“You shouldn’t have to.” He thought about all the changes she was always trying to exact from him. “Neither of us should have to.”
“You don’t understand. You never understand.”
An accusation. That was another thing she always pulled out of her pocket—there was always an accusation at the ready. Some way in which he’d wronged her. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice self-consciously pathetic. “I’ve taken up too much of your time.”
He resisted telling her it was okay. He couldn’t give her any more. “You’re going to be all right, Roxy. Promise.”
She hesitated. “I really loved you, you know. I can’t even tell you how much, you just have to feel it. Or not.”
One of her lines, dramatic and ripped from the script of whatever drama she was watching most recently.
“You too.”
Voice tight, she said, “’Bye.” She made sure to let him hear her sob once more before hanging up.
Overall, that went pretty well. As far as Jamie and Roxy’s post-breakup conversations went, that was one of the easier ones. She hadn’t given him as much shit as usual. Sometimes the conversations went around and around, circle after circle. She’d act like she got it, then get mad when she realized it was really happening, then lean on one of her many tactics to reel him back in.
It was all so transparent. He saw right through it. He knew it was psycho. His friends called her Bobbitt, as in Lorena Bobbitt, the notorious penis hacker from the nineties.
The nickname would have bothered him less if he didn’t know that it was his mom who had started it.
It didn’t matter, though, how much Roxy drove him up the wall. When it was good, it was fucking fantastic. Psycho girls make the best and worst girlfriends. At least his friends kind of understood why they never ended up staying broken up. When his defenses ran short, he’d just say, Have you seen her?
That usually got a solid, That’s true, man.
He ignored a flash of regret and tossed his phone aside.
Essay. Essay, essay, essay. He had to finish his make-up assignment for school, so he could be finished with eleventh grade.
Forty minutes later, it was finished. It was solid B quality. If he read through it once more he could knock it up to a hundred percent, he always could, but why bother with that?
He just didn’t care enough.
Chapter Six
Willa
For a moment I sat paralyzed.
Ben.
I said it. “Ben.”
Oh, my god, oh, my god, it was him, he was there, right in front of me. What should I do? What should I feel? I’d thought of this, wished for this, so many times since he’d been gone, but now I found myself with a sickening feeling of fear battling with my joy at seeing him.
“Please talk to me.” I had to try. I needed him to be real, even while I needed this all to be a dream. “Please say something, Ben. I see you. You’re here. You’re home.” My voice caught in my throat. “Please say something. Anything.”
He looked past me. At the dog? At the book I’d closed? At the window where I thought the light had come in? Maybe it hadn’t been light at all, but him, trying to come into form.
“Ben, please—”
It seemed like minutes he stood there, but it was just seconds. It all happened so fast, then just like that he disappeared, as if vapor, so fast that I couldn’t even define what he’d looked like before he’d gone. Was he wavery and watercolored like a sitcom dream sequence? Solid like a person? Vague like my imagination? Transparent like a ghost? Had I even seen anything at all? Or just sensed him—real or imagined—and extrapolated that out to some crazy image?
What was I supposed to do with this? I was sure I’d seen something, whatever the qualities, but it was impossible, and one look proved it. There was nothing there. Of course there was nothing there.
But I couldn’t have convinced Dolly of that. She was staring intently right where I’d … seen it? Felt it? Sensed it?
I reached out carefully, feeling the air in the space, absolutely certain it would be ice-cold. Or that maybe I’d even bump my hand into something, some form that was there but that I couldn’t see. If the guys from Ghost Hunters were here, they’d have all kinds of equipment to measure temperature, magnetic charges and changes, voices that couldn’t be heard by the human ear, maybe even images I could no longer see but were somehow there still.
Slowly, slowly, I moved my fingers, holding my breath. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for. “Ben…?” I asked.
Even if there was something there—which I was sure there was not, but if there was something there—it could very well have been someone other than Ben, but naturally my mind went directly to him and stayed there.
This was nonsense. The crazy thoughts of a woman with an empty stomach and a tired mind.
So, like a woman with an empty stomach and a tired mind, I asked, “Is someone here?” I listened intently.
My phone rang, and I screamed. Straight-up screamed. It was embarrassing, though that was stupid, because I was the only one here. I fumbled for it with shaking hands, hoping to see Jamie’s name. Instead I saw it was my friend Kristin calling.
“Holy shit, you scared me!” was my salutation.
Pause. “I scared you?”
I took a shuddering breath and nodded, even though she couldn’t see me.
“Do you want me to call back and try to ring more quietly?” she asked, and I could picture the wry twitch of her lips as she said it.
“I’d appreciate the consideration,” I said, and gave a halfhearted laugh. How could I possibly explain what had just happened?
“I don’t mean to seem dense, but I feel like I missed the bottom step here. What the hell is going on?”
I thought about telling her, pictured myself saying, I just saw Ben, but those words would not come to me. She’d have me committed—if she could—in no time flat. “Nothing. I’m just easily spooked today, for some reason.”
“Are you at the beach house?”
“Yeah, I got here a little while ago.”
“Why do you sound like this?”
“I don’t know, it’s just been … weird.”
“Oh, no. Why?”
