Someone Else's Love Story

by Joshilyn Jackson

  The last thing is a note in his calendar. He has set up a meeting with Father Lewis. Father Lewis will probably need to talk for a long time, but William believes he can find a way to navigate the conversation peaceably. Before the Circle K, he could not allow Father Lewis, or anyone, even his wife, to say his child was in “a better place” without speaking back in the cruelest terms.

  “It’s such shit, and you know it,” he said to Father Lewis, then, while Bridget sat silent on their sofa. She stared out the window, watching birds light and peck and flutter on the feeders. She didn’t appear to be listening as William told him, “If you had faith, you’d walk into the sea and get to heaven sooner.”

  “Suicide is a sin, William. Are you thinking of harming yourself?” the priest asked, concerned.

  William didn’t answer the direct question, which in retrospect is telling. All he said was, “You’re worshipping a God who sticks you to the planet on a technicality.”

  These conversations were not productive.

  Now he has decided to return to a sustainable peace with Bridget’s church. If he doesn’t, he is choosing to remain on his side of the unwinnable either/or. When it is God or William, God has her, all to himself.

  God has had her from the moment the paramedics lifted Bridget out of her wrecked wagon, and she saw the place where the backseat had been. She experienced a cardiac arrest, the stop that is the start of death. Bridget, inside the process of her body shutting down, dreamed she saw their child rising, whole and beautiful, and she went after her. She talked about her own brief death this way, as if it had been a choice, saying she shrugged off her body like a heavy coat and flew up to catch Twyla.

  What happened after that—­the beckoning light, the flight through the tunnel holding Twyla, the flooding sense of peace, the bells, the careful placing of their laughing child into huge, strong arms that held her kindly, the feeling of being welcome, of a warm acceptance—­was a direct result of cerebral anoxia and the flood of endorphins that the panicked brain releases as it dies. William could likely have approximated the experience for himself, with a careful use of ketamine and suggestion.

  In retrospect, however, this was not a thing he should have said to Bridget.

  To be fair, there was little he could say to Bridget on the subject of Twyla’s afterlife, so Bridget listened, more and more, to God.

  She began going to mass every morning. When not at mass, she spent hours praying, talking to the God she imagined holding their child. At night, Bridget even started sleeping on her back, facing up, yearning toward a better comfort than any William had to offer. Perhaps because it was a comfort that William’s words directly undermined.

  He stopped talking when he understood how deeply it hurt her, but by then even his silence was a contradiction of her hope. William’s very presence corroded it. His unbelief, his unremitting sorrow, the absoluteness of his loss—­it was an assault upon her only peace. She moved farther and farther from him. She avoided him in daylight, busying herself with mass and prayer and more work for the church. The slice of sheet widened in the bed between them every night. It was Bridget and God, and there was no room for William.

  As the months ticked on, her words and eyes for God and God alone, William became so angry. His longtime rival was no longer satisfied with first place. God had taken all the places. William became angry with all parts of Bridget, one by one, until he was even angry at the details of her dying hallucination.

  If William’s heart stopped beating, he thought, were he to dream an afterlife as his brain’s electrical activity ticked down to cooling nothing, were he to find himself in Bridget’s heaven, he would not hand Twyla over. He would fight and rage. He would rend the puffy cloud walls and kick holes in the golden streets. He would go to his oblivion in the peace of knowing he had demanded Twyla’s life back with the last pulse of his brain. Irrational, this anger, but it came. The more she prayed, the more it grew.

  The last night, with most of the bed between them, the moon was very high and bright. He’d forgotten to shut the blinds. In this abundant moonlight, she’d looked at him. It was strange to see the celery green of her eyes so close, so full of longing.

  With her looking, he could say, “I miss you.” Simple words, but they were true. He missed her. It was the only thing he felt now, except grief, and the rage at his inability to help her when God could. “I miss you,” he said again.

  “I know. Will, I miss you, too. So much. I don’t want us to live like this. I want us to be better.”

  She moved first. It started as a slight bend toward him that he mirrored, a tentative shift together in the moonlight. Then he rolled on his side, she on hers. They both moved closer, her mouth finding his, his hands fitting themselves to her familiar, long-­beloved contours.

  It might have been the start of a way back, to a place of compromise. She’d always said their marriage’s best trick was to hold her faith between them without him breaking it or her letting it part them. But William, aware of the simple mathematical risk, understanding all that could be lost, turned briefly away from her. He reached to open the bedside drawer. He took one of the condoms in the box he’d always kept there. When he turned back, she was already scrambling backward away from him, on all fours like an animal. She was naked, cheeks burning, and her eyes were furious slits.

  She reared up on her knees and slapped him, once, hard across his face. He dropped the packet on the bed, on his knees now, too.

  “No!” she said.

  “I can’t,” he answered. His cheek burned.

  They faced each other in the darkness, panting, both of them shocked, and both of them so angry. Bridget got up out of bed and walked away, snatching her thick bathrobe as she passed her closet. She did not come back to their room that night. She was asleep on the sofa in the den the next day when he went to work. While he was at the lab, the Sullivans came, acting as a tribe. When he got home, all her things were gone. All evidence of Bridget had been removed, as thoroughly as he’d removed the evidence of Twyla.

