“Why?”
“Why what?” Joel asked. Casual.
“Why are you here?” Tallie asked, raising her voice.
“Because Ben told me Lionel could die!” Joel scoffed, which made her feel childish and ridiculous for asking the question. “I tried calling you. I tried texting you. I emailed you—”
“Joel, I’m sure Ben was drunk and overreacted. And I blocked your number. I haven’t checked my email—”
“Pfft…um, wait. Sorry, sorry, I really have to go to the bathroom. Hold on,” Joel said, disappearing down the hall and around the corner.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about. Ben was probably trashed with his owl girlfriend and had no clue what he was saying! I can’t believe he’s here,” Tallie said to Emmett. She stood there, dumbfounded. “Can you believe he’d show up?”
Emmett shook his head stiffly.
“After everything…he flies here and comes to the hospital like we’re one big happy family? Wow, I don’t know what to say. This is too fucking much.”
“Are you all right?” Emmett asked.
“Sure, I guess. But nothing’s making sense right now,” she said. Emmett nodded and watched her face. She stared at him, silent, her mind spinning JoelishereJoelshowedupJoelishereJoelshowedup around and around like a siren.
She turned when she heard footsteps.
“Okay,” Joel said, walking toward them again, his voice lifted in a jolt. “Hey, man,” he then said to Emmett, extending his hand.
Tallie watched a blush spread across Emmett’s cheeks, lighting him up as if he’d been plugged into a live socket. “Hey,” he said, holding out his hands to show Joel he couldn’t shake his.
“Joel, Emmett, Emmett, Joel. Emmett helped put the fire out. He burned his hands,” Tallie said.
“Oh, wow. Oh,” Joel said, taking a look at Emmett’s hands before tilting his head at him.
“Joel, you never email me.”
“What were you talking about before you went to the bathroom?”
“Um, sure I know we don’t email a lot, but come on…,” Joel began with wide eyes.
“Tallie, can I talk to you for a second alone?” Emmett leaned over and said in her ear.
“Of course. We’ll be right back,” Tallie said to Joel, loving how good it would feel to walk away from him with another man. Joel took a seat in one of the empty chairs lining that section of the hallway and pulled out his phone. Tallie and Emmett walked around the corner, where they were alone.
“I’m so sorry. You’ve been so kind to me. This is my fault Joel is here, and I was going to tell you everything, I swear. I was just about to tell you when you saw him,” Emmett said. He looked away from her and back again, up at the ceiling, down at the floor. As if he were offstage, too nervous to step out. Was he crying? Tallie’s brain swirled.
“Emmett, I don’t understand. Slow down. I don’t understand anything you’re saying. How in the world is it your fault Joel is here? Trust me, this isn’t your fault. What do you mean? Are you feeling okay?” she asked. Was he having another episode? He really ought to look into medication, and she’d tell him that as soon as they got through this part. So much was happening that it was probably shorting him out, sending him into overdrive. It was almost sending her into overdrive, too. Her stomach wobbled like gelatin.
“You took my letters, so I talked to Joel. It was a messed-up thing to do, and I’m sorry,” he said.
“Your letters?” Tallie said, searching her mind like she’d searched his pockets on Thursday night. “Okay…right. I…yes…I looked at your letters. I should’ve said something…Uh, what do you mean you talked to Joel? Talked to Joel how? About what?”
Emmett had talked to Joel? Emmett had talked to Joel. The sentence was a cipher, impossible to decode.
Joel rounded the corner wagging his finger at them.
“I knew I recognized you, man. You’re Rye Kipling. From Bloom. I followed all that shit you went through some years back. The Southeastern Kentucky News said you were missing. Why’d she say your name was Emmett? Who’s Emmett?” Joel asked, lifting his chin.
His words vaporized, caught in her throat. And now it was Tallie who felt on fire.
