You Love Me

by Caroline Kepnes

  There’s nothing more annoying than good advice from someone who makes a lot of bad decisions and we’re silent until Oliver drops me in my driveway. Goodbye, Oliver, and hello to my empty houses. You and the Meerkat are still not in your guesthouse and I take another shower—I still smell bunny blood—and I put on my black cashmere sweater and I go into my kitchen and stand before my chopping block of Rachael Rays. I choose a smaller knife, the sharpest one I have, and I slip the knife into a book and Oliver is right, Mary Kay.

  It’s time to go hard.

  47

  I pop a Percocet—just one half this time—and Oliver has to win over so many motherfuckers if he wants Johnny Bates to make it into American homes. He’s my friend, in a way, and I really will cross my fingers for him, but I won’t hold my breath. That business isn’t so different from dealing with the Quinns. He’s gotta go hard when they tell him to go hard and then when they tell him it’s too hard he’s gotta go soft and when they send him notes and tell him they have no idea what he was thinking, that Johnny Bates is way too soft, he’s gotta suck it up and tell them how smart they are. It’s not an easy way of life, and me, I only have to kill it in one room, with one woman: you.

  I catch a ferry to Seattle and I do what I need to do and I catch another ferry back to Bainbridge and I go home. I get my car but I don’t park at the library—too close and not close as in Closer—and I pull my hat down the way people do sometimes, when you need to leave the house but you don’t fucking feel like talking to anyone.

  I’m too nervous, what with Rachael Ray up my sleeve, about to go where she’s never gone before. Can I do this? Can I really do this?

  I cut through the woods and I’m in the gardens by the library, crouching. The windows need to be washed but I see you in there. You’re being you. I’m nervous and I can’t risk you seeing me so I carry on through the woods, into the back parking lot. I might vomit. The half a Percocet. The adrenaline. The Pain Pong.

  “Hi, Joe.” It’s the Meerkat and she’s on the move and she doesn’t stop to talk. “Bye, Joe.”

  She zooms by into the library and her Instagram said she was in Seattle and I brought Rachael Ray here for us, for you and me and now she knows I’m here—fuck—and will she tell you?

  I duck my head and take the path down the steps into the garden and the cupola is empty—thank God—and I move like a mechanic, like Mick Fucking Jagger, maneuvering my broken body onto the ground, sliding my upper body under the love seat. I wanted to do this the right way, with spray paint, but then other people would see and the paint would bleed everywhere so it’s just not realistic, is it? I take the knife out of my sleeve and I start to go to work. It’s a slow go. I have empathy for Oliver because knives aren’t easy and at this rate I’m never going to finish. I’ve never carved initials into a tree. I don’t even know if you’ll be moved by this because yes, you love the graffiti at Fort Ward, but will you love the fact that I carved our initials into the underbelly of a love seat that’s property of the Bainbridge Public Library? Will you even be able to read my shitty knife-writing?

  “Whatcha doing?”

  I flinch and drop my knife and the Meerkat needs to be less caffeinated. Less nosy. “There’s a loose screw,” I say. “I’m just fixing it so nobody gets hurt. Can you gimme a minute?”

  “I can give you a million minutes,” she says and then she’s gone, clomp, clomp, clomp.

  I have to move fast because the Meerkat isn’t stupid and I am defacing public property for my own private purposes and this is only part one of Operation Go Hard and I have to make it to part two, the harder part of going hard.

  The door opens. It’s you. “Okay,” you say. “Please don’t make me have to tell you to stop vandalizing our property.”

  The fucking Meerkat ratted me out and I’m not done yet and I had a plan. I was gonna lay down a red blanket and play “One” by U2—our first fuck—and you were gonna lie down and see our initials and life isn’t what happens when you’re making plans. It’s what happens when you get a fucking head injury and turn into a sappy dork.

  You say my name again. “Joe, come on. Stop.”

  I pocket my knife and bang my head as I worm my way out from under the love seat. I am standing. Dizzy. My poor head. You just sigh. “I told you. There’s nothing to talk about. Go home.”

  “Wait.”

