by LP Tvorik
It didn’t work like that with Nate. Perhaps because he wasn’t dead. Maybe if he was, I’d have been able to get over it. The first few days would have been the hardest, and then I’d have moved on and found a way to live without him. But how do you learn to live without something you may never have had in the first place?
The first few days were straightforward sadness. Defeat. Betrayal. All I knew was that he’d begged for another chance, made me a promise, and then abandoned me at the spot. I waited until dawn and then stumbled home in tears, curled up in a corner of my bedroom, and wept until the sun was high overhead. Daddy was away at a conference and he’d arranged for Tom to stay with some folks from the church so I wouldn’t have to look out for him. All weekend, I wandered about in a haze, alone in an empty house.
On Monday, it got worse. So much worse.
Gemma picked me up, as she had for the past two weeks. Her face was unusually pale as I climbed into the front seat of her two-door coupe.
“Aly, I’m so sorry,” she said mournfully. Her concern matched my broken heart, but it didn’t make any sense. I hadn’t told her that Nate was supposed to meet me, or that he’d squandered his last chance to make us right. How did she know to pity me more today than any other? “My mom told me what happened. Are you okay?”
Her mom told her? “Uh…” I frowned, so perplexed I momentarily forgot my sadness. “How the hell does your mom know?”
Gemma rolled her eyes as she backed the car out of my drive. “Her latest boy toy is some cop,” she said. “And you know mom’s nosey as hell, so she’s always prodding him for info on his cases. He responded to the call on Friday night.”
“The call?” Fear slithered up my spine, even before Gemma’s eyes widened, mouth parting in a silent ‘o’.
“You don’t know,” she breathed.
“Don’t know what?” I asked, my heart thundering in my ears. An amorphous, nameless terror had taken over my body, and it took all my strength to ask the question and validate my fear.
Gemma flipped her hazards on and pulled over to the side of the road— the vehicular equivalent of telling someone they should probably ‘sit down’ to hear whatever was coming next. My stomach dropped like so much lead into the pit of my stomach and my heart hammered so hard I could feel it pounding against my rib cage.
“Gemma, what happened?” I asked again as my friend put the car in park and angled herself so she was facing me. Her right hand clutched the gear shift, nails digging into the false leather.
“Aly, your boy was arrested,” she said, looking down at her lap and shaking her head. “He…” she trailed off before looking up at me. “Didn’t you think it was weird you didn’t hear from him all weekend?
“I never hear from him on the weekend,” I shrugged impatiently. “He doesn’t have a phone. Gemma, please just tell me. What did he do?”
He got caught shoplifting. Loitering. Fighting. Driving too fast. Is speeding an arrestable offense?
“He killed his foster dad,” Gemma said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “Beat him to death with his bare hands.”
I stared at her, uncomprehending. My mind frantically tried to make sense of her words. It threw memories at me in rapid fire. Holding his hand the first night we met. Laying on the rock with him, staring at the stars. His arm around my shoulder, offering comfort. His gruff, reassuring strength, holding me together after my mother’s death. The lost look in his eyes when I promised I would never hit him. His voice, firm but gentle, talking me down off of cliff after cliff throughout six years of loyal, intimate friendship.
“No he didn’t,” I breathed, unable to reconcile Gemma’s words with my truth. He wouldn’t. My Nate wasn’t a murderer. But just as soon as the words left my mouth, I remembered the feral gleam in his eye during Friday’s fight. I thought of the endless bruises, cropping up and fading on his skin, and the tough, silvery scar tissue on his knuckles. Perhaps my version of Nate wasn’t a murderer, but it was past time I finally accepted that my version wasn’t the only version. Somewhere out there was a version for whom fighting was a way of life— who slept with pseudo-siblings and apparently beat people to death.
