Carter,
His name and a comma, as if Link had planned to go on but didn’t, wanted to give Carter an explanation and then didn’t find it necessary. Link is gone, and Carter is alone. Alone, all alone.
He’s alone.
It crashes over him like panic, like panic but emptier, like despair but sharper. Carter claps a hand over his heart and reminds his ribs to expand and his lungs to pull air and his heart to slow. He’s fine. He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine.
Still frozen at the side table with the notepad clutched in one hand, Carter looks at his feet to center himself and spots a blue hair tie that’s been dropped between the bed and the table. It’s the blue hair tie Link used last night. It could have been a dream, the whole thing, if not for these two last, insignificant points connecting him to Link. In his suitcase, the cottage birdhouse is tucked safely away. He has the room for the night; he could stay and see the things he missed by himself. He could.
Instead, Carter books a new flight home, pays the exorbitant cost for something leaving today as soon as possible, and then calls for a cab and packs the rest of his things.
“Paige?” Carter wheels his suitcase behind him with his phone tucked between his ear and shoulder. “I’m coming back tonight and I need you to do me a favor.” When Paige replies that she won’t do anything without getting something herself first, he’s ready, because of course she won’t. The door slams behind him. Carter walks to the elevator. “I’ll go out with your friend,” he says.
It’s over, really over. All of it. It’s time for Carter to move on.
Fourteen
Over the next two weeks, Carter finds that, if he sleeps with his legs dangling off the end of the cramped two-seater couch in his office, he doesn’t wake up with a crick in his neck. It takes a good ten minutes for the pins and needles in his legs to dissipate, but at least he can turn his neck from side to side without excruciating pain.
Carter sits up on the couch before dawn, his routine now, stretching aching muscles and rubbing his shins. His office has one narrow window running along the top of one wall. There was a time he was proud of earning this office with that window, a moment when he’d picked out this hard, gray-blue couch from a corporate catalogue and thought: Yes, this is what I want. Wincing at a sharp pain in his back as he stands to face the day, Carter no longer knows who that guy was—the one who chose this couch and this office, who was satisfied with this particular drab lot in life—but he is really starting to hate him.
It’s snowing. It’s the first day of March. Just to torture himself, Carter checks the weather in New Orleans; it is sunny with a high in the mid-seventies. Of course. Carter changes into the last outfit in a duffel bag that’s been shoved into a bottom drawer of his desk and sneaks out of the office building before the day starts for anyone else.
“It’s like you’re trying to be as pathetic as possible.”
He’d asked three small favors of Paige: to let him do laundry and shower at her place, to keep her opinions about his personal life to herself, and to not tell anyone that he’s been sleeping at his office. Two out of three was more than he was expecting of her.
“I’m just trying to—”
“Figure out your next steps, yeah, yeah. On that note…”
Paige and Carter are a matching set: brown hair and brown eyes and dimpled smiles, two years apart almost exactly. As kids they were always dressed in coordinating outfits for their yearly family portrait, smiling innocently, two precious cherubs, as if they didn’t spend every other waking hour at each other’s throats. Matching in looks, they are opposite in personality, even now, in their late twenties. In darker moments, Carter sometimes hopes he’ll go bald, if only to stop looking so much like Paige.
Paige works as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company and spends her weekends hanging with her “girls,” who all dress and act eerily like her: a Borg collective of black leggings and puffy vests and hair styled in beachy waves. And that’s one reason, among many other reasons, that Carter has no interest in dating any of them. However, he does owe her, and she hasn’t yet poured bleach onto any of his clothes.
Paige hops up onto the dryer, blocking his efforts to load his clothes with her crossed legs. He scowls at her, but she’s on her phone and mostly ignoring him. “You should finally go out with Meredith tomorrow. She’s been very patient, Carter.” He shoves her legs aside to throw in a pile of wet clothes. “Like, she actually likes you and still wants to go out with you even though you’re homeless.”
