The Light We Lost

by Jill Santopolo

  I took a step closer to him and saw tears in his eyes. “Lucy,” he said, and started to cough. “Sometimes I love you so much that I don’t even know how my heart can stand it.”

  I walked over to him and hugged him, harder than I ever had, as if I somehow needed to show him how much I loved him with the strength of that hug.

  Darren was my Old Nassau experiment. The longer we were together, the more I loved him, and the better it got.

  xli

  There are certain events in a person’s life that feel like turning points, even as they’re happening. September 11th was a turning point in my life. Your moving away was another. And Christmas with Darren was a third. We’d been together not quite a year and a half at that point, but I knew then that we would get married. Not necessarily right away, but I knew it would happen—unless something unexpected happened instead. Unless you happened, actually. I always imagined you were the only person, the only thing that could stop me from marrying Darren. I wondered if that meant I shouldn’t marry him, but I also knew then that I couldn’t have you, and I couldn’t imagine my life without him. And I loved him—I love him—really and truly. Just not the same way I loved—love—you.

  I still dream about you—I’ve told you this—I have ever since you left. You and I are in Central Park having a picnic, or in a hotel room, or apple picking. Sometimes the dream is about something we actually did together, and sometimes it isn’t. But it always ends with you pulling me toward you, our bodies pressed together, our lips meeting—and then I wake up, my heart racing, feeling so guilty for thinking about someone else when I’m in bed with Darren, even all these years later. I’ve tried so hard to stop them, but they still come.

  Do you dream about me? Are you dreaming about me right now?

  • • •

  ONE MORNING, right around my twenty-sixth birthday, I saw a picture you took in the New York Times. Pakistanis protesting civilian casualties from a drone strike. Pakistanis, not Iraqis. You had moved. You’d moved to a brand-new country and you hadn’t told me.

  I dreamed about you that night, but that dream was different. We were walking through Times Square, and a rush of tourists came. My hand was torn out of yours; we got separated and I was looking for you all over. I was panicked in the dream, and I must’ve called out to you, because the next thing I knew, Darren was shaking my shoulders and saying, “You’re having a nightmare. Wake up, Lucy.”

  I woke up sweaty, the panicked feeling still there.

  “What was it?” Darren asked. “You were saying ‘gave.’ What did you give?”

  I shook my head. “I . . . I don’t know,” I stammered. But, of course, I knew I wasn’t saying “gave” at all.

  Darren got me a glass of water, then climbed back into bed and held me close to him. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here. I’ll keep the bad dreams away.”

  I wrapped my arms around him but knew that no one could keep that kind of bad dream away. I stayed up a long time after that and finally fell back to sleep as the sun was coming up.

  That day at work I e-mailed you. Haven’t heard from you in a while, but saw that you’re in Pakistan. Loved the photograph. Are you there for a while?

  The response came quickly. Hey Luce! So nice to hear from you. Hope you’re doing well. Have been in Pakistan for a few months, but they asked if I’d transfer here officially. I’m thinking about saying yes. I’ll probably be in the States again this summer. Hope we can get together then. I keep an eye out for It Takes a Galaxy whenever I travel. Your team has been doing great work. Still love that Galacto.

  Do you remember sending that? I was so glad you did. Knowing that you hadn’t moved without telling me made me feel calmer, as if the world were spinning at the right speed again. But really, I’m not sure why it mattered so much to me. I guess I wanted to still be important to you, to be the person you wanted to share news with, even if you weren’t that person for me. Some psychologist would have fun with that one.

  What you didn’t tell me then was that you’d met a journalist—Raina—who was reporting from Islamabad, and that was why you were thinking about moving. I’m not sure how I would have felt if I’d known that just then. Honestly, I think I’m glad you didn’t tell me.

  xlii

  That year Darren gave me a pair of Manolo Blahniks for my birthday. And we decided to move in together. We’d been a couple for a little over a year and a half, and both of our leases were up in the summer.

  “Let’s find a new place,” he said. “One that’s not yours and not mine—one that will only ever be ours.”

  I liked that idea. It had felt a little strange moving your clothes out of drawers so that mine could fit in, and you offering to take down a poster or two on the wall so I could put up some of mine. You had shared your space with me, and I didn’t want to take more than what was offered or change too much, even if I would’ve set the apartment up differently.

  “What do you think we should look for?” Darren asked, grabbing a piece of paper and a pen off his coffee table. We were at his place. It seemed we were mostly at his place. Probably because it was bigger and easier to get to on the subway and had a particular dog bed that Annie loved that was too big to lug with us and too expensive to buy a duplicate of.

  “Dishwasher,” I told him, as I put my socked feet up on the table. “Light. As much space as we can afford.”

  He nodded, writing furiously. “I’m adding close to a subway stop, near good restaurants and shopping, and two bedrooms.”

  “Two bedrooms?” I asked, my feet back on the floor.

  “For guests,” he answered, not looking at me.

  But my brain went to babies. Moving in with Darren didn’t feel like moving in with you. It felt more serious. More like we were making a real commitment to each other. More like the step before getting engaged.

