One True Loves

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  “But I don’t want you to share those things with me because you have to, because you feel it’s right to honor a promise we made months ago. I want us to share all of that together because it’s what makes you happy, because you wake up every day glad that you’re with me, because you have the freedom to choose the life you want, and you choose our life together. That’s what I want. If I don’t give you the chance to leave right now, then I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “I just don’t think I’ll ever feel comfortable again.”

  “What are we saying here?” I ask him. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

  “I’m saying that I’m calling off the wedding. For now, at least. And I think one of us should stay somewhere else.”

  “Sam . . .”

  “Then you’ll be free. To see if you love him the way you love me, to see what’s left between you. You should be free to do that. And you can’t do that if I’m with you or if I’m pleading for you to stay. Which I don’t trust myself not to do. If I’m with you, I will try to get you to choose me. I know that I will. And I don’t want to do that. So . . . go. Figure out what you want. I’m telling you it’s OK.”

  My instinct is to grab on to him tightly, to never let go, to put my hand over his mouth in order to stop him from saying all of this.

  But I know that even if I can stop the words from coming out of his mouth, that won’t make them any less true.

  So I grab Sam by the neck and pull his head close to mine. I am, not for the first time, deeply grateful to be loved by him, to be loved the way he loves.

  “I don’t deserve you,” I say. Our foreheads are pushed so close together neither of us can see the other. I am looking down at his knees. “How can you be so selfless? So good?”

  Sam shakes his head slowly, without peeling away from me. “It’s not selfless,” he says. “I don’t want to be with a woman who wants to be with someone else.”

  Sam cracks his knuckles, and when I hear the sound of it, I notice that my own hands feel tight and cramped. I open and close them, trying to stretch out my fingers.

  “I want to be with someone who lives for me. I want to be with someone who considers me the love of her life. I deserve that.”

  I get it. I get it now. Sam is pulling his heart out of his chest and handing it to me, saying, “If you’re going to break it, break it now.”

  I want to tell him that I’ll never break his heart, that there is nothing to worry about.

  But that’s not true, is it?

  I pull away from him.

  “I should be the one to go,” I say. I say it just as I can’t believe I’m saying it. “It’s not fair to make you leave. I can stay with my parents for a while.”

  This is where everything starts to shift. This is where it feels like the room is getting darker and the world is getting scarier, even though nothing outside of our hearts has changed.

  Sam considers and then nods, agreeing with me.

  And just like that, we have transitioned from two people considering something to two people having made a decision.

  “I guess I’ll pack up some stuff,” I say.

  “OK,” he says.

  I don’t move for a moment, still stunned that it’s happening. But then I realize that staying still doesn’t actually pause time, it’s still passing, life is still happening. You have to keep moving.

  I stand up and head to my closet to gather my clothes. I make it to our bedroom before I start crying.

  I should be thinking of outfits to pack, things to wear to work. I should be calling my parents to tell them I’m going to be sleeping at their house. But instead, I just start throwing things into a duffel bag, with little attention paid to whether the clothes match or what I might need.

  The only thing I take on purpose is the envelope I have of keepsakes from Jesse. I don’t want Sam to look through them. I don’t want him hurting himself by reading love letters I once wrote to the boy I chose all those years ago.

  I walk back into the kitchen, saying good-bye to Mozart and Homer on the way.

  Sam is in the exact same position I left him.

  He stands up to say good-bye to me.

  I can’t help but kiss him. I’m relieved that he lets me.

  As we stand there, still close to each other, Sam finally allows himself to lose his composure. When he cries, his eyes bloom and the tears fall down his cheeks so slowly that I can catch every one before they reach his chin.

  It breaks my heart to be loved like this, to be loved so purely that I’m capable of breaking a heart.

  It is not something I take lightly. In fact, I think it might be the most important thing in the world.

  “What am I gonna do?” I ask him.

  I mean, what am I going to do right now? And, what am I going to do without him? And, what am I going to do with my life? And, how am I going to do this?

  “You’ll do whatever you want,” he says, brushing the side of his knuckle under his eye and taking a step back from me. “That’s what it means to be free.”

  By the time I pull into my parents’ driveway, it’s almost two a.m. Their front light is on, as if they’ve been waiting for me, but I know that they leave it on every night. My father thinks it wards off burglars.

  I don’t want to wake them up. So I’m planning on tiptoeing into the house and saying hello in the morning.

  I turn the car off and grab my things. I realize as I step out onto the driveway that I didn’t bring any shoes other than the boots on my feet. I guess I’ll be wearing these indefinitely. I remind myself that “indefinitely” doesn’t mean forever.

  I slowly shut the car door, not so much closing it as tucking it gently into place. I sneak around to the rear of the house, onto the back deck. My parents never lock the back door and I know that it doesn’t squeak like the front door does.

  There is a small click as I turn the knob and a swish as I move the door out of my way. Then I’m in.

  Home.

  Free.

  I walk over to the breakfast table and grab a pen and a piece of paper. I leave my parents a note telling them that I am here. When I’m done, I take off my boots so they don’t clang against the hard kitchen floor. I leave them by the back door.

