Alone

by Michelle Parise

  When we get home, he puts her to bed and I eavesdrop on their conversation, staccato with laughter. We kiss long and hard at the door when it’s time for him to go.

  “I’ll see you in a few days and we’ll talk,” he says, and I am afraid. Afraid of what this all means or doesn’t mean. Three years ago when I saw him, everything changed in an instant, but it’s been so rocky and painful and confusing since then. I want this anniversary to be happy, I do. I want to let the happiness in, but I don’t know if it’s real this time. “Everything’s going to be okay,” says The Man with the White Shirt, and I only sort of believe him.

  Four days later, I’m at his apartment. He’s acting so strange and I can’t breathe. Or speak. I feel like everything is on the line even though nothing is. I don’t know what he’s going to say and I’ve never felt so frightened of what it might be. You can’t blame me, can you? He’s been unpredictable these past three years, so inconsistent with his push-pull. The way he always keeps his love for me on a retractable leash.

  The Man with the White Shirt is really taking his time now, to say the things he says he needs to say to me. Everything in my body is tense, waiting for the firing gun. And then he says, “I want you to be my girl,” like it’s the fifties, and we’re at the Chock’lit Shoppe and he’s finally picking Betty or Veronica. Still, my insides flip over, my throat constricts.

  “I want to be able to introduce you as my beautiful girlfriend,” he continues.

  “I want you to never have to call me The Not-Boyfriend again.”

  “I love you, and I only want to love you. I don’t want to love anyone else.”

  I say nothing. I say nothing and this scares him because I’m never quiet. But I actually have no words. This isn’t a maybe from The Man with the White Shirt. This is a Fuck Yes! I’ve waited three years for this moment, and I can hardly breathe. And then we kiss so sweetly it is like it’s the fifties and we’re in the Chock’lit Shoppe and he’s chosen Veronica. Obviously.

  I can’t believe this is happening. Especially now. He’s just gotten his dream job with an airline, and in a few days he’s about to leave for flight school and will be gone for the next five weeks. What a weird way to start. I know he’ll retract it, I just know it. In a few days, once he gets there and settled and is surrounded by all those young flight attendants, he’ll realize he’s made a mistake. He’ll change his mind. He’s always changing his mind. Why would this big declaration be any different?

  I take him to the airport to see him off. I remind him he’s going to do great. I give him a small rosary I bought in Vatican City when I was there at the start of summer on my solo adventure. I always travel with a rosary because flying scares me. I don’t trust it, you know? It just seems very unlikely that airplanes are even possible. It’s sorcery. With this job, White Shirt will be flying all the time, sometimes several times a day! This freaks me out, and I make him promise he will always have this little rosary on him when he flies. He promises. We’re both crying as we say goodbye, hugging and kissing at the gate and totally That Couple in the airport.

  For the first few weeks he’s gone, every single day I expect him to call to tell me he’s changed his mind, that he was swept up in the moment of getting his dream job and feeling emotional. I wake up every morning and think, This will be the day. So I say to my friends, “We’ll see! Who knows what’s going to happen. You know White Shirt,” and I shrug and roll my eyes and pretend to be breezy about it. I remain unconvinced. Cautious. Cautiously on Cloud 9, yet again.

  One of Us Cannot Be Wrong

  Dear White Shirt,

  I had a hard time sleeping. I woke up early thinking of heavy and light. How even the heavy can be light, but rarely the other way around. How even clichés are feelings, too.

  I tried to pray last night but for once I didn’t have anything specific to pray about, other than the persistence of fear. I felt unease. I felt so much unknowing. I kept impatiently thinking about patience. The more I thought about trust, the darker it all got. The more I thought about the things you said before you left, the lighter it all got.

  I told you once that we were a fire that burns unattended. I’m really scared and unsure if I’m ready, but I am willing to start tending this fire with you now. Maybe that will make it go out, or maybe it will become the bonfire I always imagined it could be. Maybe I will get burned again, I don’t know. I couldn’t sleep at all last night because of all the I don’t knows, you know?

