by Sorenna Wise
“But you did.” I kept the accusation out of my voice. I did not begrudge him for hanging on; after all, I had done the exact same thing with Blaise, albeit not as long.
“I did, against my better judgment. I was ready to have her out of my life, but a week later, I got this call. I hadn’t seen Alyson at all since the fight, so I was genuinely shocked when I heard who it was.” He paused for a second, obviously recalling the moment. “It was her mom.”
“Uh, what?” The notion of a parent getting involved in their child’s love life struck me as incredibly bizarre. I would have died if my mother had called Blaise at any time during our association, even when times were good. “Was this before or after marriage was an issue?”
“Before. I had no idea what to do. I’d met her a couple of times, but there’d never been any real sort of bonding between us. I was still just her daughter’s nice boyfriend, and here she was calling me like we had some personal business. I wanted to be like, ‘Mrs. Bridges, I broke up with Alyson, not you,’ but you don’t just say something like that. So I asked her how she was doing and if there was something I could do for her.”
I fidgeted a little. The awkwardness was practically tangible. “Did she chastise you? Did she tell you that you were a horrible human being for breaking her little darling’s heart?”
‘That’s what I expected,” Jake replied. “I braced myself for it. But no, she ended up apologizing for what Alyson had done. She said she understood it wasn’t my fault, and she thanked me for not being too harsh on her. Needless to say, I was completely caught off guard. I got the sense she was trying to get at something, but I couldn’t figure out what. I told her not to worry about it, and then I asked after Alyson. I said I hoped she was doing okay.”
“Ever the gentleman. No wonder her mom loved you.” I nuzzled his shoulder affectionately.
Jake shrugged. “I still felt responsible for the argument, even though Alyson started it. I felt like I had to take care of her. I was not ready for what she told me, though.”
I had an inkling as to what it might be, but still, I prompted him. “What did she say?”
He took a long breath. “Mrs. Bridges informed me that Alyson was supposed to be on antipsychotic medication, and that when she met me, she stopped taking them because she thought she’d be fine as long as I was with her.” He shook his head, as if he had yet to fully process the thought. “Alyson’s bipolar, and apparently her manic phases express themselves in an excess of negative emotions, rather than positive. If she’s on her meds, she’s learned to manage it extremely well. I didn’t have any idea about it until she started acting erratically.”
“That’s nuts,” I said. “I don’t even know what to think about that.” It did explain a lot, especially the account Blaise had given of his and Alyson’s first meeting. If she was having a depressive episode, it might have made her that much more prone to pouring her heart out to him. “But she’s so icily composed most of the time.”
“Like I said, she’d taught herself to manage it. If she keeps a tight lid on her emotions like that, she minimizes the risk that they’ll get away from her. But she can only do that when she’s medicated. When she’s off, there’s no guarantee of anything. To hear her mom tell it, I’m pretty lucky she never got violent with me.”
I tried to imagine Alyson assaulting someone with her delicate physique, and it was outlandish in my mind. I had to remember, however, that dance required an incredible amount of strength and stamina, both of which she must have had in order to enroll in the program she was in. Something else was bothering me, though. I curled my fingers around the damp walls of my water glass. “Jake, can I ask you something? Don’t be mad.”
“At you? I won’t be mad at you.”
I stared down into the bottom of the cup. “She told you all that, and you still took Alyson back. Why did you do that? There was no way it could’ve ended in anything but pain after that.”
He answered immediately. “Mrs. Bridges asked me to.”
I must have made a face, because he chuckled. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “Alyson’s mother calls you after you guys have a relationship-shattering fight and asks you to reconsider.”
“Yes,” he confirmed. I had nothing to say. Wordlessly, I gestured for him to continue. It was hard to comprehend that this was a real story, something that had occurred in his life instead of on television. if Lifetime made a movie out of this, the money would just pile up. “She gave me this whole line about how she knew Alyson was troubled, but she was really a good person and she loved me a lot, and wouldn’t it be a shame if I didn’t give her a second chance and missed out on a great thing? Well, I shouldn’t have agreed with her, but I did. She clouded my perceptions. I ended that call thinking she was absolutely right, and the least I could do was try and work things out.”
“You’re a sucker,” I told him.
He nodded. “Yep. I found out later that Alyson was right there with her mom during that entire conversation. She’d run home after we fought, and then she came straight back as soon as she knew for sure what I’d said. She was at my door two days later.”
“Oh man,” I said. “Did you un-box her stuff before then?”
“Most of it. There were still a couple boxes around. She saw them, but she was clearly trying to be on her best behavior. I assume her mom made her take some meds, too. If she’d returned in the same state she’d left in, I would have sent her right back. And…” His expression became pained. “We just sort of picked back up where we left off.”
“You didn’t, like, talk about it?” I loved Jake, but I was beginning to seriously question his past choices. “I’m just saying, if that had been you and me, there would have been all the talking.”
“Nor immediately,” he said. “I’m not going to pretend I was real smart about it, but I knew I couldn’t just let her in and be like, ‘So your mom told me you’re crazy.’ If we were going to make any progress at all, it was gonna be slow. I had to accept that.”