  We spent our weekends looking at apartments. Darren wouldn’t let us settle for something less than perfect. Our real estate agent was ready to kill us.

  “I think this is it,” I finally said to Darren one Sunday in late April. It was prewar, put together in a seemingly haphazard way that involved hallways and alcoves and an archway into the kitchen. It was two flights up and had an exposed brick wall in the master bedroom. “I love it.”

  He smiled at me. “And I love you.”

  I swatted at him and laughed. “But do you like the apartment?” I asked.

  “I do,” he said. “And not just because you do.”

  “Good,” I said.

  We signed the lease that day, and moved in together three weeks later. We took tons of pictures and I posted our smiles on Facebook. We went to Bed Bath & Beyond and bought anything that made us laugh—a cookie jar in the shape of a muffin, a teapot with a sculpted face, a shower curtain with a picture of a shower curtain that had a picture of a shower curtain on it ad infinitum.

  “Mise en abyme,” I said.

  Darren looked at me like I was speaking another language, which I guess I was.

  “The Quaker Oats phenomenon,” I clarified. “An image with an image of itself on it, over and over again.”

  “I didn’t know that had a name,” he said.

  You would’ve known, but I didn’t think about you just then. I didn’t think about you when Darren paid for everything in our cart, or when we got home and played fetch with Annie. But I couldn’t help comparing Darren’s and my first night in our place with the one that you and I spent together in your studio that became ours that became mine.

  Darren and I cooked dinner together—a fancy affair that involved simmering sauces and Cornish game hens and a bottle of champagne. Then we took Annie for a walk, watched a movie, and made love.

  You and I had ordered in pizza and split a bottle of wine and had sex on every surface imaginable. The couch, the floor, the coffee table, and the bed of course. Then we woke up the next
morning and did it all again.

  But you and I didn’t wash each other’s hair in the shower, like Darren and I did that first morning. I don’t know why we never thought to do that, but it’s wonderful, washing the hair of someone you love, having him wash your hair back. It’s intimate. Maybe it connects to some part of the genetic material we share with apes; they always groom their mates.

  And you and I didn’t leave notes for each other in the refrigerator either. Little Post-its stuck to various containers so that the milk read I love you and the orange juice said You’re beautiful and the bag of string cheese had I’m so happy and Me too next to the image of that Polly-O parrot.

  I don’t remember how it started, but I do remember thinking: This is something Gabe would never ever do. He’d probably think this is moronic. I hope you don’t. I hope I’m wrong. Because I loved it.

  xliii

  When we met for a cup of coffee that spring as you were passing through the city, I could sense there was something different about you. There was something different about the city, too. They’d started building the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero. It felt like the bandaging of a wound, or like an elaborate tattoo inked to cover a scar. I understood the desire to rebuild, to create something tall and grand, a big fuck-you in the New York City skyline. But the area felt sacred to me, too, still raw. Not quite healed enough to build on.

  It had nothing to do with us. It had to do with the people who looked like birds flying out of windows as the towers burned and collapsed. With the new building going up, it made it harder for me to see them. I kept away from that part of Manhattan. Is it awful to admit that I’ve never gone, even now that it’s all completed? Even now that there’s a memorial there too? I didn’t think I’d be able to handle it alone, and I didn’t want to go with Darren.

  We didn’t talk about the Freedom Tower that day, though, or the memorial, or the morning we met.

  You started out by telling me how impressed you were with the It Takes a Galaxy episode you saw during your layover in London. “The one where Electra proves to her grandfather that she can repair his spaceship, even though he thinks they should ask her brother. Was that one yours?” you asked.

  I smiled. “Guilty as charged,” I said.

  “I thought so,” you told me, as you sipped your Americano. “It felt like taking a little trip into your brain.”

  Darren never said anything about It Takes a Galaxy. He certainly wouldn’t have said that. I felt a pang, a wistfulness. It had been great to be in a relationship with someone who cared so much about my job, who understood that part of me.

  “How’s Islamabad?” I asked.

  “Good,” you answered. “It’s . . . good.”

  For you—for us—a nonanswer like that felt off. I took you in, then, trying to see what I was missing. You seemed relaxed. You were leaning back against your chair, holding the cup of coffee in your lap.

  I started fishing. “Do you like your apartment?”

  “It’s nice,” you said. “It’s a house, really. I share it with some other journalists.”

  “Oh, that sounds fun. A nice group of guys?”

  You looked down at your coffee cup. “Actually,” you said, “I share it with Raina. I met her when the AP first sent me to Islamabad. We ended up collaborating on the piece.” You shrugged.

  “And you collaborated on a lot more?” I supplied for you. I wondered if that kind of work and life collaboration was what you’d imagined for us when you asked me to come away with you.

  You shrugged again, as if you were embarrassed to tell me this. “She’s a Pegasus,” you finally said, “like you.”

  It felt like a punch in the gut when you said that, which was idiotic because I never agreed with your interpretation of that myth anyway. But I knew what that word meant to you. And even though I’d been with Darren for nearly two years, and you hadn’t been with anyone, and it only seemed fair that you find someone too, it still hurt. As long as I’d been with him, Darren had never taken your place in my heart, and I hated the idea that someone else had taken my place in yours.

