Maybe in Another Life

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  “I know,” he says. “This situation isn’t ideal.”

  “Let’s not do this,” I tell him.

  “She’s going to end up with someone better for her than me,” he says. “You, of all people, should know that’s good news.”

  “Oh, I know she’s going to end up with someone better than you,” I tell him. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you acted like a chickenshit about it, and instead of being honest, you lied and you cheated.”

  “You know, when you meet the love of your life, it makes you do crazy things,” he says in his own defense. As if I couldn’t possibly understand what he’s been through because I haven’t met my soul mate. As if being in love is an excuse for anything. “I didn’t want to love Jennifer this way. I didn’t mean for it to happen. But when you have that kind of connection with someone, nothing can stand in its way.”

  I don’t believe that being in love absolves you of anything. I no longer believe that all’s fair in love and war. I’d go so far as to say your actions in love are not an exception to who you are. They are, in fact, the very definition of who you are. “Why are you trying to convince me you’re a good guy?”

  “Because you’re the only one Gabby will listen to.”

  “I’m not going to defend you to her.”

  “I know that—”

  “And more to the point, Mark, I don’t agree with you. I don’t think meeting the love of your life gives you carte blanche to ruin everything in your path. There are a lot of people out there who find the person they believe they are supposed to be with, and it doesn’t work out because they have other things they have to do, and instead of being a liar and running from their responsibilities, they act like adults and do the right thing.”

  “I just want Gabby to know that I never meant to hurt her.”

  “OK, fine,” I tell him, so that he will leave. But the truth is, it’s not OK. It’s not OK at all.

  It doesn’t matter if we don’t mean to do the things we do. It doesn’t matter if it was an accident or a mistake. It doesn’t even matter if we think this is all up to fate. Because regardless of our destiny, we still have to answer for our actions. We make choices, big and small, every day of our lives, and those choices have consequences.

  We have to face those consequences head-on, for better or worse. We don’t get to erase them just by saying we didn’t mean to. Fate or not, our lives are still the results of our choices. I’m starting to think that when we don’t own them, we don’t own ourselves.

  Mark moves toward the front door, and I follow him out.

  “So I guess that’s it, then,” he says. “I guess I don’t live here anymore.”

  Charlemagne comes out of the bedroom and runs over to him. He’s skittish around her, scared. Maybe that’s why she pees on his shoe. Or maybe it’s because he’s standing at the door, where we normally put her wee-wee pads.

  Either way, I watch as she squats down and pees right on him.

  He makes a face of disgust and looks at me. I stare back at him.

  He turns around and walks out.

  When Gabby comes home later that day, Charlemagne and I rush to the door. I greet her by telling her what Charlemagne did.

  Gabby laughs a full belly laugh and leans over to give Charlemagne a hug.

  The three of us stand there, laughing.

  “My parents want me to move to London,” I say. “They said they’ll help me with the baby.”

  Gabby looks up at me, surprised. “Really?” she says. “What do you think of that? Think you’ll go?”

  And then I say something that I’ve never said before. “No,” I say. “I want to stay here.” I start laughing suddenly.

  Gabby looks at me as if I have three heads. “What is so funny?” she says.

  Between the laughter, I say, “It’s just that I ruined things with the only man I think I’ve ever really loved. I’m pregnant with a baby I didn’t plan for, as a result of sleeping with a married man, who won’t even be in my child’s life. I’m fatter than I’ve ever been. And my dog is still peeing inside the house. And yet, somehow, I feel like my life here is so good I couldn’t possibly leave it. For the first time in my life, I have someone I feel like I can’t live without.”

  “Is it me?” Gabby says suspiciously. “Because if it’s not, this is a weird story.”

  “Yeah dude,” I say to her. “It’s you.”

  “Awww, thanks, bro!”

  I’m sitting in the backseat of the car, looking out the open window. I’m inhaling the fresh air as we drive through the city. It’s possible that from an outside perspective, I look like a dog. But I don’t care. I’m so happy to be out of the hospital. To be living out in the real world. To see sunshine without the filter of a windowpane. Everything in the world has a smell to it. Outside isn’t just the smell of fresh-cut grass and flowers. It’s also smoke from diners and garlic from Italian restaurants. And I love all of it. It’s probably just because I’ve spent so much time inhaling inorganic scents in a sterile hospital. And maybe a month from now I won’t appreciate it the way I do right now. But that’s OK. I appreciate it now.

  I turn my head away from the window for a moment when I hear Mark sigh at a red light. I notice now that it is eerily quiet in the car. Mark seems to be getting more and more nervous the closer we get to their house. As I pay more attention, I can tell that he’s out of sorts.

  “Are you OK?” Gabby asks him.

  “Hm? What? No, yeah, I’m fine,” he says. “Just focusing on the road.”

  I can see his hands twitching. I can hear the shortness of his breath. And I’m starting to wonder if I’m missing something, if maybe he really doesn’t want me living with them, if he sees it as a burden.

  If he did, if he told Gabby that he didn’t want to take on the responsibility, she’d fight him on it. I know that. And she’d never let on to me. I know that, too. So it’s entirely possible that I’m imposing and I don’t even know it.