It was a reasonable argument. In fairness to Jake, I was making these judgments without having the slightest clue what I would do in a similar situation. My conflict with Blaise had been less than ideal. This…was unreal to me. “Okay,” I said. “But you did discuss it, right? Eventually?”
“Alyson’s the one who brought it up, believe it or not.” I didn’t believe it; my expression made that abundantly clear. He went on anyway. “We were walking on eggshells around each other for the first couple of weeks, and she finally got sick of it and said she was sorry. Which was really all I wanted to begin with.”
I stopped him. “Hold on. Wait. Are you saying she didn’t apologize when she got back to your apartment? Like, that wasn’t the absolute first thing she did?”
“Nope. I opened the door and she walked in like nothing had happened. She went straight into my bedroom and started putting her stuff back in the closet. She never lived there, but we were together so often that all her belongings were sort of split between my place and hers.”
Like my stuff is now, I thought. At some point, I’d dropped all pretenses and simply claimed the top drawer of his dresser for myself. It was for nights like these, when we stayed up so late talking that it was more of an inconvenience for me to leave than it was to stay.
“It looked good to everyone on the outside,” he said. I knew he could tell what was on my mind. “They didn’t know anything about it, though. Besides, her clothes weren’t the problem.”
I made myself stop introspecting. “Was it hard to talk about? I bet she was a total ice queen.”
“She was for a while, yeah. She wanted to make it seem like it was my fault, and that the only reason she ever lost control was because I incited her. I think she expected me to back down the moment she put on her angry voice, since that’s what I usually did. Fighting with her was incredibly taxing; I learned early on that it was easier not to contest her at all.”
“That’s how you got stuck with her,
you idiot,” I murmured reproachfully. I lay curled up against him with my head on his shoulder, staring at the edge of my hand on his chest. “You didn’t stand up for yourself, so you were perfect for her.”
“Everything looks obvious in hindsight,” he said simply. “But I’d had enough of it that time. I already knew it was all a front. I told her straight that she was bullshitting me.”
“I bet that went over well.”
“She would’ve looked the same if I reached over and slapped her.” Jake shifted under me, resettling his arm around my waist. “That pretty much did away with the defenses she’d been putting up. And then I got to see who she really was.” The tone of his voice suggested that he rather regretted the truth. “She cried a lot. She said she understood that she was wrong and that she shouldn’t ever go off her pills, but she felt safe enough with me that she thought it would be all right. I told her it wasn’t about safety, it was about a chemical imbalance in her brain. Of course she knew that, it all made sense when she heard me saying it, but she couldn’t bring herself to start taking the medicine again. She hated the way it made the world look, and the way it made her think of herself. She didn’t want to have to rely on something outside of her in order to be a whole person.”
“She’d rather be miserable and damaged?” I could see where Alyson was coming from, but to me as a third part observer, the right answer was apparent. “When the disorder is that severe, I don’t see how she could have a choice.”
“Honestly,” Jake said, “she didn’t. Deep down, she knew. She’s not stupid. But she is delusional, just enough that she can keep convincing herself that bad, destructive ideas are actually better for her. I made her promise to keep taking her meds, and she swore she would. So things got better.”
“They didn’t stay better?”
“Well, you know how the story ends. It was too much for me to hope she’d honor that promise, although I think she genuinely tried. She let herself be lulled back into that false sense of security, where she thought she could function without the doctor. During the early summer of last year, about six months before I met you, I began to notice the warning signs resurfacing. She got irrationally jealous. She’d demand to be allowed to hold onto my phone. She went through my computer. I tried harder to cut off her behavior before it became a problem, but it didn’t work. She went back to the same place she’d been in a year and a half ago. And then she dropped even lower.”
His words about narrowly escaping violence came back to me. “Oh, God,” I said. “She hurt someone?”
“Almost. We were at a house party, and I had to go to the bathroom, so she followed me there and stood outside the door. I have to be fair to her; it was partially to guard me and partially because there were a lot of strangers there and she didn’t want to get caught alone. Well, when I came out, I didn’t see her.”
“Uh oh.”
“I was moving back toward the outside when I heard this commotion going on in the living room, so I looked to see what was going on, and there was Alyson about to fight some girl I didn’t know. I had never seen her challenge anyone directly like that, but I knew she had that mean streak in her, and people were egging her on. I just pushed my way through, grabbed her, and dragged her out of the house. She was hysterically mad, yelling and trying to get away from me, until I told her that if she kept it up, someone was going to call the police and I’d let them have her. That shut her up pretty quick. But that was my moment, you know? I couldn’t do it anymore. The next day, I went back to the house to apologize to the guy who threw the party, and he was like, ‘Man, I know it’s your life and all, but you got to get the hell away from that crazy bitch. She’s going to ruin you.’ It wasn’t the first time I’d been told something along those lines, but it was the first time I listened. I spent a few days thinking about what I was going to say, and then I ended it for good.”
“I can only assume she took it badly.” I said.
