The Art of Losing

by Lizzy Mason

  “Don’t ever die on me,” I said. Mom and Audrey nodded solemnly.

  Then I looked at Dad, who said, “Have you heard the one about the three-legged pig?”

  I nodded and smiled. “Too good to eat all at once.”

  He winked and went back to reading his newspaper.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I sat through the rest of the meeting, but I barely heard a word of what anyone said. I kept replaying in my mind the story Raf had told about being found passed out, drunk and high, nearly dead. I didn’t know that version of him, and it scared me that that part of his life was so recent. It was still, and always would be, a part of who he was. And if I was his girlfriend, if we stayed together, it would always be a part of mine, too.

  I had no plans to start drinking heavily or doing drugs, but hadn’t I always imagined a champagne toast at my wedding? Hadn’t I planned to go to parties and drink at college? Would I be giving up too much of my early adulthood if I stayed home or went to meetings with Raf instead of having drinks with my friends at happy hour? What would we do on New Year’s Eve?

  I was spinning out, completely panicking, by the time the hour came to a close. I could see Raf sneaking glances at me as we walked outside and while he stopped to smoke a cigarette. I kept my hands in my pockets and my mouth closed as Raf smoked and as he led me to the car. I climbed in silently.

  “Are you okay?” he asked me as we pulled out of the church parking lot.

  I nodded. “Yeah, I’m just . . . processing.”

  “You look like you have a thousand questions and they’re piling up so fast that they’re choking you.”

  I managed a tight-lipped smile, and Raf looked relieved.

  “I just . . . didn’t know all of that. About you,” I said. “I knew you went to rehab, but honestly? I thought you were more like Mike, drinking on weekends and smoking weed sometimes. I feel stupid that I didn’t put it together.”

  Raf was quiet for a minute and I could see his jaw working anxiously while he thought. “Are you disappointed?” he asked softly.

  “No!” I said automatically, but I wasn’t really so certain. “I was just surprised.”

  He scoffed. “That’s convincing,” he said. He turned to me as we pulled up to a red light just outside our neighborhood. “Harley, that’s why I agreed to bring you tonight. I needed you to know that this sobriety thing isn’t a fun new group of people to hang out with; it’s not about the parties or the all-nighters at the diner, and it’s not just smoking cigarettes outside at meetings and goofing off. It’s going to be a struggle for the rest of my life.”

  We pulled up in front of his house, but he didn’t look at me as he turned the car off. “I want to be with you, but I don’t blame you for pulling away and not being sure about me. I need you to really think about what being with me could do to your life. I’m not always a happy person. I get depressed and surly, and sometimes it’s really hard to get out of those moods. I could be a ticking time bomb.”

  His words rolled over us like a fog. Finally, I opened the door and walked around to his side.

  “I understand,” I said. And I leaned in and kissed him, just in case it was the last time, breathing in his familiar smell that reminded me of home-cooked meals and movie nights on the couch. “Just give me a little time to process.”

  Raf nodded with a solemn, single tilt of his head. “Okay,” he said.

  I walked back to the house in a daze and proceeded to pace its silent rooms restlessly. Floyd followed me for a while, from kitchen to basement to bedroom, before he grew tired and curled up at the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted to fix things, to do something, but I didn’t know what or how.

  I wished Audrey were home. Mom and Dad were early-to-bed types, but I could always count on Audrey to be awake late into the night if I was ever bored or couldn’t sleep. Now, almost two months into her hospital stay, it still felt weird not to hear the low murmur of the TV show or movie she was watching or the creak of the floorboards beneath her feet while she roamed the house at night. Without thinking, I picked up the phone and called her.

  She answered right away, sounding wide awake. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Audy,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Pretty good, considering,” she said. “You?”

  I sighed into the phone so she could hear it.

  “That bad?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m a mess,” I confessed. And I told her about Raf’s relapse and going to the meeting with him. What I had learned, and realized, about what a relationship with him could be like.

  “Wow,” she murmured.

  “This is why I don’t take chances. I just know disappointment will follow.”

  She scoffed dismissively. “That’s a ridiculous philosophy.”

  “I know that,” I said. “But it was working for me.”

  “Really?” she asked. She knew the answer as well as I did.

  “I don’t want to get hurt again,” I confessed.

  “Of course you don’t.”

  “Fine, but what do I do? I mean, you watch all those movies about love and finding The One, and now I’ve watched them, too, and . . . I just don’t get it. It all just seems so hard. There’s always so much heartbreak that goes into finding the happy ending.”

  She laughed softly. “Maybe it’s naïve,” she said, “but I just feel like it has to be worth the pain or there wouldn’t be so many movies made about love, you know?”

  “But when do you know it’s worth taking that risk?”

  “I wish that I knew,” Audrey said, sounding wise beyond her years. “But I think there are too many people in this world for it to be impossible to find someone you want to be with for the rest of your life. I mean, people are friends for years, right? Some people are friends their whole lives. And that’s not an obligation. There’s no marriage certificate or ceremony.”

