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Say Say Say

Page 13

by Lila Savage


  And so, she found herself at his door, her stomach in knots. Ella expected him still to be grieving, but she also trusted that he had turned some kind of corner. When he opened the door, it was clear that this was both true and untrue. The tension was, if not gone, different. It felt like the ruins after a terrific storm, when it was still unclear what might be salvaged from the wreckage. There was his face, his wonderful face, all of the smile lines that had once creased and warmed her days, there was the essence of him, so different from remembering the essence of him, she felt his presence in front of her and she also felt it inside her. It was different because he could see her and she could feel seen, feel recognized if not known. It was lovely and it was unsettling. Ella embraced him as she began to panic. She tried to talk herself down—she could still be vague. She could still leave things unsaid, resolve to visit more often in a friendly manner. She wasn’t locked in.

  They sat on the couch in the afternoon sunshine and spoke about how Jill was, and Ella’s new job, and how Bryn was doing, although in no meaningful detail. Ella noted, almost bewildered, how little the room had changed. Even the sunbeam was the same sunbeam; even the lamps remained absent. Bryn thanked her for all she had done. Ella said, “I can’t help feeling like I should have done more,” which was something people say. People say they should have done more and often they mean that they wish what they’d actually done had helped more. Bryn had likely encountered this before, developed his own abrupt, blank-faced reassurances to use again and again, and he started to you-were-great her, to there’s-nothing-to-regret her. Ella interrupted.

  “I feel like I need to say this,” she said, and he waited. Her hands were icy and damp, and her abdominal muscles were all tightened. She didn’t know if Bryn was looking at her, because she was looking at her feet and at the window and at the room’s single plant, glossily unchanged. And then she looked at him and he was looking at her but she could read nothing in his face except for stillness and the stillness seemed almost unreachable. Almost, but perhaps not completely.

  “I think I did a, well, an adequate job as an employee,” she said. “I did, most of the time, what I was asked. I failed on a few fronts, but we were still feeling out my role together. And I think I should have been more intuitive about what you reasonably needed but didn’t ask for, especially once I figured out you weren’t the sort of man who asks for more help easily.” It felt strange to refer to him this way, as a man—as a sort of man, a type to be classified. It felt distancing, he was an a and not the, not the friend in question, not her friend, her Bryn. She felt compelled to be specific now, to be vulnerable in her specificity. Anything general could be dismissed as further politeness, the politeness of expressing regret. To be polite in that manner she needn’t have come—a card, a note with flowers would have sufficed. Discomfort had brought her here, she realized, not a desire to comfort and be comforted. Perhaps the discomfort was penance, although it wasn’t merely that. It was a last offering of real closeness, of her real self.

  She paused.

  “I’ve been thinking, I wish I would have cleaned the bathroom.” Bryn frowned reflexively, dismissively, but Ella continued: “I wish I would have brought over dinner. I wish I would have hugged you the day your mother died.” Ella sighed shakily. She shivered a little, just as she had back when she and Alix used to argue late into the night, it was as if the intensity of feeling ate up all her heat, left her teeth chattering and her shoulders stiff with chill. They seldom fought now. They were happier together now than they’d known they could be, back in those more difficult times when they’d first moved in together. Ella looked around the terribly familiar room. She looked into Bryn’s familiar gaze and echoed her words from earlier, “I did an adequate job as an employee, but I didn’t do well by you as a”—here she paused again—“a friend. I was afraid. I thought I was afraid of overstepping my role, of making you uncomfortable, because you’re so private.” This statement again felt impersonal, distancing. What did she really know about his character, his tendencies? In her head she’d sometimes felt she was an expert on him; at other times she’d found him unknowable. He maybe didn’t apply that word to himself, private, especially where she was concerned. She had seen those swollen wrists, that scabbing skin. She had seen the deflated bed pillows. She had seen his face and his hands, and he’d seen hers. Perhaps calling him private could even be considered a kind of mockery, he’d had so little privacy, like suggesting he’d stood naked with his hands uselessly clasped to cover his groin, curled in wretchedly to hide himself when so much was already on display.

  “Maybe those fears were fair,” she said, “but I’ve realized that, for me, they were only excuses. I was afraid of the weight of your burden.” That sounded stilted, possibly stilted and resentful—so formal! And also perhaps the word he’d least wanted to identify with through all that had occurred. He would have feared being burdensome, he must have, she knew. But how else to express what she felt?

