Forever, Interrupted

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  “He was eighteen and leaving for college. As many of you know he went to college close by, only an hour or two away, but it was much farther than he had ever been from me and I was terrified. My only son was moving away! All summer long I was crying on and off, trying to hide it from him, trying not to make him feel guilty. The day came to take him to school. Well, actually, wait.” She stops, no longer reading from the paper. “The other part of this you need to know is that we have a guest bathroom in the house that we never use. No one ever uses it. It was this big family joke that no one had set foot in the guest bathroom for years. We have a bathroom downstairs that guests always use and an extra bathroom upstairs that I had deemed the guest bathroom and insisted it had to be redone and gorgeous because guests would use it, but no guest ever used it. I’ve never even had to clean it. Anyway . . . ” she continues.

  “As Steven and I are moving Ben in, we bring in the last of his stuff and I just start bawling my eyes out, right in front of his new roommate and his parents. It had to be mortifying for him, but he didn’t show it. He walked me out to the car and he hugged Steven and I, and he said, ‘Mom, don’t worry. I’ll come back next month and stay a weekend, all right?’ And I nodded. I knew that if I didn’t leave that minute, I’d never be able to. So I got in the car and Steven and I had started to drive away when Ben gave me one last kiss and said, ‘When you get sad, check the guest bathroom.’ I asked him to explain what he meant, but he smiled and repeated himself, so I let it go, and when I got home, I ran in there.” She laughs. “I couldn’t wait another minute, and as I turned on the light, I saw that he had written ‘I love you’ across the mirror in soap. At the very bottom it said, ‘And you can keep this forever because no one will ever see it.’ And I did, it’s still there now. I don’t think a single other person has ever seen it.”

  I look down at the ground just in time to see the tears fall off my face and onto my shoes.

  JANUARY

  It was the day before our five-week deal was up. For the past four weeks and six days, Ben and I had been spending all of our time together, but neither one of us was allowed to mention words like boyfriend, girlfriend, or more specifically, I love you. I was very much looking forward to tomorrow. We had spent the day in bed, reading magazines (me) and newspapers (him), and he had been trying to convince me that it was a good idea to get a dog. This all started because of the pictures of dogs for adoption in the classifieds.

  “Just look at this one. It’s blind in one eye!” Ben said as he shoved the newspaper in my face. His fingertips were covered in gray ink. All I could think was that he was getting the ink all over my white sheets.

  “I see him!” I said back, putting down my magazine and turning toward Ben. “He’s very, very cute. How old is he?”

  “He’s two! Just two years old and he needs a home, Elsie! We can be that home!”

  I grabbed the newspaper from him. “We can’t be anything. We aren’t talking about anything that would progress our relationship in any way, shape, or form. Which a dog most certainly does.”

  Ben grabbed the paper back. “Yes, but that ends tomorrow and this dog might get adopted today!”

  “Well, if he gets adopted today then he’s okay, right? We don’t need to step in and help him,” I said, smiling at him, teasing him.

  “Elsie.” Ben shook his head. His voice turned purposefully childish. “Before, when I said that I was worried that the dog wouldn’t find a good home, I wasn’t being entirely honest about how I felt about this dog.”

  “You weren’t?” I said, falsely shocked.

  “No, Elsie. I wasn’t. And I think you knew that.”

  I shook my head. “I knew no such thing.”

  “I want this dog, dammit! I don’t want anyone else to have it! We have to get it today!”

  We had been joking up until then, but I was starting to feel that if I said I’d go get it that day, he’d put his clothes on and be in the car within minutes.

  “We can’t get a dog!” I said, laughing. “Whose house would it even live at?”

  “Here. It would live here and I would take care of it.”

  “Here? At my house?”

  “Well, I can’t keep him at my house! It’s a shithole!”

  “So, really, you want me to get a dog and you want to play with it.”

  “No, I will take care of the dog with you and it will be our dog.”