  William wasn’t great at nuance, but he understood this was a statement.

  It was a relief, he found, not to lie beside her anymore, failing her, more angry every day. It was a relief to mourn his child in the peace of being allowed to feel his loss as absolute. It was easier, in fact, to accept the house’s evidence: there never was a Bridget. Nine days after she left, he found her old charm bracelet under the sofa, and he stuffed that in the attic. There, he found she’d taken many of Twyla’s things with her, and that was also a relief.

  He banned her name, her image, and all thought of her, though the ban caused the only fight he’d ever had with Paula. Paula still went to see Bridget every Tuesday, but she stopped telling him, as he insisted. She let her Tuesday absences speak for her and didn’t say the banished name, as promised.

  He thought at the time it was necessary for survival, but then, the anniversary came. He was waylaid by detergent in the Circle K. Trying to escape his wife, he walked into a bullet. The ban was not sustainable.

  So, here he is now, with the pictures on the mantel and their park in ruins. He is ready even to talk to Father Lewis. Of all the things William lost in the accident, it’s strange that the one he must work hardest to reform is the one that holds the least interest: the art of coexistence with theology.

  “She’s coming,” Paula says.

  Paula stands and melts back into the night, disappearing. Yes, Bridget is making her way to him. He sees her flashlight bobbing along, helping her pick a path through the wreckage. She crosses the ruined park she once miracled into a lovely place. Her light traces all the damage he has done, all that he has torn apart with his bare hands. Well, and an ax. And Paula.

  She comes right to him in the darkness, her sonar as accurate as ever. She points the flashlight up, so they can see each other in the ambient light. Her face is so sad.


  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he says.

  “I don’t know that I would have come, for this, Will.” She gestures at the wreckage in the park, but she’s using her private name for him. This is a good sign, in spite of her sad face. She must not understand what he has done here.

  He swallows. “I want you to fix it,” he says, by way of explanation. But that’s not right. He wrecked the park to give Bridget and God both something to do. Something that includes him. “I want you to help me fix it.”

  Her head tilts sideways, puzzled, and then her lips part and her eyes go wide.

  “Is it—­ Did you make me a metaphor?” Her tone is so disbelieving that he smiles, mostly with relief. He nods once in a short yes. He has made her a metaphor. The park is his attempt to speak to her in a language that was never his. She looks at the park with new eyes, and her gaze on it has softened. “What does it mean, the one whole birdhouse?”

  She points to the flowered one, so ill-­placed, that he saved from Paula’s hatchet.

  “Nothing,” he says with an exasperated shrug. “It’s full of birds.”

  “What?” she says.

  She’s right to be surprised. He is, too, because it’s very late for nesting. It must be a species that breeds later in the spring. She goes to the tree, though, and while she is too short to see inside, she listens. He listens, too. They are rustling around in there, sensing the coming dawn.

  “You think a cat got their first nest?” Bridget asks, perhaps a better explanation.

  “Maybe,” William says. If this is their second-­choice birdhouse, they didn’t learn much from the first experience. It isn’t safe. “I couldn’t kill a bunch of little birds for a metaphor.”

  She smiles then, her old real Bridget smile, and says, “Of course you couldn’t.” She looks at him as if she sees him. “Will, I’m so sorry. I left you months before I packed, and it was wrong and awful. Then you got shot, and it was like waking up. I realized I could lose you all over again. You were still so angry in the hospital, though. I ran, and I shouldn’t have. I should have stayed and talked to you. Yesterday, your friend came over, Shandi, and she told me how stupid I’ve been. She’s right. I was. I am.”

  Shandi? It’s surprising, but this is not the time to ask her to elaborate. She has to stop apologizing. They have both done many things poorly, things that hurt each other. She shouldn’t be apologizing; he is close to certain that he hurt her first.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m stupid, too. If I start listing all the ways I failed you, we’ll still be standing here when the sun is up. We’ll get arrested.”

  Off to their left, there is a footstep sound. The snapping of a twig. Paula? Maybe, but it could be anyone, and he would much prefer not to be caught. Even though he should be. This is a public park he has destroyed, after all. But he has good-­faith plans to fix it, whether Bridget helps or not.

  “Crap!” says Bridget, “William, this is crazy. Come on.”

  She takes his hand. The feel of her fingers in his, the pressure of her hand, is so familiar. She tugs on him, and he follows.

  They are leaving his parked SUV behind, but he entrusts it to his wingman. Paula will gather the ax and the other tools and drive away from the scene of the crime. She’ll probably think to hotwire Bridget’s car and move that away as well; Paula, in her youth, learned a broad and useful array of basic criminal skills.

  Bridget says, “We have to fix this tomorrow. This is so wrong. It was very wrong you did this.”

  Her voice isn’t angry, though, and he is calm and breathing easy as she pulls him toward the house. She said, We have to fix this. We. First-­person plural. She is still Bridget, after all, complete inside herself. Last time, the whole neighborhood rallied, all because she was bold enough to rip out all the ugly, dying phlox. She can fix it. They can fix it.