  We pull up to the side of the road in front of their place, and I can see that Mark installed a ramp for me to get up the three small steps to their door. He gets out of the car and immediately comes around to my side to help me out. He opens my door before Gabby can even get to me.

  “Oh,” he says. “You need the chair.” Before I can answer, he’s opened the trunk and is pulling it out. It drops to the ground with a thud. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s heavier than I thought.”

  Gabby moves toward him to help him open it up, and I see him flinch at her touch.

  It’s not me he’s uncomfortable around. It’s her.

  “Are you sure you’re OK?” she asks.

  “Let’s just get inside, OK?” he says.

  “Um, OK . . .”

  The two of them help me into the chair, and Mark grabs my bags. I wheel myself behind Gabby as she makes her way to the front door.

  When she opens it and the three of us walk through the door, the tension is palpable. There is something wrong, and all three of us know it.

  “I installed a seat in the shower and took the door off. It’s just a curtain now. That should make it easy for you to get in and out on your own,” Mark says.

  He’s talking to me, but he’s looking at Gabby. He wants her to know all the work he did.

  “I also moved all of your things into the first-floor office. And put the guest bed in there so you don’t have to go up and down the stairs. And I lowered the bed. You can try it.”

  I don’t move.

  “Or later, I guess.”

  Gabby looks at him sideways.

  “You should be able to rest down on it to sit and then swing your legs over, as opposed to having to use your pelvis to sit or stand.”

  “Mark, what is going on?” Gabby asks.

  “I bought a two-way pager system, so if you’re in bed, you can just talk into it, and Gabby will know to come get you. And the dining-room table was too high, so this morning I had one delivered that is lower to the groun
d so your chair can reach.”

  Gabby whips her head around the corner, surprised. “You did that this morning? Where did our table go?”

  Mark breathes in. “Hannah, could you give us a minute? Maybe you could confirm that your bed is the right height?”

  “Mark, what the hell is going on?” Gabby’s voice is tight and rigid. There is no bend in it, no patience.

  “Hannah,” he pleads.

  “OK,” I say, and I start wheeling myself away.

  “No!” Gabby says, losing her patience. “She can barely move herself from place to place. Don’t ask her to leave the room.”

  “It’s fine, really,” I say, but just as I say it, Mark blurts it out.

  “I’m leaving,” he says. He looks at the ground when he says it.

  “To go where?” Gabby asks.

  “I mean I’m leaving you,” he says.

  She goes from confused to stunned, as if she’s been slapped across the face. Her jaw goes slack, her eyes open wide, her head shakes subtly from side to side, as if incapable of processing what she’s hearing.

  He fills in the gaps for her. “I’ve met someone. And I believe she is the one for me. And I’m leaving. I’ve left you with everything you two could need. Hannah is taken care of. I’m leaving you the house and most of the furniture. Louis Grant is drafting the paperwork.”

  “You called our attorney before you talked to me?”

  “I was just asking him for a referral when he explained he could do it himself. I didn’t mean to go behind your back.”

  She starts laughing. I knew she was going to start laughing when he said that. I wonder if the second it came out of his mouth, he thought, Oh, crap, I shouldn’t have said that. I want to wheel out of the room very badly, but I also know that my wheelchair squeaks, and we are three people in one room. If one of us leaves, the other two are going to notice. And I’m not even sure they are registering that I’m here. I don’t want to bring attention to the fact that I’m here by not being here anymore.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” she says.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “But I’m not. We should talk about this in a few days, when you’ve had time to adjust to the information. I’m truly sorry to hurt you. It was never my intention. But I am in love with someone else, and it no longer seems fair to keep going the way we have been.”

  “What am I missing?” she asks. “We were talking about having a baby.”

  Mark shakes his head. “That was a . . . that was wrong of me. I was . . . pretending to be someone I’m not. I have made mistakes, Gabrielle, and I am now trying to fix them.”

  “Leaving me is fixing your mistakes?”

  “I think we should talk about this at a later date. For now, I have moved my clothes and other things to my new place.”

  “Did you take my dining-room table?”

  “I wanted to make sure you and Hannah had what you needed, so I took the table to my new home and bought you both a table that would work better for Hannah’s situation.”

  “She’s not an invalid, Mark. She’s going to be walking eventually. I want my table back.”

  “I did what I thought was best. I think I should go now.”

  She stares at him for what feels like hours but is probably only thirty seconds. And then she erupts like I have never seen her before.

  “Get out of my house!” she screams. “Get out of here! Get away from me!”

  He heads for the door.

  “I never should have married you,” she says, and you can tell she means it. She deeply, deeply means it. She doesn’t say it as if it’s just occurring to her or as if she wants to hurt his feelings. She says it as if she is heartbroken that her worst fears came true right in front of her very eyes.

  He doesn’t look back at her. He just walks out the door, leaving it open behind him. It strikes me as cruel, that small gesture. He could have shut the door behind him. It’s almost instinctual, isn’t it? To shut the door behind you? But he didn’t. He let it hang open, forcing her to close it.

  But she doesn’t. Instead, she crumples to the ground, yelling from the base of her lungs. It’s throaty and deep, a grunt more than a scream. “I hate you!”