  I thought of Neema and wondered if she and Audrey really could remain friends. I’d hate to see their friendship end when it clearly meant so much to them both.

  And I thought of Cassidy, who I loved like a sister, who I probably wouldn’t be friends with if we had met later in our lives, but who I would do anything for.

  Audrey kept talking, amazingly at length and with very little slurring. “I also think it’s better to have loved and lost, you know? I just think everyone should get to experience that happiness, even if there’s a chance it might lead to heartbreak.” She was silent for a second, but when I didn’t answer, she went on. “Do you want to be with Raf badly enough to take the chance that it might not end well? That you might go through what you’ve been through with Mike all over again?”

  I was quiet. It was the same question that Cassidy had asked, but now it held much more weight.

  “You still there?” she whispered.

  “I’m here,” I answered. “I’m just wondering how you ever got so much smarter than me.”

  “Ha! I’ve always been smarter than you. You just refused to see it.”

  “Maybe,” I said, allowing her to get away with it.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Audrey said.

  “I know. Because I don’t think I can. And not because I don’t love Raf, I do. It’s because I don’t think I’d let myself get treated the way Mike treated me again. If Raf wants to keep drinking, then I’m out. And it’ll hurt, but not like it would if I kept letting him break my heart over and over again the way Mike did.”

  This time it was Audrey’s turn to be quiet.

  “I love you,” she said finally.

  “I love you, too,” I answered, swallowing the lump in my throat. “Come home soon, okay?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  We said good night and hung up. But I wasn’t ready for bed yet. I dug around under my bed
until I found a half-empty notebook and turned to a blank page. But this time I wasn’t writing angry poetry to submit to the literary magazine. It was a script for a comic. I illustrated it crudely with the worst stick-figure drawings in history, but I hoped it would make Raf laugh, at least.

  I wrote a note and clipped it to the front page of the “comic.” It read:

  Dear Raf,

  I don’t remember the first time I saw you. It felt like you had always been there, at my side. I would have followed you anywhere as long as my hand was in yours.

  You were my first friend. My first kiss. My first broken heart.

  You are my first love. I just didn’t know what love was when I was three.

  I don’t know how to tell if I’m ready, or if you are, or what our future might be. I don’t know if we’ll be happy or if I’ll be enough to pull you from those dark moods. But I know that I don’t want to take the chance of losing you. Of not loving you. I don’t want to dream of a future without you in it.

  Love,

  Harley

  Then I snuck outside, my heart racing, almost hoping that I would run into him. But I put the pages of my scrawlings in the mailbox and dashed back inside on bare feet without encountering so much as a hint of smoke in the air.

  I texted Raf before I could second-guess myself, telling him to check his mailbox.

  And then I waited.

  I didn’t sleep much that night. I couldn’t close my eyes because they were glued to my phone. But Raf didn’t text me back. I hoped he’d called Elaine or Cajun or gone to another meeting. He’d told me there were places, sober clubs, where you could go to a meeting even in the middle of the night.

  I spent the night writing, doing what Dr. Talia suggested, and reliving memories painful and happy, embarrassing and hopeful. And remembering things a little differently, or at least putting some of those memories into perspective.

  Eventually, though, I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up early the next morning and immediately checked my phone for a text from Raf, the screen was black. I nearly sobbed when I realized I’d forgotten to charge it. While I waited for it to charge enough to turn on, I opened the door to my bedroom to go to the bathroom, and on the carpet in the hallway was a manila envelope. A sticky note, in my mom’s handwriting, read:

  Baby duck—

  Found this in the door when I walked Floyd. Didn’t read it. See? We’re both growing.

  The seal was in place, and my name was written on the outside in block letters with several outlines and 3-D effects. It looked like it should have been spray-painted onto a brick wall. I pried it open carefully, trying not to shred the envelope.

  Inside was a small book, ten pages long, crudely made with sketch paper and staples. The title was Addicted to You.

  Raf had illustrated my comic.

  The cover was an image of a hand holding a liquor bottle, but inside, instead of alcohol, was a tiny version of Raf, a perfect illustrated replica—from the crooked smile to the Chuck Taylors.

  The first page of panels showed me and Raf as kids; we were standing under the willow tree in the nature preserve behind our houses. In a close-up, I was holding a My Little Pony in one hand and Raf’s hand in the other. The caption read: it started with a plastic horse. Raf was telling me that we were going to live there forever. I answered that I was going to need a bed because I wouldn’t sleep on dirt. When Raf asked if I’d sleep on a bed made of dirt, I hit him with a long willow branch, leaving a welt across his arm.

  The next page of panels showed our first kiss, on the street in front of our houses. Me, being dared by Allie, followed by me kissing him. The caption above read: we’ve always had bad timing.

  I felt my lips curl into a smile.

  The next page was about us when we were around twelve and thirteen. One panel showed him playing basketball while I walked Floyd in the background. He was missing the shot because he was looking at me. I hadn’t written that part. My script picked back up when I was following him and Paul down the street, flirting. And then I was sitting on the front steps of the house, waiting for him. He was inside with a beer bottle in one hand, a pill bottle in the other.