After too long of a hesitation, I told her about my day and what I thought I’d seen, and when I was done it all sounded like nothing. Imagination or wishful thinking combined with low blood sugar and a dash of depression. Definitely not scream-worthy, but the thing was, it was more about feeling than about any actual events, and, whatever had happened, I couldn’t change my feelings about it.
“I know,” I said before she could speak again. “I imagined I saw something and totally freaked out when my phone rang. Next thing you know, I’m going to be afraid of toilet paper or something, screaming in the bathroom like a lunatic.”
She laughed. “Hopefully it won’t go that far. Look, it’s normal for you to be having a tough time with this. You are so full of emotions right now that you probably almost have to reassign them to other things, because to hold all that in your heart would be just … too heavy.” Her answer surprised me, as I had thought she’d think I was just plain nuts.
I wanted to cry. That’s how it was these days. I was so quick to cry. And at a kindness more than anything else. I cried once at Target when the cashier didn’t charge me five cents apiece for the two bags she’d used (a county surcharge). Truth was, I think she just didn’t enter it on time, but I was still so touched by what I took as a small kindness that I found myself tearing up.
Now my friend’s support, which I had always had and taken for granted, was hitting me in the heart.
“Thank you,” I managed.
“Oh, honey, are you crying?”
I nodded again, speechless.
“You’re nodding, aren’t you?” Her voice was tender. She knew me so well. I could see her I Love Lucy red hair bouncing as she nodded back in a futile effort to try and communicate with me over the phone lin
e.
I gave a laugh through my sniffles. “Yes,” I squeaked. “I’m sorry I’m such a basket case.”
“Are you kidding?” she asked with genuine incredulity. “Who on earth wouldn’t be? You shouldn’t be there alone. I knew that the moment you said you were going, but I just couldn’t get away.”
“It’s not your job to babysit me. I’ll be fine. I guess the initial period is just bound to be tough. And I am tired. That’s contributing, for sure.”
“Maybe.” She didn’t sound so sure.
“I’m fine, Kristin. No one ever died from feeling a little off.”
“Not that we know of!”
I laughed. “Touché.”
“So I thought I’d come down this weekend,” she said, all business now. I’d noticed she always tried to let me off the hook for my tears. If I wanted to talk, she was there, but she always did some verbal gymnastics to let me move past it. “Is that okay? I can come sooner if you want. Maybe pick up Jamie and force his ass down there…?”
Today was Monday. Kristin was a teacher at my school, so she also had the summer off, but her husband, Phillip, worked constantly and she didn’t like to leave her teenage daughter, Kelsey, alone too much. Not that Kelsey wasn’t a really good girl—she was, apart from her junk-food addiction—but Kristin wasn’t comfortable leaving her on her own for too long, and Kelsey had a summer school class to finish before she could get away and hopefully come to the beach.
So what was I going to do? Say yes? I need you to come watch Fixer Upper with me? I mean, yeah, that would have been great, but Dolly and I could watch HGTV by ourselves.
“No, no,” I said, my voice more insistent than I felt. “Honestly, I’m fine. You know me. This was just a glitch.”
“Okay.” She sounded relieved now. “But I’m going to be checking in on you regularly.”
“Fine. Oh! Shit!”
“What?”
“Sorry, I just remembered I didn’t turn the water on. I won’t have hot water for hours. Got to run.” And it was true, I had forgotten to turn the water on and that did mean it would take some time for it to heat up, but even truer was the fact that I was actually kind of panicked at the idea of hanging up the phone with her, so I had to force myself to do it before I became a whiny little baby and asked her to come early after all. That would have been shameful.
We hung up and I looked at the phone for a moment, considering calling her back. Then I reassured myself that I could call her back if I needed to at any point, so I got up, went to the utility room, turned the crank for the water, and then moved the setting on the hot-water heater from vacation to normal.
That done, I looked around the small room to see if anything else needed to be taken care of. Everything looked in order, so I went back out to the kitchen. It was time to get started, spit-spot, like Mary Poppins. There was no reason to wait or hesitate, no reason to dread the inevitable, I just had to do it.
I began by opening the dishwasher, bracing myself for what I was sure would be a bunch of Ben’s used dishes staring me in the face. But there was nothing. Well, almost nothing. One lone coffee mug sat in the back of the top rack, rinsed and clean-looking. I breathed a big sigh of relief. For once Ben had emptied the dishwasher. I almost made a mental note to thank him, but then remembered, for the ten millionth time, that he was gone.
Nothing to put in, nothing to take out, so I closed the dishwasher and checked the sink. It was also clean. Not even so much as a spoon was there. The toaster was empty and crumb-free, the coffee machine was spotless, and the microwave had been broken for ages, so I knew it was empty.
It’s funny, but I think I felt a little bit deflated at the impersonal sanitaryness of it all. I’d been hoping, and saying I hoped, that there would be no eerie vestiges of his life’s interruption remaining, but now I wondered if I had been just contending that the way a mother says she hopes her toddler doesn’t miss her when she drops him off at nursery school for the first time. It’s all well and good to make the case for everything going smoothly, but there’s also a case for being needed.