  I tiptoe across the kitchen and dining room, down the hall. I stand outside my bedroom door and slowly, gently turn the knob.

  I don’t dare turn on the light in my bedroom. I’ve made it this far and I’m not going to throw it all away now.

  I sit down on the bottom edge of the bed and take off my pants and shirt. I feel around in my bag for something to wear as pajamas. I grab a shirt and a pair of shorts and put them on.

  I pad over to the bathroom that my room has always shared with Marie’s. I feel around for the faucet and turn the water on to a trickle. As I brush my teeth, I start to question whether I should have just woken up my parents by calling or ringing the front door. But by the time I’m running water over my face, I realize that I didn’t want to wake them because I don’t want to talk about any of this. Sneaking in was my only option. If your daughter shows up at two in the morning the night that her long-lost husband comes home, you’re going to want to talk about it.

  I walk back to my bedroom, ready to fall asleep. But as soon as I go to turn the blankets down, I hit my head against the overhanging lamp on the nightstand.

  “Ow!” I say instinctually, and then I roll my eyes at myself. I know that goddamn lamp is there. I worry for a moment that I’ve blown my cover, but it remains quiet in the house.

  I rub my head and slip into the covers, avoiding the lamp the way I now remember you have to.

  I look out the window and I can see a few windows of Marie’s house down the street. All of the lights in her house are off and I imagine that she, Mike, Sophie, and Ava are sound asleep.

  I’m shaken out of it by blinding light and the sight of my father in his underwear with a baseball bat.

  “Oh, my God!” I scream, scrambling to the fa
rther corners of the bed, as far away from him as possible.

  “Oh,” my dad says, slowly putting down the bat. “It’s just you.”

  “Of course it’s just me!” I say to him. “What were you going to do with that?”

  “I was going to beat the ever-living crap out of the thief who had broken into my home! That’s what I was going to do!”

  My mother comes rushing in in plaid pajama bottoms and a T-shirt that says, “Read a Mother F&#king Book.” There is no way that that shirt is not a gift from my father that my mother refuses to wear out of the house.

  “Emma, what are you doing here?” she says. “You scared us half to death.”

  “I left a note on the kitchen table!”

  “Oh,” my dad says, falsely assuaged, and looking at my mother. “Never mind, Ash; looks like this is our fault.”

  I give him a sarcastic look that I swear I haven’t given since I was seventeen.

  “Emma, our apologies. The next time we fear we are being attacked in the night, we will first check the kitchen table for a note.”

  I’m about to apologize, realizing the full extent of the absurdity of breaking into my parents’ house and then blaming them for their surprise. But my mom steps in first.

  “Honey, are you OK? Why aren’t you with Sam?” I swear, and maybe I’m just being sensitive, but I swear there’s a small pause in between “with” and “Sam” because she is unsure whom I’m supposed to be with.

  I breathe in, allowing all of the formerly tensed muscles in my shoulders and back to relax. “We might not be getting married. I think I have a date with Jesse tomorrow. I don’t know. I honestly . . . I don’t know.”

  My dad puts the bat down. My mom pushes past him to sit down on the bed next to me. I move toward her, resting my head on her shoulder. She rubs my back. Why does it feel better when your parents hold you? I’m thirty-one years old.

  “I should put on pants, shouldn’t I?” my father asks.

  My mother and I look up, as one unit, and nod to him.

  He’s gone in a flash.

  “Tell me everything about how today went,” she says. “All the parts you need to get off your chest.”

  As I do, my father comes back into the room, in sweats, and sits on the other side of me. He grabs my hand.

  They listen.

  At the end of it, when I’ve said everything that’s left in me, when I get out every piece I have, my mom says, “If you want my two cents, you have the unique ability to love with your whole heart even after it’s been broken. That’s a good thing. Don’t feel guilty about that.”

  “You’re a fighter,” my dad says. “You get back up after you’ve been knocked down. That is my favorite part about you.”

  I laugh and say, in a jovial tone, “Not that I run the bookstore?”

  I’m joking but I’m not joking.

  “Not even close. There are so many things to love about you that, honestly, that’s not even in the top ten.”

  I put my head on his shoulder and rest there for a moment. I watch my mom’s eyes droop. I hear my dad’s breathing slow down.

  “OK, go back to bed,” I tell them. “I’ll be OK. Thank you. Sorry again about scaring you.”

  They each give me a hug and then go.

  I lie on my old mattress and I try to fall asleep, but I was a fool to ever think that sleep would come.

  Just before six a.m., I see a light come on in Marie’s house.

  I take off my engagement ring and put it in my purse. And then I throw on some pants, grab my boots, and walk right out the front door.

  Marie is with Ava in the bathroom with the door open. Ava is sitting on the toilet and Marie is coaxing her to relax. The twins are potty trained, but as of a few weeks ago, Ava has started backsliding. She will only go if Marie is with her. I have decided to hang back and stand by the door, as is my right as an aunt.

  “You can go ahead and take a seat,” Marie says to me as she sits down on the slate gray tile of the bathroom floor. “We’re gonna be here a while.”