Perhaps if it hadn’t happened so abruptly, and if I hadn’t been so mired in heartbreak, I’d have been able to see past the shock and ask myself why there were multiple editions of the boy I loved— what external circumstances had broken him into so many unknowable pieces. Maybe if he hadn’t kept himself so closed off from me I’d have realized there weren’t multiple versions at all. Just one. One boy and more secrets than anyone should have to keep.
But it was abrupt and my heart was broken and some instinct for self-preservation rose up from my subconscious and wrapped me tight in a shield of disgust and self-absorption. There was no room in my heart for empathy.
“Aly?” Gemma asked, resting a gentle hand on my arm. “Are you okay?”
“No.” All I could feel in that moment was my own hurt. Shame that I hadn’t seen who he really was. Humiliation that everyone would know that Aly Winger shacked up with a murderer and was therefore either stupid or irreconcilably broken. Disgust that I’d given so much of myself to someone so twisted.
“Do you wanna cut class?” she asked kindly. “We could go get coffee. Or go back to my place. My mom’s at work. We could get day drunk.”
That sounded wonderful. I’d never had more than a glass of wine, but I relished the thought of drowning my sorrows in humanity’s favorite numbing agent.
“No,” I said again, trying to make my voice stronger. My relationship might have been a sham, but the version of me it created was better than the one before. I was no longer one to cower. “Let’s go to school.” The best path forward was to hold my head high and make myself impervious to the whispers and rumors. Shrinking from reality and getting sloppy drunk wouldn’t help at all. I would walk into school and act like nothing phased me and maybe, if I kept up appearances for long enough, I would start to feel as strong as I acted.
The next few weeks were an exercise in discipline. Nobody confronted me directly, perhaps because of the persistent rumor that I shared the relentless sociopathy of my erstwhile boyfriend. I still heard them talk, though. Whispers and snippets came together into a conflicted, dramatized legend, and it was a fresh pain that I had no more idea of what was truth and fiction than the rest of them.
“I heard he flipped out on the guy for looking at him funny.”
“I heard he’s in foster care because his dad’s a murderer too. You know there’s a theory that crazy is genetic?”
“I heard he beat up one of the kids, too. A little girl.”
“My mom is friends with the foster mother. Apparently, he tried to force himself on her and that’s how the fight started.”
“Well, I overheard some of the sister’s friends in the bathroom. I think the dad was a pervert and Nate was just trying to stop him.”
“My dad says he’s gonna get the death penalty.”
“I heard the other kids got carted off to a different city for their own safety, in case he gets out and comes after them too.”
“He tore the guy’s head clean off. Blood everywhere.”
After then, somehow, it got worse.
“You hear his sister is pregnant? The slutty one I mean.”
“Apparently they were fighting over her. I saw her at the mall. She’s definitely got a bump.”
“The baby is his. He tried to get her to abort it but she wouldn’t so he tried to beat it out of her. The dad intervened.”
The pain didn’t get better. It was bad, then worse, then unbearable. I desperately wanted to know the truth and, just as desperately, to forget Nate had ever existed.
Then came the letters.
The first was in a business envelope. My address was scrawled across the front in Nate’s sloppy chicken scratch, and the return address was a
stamp from some law firm downtown. I went inside and opened the envelope and pulled out two pages of lined legal pad paper. Happy tears trickled over my cheeks while I read his story. His truth. My father took me to visit him in jail. We pressed our hands to the plexiglass between us and said ‘I love you.’ His case was dismissed. It was all a misunderstanding. He followed me to California and we got married and spent the rest of our lives together. Happily ever after.
The End.
Of course not. Life isn’t a fairytale, Nate wasn’t a prince, and I was not a sweet and gentle damsel.
I sat for hours that night, cross legged on my bed with the envelope on the comforter before me. I stared daggers at that paper— light as a feather but heavy with possibilities. I picked it up and held it to the light above as if I could somehow see his intent through the envelope. I raced through possibilities, his voice reading my theories straight from the wrinkles of my brain, as real as if he was sitting right next to me.
“I’m not a murderer, Alex. He killed himself and framed me.”
