptible but nevertheless real. We are closer now than we were just three minutes ago.

“I've been thinking about writing again,” Marie says, changing the subject.

“Oh yeah?” I ask. “Writing what?”

She shrugs. “That's the part I'm not sure about. I just need to do something, you know? Anything that is not revolving around my kids. I need to get back to me, a little bit. Anyway, it might be a dumb idea because I say that I want to start writing again but I can't find anything I want to write
about.
I'm not inspired. I'm just . . . well, bored.”

“You'll find something,” I say.
“And when you do, it will be great. Just don't make it a murder mystery where you pin the murders on a character that is clearly supposed to be me, like you did back then,” I say, teasing.

She laughs, shaking her head at me. “No one ever believed me that it wasn't supposed to be you,” she says.

“You named her Emily.”

“It's a common name,” Marie says, pretending to defend herself. “But, yeah, OK. I'm mature enough now to admit that might not have come from a totally innocent place.”

“Thank you,” I say magnanimously.

“I was just so annoyed that you were always copying me.”

“What?” I say. “I was never copying you. I was basically the opposite of you.”

Marie shakes her head. “Sorry, but no. Remember when I got really into TLC? And suddenly, you started telling everyone you loved ‘Waterfalls'? Or when I had a crush on Keanu Reeves? And then suddenly, you had his picture up over your bed?”

“Oh, my God,” I say, realizing she's totally right.

“And then, of course, you went and started dating the captain of the swim team. Just like me.”

“Whoa,” I say. “That honestly never occurred to me. But you're totally right. You and Graham. And then me and Jesse.”

Marie smiles, half laughing at me. “See?”

“I must have really wanted to be like you,” I say. “Because I thought Graham was so lame. And then I went and
also dated the captain of the swim team
.”

Marie lifts her tea to her mouth, smiling. “So, I think we can agree that on some level, you've always wanted to be me.”

I laugh. “You know what? If being you means having just the one man in your life, I'll take it.”

“Boohoo,” she says. “Two men love you.”

“Oh, shut up,” I say as I find a dish towel and throw it at her.

Our laughter is interrupted by Mike coming down the stairs with Sophie behind him and Ava on his hip.

“Breakfast!” he says to the girls, and I see Marie reanimate, opening up the refrigerator, ready for the day.

I know when to excuse myself.

“I'm around if you need anything today,” Marie says as I gather my things. “Seriously. Just call. Or stop by. I'm here for you.”

“OK,” I say. “Thank you.”

She gives me a hug and then picks up Sophie into her arms. I head out the door.

On the way back to my parents', my phone dings. I'm not sure who I thought would be contacting me but I definitely wasn't expecting a text message from Francine.

So excited to see you again that I didn't sleep all night. This is Jesse, btw. Not my mom. Pretty weird if my mom couldn't wait to see you.