“I am not homeless!” Carter yanks the next load out of the washer too quickly; three socks plop onto the floor. “I just don’t feel like going home.”
“You know he called me. Matt.” Paige glances up from texting; she’s baiting him.
“Good for Matt.” Carter slams the dryer door shut. Paige tucks her legs out of the way just in time, gives him a dark look, and jumps down.
“You are so immature, Carter,” she says, as if her own maturity didn’t peak in the seventh grade. Carter repeats her in a mocking tone. She rolls her eyes. “Fine, be immature and alone for the rest of your life; see if I care,” Paige walks into her bedroom, texting as she goes.
“Fine, I will!” Carter shouts after her. The bedroom door slams. Carter blows out a breath and drops onto her couch, which is large and comfortable and soft, but he’d rather sleep on a bed of nails than ask Paige if he can stay with her. He can’t storm out, though, not until his clothes are done, so he flips through a Cosmo and waits. In two weeks, he’s done almost everything he needs to do in order to extricate what very little is left of his own life from his life with Matthew: The joint bank account has been closed, the wedding cancelled, and his sizable portion of the wedding and honeymoon fund is now in a savings account; everyone at work knows; their friends know; and their friends have chosen a side, and it’s not Carter’s. In the story of true love finally winning out, Carter was dispensable, a bump in the road.
And to Link, he was—what? Was he anything at all?
Paige swishes out of her bedroom and into the kitchen, bangs around, and then shouts from inside the pantry, “Let’s go get Mexican food! I need a margarita or four.” She laughs hysterically at her own joke.
Carter rolls his eyes, then stumbles on an article titled, “These Couples Get Real About Wedding Night Sex!” He closes the magazine. “I’ll go out with Meredith tomorrow.”
“Thank god,” Paige says, struggling into thigh-high, fur-lined, suede snow boots. They look brand new. A lot of the shoes piled in the closet look brand new. “You can finally disappoint her, and she’ll stop talking about how cute you are and making me gag.”
Carter retrieves his own sensible, functional waterproof boots, ties the laces, stands, and waits with an eyebrow raised and arms crossed while Paige continues to try to get one foot in one boot. “It snowed three inches, Paige. It’s not the tundra.”
“Your face is the tundra,” she replies, then cheers when she finally conquers one ridiculous boot. “So, Tapas Tapas or La Casita? My treat.”
* * *
He does not have a terrible time on his date with Meredith. Actually, it’s quite nice. She works in event planning, so they have a great time comparing out-of-touch and impossible-to-please nightmare clients all through dinner at a decent Italian place. When the conversation turns to his recent breakup, she’s sympathetic and nonjudgmental.
“All I got in my divorces were the dogs and lawyer fees.” Meredith tips back another glass of red wine. “Well, that and a lifetime of bitterness. Trust me, you dodged a bullet.”
“Maybe,” Carter says, swirling his own wine around in the glass. “What I’m struggling with now is, how can I ever trust my own feelings again? What does love even look like?”
Meredith laughs, “Love is bullshit. And so are prenups if your lawyer sucks.” She clinks their glasses, then holds hers aloft for
another refill.
Later, Carter walks her to her front porch to say goodnight. “I had a good time,” he says, standing one step down. He wouldn’t mind hanging out again.
Fishing her keys from her purse, Meredith holds his gaze and says, “It doesn’t have to end yet.” She bites her bottom lip. Her dogs yap incessantly behind the closed door.
“Oh,” Carter says. “Uh.” She’s attractive, though there isn’t really a spark, not like with Link. Not that the spark with Link mattered much in the end. He could. He could just sleep his way through enough not-terrible, attractive-enough dates until he can no longer remember what it was like to be with Link or Matthew. If love is bullshit, then what does it matter?
“I—actually, I have to work on some scale models tomorrow. Gonna take all day, so.” It wouldn’t be right to use Meredith like that. Also, the dogs are already giving him a headache. “Thanks for the nice evening; we should do it again.” He half-jogs, half-walks down the driveway.