  You don’t move. Do I get down on my knees? No, I don’t get down on my knees. That’s not us. I sit on the bench. I don’t ask you to join me, but you do. You put your hands on your elbows.

  “You were right,” I say.

  “About what?”

  “You told me that it’s not in my nature to love.”

  “I was mad and I told you I was sorry. Can we not do this?”

  “Yes,” I say. “We can absolutely not do this. I can go home. I can put my house on the market and I can move. And you can go back inside and pretend I don’t exist.”

  “Joe…”

  “It’s not in my nature to love, Mary Kay. And the truth hurts. And you have every reason to pretend I don’t exist because you’re absolutely right. My note to you was generic and vague. I disappeared on you. And my letter wasn’t just vague. It was bullshit because you can’t open up to someone without opening up all the way and I didn’t do that. I got scared. I ran. No excuses.”

  “Can I go now?”

  “Did I walk out on you when you told me about Phil?”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you’re married, too?”

  “Believe me, Mary Kay, I thought about running scared. The man was a rock star. I was intimidated…” I was never intimidated by that fucking rat but certain situations call for certain logic and it’s working.

  You’re listening. The windows of your Empathy Bordello are opening and you’re letting me back in, a little.

  “Mary Kay, I promise I’ll never chicken out on you again. I know I ran away.”

  You say nothing and of course you say nothing. A liar can’t promise that he’ll never lie again. You say you should probably go back in and I tell you to wait and you throw up your hands. “I did wait. I waited all day for you to call.”

  “I did call.”

  “Not when you got off the plane.”

  “I got mugged.”

  “Oh, do you expect me to believe that you got mugged at the airport? What, Joe? You got… shot at the Starbucks in LAX?”

  “I flew into Burbank.”

  “I don’t care. It’s too late.”

  “Mary Kay, I told you. You’re right. I fucked up. And I don’t blame you for icing me out that day and all the days after. You had every right to do that.”

  “You should go.”

  “No,” I say. “I have to tell you something about me.”

  I have no plan and I’m not a pantser. I am a planner. But I’m not gonna win you back with schmaltz—you want me to be vulnerable and you want some fucking facts—and I have to tell you everything without telling you everything. “Okay, look,” I begin. “I went to this school shrink when I was kid. She talked about object permanence. How babies, if you show them an apple, they see the apple. And if you cover the apple up with a box, they forget the apple was there. They forget the apple exists because it doesn’t exist to them when they can’t see it.”

  “I’m familiar with the concept of object permanence.”

  “I did lie to you, Mary Kay. On our first date… I glossed over my relationships…” It’s true. “I wanted to come off like Mr. Independent. Mr. Evolved…” God, it feels good to speak the truth. “But in reality, I moved here because I let my ex walk all over me…” More like stampede. “I let her treat me like a doormat… And I know it sounds macho and stupid but I thought it might turn you off if I told you about what a sucker I’d been.”

  “Joe…”

  “See, I thought, here’s my fresh start. If I don’t tell you about Lauren…” I can’t say Love’s real name because the story online is a lie—she didn’t die of can
cer—and I’m caught in her family’s web of lies. “I thought that if I didn’t tell you that Lauren existed, I would feel like she never existed, like that guy I was when I was with her, like he never existed either.”

  You pick at the splintered wood. “So you ran back to your ex. And you referred to it as a ‘family emergency,’ which tells me that she still very much ‘exists’ to you…”

  “I know,” I say. “Fucking stupid. Inexcusable. And if I could go back to that night, I would wake you up and tell you about Lauren. I would tell you that she just called threatening to commit suicide. I would tell you that I hate myself for not telling you sooner, for not blocking her number… but I would also tell you that I never blocked her number because I have empathy for her. The woman has no one.”

  “Except you…”

  “Not anymore, Mary Kay.” RIP Love. “My empathy got the best of me, but I cut the cord.”

  “Well, that’s nifty.”

  “Listen to me. I saw her…” Truth. “She was on the verge of taking her own life…” More truth. “But now it’s over. She’s with her brother, the only person she really ever loved, and I blocked her number. This is the end of the line for us.”