“It was self defense, Alex. He hit me first.”
“I had to kill him, Alex. He was going after Deb.”
“I never loved you, Alex. You were nothing but a game.”
In the end, I never opened the letter, but not for the reasons you think. I wasn’t afraid he would say the wrong thing and break me further. I was afraid he would say the right thing and pull me back in. Whatever the reason, he had killed a man. He had beaten a living being unconscious and then kept beating him until he no longer drew breath. Whatever the reason, he had suddenly, out of nowhere, abandoned me for Deb. Deb who, according to a particularly consistent rumor, was pregnant with Nate’s baby.
You’ve heard the theory of Occam’s Razor? If there are two explanations for an occurrence, the simpler one is usually better?
The bottom line was that Nate was violent, he was dishonest, and he was about to go to prison for a very long time. My Nate was gone. Dead and buried, if he ever existed at all. The letter was just a whisper from the other side. An artifact from a life I desperately wanted to leave behind. All it could do was hurt me.
So why did I keep it?
‥ ‥ ‥
I graduated high school on June 8, 2002. I was the valedictorian, and I wrote a charming, loquacious speech about hard work and friendship and bright, happy futures. I printed it out in triplicate for the class president, the English Department head, and the vice principal to proof for grammatical errors and inappropriate content. They said it was lovely and vice principal told me how brave I was for overcoming everything I’d been through.
When the day came, I stood in front of 112 students and their corresponding families and delivered a speech that was thirty seconds long. I tapped my three pages of drivel on the podium, leaned toward the microphone, and squinted against the spotlights into the dark, packed auditorium.
“Gemma Roberts,” I said, trying not to cringe as my voice echoed out through the loudspeakers. “You’re an amazing friend. I’m going to miss you next year. Daddy,” I said calmly, as the faculty seated behind me on the stage started to shift. They knew I was going off script. “Things haven’t always been easy, but I know you love me. Thank you for forgiving me when I didn’t follow your rules. Tom-tom,” somewhere in the audience I heard my brother whoop and I smiled in spite of myself. “You’re my favorite person on earth. I love you more than life. Mrs. Parker,” I turned around and smiled at the English Department head. “You’re the kind of teacher who changes kids’ lives for the better.
“All the rest of you,” I finished, gripping the edges of the podium so hard my fingers were turning white, “can go fuck yourselves.”
The crowd went wild. Some people laughed. Some people cheered. It was the most support I’d ever received from my classmates, and I barely heard it. I walked backstage, and nobody followed me. I think the faculty were all too shocked. Sweet, quiet little Aly Winger would never do something so outrageous.
My cap and gown were a crumpled-up wad in my arms and I was leaning against the car when my father approached, Tom grinning by his side, five minutes later.
“Did that make you feel better?” Daddy asked evenly, unlocking the car as he approached.
“Yes,” I answered honestly, returning Tom’s too-tight hug.
“You left without your diploma.” I buckled my seatbelt as my father turned the key in the ignition.
“It was just a rolled up piece of blank paper,” I said. “We get our real diplomas in the mail in two weeks.”
My father hummed thoughtfully and we drove the rest of the way home in silence.
‥ ‥ ‥
I spent the summer at my grandparents’ lake house in northern Michigan. Tom and I whiled away the longest days of the year swimming and fishing, walking in the woods, and lazing around watching TV. It was only there, hundreds of miles from the pain of the past, that the pain finally began to fade.
Every week on Sunday my father would call and ask us how we were and share trite small-talk from home. Nearly every call ended on the same note.
“You got another one,” he’d tell me.
“Throw it away,” I’d respond.
“Sugar, you know I hate that he hurt you but maybe you should just read them. Forgiveness is important in the healing pro—”
“Throw it away.”
But when I came home in early August there was a stack of letters on my desk. The more recent ones weren’t from the jail. They were return addressed to the federal prison on the other side of the state. There were ten of them. Eleven including the first, which was sitting in a shoebox with other treasured items beneath my bed.