He still believes in love, despite everything, because he’s a fool. And, driving back to spend another night sleeping on the horrible, tiny couch in his office, Carter knows without a doubt that he is exactly as pathetic as Paige says he is.
Fifteen
Every night the security guard for the office building watches Carter spread a pillow and blanket on the couch in his office, and every night Carter watches the security guard smoke a joint in the breezeway outside his window. He likes to think they have an unspoken agreement, or else the security guard simply does not give a shit. Tonight, Carter sits on the edge of his desk, his head in his hands, his mind spinning.
There’s a knock. “You were out late tonight.” The security sticks his head in the door like a concerned father, though he is definitely younger than Carter and definitely stoned. His name tag says Stan.
“Yeah, I had a date,” Carter replies, unsure why he’s explaining himself to Stan the stoned security guard. Across from his desk is a shelf, and in the middle of his books on architecture Carter has placed the New Orleans cottage birdhouse that Link gave him. The yellow and blue and green stand out against the neutral color scheme in his office. Every time the house catches Carter’s eye, which is often, a bright warmth flushes through Carter’s body.
“Hey, Stan,” Carter calls as Stan starts to leave. “Do you happen to have another one of those joints?”
The small, high windows turn out to be very convenient for blowing smoke outside until the joint is down to just the roach, and Carter sprawls on the floor. Stan lies back across Carter’s desk, making a mess of his files and the plans he was working on. Carter is floating, untethered from reality. This is what he’s been most afraid of admitting, that he’s directionless and drifting. It’s not that he’s figuring out what to do next as he told Paige; it’s that he has no next. He can’t go home, because the condo no longer is home. He doesn’t want to get a new place here, because he doesn’t want to be here. Carter belongs nowhere and with no one. He really is a fool. Just like the fool on the tarot card he filched from a fortune-teller while blitzed on absinthe.
“The thing is,” Carter says, as if they were in the middle of a conversation, “I wasn’t just lonely. If I was lonely and just wanted that, I could be doing that with Meredith right now.” He checks the time, then amends, “I could have done that with Meredith.”
“True,” Stan says, as if he knows exactly what Carter is talking about. Maybe he does. Maybe they’re connecting on some higher wavelength. Higher. Carter giggles, then continues, “But Link’s messed up, and I’m messed up, and—left at the altar. That’s heavy.” Carter can physically feel the weight pressing on him, hitting him over and over in the chest. Oh, wait, no. That’s his heart, hammering frantically.
Carter sits up, and the room spins. He can feel his pulse through his whole body. “But I was just a fling for Link because they needed to get over Jamie. I have to accept that. Everyone just takes what they need from ol’ Carter, and then they just toss me aside. Doesn’t matter what I want. That’s just who I am, Toss Aside Carter.” This sad fact strikes him as hilarious, and he and Stan laugh and laugh until Stan turns suddenly sober, gets off the desk, and yanks Carter to his feet.
“Listen. Look. Listen, dude.” He jabs Carter in the chest and it reverberates like a sonic boom through Carter’s body. “Before I got this job, I worked as a mall cop, right. And when I took this job, everyone thought I was nutso, right? They were all, ‘Stan, you’ve got it made! You got a Segway. Pepper spray and mace. You can get a hot dog on a stick anytime you want.’ No one got why I wanted this job instead. And it got to me.” He taps his own temple. “Like I couldn’t believe my own self anymore. But they were wrong. I got it made here. More money, I’m basically my own boss. I got a taser. You understand what I’m saying?”
Carter shakes his head slowly. “No.” His brain is sloshing around inside his skull. “No, I do not.”
Stand holds Carter’s face between his hands, squishing his cheeks. “I am saying…” He says, then squints. “What was I saying…”
With his head held at this angle, Carter is staring right at the birdhouse cottage, vibrant even in his dark, dull office.