  Whoever said that the truth just sounds different was right. You’re taking it all in and I really won’t be hearing from RIP LoveSick anymore. She was never the same after she lost her brother and if there’s a heaven, she’s with him, and if not, well, she can’t hurt me anymore. More importantly, she can’t hurt my fucking son.

  You wave at my wounds. “Did her brother do this to you?”

  “No,” I say, getting off on all this delicious, cathartic truth. “But I’m happy it happened.”

  You sigh and that was too Phil-ish and I correct. “I mean that it was a wake-up call about what a hypocrite I’ve been, hiding the ugliness of what it was like with Lauren, as if anyone can just ‘erase their past,’ sneaking out on you with that stupid half-ass note. This gunshot, this beating, it was the universe telling me that playing the hero for Lauren, swooping in to ‘save’ her… well, you can’t call yourself a hero if you’re lying to someone you love. I won’t make that mistake again, Mary Kay, I mean that, not with you, not with anyone.”

  I take the ring out of my pocket. No YouTube-style show. No flowers. No string section rounding the corner to serenade us with U2. I just put it on my middle finger. “I got this on 1stdibs.”

  “Oh,” you say. “Well, that’s nice.”

  “It made me think about why I ran away, what rings are for people. Because some of us… we don’t ever learn about object permanence, not really. I mean I was with that shrink because I refused to leave my jacket and my backpack in my locker because I thought if I couldn’t see them at all times… they’d be gone.”

  “Are you asking me why I didn’t wear a ring when I was… when Phil was alive?”

  I close my hand around the ring. “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t have one. I lost it when I was pregnant.”

  “How?”

  “I lost it at the beach…” You scratch your elbows. “He was never home. Anyway, he finished Moan and Groan, all these songs where he’s complaining about me and the baby ruining his life… The album explodes and he was so happy and I was so lonely. I was pregnant. I had homework. Everyone acted like I should be different, Oh, you’re still getting your masters?” You ball up your fists. “Nomi was born. He bought me a new ring. I told him I lost that one, too. I was lying. I just hid it in the attic. But I thought I was doing a nice thing. I thought he might get a song out of it… two lost rings… Anyway, a couple years later, Nomi must have been about three… Phil goes up to the attic. He found the ring, the one I said I lost. He didn’t yell at me. He didn’t cry. He left it on my pillow and I know what you mean. You’re just as evil as me.”

  “You’re not evil, Mary Kay.”

  “I’m gonna be completely honest with you.”

  Good. “Good.”

  “I loved not telling you about Phil. I got off on the danger, the reality that you might find out and hate me. It was a game and I finally got to be the horrible woman that everyone around here secretly thought I was.”

  “It’s not your fault that I was stupid. We’ve been through this. It’s on me, too.”

  You smirk and I see this new side of you. Haughty. All velvet ropes and there’s no one in the room but you and I want in. “Joe” you simper. “You’re earnest. And I’m… I’m not sure that I’m even a whole person. Sometimes I think that everything I do and say… it’s all a reaction to what everyone thinks about me… She thinks she’s hot stuff because of one album. Her poor husband was right. She dragged him down just like he said she would! And she won’t even wear a ring. If she had any dignity she’d leave him and maybe then he’d write good music. She acts like she’s some kinda saint, keeping him on the wagon, but the man is miserable! And she just walks around that library pretending to be some independent woman. What a joke. What a lie. Who does she think she’s fooling? What is she looking for? When’s it ever gonna be enough for her?”

  “Now,” I say. “This is enough. You don’t scare me and with this ‘not a whole person’ bullshit, either. Good try though. You almost had me… almost…”

  It’s time to go hard but not too hard, soft but not too soft. I open my fist and the ring is right there. You spent your entire adult life pulling Phil out of the quicksand of stardom. I won’t ask you to marry me. You know what the ring means. I go soft so that you can go hard—please, please, please—and finally, you pick up the ring and slide it onto your finger and your face lights up and you are the star, my star.

  “Okay,” you say. “I get it now. You really do exist.”