  I’m not sure I’ve been this uneasy in this whole three years. I’m not sure I’ve been happier. But I’m scared. I’m scared about everything you’ve said because I’m programmed to believe you are unpredictable and fickle. All my caution flags are up.

  This got heavy. My intention was to send you light.

  Will you change your mind? Neither of us can be sure.

  xo,

  mp

  THE OUTLIER

  He doesn’t change his mind. Every single day he messages me or calls me or Skypes. He says, “I love you,” over and over. He tells me how much he misses me, how much he needs me. After five weeks, he returns from flight school and it’s the same. The Man with the White Shirt is finally, actually my boyfriend. We are doing this.

  It exists.

  I can’t believe it. Neither can a lot of people. “It’s like a miracle from The Baby Jesus himself!” says my friend The Bright One. We’re eating take-out Thai food in my apartment with Solo Time and Big Laugh. “The Baby Jesus, riiiiight!” Big Laugh shouts and slaps the table with laughter. She can’t believe it either.

  “Oh, I knew it would happen!” says Solo Time, ever Team White Shirt, and Big Laugh changes her mind. “I thought so, too, I thought so, too! He loves you, I knew it.”

  But love isn’t what’s at question. That he loves me has never been the issue. It’s whether he knows what to do with that love. It’s whether he can manage that love within the parameters he’s set up for himself. And this remains open. It remains to be seen. It keeps me cautious. It keeps my own love at bay. The Bright One kisses her teeth. “It is a damn miracle,” she says, and I can see she’s unconvinced that he’s changed. Still it’s easy to be swept up in it, The New Man with The White Shirt.

  “You would have the cutest mixed-race babies!” says Big Laugh, who is here in a rare moment away from her own mixed-race babies. And then the four of us launch hard into a discussion about using the term mixed-race versus multiracial or biracial. And then how different it is to be biracial but to present white (or white-ish) like The Man with the White Shirt and his sister, versus Big Laugh’s two children who also have a black mom and a white dad, but who present black. We talk about the recent Black Lives Matter movement, what’s happening in our careers, and which Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book is our favourite. We all love her and can’t agree on one book and end up talking about all of them. And that gets us back to race, and romance, and right back to that miracle from The Baby Jesus Himself, The Man with the White Shirt. God, I love my friends.

  Now that the miracle is real, I have to explain to Birdie what it all means. “You guys are going to kiss now?? Ewww,” is what she says, making a disgusted face, because she’s nine, and anything kissy or lovey-dovey is super-gross to her. But all she really cares about is one thing. “Does this mean we get to see him more?!” Her eyes are bright with expectation and I tell her yes, we will see him more and sometimes he might even sleep over. “Awesome!” she says, “Because I love him. He’s so fun.”

  In a closed women’s Facebook group I’m in, someone posts about how awful the dating scene is, how all the men are boys and we’re all doomed to be single forever. And I post back a few words about White Shirt’s change of heart and how you just never know, sometimes when you least expect it, the boy becomes a man. The Matchmaker, who’s become my friend and is also in this group, posts in reply, “Yes, of course, except for White Shirt, THE OUTLIER!!” And this new nickname sticks. The Outlier. It’s perfect. I knew he was better than a
ll the others. I knew he would choose love over wanderlust. I knew he was right for me despite all the wrongs, and that if I loved him hard enough, he’d want to try, for real.

  For the next nine months anyway.

  THE END (AGAIN)

  For nine months, we are a couple. That Couple. The one that looks great together on Instagram. The one that has birthdays five days apart and at the same time blow out the candles on a giant crème brûlée in a hipster bar on a trivia night while the waitress snaps a photo. It’s all so perfect, I could die.

  But we’re also trying to figure it all out. The relationship. It’s so new to both of us, and we aren’t that great at it at first. Even though we’ve been in love (and circles) for the past three years, now we are Doing This Thing and the pressure is on. We act like we just met or something. We’re shy and awkward. We make so many assumptions about each other, almost all wrong. This Thing We’re Doing is bigger than us, and we make a million mistakes at it. We are not at ease in This Thing. It’s a shirt that doesn’t fit us right.