RYE
Ryland Miller Kipling was born in 1987 in Bloom, Kentucky, an hour south of Clementine. When he was twenty-three, Rye married Eleanor Christina Bloom in the spring. That same year, Christmas Day, they welcomed their daughter, Briar Anna Kipling, into the world. Briar Anna’s hair held the same red-gold-blond as Rye’s, and their daughter had Eleanor Christina’s brown eyes and Cupid’s bow. Rye worked long day shifts that stretched into nights at the restaurant on Lake Bloom in order to pay for their home, the Honeybee House.
When they met, Eleanor told him to call her Christine because she was an actress, and Christine Bloom sounded more old-Hollywood to her. “Like someone they would name a perfume after,” she’d said. And once Briar Anna began to talk and say her name—she tried as hard as she could, but no matter what, it came out of her mouth as Brenna. So they called her that.
Christine was a bit manic and unpredictable, but Rye had found it alluring, never a problem in the first year of their relationship. He had his own mood swings and weirdness, too, like everyone else. But Christine’s mental issues spun out after Brenna’s birth. Days turned into full weeks when she wouldn’t leave their bedroom. Depressive episodes bled into manic episodes that bled back into depressive episodes that spread into their bedroom again, poured across their hallway floor into the living room and kitchen, onto their lawn. Oil spills slicking everything in their life. She’d been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder after having Brenna. Christine told him she’d always felt like she had mental issues, but her parents ignored her, told her she’d grow out of them. The Blooms didn’t want mental illness staining their perfect family. They suggested that maybe it was Rye who was making her feel so bad.
Rye accompanied her to the psychiatric appointments, leaving Brenna with his parents for the afternoon. He would go and sit next to Christine on the couch if she wanted or he would stay in the waiting room when she asked, staring at his phone or flipping through new and old issues of Field & Stream, Time, People. Christine would emerge from her dialectical behavior therapy gauzy and backlit with hope. And on they’d go, back home to try again. She’d take her medication and it’d work; she’d hate the numbness and stop. The pattern repeated and repeated, a revolving door of progress and setbacks.
There were strings of days when it seemed as if they could get through this. Together. When necessary, Rye would cook every meal or bring food home from the restaurant, clean the house, take care of Brenna when Christine couldn’t. And there were times when Christine, clear and happy, was bright-eyed and attentive to Brenna, asking for help when she needed it. If he was the easy heart, she was the wild one—a big, wild heart with big, wild dreams of being a famous actress and playwright. Christine started working at the local theater again.
Before Brenna, she’d won first place in a playwriting contest for her play about a group of high school students with secret superpowers and had been cast as the local playhouse’s first female Hamlet. In the two years preceding getting pregnant, she’d finished highly successful runs as Amy in Little Women, Violet in It’s a Wonderful Life, Emily Webb in Our Town, and the title character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. After going with Hunter and Savannah to see her in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Rye had given Christine two bouquets of daisies and told her she was the crème de la crème.
After they’d begun dating, to help her make some money of her own, Rye had persuaded her to try waitressing at his family’s restaurant. She was a terrible waitress. So bad that he had to beg her to quit so his mom wouldn’t have to fire her. But she was an outstanding actress. Brilliant and affecting and funny, coming alive onstage in a way she didn’t anywhere else.
After Brenna, Rye had encouraged her to start auditioning again. When she score
d the role of Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the local theater, he helped her run lines, getting fully into it with her—in the living room, in the kitchen, in the bedroom—reading Brick’s parts and Mae’s, too, in a whiny, high-pitched southern drawl. They’d collapse together on the floor, wine-buzzed, laughing from too much silliness. Those were the best days after Brenna. When previously safe things like having a glass of wine didn’t feel so dangerous anymore. She shouldn’t have been drinking on her antidepressants, but they welcomed the small rebellion because it made things feel normalish. And it was settled—Brenna was perfect and would be their only child. When she was two years old, Rye got a vasectomy and was laid up on the couch for a weekend, a nubby bag of frozen peas between his legs.