In some crazy way, Ben’s having left the place clean felt, even more, like he didn’t need me. It wasn’t just that he’d managed to die without me, that he’d gone on to some great beyond and hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye (much less wait for me), but he didn’t even need me to clean his cereal bowl after he’d gone.
Silly. If he’d gone home alive and I’d come here alone and found his cereal bowl and other dishes waiting for my attention, I would have been pissed. Now I was almost unspeakably sad.
There was no pleasing me.
I went to the hall linen closet, took out some flowered Laura Ashley sheets, sniffed them to make sure they smelled clean, and went into the bedroom to make the bed.
That was where I’d found my mess. The bed was unmade, the sheets rumpled and strewn off. The pillows were in place, but the rest of it looked like a struggle had taken place. Of course, it always looked like that after Ben had slept. But the last time he’d slept here he’d also died here, so it was disturbing to see it and imagine the scenario. This was ridiculous. I had no patience for my meandering melancholy anymore. I went straight to the bed, ripped the sheets off, threw them on the floor, and set about putting the new ones on. I didn’t allow myself the luxury of stopping or sitting on the bed and crying, trying to feel his presence or whatever essence he might have left here as his last; I just pushed forward and made the bed.
Then I picked up those dirty sheets and marched right back into the utility room and opened the washer. There was a pair of his underpants in there, a couple of T-shirts, and some shorts. I hesitated, braced my hand against the washer, and had a little war with myself over whether or not I should take the things out and examine them.
I felt some weird reverence, as if they were holy things, having been near him when he died. But it wasn’t like I’d found the Shroud of Turin; he hadn’t been wearing these things, for heaven’s sake! I actually knew what he’d been wearing because, as I learned, that’s one of the first lines of an autopsy report: what the subject was wearing. Apparently it helps define mood or intention. All it did for me was make me feel even sadder, because I could picture him so completely.
“No,” I said firmly to myself, right out loud. “You don’t need to do this. There is no benefit. Only sadness. Don’t. Do. It.” I threw the sheets in on top of the clothes and went to toss some Tide pods in and start it, but I stopped.
I wasn’t ready for that quite yet. I could walk out of the room, but I couldn’t commit to washing all the stardust and scent away.
Not yet.
I flipped the light switch off and went back out, feeling accomplished. This was a little bit of progress. No, it hadn’t been complete resistance, but at least I’d moved on and didn’t get totally hung up on the sadness of it all.
For the rest of the afternoon and evening, I emptied out the rest of the things from the car, made a grocery list, put linens in the closet, and put my suitcase in the bedroom I never thought I’d be able to face again … Dolly half followed me, but she did seem disturbed. Then again, it was ocean air, and she wasn’t used to that. She’d run some on the beach. Back in the old days when Ben used to take her on his morning runs, she’d often limp for a few days afterward because the sandy terrain was different for her, she wasn’t used to it. Maybe her behavior now was just a variation of that.
I decided not to put too much thought into it. This was the new me: I was going to stop overthinking, worrying, fretting, and wringing my hands over every little thing. Particularly since, as life had shown me, I had virtually no control over anything anyway. What a waste of energy it was to try.
So I finished straightening the house and went to the bedroom to go to bed. It was a little daunting, I’ll admit. But, again, this was something I’d done thousands of times. It was not a big deal.
At least not until I saw him again. When he walked right through the damn room in front of m
e.
Chapter Seven
Jamie
After fulfilling the duties of mollifying Roxy and finishing his essay, Jamie went downstairs to demolish the rest of the rotisserie chicken in the fridge and sneak a beer or two from the basement fridge. He could throw on some mindless TV and pass out on the couch instead of his bed. Last night he’d been up until it was bright out dealing with Roxy’s shit. Tonight he could just do nothing.
He left his phone in his room, just in case Roxy decided to call again. He knew he could only ignore a few calls before giving in, if only to stop the incessant ringing. The texts were easier to not respond to; he could gauge her Crazy Levels, but they were harder to resist reading.
The fridge was always stocked with wine and beer, always had been. His parents always socialized, and his mom still did now that his dad was gone. Less. She did it less. But she was always prepared in case someone stopped by. She had a lot of friends and they always seemed to talk over drinks.
He felt sure she knew he siphoned off a couple of bottles here and there. He had this feeling because beers were always in there and stocked, and they were always IPAs, which he tried to like, but which he still kind of hated. Seemed sort of on purpose to him. Sure, you can take some beers, but you’re not going to like them. She always seemed tired, and this was one of the biggest manifestations of it: she didn’t argue about him stealing beers, didn’t correct him or punish him, just tried, in this small passive-aggressive way, to make it unpleasant for him.
That was her “handling things” these days.
He kind of missed the days when she’d ground him or yell or in some other way look alive. It was almost as if, when his father died, he’d lost his mother too.
He cracked open a Flying Dog Raging Bitch. It was hoppy, strong, and bitter. But it would work.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia was on marathon, so he watched a few episodes and stripped the bird down to the bone, eating like Henry VIII himself. At some point he fell asleep. Content, slightly buzzed, and happily deluding himself that the Roxy drama was actually over.
Every Time You Go Away Page 4