“She was devastated. She tried for two hours to get me to change my mind. It was a lot like tonight, actually. And it wound up pretty much like tonight did, too. I decided that if Mrs. Bridges called me again, I’d just tell her I was through. It was too much for me to carry. I’d given the ill-advised second chance my best try.” He hesitated. “She didn’t call, which is for the best. It wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.”
That was the end of the story. Neither of us made any effort to break the quiet that descended on the room after he stopped talking. He cleared his throat once, then moved me aside so he could get some water from the kitchen. I listened to him fill a glass, drink it, and put it back on the counter. “Are you happy?” I asked, as he came back through the doorway. “I think that would have really messed me up.”
“Maybe if I hadn’t found something stable, I wouldn’t be. Fortunately, you came along.” He sat down and ran his fingers into my hair. “I’m happier with you than I ever was with her.”
I smiled, took his hand from my head, and kissed his fingers. “Love you, Jake,” I said softly. Then I ruined the moment by yawning. We both laughed.
“I love you too, baby,” he said, stroking the hair back from my forehead.
The words chased the uneasiness out of my brain, leaving in its place a deep, sweet peace.
CHAPTER 9
I did not tell anyone else about the things Jake had said about Alyson for a fairly significant period of time. In a conference call to Christine and Audrey, I alluded to the fact that we’d had an extremely important discussion, but I refused to fill in the details yet. I needed some more time to sort things out on my own before I asked for other opinions.
“Oh God,” said Audrey. “Are you pregnant?” Christine let out an audible gasp.
“If you’re pregnant, I will destroy you,” my sister said. “You know Mom wants us to be married first.”
“Oh God, are you engaged?” Audrey again. “Did Jake propose?” Another gasp from Christine.
“He better have bought you a giant ring. I’m talking like, Ring Pop scale.” Audrey agreed wholeheartedly. “He’s too hot to be cheap,” Christine added.
I rolled my eyes. “No, you guys. No to both of those things. We’ve only been dating for like, ten months.” It was a short time in the world of committed, long-term relationships, but I still couldn’t believe it had been that long since I was telling them I’d just met him. “And I don’t even know if I want kids.”
“Girl,” Audrey said, “this better be good. I am not having you string me along if it turns out you’re, like, moving in with him or something. That is not a big deal, people do that literally all the time.”
“Well, we’re not doing that either,” I said. “I promise, I’ll tell you everything when Christine comes home, okay? This is a thing we have to do in person.” Christine had plans to visit California for the Thanksgiving holiday, which was about three weeks away. It was a much better time for her than Christmas, when the opera houses were always bursting with holiday programs.
“Ugh,” said Audrey. “You better pray the days go by fast enough. I’ll be counting.”
“Would you relax?” I implored. “I told you, it’s nothing life-changing. It’s about Alyson, and it’s…complicated.”
“Ohhhh,” they said in unison. Instantly, the mood changed from impatience to understanding. “You could have just said that,” Audrey told me.
“I figured you’d be sick of hearing about her.”
“Are you kidding?” Christine sounded downright gleeful. “Your weird boy-drama is the best. I can tell my friends about it as much as I want because they don’t know anyone involved!”
“Oh, good,” I said glumly. But inside, I was glad. I’d really been afraid I was turning into one of those girls whose only topic of conversation was the tangled web of her love life. As long as they didn’t mind, I felt better.
“Don’t worry,” my sister said. “They love it too.” That made me laugh.
“So Christine,” Audrey interjected. �
��What are your plans while you’re here? We should definitely do something fun, don’t you think?” And just like that, the talk was off to a much lighter, happier place. We were girls again, chatting about shopping and shoes and colors of nail polish—pretending there were no darker cares lurking just below the surface.
Three weeks later, I met Christine at the airport on the Monday before Thanksgiving. She hugged me tightly, her blonde hair spilling over my shoulders, and then she stood back to look at me, smiling. “Two questions,” she said. “One, when are we meeting Audrey? And two, when do I get to meet your boyfriend?”
“Boyfriend first,” I said. “Mom told him he had to come to her house for dinner tonight. I think Audrey will be there too.” If it surprised you that my best friend had yet to meet Jake as well, it shouldn’t. I think of Audrey as my second sister, but we’d been living separate lives since college ended. She traveled extensively for fashion work, so it wasn’t uncommon for us not to meet up until a major holiday, as we were doing that week. I had orchestrated things this way on purpose; I wanted them to know Jake himself before I told them about the mess he’d gotten into with Alyson. Did I think they’d hate him because of it? No, but it was only fair to give him a chance to meet them before they knew all about his dirty laundry.
I’m the best girlfriend in the world, aren’t I?
Now, contrary to however it might seem, I’m not telling this story so I can talk about all the dinners I ate. Let us suffice to say about the evening that everyone adored Jake. My mother and her sister, my aunt, wasted no time in dropping hints about a ring. I can’t tell you how many times I said their names in an exasperated manner. “We’re just saying!” they would giggle, or, “We just think it’s good for him to know!” As always, Jake was a complete prince. I’m sure someday he’ll do something to make me complain about him, but it hasn’t happened yet.