  Following that was a page of panels about us now. Us sitting together on the garden wall between our houses, smoking. Lying next to each other as fireworks exploded overhead. Sitting in an AA meeting. Fighting outside his back door. I narrated them, as if I was speaking to him from the pages of the comic in each scene.

  “Maybe I don’t understand addiction,” I said. Raf had drawn my ski-slope nose a little too upturned, my ponytail a little too curled, but I looked adorable illustrated in his hand. “I never even got addicted to cigarettes,” I continued. “But I know that I can’t picture my life without you now that you’re back in it. So maybe I’m addicted to you.”

  The last two pages weren’t from my script. The first showed Raf holding my letter, a small lopsided smile on his face, followed by a close-up. The smile had widened. A caption below narrated: i’ve been told that dating could be bad for my recovery. i’m not supposed to replace drugs and alcohol with a person. Above his head, a thought bubble read: “Too late.” Hearts floated in the air around him like butterflies.

  And on the back page of the book was the drawing of me I’d seen in Raf’s book. It took up the entire last page. A note at the bottom said,

  I’ll be here when you’re ready. –R

  My heart was beating so fast, I could hear it like thunder echoing in my head. The rush of relief that we hadn’t screwed everything up, that we were going to really do this, made me dizzy. I put on a bra and threw my hair into a ponytail. I considered changing into something cuter and then remembered Raf had seen me in this exact outfit of yoga pants and a T-shirt so often that he had drawn me wearing it. So I ran down the stairs and out the back door.

  Raf was sitting on the wall, just as he’d said he would be. There were smears of ink on his jeans, his forearms, and across his cheek. When he saw me, my eyes widened like a startled deer and his lips twitched into a small, tentative smile. If this were a romantic comedy, I’d have run into his arms and he’d swing me up gracefully as we kissed. But I wasn’t exactly an agile runner. I would bowl him over trying to leap into his arms.

  “Hi,” I said as I came to a stop in front of him.

  “Hey,” he answered. He had a small smile on his face. He looked like he was trying to keep it from widening. That’s when I realized I didn’t smell smoke.

  “You’re not smoking?” I asked.

  He lifted his sleeve and showed me a nicotine patch. “Trying this out,” he said with practiced nonchalance. All I could think about was how much nicer it would be to kiss him now.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as I sat down next to him. The stone wall was warm under my thighs, but the sun wasn’t completely up yet, so it wasn’t hot enough to burn me.

  He shook his head. “Why would you be sorry?”

  “I’m sorry I’ve kept you guessing. I’m sorry if I made you feel like I didn’t trust you,” I said. “But thank you for putting up with it so I could figure out what I want.”

  “You’re worth it,” he said as he shifted sideways to face me.

  I turned, too, meeting his dark eyes. Trying not to focus on his full lips.

  “I feel like I don’t deserve you,” he said. “You’ve already been through so much with Mike. I don’t want to put you through that again.”

  I reached out my hand and rested it on his. “You’re not Mike,” I said. “You’re sweet, thoughtful, polite, sexy, and about a thousand other things that he’s not. But more than any of that, you’re working on making yourself better. You actually beat yourself up about not working hard enough at being happy. And that’s why I love you. You make me want to be better, too.”

  Raf blushed, deep enough that it was visible even under his tan skin. And befo
re I could worry that I’d blurted out that I loved him, he said, “I love you, too, you know.”

  My heart lifted in my chest and a smile stretched my lips. “You do?”

  He nodded. “Like you said, I didn’t know what it was when I was four; I just knew I wanted to be around you all the time.” The blush spread to the tips of his ears. “I used to invent reasons to be around you. Remember when I told you it was International Hug-A-Friend Day and you had to hug me once an hour?”

  “No!” I said, reaching out to smack him in the arm. “You little perv.”

  He grinned sheepishly. “I’ll discuss it with my therapist.”

  “Maybe I’ll talk about it with mine, too,” I said.

  I laughed when Raf’s eyebrows shot up. “You have a shrink?” he said.

  I nodded. “Yeah. I may not have all the insight you do yet, but she’s been helping.”

  “I’m just so proud,” he said, his hands clasped against his heart. His smile turned mischievous. “What do you say about me in therapy?”

  “Well . . .” I blinked a few times, caught off guard. “I said that I want to be with you, to help you. And my therapist said I shouldn’t try to change you or fix you. She said that I can love you without taking responsibility for your actions.”

  “Mmm,” he said. Then he was quiet for a second. “Do you know the Serenity Prayer?”

  “I sort of remember it,” I said, not sure where this was going.

  “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” Raf recited. “I still have trouble with the ‘God’ part, but the rest makes a lot of sense.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I see that.”

  “There are a lot of things we can’t change. Including what might happen in the future. But change can be a good thing. And I want to change for you. And for me.”

  I nodded, but there was still an anxious knot in my stomach. “Do you think it’s a good idea to ignore what the program says about dating, though?” I asked.