  If you looked behind the photo of us smiling at our birthday candles on the crème brûlée, you’d see that later that night we had a huge fight. It was about mansplaining, if you must know. He mansplained mansplaining to me and I thought my head would explode. And it did, so much so that I talked over him, interrupting and indignant, laying into him about the origins of the term and not hearing what he was actually trying to say — that he’d originally misunderstood the term. He was trying to explain how wrong he’d been about it, not trying to explain that he was right.

  We had other arguments, too. About how much time we should spend together and when. About not hearing each other. Or not understanding. Relationship stuff. No big deal, these things are normal, I thought. They’re just growing pains. We were just trying to get in shape so the shirt would fit better. We wanted it to fit. We wanted it to be right, even though for some reason, it didn’t feel right. To either of us. It’s hard to say what or why. The love and attraction and friendship and deep connection were there as always, so why were we so off? Did putting a label on it really change it?

  Still, we continued as That Couple. On Christmas Eve we returned home from my cousin’s at 1:00 a.m. and White Shirt carried Birdie to her bed. Together we put the little gifts in her stocking, and then secretly slid gifts into each other’s. Since The Bomb, my stocking had been merely ornamental, hanging there empty for four Christmases since The Grinch came through back in 2012. Now here it was, filled with little shampoo bottles and chocolates again for the first time in forever. It was his first stocking in almost twenty years, he said. And he cried when he saw it, how I’d written his name in silver sparkles and fancy script.

  We went on trips together, because now he had flight privileges and I did, too, as his companion. We went to Miami Beach and Mexico. We got stranded in Charlottetown for five days in a snowstorm. It all felt so romantic, even if sometimes it was a struggle. We were doing it, The Thing, finally. The Man with the White Shirt and I were trying. Together.

  One spring night, my father and his lovely girlfriend hosted a dinner for White Shirt’s parents. White Shirt, Birdie, and I were there, too.

  I’d tried to dissuade him when he called to tell me about his plan for the dinner. “Dad, I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

  “WHY NOT?” he shouted, because he always shout-talks when someone disagrees with him. “I had The Scientist’s parents over for dinner to meet them that time!”

  “Dad! ‘That time’ was when we were getting married! This is not the same thing at all! White Shirt has only just decided he wants to try to be in a relationship. We don’t even know if he can do that! This is going to scare him away!”

  “NO ONE IS GETTING SCARED AWAY! IT’S JUST DINNER!”

  He was right, it was just dinner. But I still worried. I was already very close with White Shirt’s parents. We texted and called each other and often made plans first and then just told White Shirt about them after. They treated Birdie like a granddaughter, cooking her favourite dishes and always bringing both of us gifts from the places they travelled. Since we started Doing This Thing, they’d told me more than once how happy they were that their son now had a great job but also that he had me and Birdie in his life. They told me they loved me, all the time. We were even planning a trip together for the summer, where White Shirt, Birdie, and I would go to Portugal with them, and where his sister and her family would join us, too.

  It was all I could talk about for months. When we go to Portugal it’s going to be so amazing! … Your father says the sea is only 1.8 kilometres from their house! … Will we have time to drive up to Porto, do you think? … Ooh, when we’re in Lisbon can we see all the funiculars? … For the next trip your dad and I decided we’ll all go to Angola!

  I couldn’t wait to see where The Man with the White Shirt was born, to be with him in the place he grew up, to see where he had spent some of his teen years, to walk the streets with him, helping him to carry the load of memories, good and bad. The homeland of my love, the heavy and light of his heart. I started learning to speak Portuguese, practising with his father as we played cards. I could read it okay, but my pronunciation was terrible. I studied it alone while White Shirt was gone on long sets of flights, writing out the words and practising the difficult pronunciation out loud in my room. I wanted to surprise him when we got to Portugal, with how much I’d learned to say in his first language.