  “I wanted a safe remove, I didn’t want to feel too much of your sadness,” she said. “I don’t know how to say this. I did feel your sadness, but—” She winced a little at the presumption that she could have known, even to a degree, his suffering. “I mean, I was in this house, and, well, something was happening to you. But something was happening to me, too, this was my life for a time, too, a part of my life, and I had to keep it from flooding me. I thought I had to. But maybe I was wrong. I think I owed you more. I could have carried more of what you carried. I know I could have.”

  “You didn’t owe me any of that,” Bryn said, the patience in his tone and even the gentleness a barrier like age.

  Ella started to cry. “I’m sorry,” she choked out. “This is embarrassing.” Bryn shifted his gaze away uncomfortably, although there was concern in his brow and in the way he held himself, neither open nor newly closed.

  “I don’t want to be the sort of person who does what’s safe. I want to do what’s kind.” Ella had wanted to say “what’s loving,” but she lost her nerve and, anyway, this suddenly seemed dangerously near to being about her, about salvaging her character, and she hadn’t meant it like that. She didn’t mean she wished she were more kind. She meant she wanted to be ferocious in her kindness. She wasn’t asking Bryn to believe that she was a better person than she appeared; she was asking him to see the spirit of her aspirational self and even her aspirational world.

  “Ella,” he said, “you are very kind. I don’t know why you’re being so hard on yourself.”

  Ella calmed her voice and said, “I didn’t come here for reassurance, Bryn.” She so rarely said his name aloud that it felt almost an endearment, and she was aware of how girlish her voice sounded saying it. She didn’t want to seem coy, and this wasn’t working, whatever she was doing. How to change it? Frustrated, she said, “It’s like I skimped on the cut of meat to make sure I had enough for the flowers. I just wish I’d cleaned the bathroom, that’s all! I wish I had. I wish I’d had to clean the bathroom, that something inside me had demanded it. Something inside me did demand it but I didn’t listen. What was I saving my hands for? To hold yours? You didn’t want them held.” She choked this through tears and thought wildly for a moment he would reach for her hand to disprove it, but he didn’t. Their moment had passed, if it had ever really occurred. He was almost broken with fatigue, but he was no longer drowning. He was in a sad but reasonable place, a clear vantage point from which to take in their substantial age difference and all of the unwelcome complications it entailed.

  Ella smeared at her tears with her hands and laughed ruefully. “Anyway,” she said, and he touched her shoulder briefly, silently, and then he said, with his familiar shielding cheer, “It’s clean now!” She laughed obligingly to help shift the mood. They rose in near unison and walked to the door together and he handed her an envelope of money, a thank-you bonus. She had intended to say, as she left, what she had truly come to say:
“I wish I could have loved you better,” but with the money in her hand it felt impossible. “See you around,” she said, and she walked down the steps into the street.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With many thanks to my family: Iva, Lynn, Robin, Hannah, Solveig, and Evelyn, and to my mentors, Elizabeth Tallent and Lan Samantha Chang. I’d also like to thank my agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, and my editors, Robin Desser and Hannah Westland. Much gratitude to my early readers and supporters: Andy Axel; Brian Ball; Ryan Bradley; John Carroll; Ann Cash; Karen Chapek; Tameka Cage Conley; Barb Davis; Dave Drummond; Ben, Sophie, and Sam Elwood; Steven Fletcher; Benjamin Flowers; Malcolm Gilmour; Mallory Hellman; Kelene Koval; Mark Labowskie; Gabriella Levine; Martin Markowitz; Ben Miyamoto; Navid Mohseni; Siyanda Mohutsiwa; Michelle Morby; Ottessa Moshfegh; Daniel Nazer; Okwiri Oduor; Kate Petersen; Ed Porter; Carissa Potter; Peter Rachleff; Josephine Rowe; Kari Rudd; Earl Schwartz; Lewis Simpler; Susie Steinbach; Michael Swiderski; Jackie Thomas-Kennedy; and Tobias Wolff. This book wouldn’t exist without the generous support of Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as well as the Michener-Copernicus Society, James Patterson, and the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Finally, thank you to the clients and families I’ve worked with over the years—I have learned so much from you.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lila Savage is originally from Minneapolis. Prior to writing fiction, she spent nearly a decade working as a caregiver. She is a recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review. She lives in San Francisco.

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