  And then she looks up at me, remembering that I am here.

  She gathers herself as best she can, but I wouldn’t say she succeeds. Tears are falling down her face, her nose is running, her mouth is open and overflowing. “Will you get his key?” she says. She whispers it, but even in attempting to whisper, she cannot control the edges of her voice.

  I spring into action. I wheel myself out the front door and down the ramp. He’s getting into the car.

  “The key,” I say. “Your key, to the house.”

  “It’s on the coffee table,” he says. “With the deed. I signed over the townhouse,” he says, as if it is a secret he has been waiting to tell, like a student excited to tell the teacher he did the extra credit.

  “OK,” I say, and then I turn my chair around and head back toward the front door.

  “I want her to be OK,” he says. “That’s why I gave her the house.”

  “OK, Mark,” I say.

  “It’s worth a lot of money,” he says. “The equity in the townhouse, I mean. My parents helped us with the down payment, and I’m giving it to her.”

  I turn the chair around. “What do you want me to say, Mark? Do you want a gold medal?”

  “I want her to understand that I’m doing everything in my power to make this easier on her. That I care about her. You get it, don’t you?”

  “Get what?”

  “That love makes you do crazy things, that sometimes you have to do things that seem wrong from the outside but you know are right. I thought you’d understand. Given what Gabby told me happened between you and Michael.”

  If I hadn’t just been in a car accident where I almost lost my life, maybe I’d be hurt by something as small as a sentence. If I hadn’t spent the past week learning how to stand up on my own and use a wheelchair, maybe I’d let myself fall for this sort of crap. But Mark has the wrong idea about me. I’m no longer a person willing to pretend the things I’ve done wrong are justifiable because of how they make me feel.

  I made a mistake. And that mistake is part of what has led me to this moment. And while I neither regret nor condone what I did, I have learned from it. I have grown since. And I’m different now.

  You can only forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past once you know you’ll never make them again. And I know I’ll never make that mistake again. So I let his words rush past me and off into the wind.

  “Just go, Mark,” I tell him. “I’ll let her know the house is hers.”

  “I never meant to hurt her.” He opens his car door.

  “OK,” I say, and I turn away from him. I roll myself up the ramp. I hear his car leave the street. I’m not going to tell her any of that. She can see the deed to the townhouse on her own and form an opinion about it. I’m not going to try to tell her he didn’t mean to hurt her. That’s absurd and meaningless.

  It doesn’t matter if we don’t mean to do the things we do. It doesn’t matter if it was an accident or a mistake. It doesn’t even matter if we think this is all up to fate. Because regardless of our destiny, we still have to answer for our actions. We make choices, big and small, every day of our lives, and those choices have consequences.

  We have to face those consequences head-on, for better or worse. We don’t get to erase them just by saying we didn’t mean to. Fate or not, our lives are still the results of our choices. I’m starting to think that when we don’t own them, we don’t own ourselves.

  I roll back into the house and see Gabby, still lying on the floor, nearly catatonic. She’s staring at the ceiling. Her tears spill from her face and form tiny puddles on the floor.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever felt pain like this,” she says. “And I think I’m still in shock. It’s only going to get worse, right? It’s only going to get d
eeper and sharper, and it’s already so deep and so sharp.”

  For the first time in what feels like a long time, I’m higher up than Gabby. I have to look down to meet her eyeline. “You won’t have to go through it alone,” I tell her. “I’ll be here through every part of it. I’d do anything for you, do you know that? Does it help? To know that I’d move mountains for you? That I’d part seas?”

  She looks up at me.

  I move one foot onto the ground and lean over. I try to get my hands onto the floor in front of me.

  “Hannah, stop,” she says as I push my center of gravity closer to her, trying to lie down next to her. But I don’t have the mechanics right. I don’t have the right strength just yet. I topple over. It hurts. It actually hurts quite a bit. But I have pain medication in my bag and things to do. So I move through it. I scoot next to her, pushing the wheelchair out of the way.

  “I love you,” I tell her. “And I believe in you. I believe in Gabby Hudson. I believe she can do anything.”

  She looks at me with gratitude, and then she keeps crying. “I’m so embarrassed,” she says between breaths. She’s about to start hyperventilating.

  “Shhh. There’s no reason to be embarrassed. I can’t go to the bathroom on my own. So you have no right to claim embarrassment,” I tell her.

  She laughs, if only for the smallest, infinitesimal second, and then she starts crying again. To hear it makes my heart ache.

  “Squeeze my hand,” I tell her as I take her hand in mine. “When it hurts so bad you don’t think you can stand it, squeeze my hand.”

  She starts crying again, and she squeezes.

  And at that moment, I realize that if I have taken away a fraction of her pain, then I have more purpose than I have ever known.

  I’m not moving to London. I’m staying right here.

  I found my home. And it’s not New York or Seattle or London or even Los Angeles.

  It’s Gabby.

  That night, Gabby and I decide to take Charlemagne for a long walk. At first, we were just going to walk around the block, but Gabby suggests getting out of the neighborhood. So we get into the car and drive to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.