“The guy that used to work at your parents’ store?”
There’s no reason for Jesse to dislike Sam other than the fact that I love Sam. But I watch as Jesse’s face grows to show contempt. I should never have said Sam’s full name. It was better when Sam was an abstract. I’ve done a stupid thing by giving him a face to match. I might as well have stabbed Jesse in the ribs. He bristles and then gets hold of himself. “You love him?” Jesse asks.
I nod but what I want to do is tell him about what Marie said, that she told me this isn’t about who I love but rather who I am. I want to tell him that I’ve been asking myself that question over and over and it’s starting to seem glaringly obvious that I am different from the person Jesse loves.
I am not her. Not anymore. No matter how easy it is for me to pretend that I am.
But instead of saying any of that, I just say, “Sam is a good man.”
And Jesse leaves it there.
He turns off the water and I’m instantly cold. He hands me a towel and the moment I wrap it around myself, I realize how naked I feel.
We dry ourselves off, not speaking.
I’m suddenly so hungry that I feel ill. I throw some clothes on and head downstairs. I start brewing coffee and put bread in the toaster. Jesse comes down shortly after, in fresh clothes.
The mood has shifted. You can feel it in the air between us. Everything we’ve been pretending isn’t true is about to come tumbling out of us, in shouts and tears.
“I started making coffee,” I say. I try to make my voice sound light and carefree but it’s not working. I know it’s not working. I know that my inner turmoil isn’t so inner, that trying to cover it up is like brushing a thin coat of white paint over a red wall. It’s seeping out. It’s clear as day what I’m trying to hide.
“I’m starting to think you don’t want to be here,” Jesse says.
I look up at him. “It’s complicated,” I say.
Jesse nods, not in agreement with me but as if he’s heard this all before. “You know what? I gotta tell ya. I don’t think it’s that complicated.”
“Of course it is,” I say, sitting down on the sofa.
“Not really,” Jesse says, following suit, sitting down opposite me. His voice is growing less patient by the second. “You and I are married. We have been together, have loved each other, forever. We belong together.”
“Jesse—”
“No!” he says. “Why do I feel like I have to convince you to be with me? This isn’t . . . You should never have done what you did. How could you agree to marry this guy?”
“You don’t—”
“You’re my wife, Emma. We stood in front of a hundred people right down the road at that goddamn lighthouse and promised to love each other for the rest of our lives. I lost you once and I did everything I could to get back to you. Now I’m here, I’m back, and I’m in danger of losing you all over again? This is supposed to be the happy part. Now that we’re here together. This is all supposed to be the easy stuff.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It should be! That’s what I’m saying. It should be that fucking simple!”
I am both stunned at the anger directed at me and surprised it took this long for it to surface.
“Yeah, well, it’s not, OK? Life doesn’t always work out the way you think it will. I learned that when you left on a plane three years ago and disappeared.”
“Because I survived a crash over the Pacific Ocean! I watched everyone else on that helicopter die. I lived on a tiny scrap of a goddamn rock, alone, trying to figure out a way to get back to you. Meanwhile, what did you do? Forget about me by August? Submit for a name change by Christmas?”
“Jesse, you know that’s not true.”
“You want to talk about the truth? The truth is you gave up on me.”
“You were gone!” My voice goes from zero to sixty in three seconds and I can feel that my emotions are bursting out of me like a horse kept too long behind a gate. “We thought you were dead!”
“I honestly thought,” Jesse says, “that you and I loved each other in a way that we could never, ever forget about each other.”
“I never forgot you! Never. I have always loved you. I still love you.”
“You got engaged to someone else!”
“When I thought that you were dead! If I had known you were alive, I would have waited every day for you.”
“Well, now you know I’m alive. And instead of coming back to me, you’re sitting on the fence. You’re here with me, crying about him in the shower.”
“I love you, Jesse, and even when I thought you were gone, I loved you. But I couldn’t spend my life loving a man who was no longer here. And I didn’t think that’s what you’d want for me, either.”
“You don’t know what I’d want,” he says.
“No!” I say. “I don’t. I barely know you anymore. And you barely know me. And I feel like you want to keep pretending that we do.”
“I know you!” he says. “Don’t tell me I don’t know you. You are the only person in my entire life that I have truly, truly known. That I know loved me. That I have understood and accepted for exactly who they are. I know everything there is to know about you.”
I shake my head. “No, Jesse, you know everything about the person I was up until the day you left. But you don’t know me now. Nor do you seem to have any interest in seeing me for who I am today, or for sharing with me who you are today.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m different, Jesse. I was in my twenties when you left. I’m thirty-one now. I don’t care about Los Angeles and writing travel pieces anymore. I care about my family. I care about my bookstore. I’m not the same as I was when you left. The loss of you changed me. I changed.”