  Anyway, my dad and his girlfriend got along wonderfully with White Shirt’s parents, the four of them speaking in a mish-mash of languages — Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, English. There was wine and food and laughter and the promise of another dinner, this time hosted by White Shirt’s parents. That dinner happened only a month later, the seven of us again, like a family, like a thing I’d only dreamed of having again one day.

  A dream, really, to see my dad so thrilled about using every single glass from his cristalleria. To see White Shirt’s mom and my dad’s lovely girlfriend compare jewellery and recipes in high-pitched, heavily-accented voices. To look across the room and see The Man with the White Shirt and Birdie, deep in their own conversation and world. To sit there and feel loved and fed and alive.

  A few weeks later, we’re in my car and I say we should buy the plane tickets for the trip to Portugal soon. He makes a strange face. A grimace, maybe. A tightening. But I soldier on, chatting about how I can’t wait to finally be there with him after all the times he’s gone without me. Reminding him how he always came back from his trips to Portugal with the most perfect little gifts for me. And how he always told me how much he missed me while he was there, how everything made him think of me.

  “Now finally I’ll be there with you!” I say, but he’s silent, not excited at all. I press him about it and with an exhale he tells me he finds it difficult to get excited about the trip because he’s worried about us arguing while we’re there.

  “You’re worried about a fight we might have two months from now?!” It seems absolutely ridiculous to me. But it isn’t ridiculous to him. He is serious. He really is paralyzed by the thought of us maybe arguing on vacation two months from now. I can’t understand it. First of all, who cares if we argue on vacation, it’s no big deal, but secondly, we may not argue at all. We’ve been on plenty of vacations together already, and it isn’t like we argued the whole time on any of them. Where is this coming from?

  As we drive, we talk it through some more and I’m happy we’re working stuff out. Relationship stuff. But when we get to his place, he says, “I can’t do this. I can’t do it. It isn’t right.” Just like that.

  He says, “We argue too much. I love you so much, and I wanted this to work so badly. But I can’t do it. It isn’t right.” And I am shocked. Again. It isn’t right. It isn’t right. It isn’t right, he keeps saying. “But what is?” I say. “Is anything, really?”

  “I don’t know. I need time. I don’t know!” he says, shaky and sad.

  I go hom
e to give him time. But I’m not very good at it.

  A few days later I return to ask him if he’s sure. Sure. And he says he is. We both cry and kiss and talk. And somewhere in all that, I just fall asleep, right there in his apartment in the middle of us talking. My entire body just shuts down. At 8:00 p.m.

  I wake up at 8:00 a.m. to the sound of him getting ready for work as quietly as possible and everything feels normal for a second, until I remember it isn’t normal at all. It’s over. When he comes into the room I sit up and say, “I’ll drive you to the airport,” and he says, “Okay,” in the quietest, saddest voice I’ve ever heard. He looks so handsome in his suit and I hate him for it, because everything will be easier for him going forward because he is a man and a handsome, charming one at that. Because men don’t lose cachet or power as they age and I was aging myself out of love by the millisecond.

  I drive him to the airport. Every song that comes on feels like a dagger, so I turn the radio off and we drive in a heavy silence. Gardiner Expressway. Highway 427. Airport Road. Terminal 3. Normally I love this route; ever since he got the airline job it has been nothing but pleasure for me to drive him to the airport, or better, to be there to pick him up. On this morning though, I’m taking the same route but without pleasure, just a boulder in my gut making all music unlistenable. This. Again.

  I pull over at the usual spot on the departures level, somewhere between taxis and hotel shuttles and frazzled people spilling out of minivans. Our usual routine has always been this: I get out of the car with him and wait patiently as he removes his luggage from the trunk and arranges it just so, in his meticulous manner. Once perfect, he adjusts his suit jacket and airport tags, smiles at me and pulls me into his body, giving me the kind of hug that feels like a thousand hugs and the scent of summer. What, that’s how it feels, okay?