  The girls’ cochlear implants mean that they have learned to talk only a few months behind other children. And Marie and Mike both use sign language to communicate with them, too. My nieces, whom we were all so worried about, may just end up speaking two languages. And that is in large part because Marie is a phenomenal, attentive, unstoppable motherly force.

  At this point, she knows more about American Sign Language, the Deaf community, hearing aids, cochlear implants, and the inner working of the ear than possibly anything else, including all of the things she used to love, things like literature, poetry, and figuring out what authors use what pseudonyms.

  But she’s also exhausted. It’s six thirty in the morning and she’s both talking and signing to her daughter to please “go pee in the potty for Mommy.”

  The bags under her eyes look like the pocket on a kangaroo.

  When Ava is finally done, Marie brings her to Mike, who is lying in bed with Sophie. As I’m standing in the hallway, I get a glimpse of Mike under the covers, half asleep, holding Sophie’s hand. For a moment, I get a flash of what sort of man I’d want to be the father of my own children and I’m embarrassed to say that the figure is only vague and blurry.

  Marie comes back out of the bedroom and we head toward the kitchen.

  “Tea?” she says as I sit down at her island.

  I’m not much of a tea drinker, but it’s cold in here and something warm sounds nice. I’d ask for coffee, but I know that Marie doesn’t keep coffee in the house. “Sure, that sounds great,” I say.

  Marie smiles and nods. She starts the kettle. Marie’s kitchen island is bigger than my dining room table. Our dining room table. Mine and Sam’s.

  I am, instantaneously, overcome with certainty.

  I don’t want to leave Sam. I don’t want to lose the life I’ve built. Not again. I love Sam. I love him. I don’t want to leave him. I want to sit down together at the piano and play “Chopsticks.”

  That’s what I want to do.

  Then I remember that way Jesse looked when he got off that plane. All of my certainty disappears.

  “Ugh,” I say, slouching my body forward, resting my head in the nest I’ve made with my arms. “Marie, what am I going to do?”

  She doesn’t stop pulling various teas out of the cupboard. She pulls them all out and puts them in front of me.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t imagine being in your shoes. I feel like maybe both options are equally right and wrong. That’s probably not the answer you were looking for. But I just don’t know.”

  “I don’t know, either.”

  “Does it help to ask what your gut tells you?” she says. “Like, if you close your eyes, what do you see? Your life with Sam? Or your life with Jesse?”

  I indulge her game, hoping that something as simple as closing my eyes might tell me what I want to do. But it doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t. I open my eyes to see Marie watching me. “That didn’t work.”

  The kettle starts to whistle and Marie turns toward the stove to grab it. “You know, all you can do is just put one foot in front of the other,” she says. “This is exactly the sort of thing people are talking about when they say you have to take things one step at a time.” She pours hot water into the white mug she’s set out for me. I look up at her.

  “Earl Grey?” she asks.

  “English Breakfast?” I ask in return and then I start laughing and say, “I’m just messing with you. I have no idea what tea names mean.”

  She laughs and picks up an English Breakfast packet, tearing off the top and pulling out a tea bag. “Here, now you’ll know what English Breakfast tastes like for next time.” She puts it in my mug and hands it to me. “Splenda?” she offers.

  I shake my head. I stopped drinking artificial sweeteners six months ago and I feel entirely the same but I’m still convinced it’s for a good cause. “I’m off the sauce,” I say.

  Marie rolls her eyes
and puts two packets in her tea.

  I laugh and look down toward my cup. I watch as the tea begins to bleed out of the bag into the water. I watch as it swirls, slowly. I can already smell the earthiness of it. I put my hands on the hot mug, letting it warm them up. I start absent-mindedly fiddling with the string.

  “Do you think you can love two people at the same time?” I ask her. “That’s what I keep wondering. I feel like I love them both. Differently and equally. Is that possible? Am I kidding myself?”

  She dips her tea bag in and out of the water. “I’m honestly not sure,” she says. “But the problem isn’t who you love or if you love both, I don’t think. I think the problem is that you aren’t sure who you are. You’re a different person now than you were before you lost Jesse. It changed you, fundamentally.”

  Marie thinks, staring down at the counter, and then tentatively starts talking again. “I don’t think you’re trying to figure out if you love Sam more or Jesse more. I think you’re trying to figure out if you want to be the person you are with Jesse or you want to be the person you are with Sam.”

  It’s like someone cracked me in half and found the rotten cancer in the deepest, most hidden part of my body. I don’t say anything back. I don’t look up. I watch as a tear falls from my face and lands right in my mug. And even though I was the one who cried it out, and I saw it fall, I have no idea what it means.

  I look up.

  “I think you’re probably right,” I say.

  Marie nods and then looks directly at me. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s important to me that you know that. That you know I regret what I did.”

  “Regret what? What are you talking about?”

  “For that day on the roof. The day that I found you looking out . . .” It feels like yesterday and one hundred years ago all at once: the binoculars, the roof, the grave anxiety of believing I could save him just by watching the shore. “I’m sorry for convincing you Jesse was dead,” Marie says. “You knew he wasn’t . . .”