“I mean, fine. You changed because I was gone, I get that. You got scared, you were grieving, so you came back to Acton because it felt safe and you took over your parents’ store because it was easy. But you don’t have to do any of that anymore. I’m back. We can go home to California. We can finally go to Puglia. I bet you can even sell some pieces to a few magazines next year. You don’t have to have this life anymore.”
But I’m already shaking my head and trying to tell him no before he’s even finished. “You are not understanding me,” I say. “Maybe at first I came home to retreat from the world, and sure, initially, I took the job at the store because it was available. But I love my life now, Jesse. I choose to live in Massachusetts. I choose to run my store. I want this for myself.”
I look at Jesse’s face as he searches mine. I try a different tactic, a different way of explaining to him.
“When I’m in a sad mood, do you know what I do to cheer myself up?”
“You eat french fries and have a Diet Coke,” Jesse says, just as I say, “I practice the piano.”
The difference in our answers startles him. His body deflates slightly, pulling away from me. I can see, as it quickly wipes across his face, that it’s hard for him to reconcile my answer with who he believes that I am.
I imagine, for a moment, that the next words out of his mouth might be, “You play the piano?”
And I’d say yes and I’d explain how I got started and that I only know a few songs and that I’m not that good, but that it relaxes me when I’m feeling stressed. I’d tell him how Homer is normally asleep under it when I want to play, so I have to pick him up and put him on the bench beside me, but that it’s so nice to sit there next to my cat and play “Für Elise.” Especially when I pretend “Für Elise” is about his fur.
It would mean so much if Jesse wanted to fall in love with who I am today. If he opened up and let me fall in love with the truth about who he is now.
But none of that happens.
Jesse just says, “So you play piano. What does that prove?”
And when he says it, I know that the gap between us is even larger than I thought.
“That we are different people now
. We grew apart. Jesse, I don’t know anything about what your life has been like for the past three and a half years and you won’t talk about it. But you are different. You can’t go through what you went through and not be different.”
“I don’t need to talk about what happened to me to prove to you that I still love you, that I’m still the person you’ve always loved.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that I think you’re trying to pretend that we can just pick up where we left off. I was, too. But that’s not possible. Life doesn’t work that way. What I’ve been through in my life affects the person that I am today. And that’s true for you, too. Whatever you went through out there. You can’t keep it bottled inside.”
“I’ve told you I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not?” I say to him. “How are we supposed to be honest with each other about our future if you won’t even tell me the most basic elements of your past? You say that you know that everything can be exactly how it was, but before you left we never had huge parts of our lives that we just didn’t talk about. We didn’t have any history that we didn’t share. And now we do. I have Sam and, c’mon, Jesse, you have scars on your body. Your finger is—”
Jesse slams his fist into the pillow cushions underneath us. It would be a violent action if it hadn’t landed in such a soft place, and I wonder if that was by design or by accident. “What do you want to know, Emma? For crying out loud. What do you want to know? That the doctors found two types of skin cancer? That when they found me, you could see the bone of my wrists and my ribs through my chest? That I had to have four root canals and it feels like half my mouth is fake now? Is that what you want to know? You want to know that I was stung by a Portuguese man-of-war as I swam looking for safety? You want to know I couldn’t get it off of me? That it just kept fucking stinging me? That the pain was so bad I thought I was dying? That the doctors say I’ll have this scar for years, maybe forever? Or maybe you just want me to admit how awful it was living out on that rock. You want me to tell you how many days I spent looking out at the sea, just waiting. Telling myself I just had to make it until tomorrow, because you’d come for me. You or my parents or my brothers. But none of you came. None of you found me. No one did.”
“We didn’t know. We didn’t know how to find you.”
“I know that,” he says. “I’m not mad at anyone for that. What I’m mad about is that you forgot about me! That you moved on and replaced me! That I’m back and I still don’t have you.”
“I didn’t replace you.”
“You got rid of my name at the end of yours and you told another man you’d marry him. What else could that possibly be? What other word would you use?”
“I didn’t replace you,” I say again, this time weakly. “I love you.”
“If that’s true, then this is simple. Be with me. Help me put us back together.”
I can feel Jesse’s eyes on me even as I look away. I turn to look out the window, to the blanket of snow covering the backyard. It is white and clean. It looks as soft as a cloud.
When I was a kid, I loved the snow. Then when I moved to California, I used to tell people I’d never leave the sun, that I never wanted to see snow again. But now, I can’t imagine a green Christmas and I know that if I left, I would miss that feeling of coming in from the cold.
I have changed over time. That’s what people do.
People aren’t stagnant. We evolve in reaction to our pleasures and our pains.
Jesse is a different man than he was before.
I am a different woman.
And what has confused me ever since I found out he was alive is now crystal clear: We are two people who are madly in love with our old selves. And that is not the same as being in love.
You can’t capture love in a bottle. You can’t hold on to it with both hands and force it to stay with you.
What has happened to us is no one’s fault—neither of us did anything wrong—but when Jesse left, life took us in opposite directions and turned us into different people. We grew apart because we were apart.
