Liv is exactly where I knew she would be. I hesitate by the park entrance, watching her sip her coffee, fold over the page of the paper. It feels big, brave, almost too much, to step forward and acknowledge how badly I need her, how badly I need someone. Eventually, I amble toward the gate of the dog run, and as I unlatch it, she looks up, casually at first, then startled to recognize the face coming toward her.
“Nell!” She stands. “Did you get a dog?”
“No,” I offer. “But I brought fresh coffee.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. What are you doing here?”
“I needed to talk to you,” I say. “I left a message at your office.”
“You really shouldn’t be here. This isn’t appropriate.” She casts about to find Watson, who is over in the corner sniffing some leaves. “We can find some time tomorrow.”
“Look, please. I’ll never do it again, I promise. I know this is unconventional and that you have all these boundaries…”
“There for good reason,” she interrupts.
“I’m sure they’re there for very good reasons,” I say. “But I’m here, and I just need fifteen minutes.” I can see her wavering. “And I did bring fresh coffee.”
“Fifteen minutes,” she concedes, sitting back down. “And for this, I expect some seriously diligent work this week.”
“I may be taking a break this week. Out of town.”
She looks at me skeptically. “What happened? Tell me what happened that you had to ambush me on a Sunday morning in the dog run.”
So I tell her. About Peter. About Ginger. About Paige. About Jamie, who left me a halfhearted voice mail saying he didn’t intend for me to find out this way, and he hoped that I’d call him for an explanation. And about Rory and Samantha, and the destruction that comes with bottling secrets up too closely.
“So who are you most angry at here?” Liv asks when I’ve cut through the bulk of the story.
“Who am I not most angry at here?” I echo.
“Shouldn’t it be Peter? Because it doesn’t sound like he’s the one you’re the most upset with.”
“I’m furious with him,” I say to Liv, considering the truth of it. “But maybe I’m also relieved.”
“About what?” She reaches down and grabs a tennis ball, hurling it toward the back of the dog run. Watson, who has meandered over toward us, takes off like a shot.
“That my instinct was right.”
“What instinct?”
“That instinct I felt back in the hospital—when I saw him. He didn’t feel right for me, but I tried anyway. Tried to let my mother and everyone else convince me otherwise.” I shrug. “For once, god knows, my instinct was right.” I don’t have to mention how wrong I was about Jamie, my decision to trust him, my false sense of familiarity, like he was an old friend, a cousin, a brother.
No, no, certainly none of those.
“And what of your mother? Rory?”
“I’m so unspeakably angry with them that I don’t know what to do with myself.” I hate how brittle I sound, how hateful I am, but it’s there all the same. I
am
angry, I
am
brittle.
“That they didn’t tell you?”
“For starters. Yes! And that they didn’t treat me enough like a grown-up to sort this out on my own!”
“You realize you’re contradicting yourself,” she says. Watson runs over panting, delivering the tennis ball to her feet. She shucks it back across the run. “You’re angry that they didn’t tell you, and yet you’re angry that you didn’t trust yourself in the first place to do it on your own.”
“Listen, I’m pissed off at a lot of things! You can’t tell me that I don’t have the right to be!”
“I’m not telling you anything,” she says, then takes a long sip of her coffee. “Let’s get back to the free association we did in our early sessions.”
“I kind of want to
talk
about what just happened,” I say.
“Yes, I get that. But first, you came to me today, so I make the rules. And second, the point of that free-association exercise was for you to explore those instincts that you’ve disregarded, spit out whatever is in your gut, and then consider it, rather than stuffing it down where you’ll never hear from it again.”
“We’re back to my walls.”
“We were never past your walls.”
I sigh. “Did I tell you that my nickname in high school was the Ice Queen?” I ask, and she shakes her head no. “Well, it was. Evidently. Or so I’ve been told.” I think of the Beatles’ song for which I was at least partially named.
It’s a song about the loneliest woman in the world!
Jesus, I think, what chance did I have?
“And what does that say to you?” Liv asks.
“It says that I’ve long been an expert in, as you say, stuffing that stuff down into my gut.”