I sat for a long time, the letters in my lap, leaning back against my bedroom door and staring at the window through which he had climbed last summer to comfort me. The paper was smooth against my fingertips, and I brushed my fingers over my address, scrawled on the front of each envelope.
I vowed to open them, someday. Weeks or months or years in the future, when my heart no longer ached to see him, I would read his letters and close the door on him once and for all.
In the meantime, they’d live beneath my bed with all the other nostalgic relics of my youth. I knew myself, and I knew my heart. I was an addict, and those letters were a fix that would drag me right back into the hole. If I read them now I’d go back to him. I’d tie myself to a liar and a murderer—a man who did not deserve the best years of my life.
Funny how it was Nate from whom I was running, and Nate who had given me the strength to turn away.
‥ ‥ ‥
That evening, I went to the grocery store to pick up the essentials, because apparently my father had been keeping true to the bachelor stereotype in Tom’s and my absence. All he had around was a half-gallon of milk and a freezer full of TV dinners.
I was rounding the corner from the canned-veggies-and-soup aisle into the baking-goods-and-spices aisle when I nearly ran her over with my cart.
Deb.
Pregnant Deb.
She was wearing plastic, dollar store sandals, sweatpants, and a worn yellow tank top that molded itself to her rounded belly. Her hair hung limp and frizzy by her face, and her eyes were shadowed.
That I wanted to smack her was no surprise.
That I also wanted to hug her took me aback.
“You’re, um…” I trailed off, my eyes sinking to her belly. “Congratulations?”
“Don’t be a bitch,” she snapped, but there was little venom in her voice. And why should there be? She won. Nevermind that I hadn’t even been aware of the competition until the end.
“I wasn’t,” I said honestly. “I just didn’t know—”
“I’m pregnant.”
“Right.” I tried to steer my cart around her but she side-stepped, blocking my way.
“It’s his,” she said,
glaring at me over my basket of produce and ground hamburger. I felt like she’d reached across the cart and slammed a knife into my chest.
“What?” I asked, my tongue suddenly too big for my mouth. How did it hurt so bad when I already knew?
“It’s his. Nate’s.” She pointed at her belly. “When he gets out, he’s going to help me raise it. He’s not coming back to you.”
“Okay,” I said quietly, although my heart was dropping to its knees and raising hands to the heavens, wailing out a drawn out, Hollywood ‘Noooooooooooo!!!!!’ at a cruel, remorseless god.
It was the culmination of three months of worrying, agonizing, and second-guessing my decision to cut myself off from him. Three months of trying not to imagine the possibility that I was wrong. All that time I’d quietly hoped that I really was the villain, and my Nate wasn’t imaginary or dead but holed up in a cell wondering why I’d abandoned him when he needed me most. I’d tried and failed to stop myself from imagining a future where he got out of prison, found me, and berated me for being such an idiot as to question our love.
She fell at his feet and wept her apologies. He pulled her into his arms and kissed away her tears, forgiving her. They rode into the sunset together and lived happily ever after.
The End.
When was I going to learn?
“My dad’s church has a program for single parents,” I said woodenly. I don’t know why I said it. Partly, I think, because of the baby. Deb had never struck me as a mothering sort, and the child didn’t deserve to be punished for the parents’ shortcomings. Partly, though, it was about Deb. She’d just driven a knife into my heart, but as I slammed into rock bottom, I guess I recognized that I wasn’t alone there. She was as broken as I was— perhaps more so. Nate had hurt us both, but at least I could walk away from him. She was tied to him forever.
“Excuse me?” she spat, glaring. “I don’t need charity.”
“Okay,” I sighed. “But it’s a good program. They’ve got donated clothes and car seats and toys. Stuff like that. There’s a support group of other moms if you have any questions about any of it. It’s not like I’ll be around, so you don’t have to worry about seeing me. Just think on it.”