And maybe that means that even though we can finally be together . . .
We shouldn’t be.
The thought cracks open my chest.
I am perfectly still but feel as if I’m caught in a riptide, barely able to see how I can get my head out and above the water.
I don’t think I was ever afraid that loving both of them made me a bad person.
I was afraid that loving Sam made me a bad person.
I was afraid that I would pick Sam. That my heart would love Sam. That my soul would need Sam.
You’re not supposed to forsake the man who journeyed home to you.
You’re supposed to be Penelope. You’re supposed to knit the shroud day in and day out and stay up every night unraveling it to keep the suitors at bay.
You’re not supposed to have a life of your own, needs of your own. You’re not supposed to love again.
But I did.
That’s exactly what I did.
Jesse moves closer to me, gently puts his hands on my arms. “If you love me, Emma, then be with me.”
It’s a scary thought, isn’t it? That every single person on this planet could lose their one true love and live to love again? It means the one you love could love again if they lost you.
But it also means I know Jesse will be OK, he will be happy one day, without me.
“I don’t think I can be with you,” I say. “I don’t think . . . I don’t think we’re right for each other. Anymore.”
Jesse’s arms slump down around him. His posture sinks. His eyes collapse shut.
It’s one of those moments in life when you can’t believe that the truth is true, that the world shook out like this.
I don’t end up with Jesse.
After all of this, all we’ve been through, we aren’t going to grow old together.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I have to go.”
“Where are you going to go? We’re snowed in.”
He grabs his jacket and puts on his shoes. “I’ll just go to the car. I don’t care. I just need to be alone right now.”
He opens the front door and slams it behind him. I go to the door and open it again to see his back as he walks toward the car, trudging through the snow. He knows I’m behind him but stops me before I can even say a word by lifting his arm up and giving me the universal sign for “Don’t.” So I don’t.
I close the door. I lean against it. I slink down to the floor and I cry.
Jesse and I were once ripped apart. And now we’ve grown apart.
The same hearts, broken twice.
Over an hour has passed and Jesse has not yet come back. I stand up and peek through the front window to see if he’s still in the car.
He’s sitting in the driver’s seat with his head down. I look around the front of the house. The warm sun has started to melt some of the snow. The roads in the distance look, if not cleared, at least a bit traveled. We could leave here right now if we wanted to. We’d just have a little shoveling to do. But my guess is Jesse is in no rush to be trapped in a car with me.
My eye drifts back to the car and I see him moving in the driver’s seat. He’s looking through my envelope. He’s looking at pictures and reading notes, maybe even the Beacon article about his disappearance.
I shouldn’t watch him. I should give him the privacy that he walked out there for. But I can’t look away.
I see a white envelope in his hands.
And I know exactly what it is.
The letter I wrote him to say good-bye.
He fiddles with the envelope, flipping it back and forth, deciding whether he’s going to open it. My heart beats like a drum in my chest.
I put my hand on the doorknob, ready to run out there and stop him, but . . . I don’t. Instead, I look back out the window.
I watch as he puts a finger under the flap and tears it open.
&n
bsp; I turn away from the window, as if he spotted me. I know that he didn’t. I just know that I’m scared.
He’s going to read that letter and everything is going to get worse. It will be all the proof he needs that I forgot him, that I gave up on us, that I gave up on him.
I turn back to the window and watch him read it. He stares at the page for a long time. And then he puts it down and looks out the side window. Then he picks it up again and starts reading it a second time.
After a while, he puts his hand on the car door and opens it. I run from the window and sit on the sofa, pretending I’ve been here the whole time.
I never should have written that goddamn letter.
The front door opens, and there he is. Staring at me. He has the letter in his hand. He’s perfectly still, stunningly quiet.
I wrote the letter so that I could let go of him. There’s no hiding that. So if that’s the evidence he’s looking for that I’ve been a terrible wife, an awful person, a disloyal soul, well, then . . . I guess he got what he was looking for.
But Jesse’s reaction surprises me.
“What is this about going crazy on the roof?” he says calmly.
“What?” I ask.
He hands me the letter as if I’ve never read it. I stand up and take it from him. I open it even though I already know what it says.
The handwriting looks hurried. You can see, at the end, that there are splotches of ink where water must have hit it. Tears, obviously. I can’t stop myself from rereading it, seeing it through new eyes.
Dear Jesse,
You’ve been gone for more than two years but there hasn’t been a day that has gone by when I haven’t thought of you.
Sometimes I remember the way you smelled salty after you’d gone for a swim in the ocean. Or I wonder whether you’d have liked the movie I just saw. Other times, I just think about your smile. I think about how your eyes would crinkle and I’d always fall a little bit more in love with you.
I think about how you would touch me. How I would touch you. I think about that a lot.
The memory of you hurt so much at first. The more I thought about your smile, your smell, the more it hurt. But I liked punishing myself. I liked the pain because the pain was you.
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