  “That’s great,” I told you then. “I’m happy for you, Gabe.”

  You ran your fingers through your hair, like I’d seen you do hundreds of times before. “Thanks,” you said. “So how’s your boyfriend? Daniel? Derrick?”

  “Darren,” I said. “He’s good.”

  Did you mess up his name on purpose? I always figured you had, but I didn’t say anything about it.

  I’m glad we only saw each other for coffee that day. I don’t think I could have taken much more than that. The jealousy I felt scared me—it made me question my relationship with Darren, and I didn’t want to do that. I loved him. And you loved someone else.

  xliv

  There are certain questions that change the world. Not the big-picture world, but the small, personal world. Will you marry me, I think, tops that list.

  The last week in May, not long after I saw you, Darren told me to pack a bag, that he was planning an early anniversary trip for us Memorial Day weekend. A surprise four-day weekend away to celebrate the fact that we moved in together, that we’d soon be dating for two years. He still hadn’t caught on that big surprises like that weren’t my favorite, but I was still trying to be a good sport about it. He clearly liked planning things and surprising me, so I decided to try to let my own feelings about it go and just appreciate how much it meant to him. Even so, I couldn’t stop trying to figure out where we were headed. I’d been assuming Cape Cod or someplace on the coast of Maine, since it was just four days, we both liked the beach, and we’d never been to either place as a couple. But when Darren gave me a list of what to put in my bag, I noticed there was no bathing suit on the list.

  “Did you forget anything?” I asked as I was packing.

  Darren had been getting ready for bed, and came over in a T-shirt and boxer briefs, smelling like face soap and toothpaste. He looked at his list in my hand, reading each item. “Nope,” he said. “Not one thing. It’s all there.”

  “No bathing suit?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said again. “Everything you need is right there.”

  I revamped my thoughts for the weekend. Maybe we were going to the Berkshires. Or that spa his oldest sister always talked about in Connecticut. Either of those would be fun.

  “You can get out of work tomorrow night right at five?” he said.

  I nodded. “I told Phil, he said fine.”

  Darren had moved over to his own suitcase and was packing too. “I’ll pick you up outside the office,” he said, “and we’ll head off.”

  “I can meet you at the rental car place,” I told him.

  “Nah.” He folded a pair of pants so the creases stayed creased and placed them in his suitcase. “I think it makes more sense for me to come get you.”

  I paused in my packing to watch him ball his socks and then tuck them into his shoes—he fit three pairs in each sneaker, his neck curving forward to make sure they were pushed all the way inside.

  Sometimes I looked at him, and all I could think was: Mine. That’s my boyfriend, my body to cuddle, my hand to hold. I never felt you were mine in the same sense that Darren was—is. It always seemed like you belonged to you and lent yourself out to me when you felt like it; I never had complete ownership. With Darren, I did. And the fact that he was so wholly mine made me ignore things that perhaps I shouldn’t have.

  I snuck up behind him that night, wrapped my arms around his chest, and kissed the back of his neck. “Okay, I get it, it’s your surprise trip. I’ll stop trying to change your plans.”

  He turned around and kissed me back and I felt him hard against me.

  “Hey,” I said, raising my eyebrows.

  “Hey,” he said back, softly.

  I lifted up his shirt and kissed my way down his torso to the elastic of his under
wear, and then slipped it off, knelt down and kissed lower.

  “Oh, Lucy.” He pulled me up off my knees and onto the bed with him.

  We didn’t go to sleep until far too late that night.

  I was groggy the whole next day at work, and was ten minutes late heading out to meet Darren for our trip.

  “Where have you been?” he asked, when I finally made it outside.

  He was pacing on the sidewalk in front of a limo.

  “That’s not a rental car,” I said.

  He laughed and snapped out of whatever funk he’d been in. “It’s not. We’re going to the airport.”

  “The airport?” I repeated.

  “I’m taking you to Paris!” he said. “Like on your bucket list: Go to Paris for a long weekend just because.”

  I felt my eyes go wide. “Are you serious?” I asked, completely dumbfounded. A surprise vacation to Paris! This was the sort of thing that happened in movies, not in the real world. But it was happening in the real world. And it was happening to me!

  It was an incredibly grand and romantic gesture. The kind of thing tons of women dream about. But after the initial shock wore off, it felt odd to me, like when Darren bought us Annie. I wanted to have had a say. What if I wanted to stay in a particular arrondissement? Or visit Biarritz while we were there? Or Giverny?

  “Serious as global warming,” he said. “Come on, we have to get to the airport!” He opened the car door for me.

  “But my passport!” I said, as I got in the car.

  “Right here,” he answered, sliding in next to me and patting his laptop case.

  • • •

  WHEN WE GOT TO JFK, I found out that he’d booked us seats in business class.

  “Are you crazy?” I asked him, as we waited in the American Airlines lounge.

  “Miles,” he said. “Credit card points. Didn’t cost a thing.”