“Oh!” Stan says, squishing Carter’s cheeks even harder. “I was saying, sometimes you gotta listen to that little voice that’s guiding you somewhere. Listen to yourself; forget everyone else. Forget what they want. What do you want, uh… I dunno your name.”
Do what I want. What does he want? He can’t look away from the birdhouse. What is the birdhouse trying to tell him? What is his name? He gasps, eyes wide, and grips Stan’s wrists. “Carter. My name is Carter, and I know what I want. I gotta go.”
His decision could probably wait until tomorrow instead of occurring at midnight, which it is by the time Carter sobers up enough to drive. But it feels urgent and silly, too, that he’s put it off for two weeks. It’s just that this is it, the final break. Once he does this, he has no choice but to accept that he has to start over somehow. Until a little while ago, thanks to Stan and half a joint, he didn’t know what starting over meant for him. Now he’ll be starting his brand-new life on his own terms. And he knows exactly where.
Carter takes a breath, turns his key in the lock, and doesn’t exhale until he can see that the condo is quiet and dark and no one is home. Looking around as if he’s never been here before, he sets his keys and phone on the counter. Someone has been packing without him; boxes are stacked along the walls in the kitchen, dining area, and living room. Some of the furniture is covered with moving sheets. Some of it is gone.
Paige texts him while he’s looking through the cabinets. The cups are all packed. The plates and bowls are not. He starts a new box.
Paige: I told u to disappoint Mer not piss her off >:{
He types back: Packing up my old place right now. Didn’t want to sleep with Meredith.
Paige: EW TMI
Carter rolls his eyes and ignores the rest of her texts until he’s finished packing the kitchen. It feels good. Necessary. He moves on to the bedroom after grabbing his phone from the counter and continues to ignore the texts from his sister that are still coming in, rapid-fire. He opens the door and stops short. The bedroom is mostly untouched; just the bookshelves are empty. The bed is even made up. Have they been here? Carter wonders. Have they been sleeping in this bed, together, the same one Carter and Matthew used to share?
Carter banishes the thought. He’s not here for Matthew; he’s here for himself. Carter packs the rest of his clothes. It will be nice to not wear the same six outfits anymore. The top middle drawer is filled with stray ties and handkerchiefs, a box of condoms, and a pair of suspenders he never wears. Behind that is the random stuff that was collected over the life of his relationship with Matthew. His phone goes off again, and again, and again. Paige’s texts read:
Matt is so ugh
Mer is very open minded. JSYK
Just tell Matt 2 f off and b done w it
Or I will
ANSWER ME
CARTER
Mer’s last boyfriend was gay
And then three devil emojis flash on his screen, all sent one at a time. With a heavy sigh, Carter texts back: No! Don’t tell Matthew anything and Please stop texting like a twelve-year-old. Her second-to-last text is so obnoxious, and confusing, he doesn’t even know where to start.
Carter silences his phone, then scans all the items he stuck in this drawer during his seven years with Matthew, stuff he didn’t know what do to with then and doesn’t know what to do with now: show programs and concert tickets, ribbons from marathons they completed together, anniversary cards, photos, a vial of sand—
“Carter.”
Matthew is standing in the doorway. Carter blinks, then turns away, goes into the attached bathroom to get a trash can, and says nothing as he grabs the items that are attached to so many memories and throws them by the fistful into the trash.
“Remember that?” Matthew says, coming closer. “The sand. St. Barts, that was fun. Remember, on the beach, how we—”
“Don’t,” Carter says. He throws the sand vial extra hard into the trash can.
“Carter, come on.” Matthew turns on the bedroom light; it makes Carter want to hiss and slither into a dark corner. He was supposed to be unburdening himself of this place, and of Matthew, alone. Matthew comes closer again. “Can’t we be civil?”
“Civil.” Carter snorts and tosses another handful of junk. “That’s all we ever were, Matthew. Polite. Reasonable. Fucking—civil.”
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