  “You are cheating. This is . . . this is progressing the relationship. This is a huge . . . just a huge . . . I mean . . . ”

  Ben started laughing. He could see that he was making me nervous. The conversation had started to teeter on moving-in territory, and I was way too eager to discuss the idea. So eager that it embarrassed me and I did everything I could to hide it.

  “Fine,” he said, putting one arm around me and the other behind him on the pillow. “I won’t talk about this at all today. But if Buster is still around tomorrow, can we discuss it?”

  “Buster? You want to name the dog Buster?”

  “I didn’t name the dog! It says in the ad that his name is Buster. If it were up to me, we’d name the dog Sonic. Because that is an awesome name.”

  “I’m not getting a dog and naming it Sonic.”

  “Fine, how about Bandit?”

  “Bandit?”

  “Evel Knievel?”

  “You would end up calling it Evel for short. That’s terrible.”

  Ben was laughing at himself. “Please don’t tell me you’d want to name a dog Fluffy or Cookie.”

  “If I was going to have a dog, I’d name it something based on what it looked like. You know? Really take into account the personality of the dog.”

  “Has anyone else told you you’re the most boring woman on the planet?” Ben asked me, smiling.

  “They have now,” I said. “What time is it? We have to meet Ana soon, I think.”

  “It’s five forty-seven p.m.,” he said.

  “Ah!” I jumped up off the bed and into a pair of jeans. “We’re already going to be late!”

  “We’re meeting her at six?” Ben asked, not moving. “She’s always late.”

  “Yes! Yes! But we still have to be on time!” I was reaching around the side of the bed searching for my bra. I didn’t like the way my breasts looked in certain positions, and I found myself running around the room with one arm covering them.

  Ben got up. “Okay. Can we just check to see if she’ll be there on time?”

  I stopped looking a moment to stare at him. “What? No. We have to leave now!”

  Ben laughed. “Okay, I will get us there at six oh five,” he said as he put his pants on and threw a shirt on over them. He was suddenly ready to go, and I was nowhere near it.

  “Okay! Okay!” I ran into the bathroom to see if I’d left my bra there. Ben followed me in, helping me. He found it before I did and threw it at me. “Don’t cover your boobs on my account. I know you think they look bad when you are bent over, but you’re wrong. So next time just let ’em hang free, baby.”

  I looked at him in stunned silence. “You are so fucking weird,” I said.

  He picked me up like I weighed three pounds. My body was straight against his, my legs tight together, my arms on his shoulders. He looked at me and kissed my collarbone. “I’m weird for loving you?”

  I think he was just as shocked he’d said it as I was. “To love parts of you, I meant.” He put me down. “I meant, to love parts of you.” He blushed slightly as I found a shirt and put it on. I smiled at him like he was a child who had very adorably hidden my car keys.

  “You weren’t supposed to say that,” I teased him as I put on mascara and got my shoes.

  “Ignore it please!” He was now waiting by the door for me.

  “I don’t think I can ignore it!” I said as we exited my front door.

  We got in the car and he started the engine. “I really am sorry about that. It just came out.”

  “You broke the rules!” I said again. />
  “I know! I know. I’m already embarrassed. It’s . . . ” He trailed off as we headed down the street. He was pretending to be focused on driving, but I could tell all of him was focused on this sentence.

  “It’s what?”

  Ben sighed, suddenly serious. “I made up the whole five-week thing because I was afraid I’d tell you I loved you too soon and you wouldn’t say it back and I’d be embarrassed, and now here I am, I waited all these days to tell you and I . . . I still told you too soon and you didn’t say it back and I’m embarrassed.” He played the end off like a joke, but it wasn’t a joke.

  “Hey,” I said, grabbing his arm. He was stopped at a red light. I turned his head and looked him in the eye. “I love you too,” I said. “Probably before you did. I’ve been waiting to say it all month, practically.”

  His eyes looked glassy, and I couldn’t tell if he was tearing up or he was perfectly fine. Either way, he kissed me and held my gaze until the cars behind us honked. Ben immediately started paying attention to the road again.