“And now?” Watson is back with his saliva-covered ball. This
time, I scoop it up from the ground and toss it as far as my once-broken body will allow.
“And now,” I say, “maybe it’s time for a change. Maybe it’s time to pull up whatever was stuffed down and unclog my intuition.”
“I thought you said that people can’t change.” She looks at me now and smiles.
“Don’t listen to me.” I smile back. “Don’t you know that I’ve lost my mind?”
“God, I haven’t road-tripped
it since sophomore year in college, right after I dropped out,” Anderson says, situating himself inside the driver’s side of the SUV we rented at Hertz on Monday morning. The car smells like old cigarette smoke masked by lemon air freshener, and under other circumstances, I might have complained and demanded a new one, but this is not before, and as Samantha said, I am trying not to make this about everything. That when you tumble from the clouds and slay the odds of surviving, maybe the little things can’t matter as much. So I strap on my seat belt, holding my breath, and eventually my senses adjust and I stop noticing what was so offensive—the stomach-churning mix of nicotine and manufactured citrus—in the first place.
“Where’d you go,” I ask, “on your trip?”
“Packed up my old Volvo and shot from Poughkeepsie to L.A. with my fraternity brother.” He laughs, remembering whatever it is that he’s remembering—the crappy hotel rooms, the waitress he bedded from the truck stop, the flat tire outside of Salt Lake City. “Jesus, I should call my buddy and say hi.” He shakes his head and says, more to himself than to me, “I haven’t spoken to him in forever.”
“I can’t remember if I’ve ever road-tripped it,” I say to him. “So we’ll call this virgin territory.”
“And Rory? Is she coming?”
“No.”
He nods, getting it. That there are some things to let go, and others not to. There are lines to be drawn, and maybe this is my line. Maybe, even though I did indeed tumble from the clouds and slew the odds of surviving, it doesn’t mean that I can’t feel bruised when sucker punched, turn the other cheek and refuse to look back.
“Don’t be angry at her forever,” he says, turning the key, the engine responding with its hum.
“Says the guy with the emotional gravitas of a fly.”
“Says the guy who never let himself get too invested because it’s easier not to,” he says. “But easy isn’t always better.” I can tell that he is thinking of his old roommate, and how life was less complicated back then. Just the open road and the prospect of Los Angeles. And he is thinking how he’d like so much to pull into a truck stop with his old friend right now and not deal with the complications and the grief that this life has brought to both of us. What had Samantha said back in the hospital?
Sometimes, I wish we could be twenty-one again.
Only at twenty-one, I wasn’t who I wanted to be at all.
“So why not call your friend? It’s not too late.”
“Maybe I will. I lost track of everyone once things took off for me,” he says, clicking the blinker and turning out of the garage onto Broadway, then navigating over toward West End and the highway south. “Where exactly are we headed?”
“South. Just drive south.” The truth is I’m not entirely sure where we’re headed. Charlottesville. That I know. The rest, I’m winging. My phone buzzes in my back pocket, and I shift to pull it out.
“Jamie,” I say to Anderson, then click the Decline button, the
country-western ring that Peter had customized for me swallowed up in an instant.
“I’m not going to say, ‘I told you so,’ in case you were waiting for it.” He smiles.
“You can say it regardless.”
“But I’m not. You trusted your hunch, went for it. You didn’t know. It was like sheep to the slaughter. He and Paige, they just knew better.”
“But my hunch wasn’t right.”
“That doesn’t mean that it was entirely wrong, either.” He veers onto the highway and flips down the sun visor. “He helped you get what you needed. Answers, whether or not they were welcome.”
“Well, once you get past the various ways he manipulated me, I suppose this is true.”
“So get past it,” he says. “There are other things anyway. Don’t give him your energy when you need it for so many other things.”
I squeeze his shoulder. “My own personal Buddha.”
“I’m trying,” he says, “you know, trying to be that better person we swore we would be.” He glances over his shoulder to change lanes. “And what about Peter? Word from him?”
