By the time I realized where I was, I was awash in a toxic mixture of heartbreak and self-hatred. What had I done wrong? Did I tell her I loved her too soon? Did things move too fast for her? She seemed to have wanted everything I did.
Around and around I went, trying to figure it out. I sat on the dew-frosted bench near the lake and shivered in the cold foggy morning.
I went over every action, every word, but I couldn’t see where I’d gone wrong. Where it all began to unravel. I knew something was up when she kept going for more wine. Asking Jemma questions she knew the other girl would relish explaining at length.
In retrospect, I realized she was trying to keep herself from saying anything, and then drinking more than I ever saw her drink in order to get the nerve to break my heart.
I guess there was some small consolation that it wasn’t easy for her.
After I had carried her to bed, she drifted off for a little bit before waking up again. I was still awake and worried about her when she began crying out of nowhere and everything spilled out.
How she wasn’t good enough for me, she couldn’t love me, wasn’t capable of it and didn’t have the time for me. It was a long rambling list of reasons that sounded like so much made-up justification to me, but I was too shocked to say anything.
Like a dam breaking loose, she unleashed it all in a torrent of sobbing and clinging. I tried to be reassuring, but that only made it worse.
A small part of me hoped that when she woke up this morning she would have forgotten all about it. That she would have reconsidered and I could, maybe with time, repress that horrible memory like some sort of nightmare.
I would have, too. But when she woke up and I saw her the words came flooding back to me and some dim part of her hungover mind must have remembered. Maybe not the whole thing, but enough.
And just like that my life was shattered in front of me. I was better off dodging her and avoiding her entirely. I stayed there on that bench until the fog burned off and the midday sun hung high overhead.
Stayed until the lengthening shadows stretched out like fingers and the streetlamps turned on. I could feel myself slipping back into that black abyss. That darkness that had claimed so much time after Claire had first left.
Worst of all was that I knew she was lying. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew she didn’t believe what she told me. At first, I wondered if it was another man, maybe somebody from back in New York.
That didn’t feel right, Claire wasn’t the cheating type. And I had the sneaking suspicion that she didn’t really want to go back there.
In the end, it didn’t matter that I was certain she was lying. It didn’t matter that I still loved her and felt the raw gaping wound where my heart used to be every time I struggled to breathe. None of it mattered because I couldn’t think of any way to make Claire see it.
I’d left my phone behind, left everything including Claire. I just walked out after those words that no guy ever wants to hear. It was a rendition of the dreaded, let’s just be friends.
The sad thing was, I’d take it.
I’d take anything I could get because I loved her so fiercely, so stupidly that I couldn’t help myself. I would have groveled, begged her and fallen to my knees if I had stayed.
Angrily scrubbing the tears from my eyes I finally heeded the angry grumbling of my stomach and began to head back home.
I was scared of what I would find when I opened the door, part of me hoped she was there still. She had time to think and had reconsidered, it was all a drunken mistake that she wanted to apologize for. But no, good things didn’t happen like that.
People fell apart, broke up, and there was nothing you could do about it. You moved on the best you knew how. Picked up the shattered pieces of your life and tried to rearrange them into something that resembled normal.
The apartment was empty, I foolishly checked every inch of every room as if she was hiding under my bed or jammed herself in the hallway closet with my wrecked bike.
I stared at the mangled wreckage, the bike she’d given a poor seventeen-year-old Thomas. It meant more than she could ever know. The hundreds of bike rides that followed, Claire perched on my handlebars as we rode to the theatre were some of my most cherished memories.
I kept the bike in good working order through the nearly ten years since. This broken, shattered heap in front of me was a disturbingly apt metaphor for how my life had turned out once Claire came back.
Now I couldn’t think back to those stolen moments between customer orders, or the nights we spent sweating and panting in each other’s arms with anything but pain.
Richard had once described grief to me like this, Think of a box with a small button and a ball inside it. Whenever that button is pressed, you feel pain. At first, the ball is nearly the size of the box. Every little jostle, every bump presses the button. But over time, the ball shrinks. The box and the button stay the same, but that ball gets a little bit smaller every day. The button isn’t hit as much. The pain doesn’t lessen when it gets pressed, but you go longer between feeling it.
It felt wrong, somehow, being grief-stricken over his daughter’s unrequited love when the man himself wasn’t even buried yet.
If you could throw a little miracle my way Richard, I sure would appreciate it.
It wasn’t a prayer, exactly, but if anybody could browbeat the Big Guy into helping me out, it was Richard. That man didn’t know the meaning of quit. Even when he shut down the bookstore, he kept all the books as if it was a temporary thing he’d undo any day now.
I wish I had that conviction.
I took a single glance at my phone on the counter and walked past it straight to the fridge. Pulled out a beer and dropped into the couch to stare at the dark mirror of the TV.
The familiar tug of depression led my thoughts down an ever-deepening spiral. I should have resisted. Could have if I had cared, but I didn’t. That was the first day in over five years that I missed my evening run.