  “I really do exist. And I really did fuck up. But I learned my lesson, Mary Kay, because we’re in the same boat. I never thought a woman like you existed either.”

  You look at me. “And I do.”

  “Yes you do.”

  When we kiss, the Meerkat hollers and we look into the library and she’s there with a few of the Mothballs and a couple patrons and they couldn’t hear us talking but they were watching. Everyone loves a proposal, even one as simple and ass backwards as ours and you’re laughing. “Well, I guess I can’t take it off now!”

  I kiss your hand. “Never.”

  The Meerkat bursts through the door and she hugs you, she hugs me, and there is clapping, so much clapping, and a Mothball brings a bottle of fake champagne outside and I should be in pain. I was shot in the head. Love tried to kill me and Seamus tried to kill me but your hand is latched onto mine and you are showing off your ring and the Meerkat is putting us on Instagram and this is it, my happy fucking ending, my happy fucking beginning.

  “Nomi,” you say. “What are you doing under there?”

  She’s on her back, under the love seat, taking a picture of my vandalism. “Reading,” she says. “I think he was trying to carve his initials.”

  “I love you,” you say. “But don’t fuck with my library, okay?”

  I went hard and you went hard and now we’re gonna go hard together. “It’s a deal,” I say. “I will be good to you and your library, especially that big Red Bed inside…” It was just dirty enough and you wink at me, my fox, my fianc-fucking- ée.

  48

  It’s been four weeks and sixteen days and the love songs were telling the truth. When it’s real, it’s real and this is real, Mary Kay. You never take off your ring and commitment agrees with us. We worked hard to get here. We sacrificed a lot. Your friend Shortus died in a hunting accident—well done, Oliver—and I don’t care if you slept with him in his stupid cabin. He’s gone, I’m here, and we ran in the 5 fucking K to honor that racist, diseased little man and then we took a shower together and you didn’t fall off the edge of the sidewalk in despair.

  You climb into bed with me and you hug me. “Promise me you won’t take up hunting.”

  It’s almost like you know that my life was plagued with violence for so long
. “I promise.”

  Everything is different now. Fecal-Eyed Nancy put the moves on me when she was drunk at the pub last week and I told you right away and you told me I did the right thing and we had sex in the bathroom by Normal Norman Rockwell’s mermaid in the cage, by the shipwrecked sailor and the naked woman of his scurvy-induced fantasies. And then you decided that maybe you won’t start hot yoga with Fecal Eyes after all and it’s easy to grow apart from people. The toast at Blackbird is good but it isn’t something we can’t live without and it doesn’t matter that Fecal Eyes didn’t actually put the moves on me. I don’t like her. I don’t want her in our life and it’s just better to push her away because I promised I wouldn’t kill anyone and I didn’t kill anyone for you and I want things to stay that way. I want to honor my first vow to you, the one you don’t even know about.

  The Meerkat bursts into the room and groans. “Enough with Taylor Swift.”

  You’re the one who keeps playing “Lover” all the time and I get where the Meerkat is a little sick of it because love can be repugnant when it’s not yours, especially when it involves the woman who birthed you. You do the right thing. You tickle her. “Never,” you say, facetiously. And then you promise you’ll take the song off the playlist after the big day and the Meerkat snaps her fingers. “But it is the big day.”

  Yes it is! You smile. “But the big day’s not over yet, honey.”

  She groans, but she’s not really mad and we’re getting married in a matter of hours. Yes! I’m a good stepfather and I kill the Taylor Swift and the Meerkat is droll. “Thanks, Joe.”

  “Anything for you, kiddo.”

  It’s Saturday and there aren’t many Saturdays like this left. The Meerkat will be away at college soon—take that, Ivan—and it’s the three of us now, we’re the family boarding the ferry and there are no sharks in these waters. I don’t ignore you the way your rat did and the Gilmore Girls found their Luke and we spend the whole day in Seattle, roaming around looking at tchotchkes, tchotchkes we don’t buy because I’m here to remind you that they’re tchotchkes we don’t need and I love your friends who own the record store and they love me.