* * *
One evening a year later, after a bad morning and a worse afternoon, after a blowout over Christine not eating and not taking her meds, Rye suggested maybe she needed to go for a short stay at the psychiatric hospital. He was willing to try anything to calm her anxiety, anything to lift her from the concrete fog of depression. The seesaw of Christine’s moods and emotions dizzied him completely.
“This will never end. It’ll never stop. And I’m so tired,” he’d told her.
“You’re so tired? You? What about me? You want to leave me!” she’d said, her ever-present fear of abandonment snaking around them both like a boa constrictor, squeezing and squeezing.
“Christine, I promise I’m not leaving you. I’ll be back. I’m just going for a walk,” he’d said, holding her still so she couldn’t throw anything else. “Please don’t yell. Brenna’s sleeping.”
She squirmed wildly in his arms like she always did. Kicked, demanded to be let go.
“You want me dead. I’m calling the fucking cops!” she screamed before Rye closed the kitchen window.
* * *
“No. I’m not missing. It’s a mistake,” Rye said to Joel in the hospital hallway. “Tallie, I’ll explain. If I could talk to you alone for a little bit longer.” He was pleading with her, his eyes welling. He didn’t want to cry there in front of Joel, in front of everyone. He felt the earth dragging him down and leaned against the wall for balance.
Rye had done this to himself. He was the reason Joel was there, and Joel was the one to out him? It was too stupid to be true. Tallie had her hands up close to her chest. And for all the faces she’d made in the past few days, this was one Rye hadn’t seen before. So sad she could burst into tears, so angry she could kill him with her bare hands.
“Yeah…if you could excuse us again that would be…awesome,” Rye said to Joel, sniffing.
“Tallie, are you all right? Is everything okay?” Joel asked carefully.
“Joel, please just give us a sec,” she said.
Joel looked back and forth between them before saying he’d go find a cup of coffee.
Rye watched Joel disappear and asked Tallie if she’d step outside with him. Out the door at the end of the hallway and down flight after flight of stairs, under the darkening Sunday sky, they would be able to breathe. They wouldn’t suffocate under the antiseptic and fluorescence. Outside, they could have a chance.
But in the hallway, Tallie didn’t say a word as she began moving toward the door, practically running. Rye had to make a deliberate effort to keep up.
“I can’t do this.” Her tenuous echo bounced around the stairwell.
“Please let me explain,” he said behind her.
“I can’t do this,” she said again. Going down, down, down, finally shoving the door open at the bottom of the stairs, swapping the artificial stairwell light for the sunset.
“Please. Please hear me out,” he said. “There is so much I want to tell you. I created a fake email account and wrote Joel, pretending to be you.”
“I…I don’t understand. What? When? Why?!”
“I don’t have a reason. It was Thursday night. I was drunk when I started it, and it was a stupid, stupid thing to do, and I’m sorrier than I can properly express out here like this. I don’t have the words, but I’m trying. I’m literally begging you to forgive me.”
“This is scaring me. I don’t know who you are,” she said, stopping to turn around. She’d walked over to the smoking section; fortunately, they were the only ones there.
“You do, though. I opened my heart to you in ways I haven’t to anyone in a really long time. You saved my life on that bridge. I lied to you when I said I didn’t ask for a sign. I did! I asked for a sign, and the sign was you.”
Of course he’d asked for a sign when he was on the bridge: Dear God, if You’re there, if You’re real, if I shouldn’t do this right now, please have someone stop me. Exit original plan. Enter God and Tallie.
“Then the Giants won the World Series…that was another sign,” he said.
“I have no clue what you’re talking about. Give me a cigarette,” she demanded, holding out her hand.
Rye did as he was told, shaking a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and handing her his lighter, too.
(Tallie lights it, smokes, begins pacing. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. She’s wearing the same sweater she wore to the outlet mall on Friday; she knit it herself. It smells like her house.)
“Please look at me for a second so I can talk to you?”
“Why should I do anything you ask me to do?” she said. Her eyes searched the parking lot. Was she looking for security? Someone to help her? It crushed him, thinking she was afraid of him.