And it was all because of love.
25
Claire
Unable to confront Thomas or Jemma, I wallowed in misery under a pile of blankets I threw together in Dad’s apartment. It was my own pitiful cocoon of sadness. I didn’t get it. Why did doing the right thing hurt so much?
I wasn’t good enough for Thomas, I knew that. He would have seen it too and then where would we be? Would we have kids by then? Married? How long for him to realize that if I gave it my all it wouldn’t be enough for him?
This was for the best.
I’d done the right thing and while I’m sure it hurt now it would get better. The dreadful rain had let up today, but it was just as overcast. Once or twice whenever I had to exit my pile of blankets I’d check my phone. There were plenty of messages, but no messages from Thomas.
Why was I checking? I wasn’t sure I even wanted to hear from him. That was a total lie. I wanted to hear from him. I desperately wanted to make sure he was okay. I ached to hear his voice.
My body yearned for his touch and it made me feel sick and wrong that I craved him like a drug. I was having fantasies of his hands, his tongue, his body against mine after I had just broke his heart. What was wrong with me?
Normally it would be me who would be with him when he got rejected or dumped. Now I couldn’t even do that.
I still remember when Naomi Clarkson broke his heart by cheating on him with Brad Cooper. He cried his eyes out and I held him, secretly jealous of the closeness Naomi got with him and wishing that I could have had that. I wouldn’t have treated him wrong, I used to think.
And look at what I’ve done now. Finally got my chance, and I broke his heart.
Did it matter that I did the right thing? From the first moment the words were out of my mouth doubt and fear crept in and hadn’t left me alone since. Every time I thought I was certain, a flicker of memory bubbled to the surface.
The sensation of his stubble against my cheek, the inside of my thighs. The
way he felt when I’d snuggle up to him when he was fast asleep, comforted by his presence. A presence that I sorely missed.
Stop being so selfish, I chided myself and blew my nose loudly. Another crumpled tissue joined the growing pile in pale imitation to the blankets I was hiding beneath.
Doing the right thing sucked.
I gave myself a day. One full day to wallow and cry, and to feel sorry for myself. One day turned to two, then to three with no sign that it was going to stop.
The depression-train has officially left the station.
My phone occasionally buzzed or chirped for my attention. I let it be, checked only a few times out of the day to see if it was Thomas. When it wasn’t, I went back to the blanket fort of sadness.
I ate food I never would have even considered before. Dad’s pantry was filled with ready-made meals. His freezer was stocked full of TV dinners, and I ate one after the other without tasting them.
At least I did that much. For the first time in recorded history, I didn’t feel like working. I couldn’t even stare at my laptop long enough to pull up a spreadsheet. I wanted to sink into the floor and never leave.
Finally, sometime around dusk on the fourth day, there was a pounding at the front door. My heart hammered in my throat as I approached it and got on my tippy toes to see through the peephole.
It was Jemma. Heart sinking, I opened the door and let her in.
“You haven’t answered a single text or phone call, I was worried sick!” she said, barging into the room. She took one look at me then at the blankets and everything clicked in her head. “He broke up with you?” Her voice was shrill with accusation and disbelief.
She’d gotten it half right. I went over to my pile of blankets in the living room and crawled back under until only my face showed out. Jemma sat cross-legged on the floor beside me, for once a look of paternal concern on her face.
“No,” I choked out hoarsely. Not using my voice for several days except to cry and sob had done a number on it. I swallowed, tried again. “No. I broke up with him.”
She poked my forehead with a long finger. “I thought you were supposed to be the smart one?”
“I am smart.”
“A smart girl wouldn’t have let a guy like that get away, much less dump his ass.”
“It was for the best.” It sounded weak when I said it out loud.
“Was he jerk to you?”
“No.”
“Did he hurt other people or was cruel to somebody else?”
“No.”
“Was he shit in bed?”
“God, no.”
“Then what the fuck is your problem?”
I took a deep breath and laid it all out for her. Everything from the last year of high school all the way to just a few days ago when things finally ended. When I finally ended them.
It seemed so anti-climactic when it was laid out on a timeline like that.
Jemma stared at me, slack-jawed. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “So let me get this straight. You feel like he’s going to realize you aren’t worth it and end up dumping you later at some indefinable point in time. So you decided to dump him first?”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“Is it?”
I wasn’t so sure anymore, but the stubbornness in me refused to back down. I nodded.
“You’re an idiot, Claire.” She didn’t say it unkindly. “I may hop from one boyfriend to the next, but even I can see how much Thomas adores you. The lingering looks, the smoldering gazes, and the way he says your name like it’s the most beautiful sound to him.”
“Exactly. I couldn’t compete with that.”
“It’s not a damn competition, Claire.” Jemma paused, pressed her palms in front of her face almost like a prayer. “Let’s try another tactic. How do you feel?”
“Miserable.”
“And, do you miss him?”
“No,” I lied.
“Bullshit. Do you miss him?”