I exhale. I so very much want to make this trip not about Peter, not have anything to do with Peter. If I could, I would pretend that he didn’t exist entirely, that I hadn’t betrothed myself to him, that I hadn’t carried his baby though no one was the wiser. In fact, I realize, I would very much like to forget him in the way that my amnesia has made me forget everything else. The irony isn’t lost on me, nor is the fact that Liv would be telling me that my desire to forget him is the very problem in the first place.
“No, no word,” I say quietly.
In fact, Peter will return to the apartment tonight to find the stack
of his e-mails—I’d gone back to his laptop after promising Samantha that I would let it go—and discovered them deep in the bowels of his deleted files. His disgusting, love-professing, sex-stinking e-mails—printed in a concise stack on our dining table. He will find his closet empty—in a frenzied state of what Anderson deemed “terrifying, tornadic Zen” on Saturday night—I stuffed the bulk of his clothes down the garbage chute in the hall, and he would find a concise note in my handwriting, a pathetic summation of this whole debacle: the past few years of our marriage, the past few months of my life.
Dear Peter:
We’re done. I’ll be gone through Thanksgiving. Be gone when I’m back. That will give me something to be thankful for.
Nell
My phone rings again—that grating country-western clang—and I remind myself to change it. My mother. Rory has surely reported the carnage back to her by now.
I press the phone to my ear, immediately regretting it.
“I have been trying to reach you since yesterday!” she says, a little too hysterically. “Rory told me what happened, and I want to come into the city and talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to talk about, Mother,” I say. Anderson tweaks the radio down a volume peg, but I wave my hand at him, telling him to turn it the hell back up. This won’t take long. “And besides, I’m not in the city.”
“Well, where are you? I’ll come there, to wherever you are!”
“I’m on my way south,” I say. Enough of an answer that she’ll know, she’ll intuit it.
There is a long pause in which I imagine her screaming inside her brain, and I smile at the idea, of giving it back to her as good as she gave it to me. Even though I know that I can’t make this about everything. But as with Rory, yes, there are some things I need to make it about.
“How can you possibly think this is a good idea?” she says, finding her voice. “This can’t end well, and you shouldn’t go chasing skeletons who don’t want to be chased.”
“This isn’t about their skeletons,” I say. “It’s about mine. About getting the answers I should have asked for a long time ago.”
“Look, Nelly Margaret, I think that you’re fragile and unbalanced right now with the news about Peter, and
I really do not think this is advisable!
Have you spoken to your therapist about this? Thought about the consequences?” She is spiraling now. “Because these things can’t be undone! I’ve been there. Why won’t you listen to me? These things that you’re doing, they’ll change everything! And you have no idea what that means, what that’s capable of.”
“Mother, don’t you get it?” I say, when she has exhausted herself, knowing full well that she both gets it—that’s the part that haunts her—and doesn’t get it at all. “The change, the blowing everything wide open: that is the point entirely.”
My body,
despite being virtually healed, can’t stay frozen for too long, so we break for the afternoon outside Washington at a roadside diner that Anderson says reminds him of his college trip.
“Only then, we’d order six beers and split the cheapest toast and eggs, and call it our meal for the day.”
“Other than the cheap toast, what’s different?” I say, scanning the menu.
His forehead wrinkles as he mulls this over.
“I’m trying”—he sets down his own menu—“trying to grow up. I think it might be time.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Twenty-eight is way too early to grow up,” I say, then grin.
“Another fair point. One more, and you’ll turn me into a monk for life.”
The waitress whose hair is overly crimped and who has saggy breasts and a sad-looking face that reminds me of a basset hound wanders over to take our order. She does a double take at Anderson the way that people do when they recognize you but can’t decide if they should publicly acknowledge it, and her cheeks turn even pinker under her unnatural swath of wet ’n’ wild blush.
I have the French toast, Anderson the waffles and fruit bowl, and then I pull out my father’s sketchbook. After I nearly destroyed it, tearing out the front half of the pages, I’ve barely even taken notice of it. I laid in wait, hoping that other people would deliver some sort of answer, some sort of salvation that was never going to come. Now, it’s time to dig deeper, peel back the skin on my own, even if it means incurring some scars.