  Her flashlight picks a path for them through the darkness, to the house, together. When they reach the yard, she stops, but he doesn’t. He lets his body intersect with hers. He turns her in his hands and kisses her. For a moment she is surprised into stiffness, rigid in his arms. Then she pushes up on tiptoe. Her mouth opens to him. Her palms cup his face.

  They do not kiss the way they did once before in this yard, when the cold rain came down to save them for a better day. They are not so young or desperate for each other now. It begins as something close to comfort. It is familiar. It is sad and good to kiss her this way, to wrap his arms around her waist and lift her up, pressed vertically, full-­length against him. He carries her inside this time, not out.

  He can’t take her to their bedroom. The history and presence of the condoms in the dresser could cause thinking. There might be more talking, more endless apology. To the rug in front of the fireplace, then. He lays her down on the thick pile. There is nothing here that he can put between them.

  She knows his body. He knows hers. They are so careful to be kind to each another. He does everything that she likes best. She is the same with him, her hand touching him precisely here, her mouth moving in this favorite way. Her lips find his new scar and linger there, learning it. They come together, skin on skin. They move slow and open-­eyed. They each accept their different risks.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” he says, and kisses her until all the apologizing stops.

  He is almost only his body. His mind plans things from far away. Tomorrow, which is close now, very close, they will begin to fix the park. As they work, he will tell her about Stevie, rising. He will tell her about a virgin’s child, calling through an iPad. Stevie, come forth. For William, it is always, it can only be, science and coincidence.

  Bridget will make it more. Bridget will make it into hope, that thing she says has feathers, and he will let her. He will give it to her, all of it, and let her. This is where he finds grace, in giving in to hers. She is letting him back into hers, and those are all the thoughts that he can have before he is only his body and hers both, the two of them a single thing, connected, risking everything. Risking even creation.

  After, they lie loosely in each other’s arms, watching the sun come up through the window. The horizon is washed in pink and gold, rimmed with blue.

  She traces his mouth with her finger.

  “The eggplant is sad,” she says, quoting his old vegetable book. He smiles, wondering what she sees in his face that she would think so.

  They lie together in the growing light. Bridget tucks her face into his shoulder. He knows this posture, recognizes the slight change in her breathing. Her body is beginning to ease itself into sleep.

  William is not tired. He watches the sunrise happening through the fence, a black chain-­link convenience for Baxter. A bird lands, one of the many cardinals who come back every year to nest. This one is male and very red. Now, Bridget lies in his arms. His genetic material is doing its busy job inside her. There is a red bird on his fence.

  “The radish is happy,” he tells his sleepy wife. Her face is pressed into him, but he can feel her smile, her teeth against his bare shoulder.

  “Will,” she says into his skin. “These are not mutually exclusive states of being.”

  Chapter 15

  I sat under a tree in Piedmont Park for hours, watching Clayton Lilli’s apartment building. I stayed sheltered near the trunk. I only left my spot of dry­ish grass twice, once to walk to a park-­side deli for a sandwich that I didn’t feel like eating, and once to visit the same deli’s restroom. From my shady spot, I had a good view of the entrance.

  At about four, I texted Mims, to make sure she and Natty got home safe. She was pretty ill with me, and worried. Yes, they were home, and Walcott was unloading, she texted. She was going to make him lunch as a thank-­you. Then she started texting me question after question—­where was I, when was I coming home, was I okay—­none of which I knew how to
answer yet. All that mattered to me was that Natty was back at her house, out of the way of whatever dumb thing I was doing.

  I ignored the questions and texted, Love you, thank you, sorry. I’m fine. Home soon. Then you can ask me anything and kill me after.

  My phone immediately began playing Mimmy’s calypso ringtone, so I shut it off.

  A little after five thirty, Clayton Lilli got home. I watched him park his Honda on the street and go inside. I didn’t move, though. I stayed right where I was. I couldn’t quite make myself go after him. I wasn’t sure what I thought he would do, but I was too jacked up in my body to walk into his apartment without William at my back, ready to kill him with a paperweight. Fifteen minutes later, his field mouse of a girlfriend showed up. Today she wore jeans and carried what looked like a ­couple of textbooks.

  She was too far for me to read her face, but her body language was grim. She shuffled with her shoulders in a little hunch. She had a key. I wondered if she lived there.

  Now I had no excuse not to go. What could he do? Re-­drug me and try to re-­rape me in the presence of the one girl he’d managed to convince of his inner sugar-­bunny nature? She was convinced enough to come back over, anyway.

  But I couldn’t make myself get up. It was like I was waiting for something, for a sign, or for permission. To stop being afraid. To stop wanting things I couldn’t have and try to find out what was possible. I sat there for at least a miserable ten minutes, trying to make myself begin.

  That was when I saw the nun.

  She was cutting across my corner of the park in sensible shoes, carrying a big fake leather tote bag. She was in street clothes, a knee-­length navy skirt and a white blouse with a rounded collar, but I knew she was a nun because she had on a simple version of the hat, with the white band at her forehead. A drape of black cloth came down from it and fell around her shoulders.