  “I had this whole plan!” He laughed. “I was going to wake up early tomorrow and go into the bathroom and write ‘I love you’ on the mirror with a bar of soap.”

  I laughed. “Well, you can still do that tomorrow,” I said, rubbing his hand. “It will mean just as much to me then.”

  Ben laughed. “Okay then, maybe I will.” And he did. I left it there for days.

  JUNE

  I can’t help but feel for Susan after her eulogy. She has made me love my husband even more than I did when he was alive.

  Susan walks to her place along the grave, and the pastor asks for me to make my way to the front. I can feel myself sweating out of nervousness on top of the sweat already there from the heat.

  I pull my heels out of the ground and stand at the top of Ben’s grave. For a minute, I just stare at the box, knowing what is inside, knowing just days earlier that body had put a ring on my finger. Knowing even more recently, that body had gotten on a bike and headed up the street to get me cereal. That body loved me. They say that public speaking and death are the top two most stressful events in a person’s life. So I forgive myself for being so scared I almost faint.

  “I,” I start. “I . . . ” I stop. Where do I even begin? My eye catches the casket in front of me again, and I stop myself from looking at it directly. I will fall to pieces if I keep thinking about what I’m doing. “Thank you for coming. For those of you who don’t know me, I want to introduce myself. My name is Elsie and I was Ben’s wife.”

  I gotta breathe. I just gotta breathe.

  “I know that you’ve probably all heard by now that Ben and I eloped just a few days before he passed away and I . . . know that puts us all in a difficult position. We are strangers to each other, but we share a very real loss. I had only been dating Ben a short while before we got married. I didn’t know him for very long. I admit that. But the short amount of time that I was his wife,” I say, “was the defining part of my life.

  “He was a good man with a big heart, and he loved all of you. I’ve heard so many stories about you. I’ve heard, Aunt Marilyn, about the time you caught him peeing in your backyard. Or Mike, he told me about when you two were little and you used to play cops and robbers, but you both were robbers so there weren’t any cops. These stories were part of why I grew to love him in such a short span of time, and they’re part of what makes me feel so close to all of you.”

  I want to look these people in the eye when I say their names, but to tell the truth, I’m not entirely sure which of the older ladies is Marilyn and which of the young men is Mike. My eyes scan the people looking at me and then they move briefly to Susan. She has her head down, tucked in her chest.

  “I guess I just want you all to know that at the end of his life, he had someone who loved him deeply and purely. He had someone who believed in him. I took good care of him, I promise you I did. And I can tell you, as the last person to see him alive, I can tell you, he was happy. He had found a happy life for himself. He was happy.”

  Susan catches my eye as I step back into place. This time she nods and puts her head back down. The pastor steps back up to lead, and my brain drifts to somewhere else, anywhere else but here.

  As I stand next to Ana, she puts her arm around me and gives me a squeeze. The pastor offers Susan and me small shovels to spread dirt on the casket. We both step forward and take them, but Susan grabs the dirt with her hand instead and gently throws it on Ben’s casket, so I do the same thing. We stand there, together but separate, side by side, dusting the dirt off our hands. I find myself jealous of the dirt that will get to spend so many years close to Ben’s body. As I dust off the last of the dirt and Susan starts to move back toward her place in the crowd, our hands graze each other, pinkies touching. Out of reflex, I freeze, and when I do, she grabs my hand, if only for a split second, and squeezes it, never looking at me. For one second, we are together in this, and then she goes back to her spot and I retreat to mine. I want to run up to her. I want to hug her and say, “Look at what we could be to each other.” But I don’t.

  I head back to the car and try to ready myself for the next phase of this day. I break it down into baby steps in my head. I just need to sit here in the front seat as Ana drives us to Susan’s house. I just have to put one foot out of the door after she parks. Then the other foot. I just have to not cry as I head into her home. I just have to give a consternated smile to the other mourners as we walk in together. That’s as far as I get before we are parked outside of Susan’s house, one in a long line of cars against the sidewalk. Do the neighbors know? Are they looking at this invasion on their street and thinking, Poor Susan Ross. She lost her son now too?