“Yes, fine! I miss Thomas, okay? Does that make you happy? It doesn’t change anything.”
“So you’ve broken things off with him, and days later you’re curled up like a five-year-old afraid of a storm, eating food with ingredients only you could probably pronounce. Does that sound like you did the right thing?”
It really didn’t. I should feel better, shouldn’t I? “I did do the right thing.” If I repeated it enough like a mantra, maybe I could make it true.
“But does it feel like you did?”
“No, but no good deed goes unpunished, that sort of thing.”
Jemma placed a hand on my arm as I reached for a tissue, all this talk about Thomas had me doubting everything I ever did and the waterworks were starting up again. I never had much cause to be comforted by Jemma, but I was glad my sister was here with me.
“If it feels bad in your gut, it’s usually bad. Listen to your heart, I know you’ve got that big brain that never stops working but put it aside a moment. Who cares what might happen in a future you can’t possibly know will happen. At this moment, right now would you feel happier with Thomas?”
I didn’t trust myself to speak so I gave a teary nod instead.
“Then that’s your answer,” she said simply. As if it was that easy. “There’s only one moment we can live in, and that’s the present. You can worry about the future, but nobody knows what it will really bring, and you can reminisce about the past but you can’t go back there. The only time we have is now and that’s the only time that matters.”
I wiped my eyes with the tissue, it was like seeing Jemma clearly for the first time. Not as a child, always indecisive and getting in trouble, but as a free spirit who had a wealth of life experience so different from my own.
“When did you get so wise?” I sniffled and looked at her curiously. She was prettier than me, always wore her hair down and had the figure that drove boys wild. Curvy without having to try, while I was quite a bit more narrow in the hips and chest. “I know you don’t like talking to me much, but thank you Jemma.”
“Do you know why we rarely talk like this?” she asked quietly.
I shook my head and blew my nose.
“Because you always have the answer. You treat me like a daughter more than a sister. I know you tried to step up and fill the role mom left, but she’s gone, Claire. She’s been gone. All my life you’ve never shown me anything as vulnerable as this. It was always you against the world. You never needed - or wanted - help from anybody. I’ve always wanted to talk to my big sister. But you always saw me as a child to manage.”
That hit me hard and the tears came on heavier than ever. She was right. Growing up as the eldest daughter in a home without a mom was hard. My therapist said I took on too much responsibility too soon, I was always looking to shoulder more burden than I should.
I didn’t reach out for help, refused to be vulnerable or show people I was struggling. I had no idea it had affected our relationship so much. Jemma was all I had now, and it took losing Thomas to realize how much I had been missing out on.
What else was I missing out on by always being alone? I worked hard to make sure I had the right answers, never asked questions except when I must so I didn’t look stupid.
I cried myself hoarse in Jemma’s arms. Let the full weight of all my bad decisions fall from my shoulders. I hoped that unburdened we could begin to heal. I wanted my sister, not another responsibility. I never wanted her to feel like she was anything less ever again.
26
Thomas
Unable to bear being alone with my own thoughts, I went back to work and baked up a storm. So far I’d managed to stay away from Claire, I didn’t call or text her despite how badly I wanted to and I didn’t bother her. Though I suspected she had moved out of her dad’s place by now.
The rainclouds had gathered in full force and every day was dark and dreary. I usually loved this sort of weather. The rain was second only to the pristine white of snowfall. The sound
of rain on the window panes was a lullaby for my soul.
I was slowly getting used to being alone again, but I still couldn’t stand to sleep in the same bed we once shared. I would catch whiffs of Claire’s scent on the sheets or on the couch somewhere and it’d send me spiraling into darkness. I wanted nothing more than to be with her again. I wondered if I’d ever understood her reasons for leaving in the first place.
After work I’d go for a run, the exercise helped to clear my head and when I got back and showered I watched something to keep my mind busy. I had to get used to being alone again. It may have only been a handful of days that we were living together, but they were the best days of my life.
The way she’d snort when she laughed without warning, how she’d leave the bathroom door open as an invitation when she took a shower. Her body pressed against mine. It was such a wonder how well we fit together. Like two pieces made whole.
I knew then that I was the only one who thought that. It tinged the memories, made them bittersweet. The happiness they radiated reminded me that I was alone.
Unloved.
She left me again, but at least this time she told me to my face. I hadn’t seen her or Jemma in the last few days. Even the boom in business was thanks to Claire, every new face that walked into the shop I searched in the hope it’d be her.
It never was.
With all the new customers and online orders, I had my hands full and if it kept up I could hire an assistant to man the register so I could bake full-time.
Without Claire’s business insight, I wasn’t sure where to go from here. Everything we’d done had been together, but she hadn’t shared much of the steps we’d need to take afterward.
Had she given up on the business as well as me? I wondered at how total her abandonment was, she said she still wanted to keep our friendship but somehow I doubted it.
There was a lot I doubted these days.
“Morning, Thomas,” said Samantha. “You’re looking as gloomy as the weather.”
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