“Tallie, please. I don’t want you to be afraid. I’m going to tell you the truth,” he said gently. “The only reason I didn’t tell you earlier is because I didn’t want you feeling sorry for me…googling me and then…acting differently toward me. Once people find out, it changes everything. Everything.”
Tallie stepped away from him.
“I really don’t understand anything you’re saying! This is all so cryptic…I…once people find out what?”
“First, I want you to know I didn’t do it to hurt you. Just to even out the invasion of privacy. I regretted it immediately, but Joel wrote me back, and I thought…”
He would tell her everything, leaving out the part about Lionel finding out about Joel’s affair during their last round of IVF and the part about Lionel cheating on Zora. A lot had happened over the weekend, but Rye knew when to keep his mouth shut. He’d take that shit to the grave as a common courtesy. He considered deleting those parts from the email, showing Tallie the rest. Tallie smoked and used her thumb to wipe the tears that spilled from the corners of her eyes.
(Tallie’s nose is hot pink again. As the sun goes down, the sky is hot pink, too.)
“What? What invasion of privacy?”
“My letters.”
“Wow. I…wow!”
“They were private, they were mine, and you took them,” he said, trying his best to keep his voice from shaking.
“Okay! I shouldn’t have done that! But what the hell? You did something this huge because I took your letters?”
“It just…set everything off, that’s all.”
“And so you thought, what? I’m so desperate I need a stranger to talk to my ex-husband for me? Did you tell Joel to come here?” Tallie asked. He could feel the energy of her anger rising, pressing against him.
“No—”
“Tell me your real name. Who are you?”
“Ryland Miller Kipling.”
“Who’s Emmett Aaron Baker?”
“Nobody. I made him up. I’m from Bloom, not Clementine. They’re close to each other—”
“What shit did you go through? What’s Joel talking about?”
“That’s what I want to tell you—”
“Who’s Brenna?”
“Is this where you apologize for sneaking the letters from my pockets and reading them?”
“Uh-huh, yeah. I’m sorry about that, but this is a disproportionate response, and you know it. An overreaction, which may be normal for you. I don’t know. One of t
he letters wasn’t even finished. The one to Brenna. Who is Brenna?”
“Because I forgive you, by the way. I’m not angry with you. I understand why you would think to do that,” Rye said.
“Em—Ryland, Rye…whatever. Answer the question or get out of here.”
Rye’s bottom lip wobbled at how easily she could be rid of him, how easily he could be rid of himself. He blinked and clawed himself from the edge.
“Brenna is my daughter,” he said slowly.
“Great. Awesome. So you lied about that, too! You said you didn’t have kids!” Tallie spat out.
“I didn’t lie. I don’t have a kid. Those butterfly wings in my backpack, they were for Halloween three years ago, but I couldn’t give them to her because…” He stopped. What he was about to say made his tongue feel as if it were someone else’s, even still. “Because…Brenna’s dead.”
* * *
All the fighting with Christine—the word tired didn’t do it justice. He was exhausted.
Weary.
Weary enough in their kitchen to loosen his grip on Christine and let her go after she’d threatened to call the cops. He’d turned his phone off, put it on the nightstand. Left in the middle of their row, wandered like a new Adam whom God had left alone without instruction. He went for a long walk through the October evening, first heading down the muddy path leading to the forest behind their house. He walked, breaking through the hedges and continuing onto the sidewalk next to the road that led the truck factory workers to and from the warehouse. He walked and walked and walked, thinking of the reasons he’d fallen in love with Christine, the memories and hope for the future that kept them stuck together. Thinking about how Brenna was such a glowing orb between them, proof of life and light. But Christine needed to take her meds. Had to. He couldn’t do this on his own; he needed breaks sometimes, too. He had to stop feeling guilty about it. He was going to tell her that gently when he got back, and eventually, when the dust had settled, he’d have to tell her sternly.
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