  I get out of the car and straighten my dress. I take off my hat with the veil and leave it on the front seat of Ana’s car. She sees me do this and nods.

  “Too dramatic for interiors,” she says.

  If I open my mouth I will cry and spill my feelings all over this sidewalk. I simply nod and tighten my lips, willing the knot in my throat to recede, to let me do this. I tell myself I can cry all night. I can cry for the rest of my life, if I can just get through this.

  When I find myself in front of Susan’s house, I am shocked at the sheer size of it. It’s too big for one person; that much is obvious from the street. My guess is she knows that already, feels it every day. It’s a Spanish-style house in a brilliant shade of white. At night, it must serve as a moon for the whole block. The roof is a deep brown with terra cotta shingles. The windows are huge. Bright, tropical-looking flowers are all over her front lawn. This house isn’t just expensive; it takes a lot of upkeep.

  “Jesus, what did she do? Write Harry Potter?” Ana says as we stare at it.

  “Ben didn’t grow up crazy rich. This all must be recent,” I say, and then we walk up the brick steps to Susan’s open front door. The minute I cross the threshold, I’m thrown into the middle of it.

  It’s a bustling house now full of people. Caterers in black pants and white shirts are offering people things like salmon mousse and shrimp ceviche on blue tortilla chips. I see a woman walk by me with a fried macaroni and cheese ball, and I think, If I ate food, that’s what I’d eat. Not this seafood crap. Who serves seafood at a funeral reception? I mean, probably everyone. But I hate seafood, and I hate this funeral reception.

  Ana grabs my hand and pulls me through the crowd. I don’t know what I was expecting from this reception, so I don’t know whether I’m disappointed or not.

  Finally, we make our way to Susan. She is in her kitchen, her beautiful, ridiculously stocked kitchen, and she is speaking to the caterers about the timing of various dishes and where things are located. She’s so kind and understanding. She says things like “Don’t worry about it. It’s just some salsa on the carpet. I’m sure it will come out.” And “Make yourself at home. The downstairs bathroom is around the corner to the right.”

  The guest bathroom. I want to see the guest bathr
oom. How do I run upstairs and find it without her knowing? Without being terribly rude and thoughtless? I just want to see his handwriting. I just want to see new evidence that he was alive.

  Ana squeezes my hand and asks me if I want a drink. I decline, and so she makes her way over to the bar area without me. Suddenly, I am standing in the middle of a funeral dedicated to my husband, and yet, I am not a part of it. I do not know anyone here. Everyone is walking around me, talking next to me, looking at me. I am the enigma to them. I am not a part of the Ben they knew. Some of them stare and then smile when I catch them. Others don’t even see me. Or maybe they are just better at staring. Susan comes out from the kitchen.

  “Should you go talk to her?” Ana asks, and I know that I should. I know that this is her house, this is her event, and I am a guest and I should say something.

  “What do I say in a situation like this?” I have started saying “situation like this” because this situation is so unique that it has no name and I don’t feel like constantly saying, “My new husband died and I’m standing in a room full of strangers making me feel like my husband was a stranger.”

  “Maybe just ‘How are you?’ ” Ana suggests. I think it’s stupid that the most appropriate question to ask the mother of my dead husband on the day of his funeral is the same question I ask bank tellers, waiters, and any other strangers I meet. Nevertheless, Ana is right. That is what I should do. I breathe in hard and hold it, and then I let it out and I start walking over to her.

  Susan is speaking with a few women her own age. They are dressed in black or navy suits with pearls. I walk up and wait patiently next to her. It’s clear that I want to cut in. The women leave pauses in the conversation, but none feel big enough for me to jump in. I know that she can see me. I’m in her sight line. She’s just making me wait because she can. Or maybe she’s not. Maybe she’s trying to be polite and this isn’t about me. Honestly, I’ve lost perspective on what’s about me and what isn’t so . . .