F*ck Love (28 page)

“The people who blind themselves to the truth. They’re just trying to survive.”

I’m distracted for a minute, my finger suspended over the camera button on my phone. “Who wants to survive without truth?”

Greer shrugs, and her shirt slips off her slender shoulder.
Perfect.
“Maybe people who have had too much of it. Or people who have had too little. Or people who are too shallow to appreciate its hard edges.”

I take the picture, then lower my phone to look at her. Greer is the truth. Right now, she’s the truth to me. The one person who cares enough to let me know that I still have on my blindfold. If I were one of the three, I’d be the shallow one. My life hasn’t been an extreme of any kind. My childhood typically dysfunctional, but typically functional. I’ve been so very underexposed that I turned into a beige bitch. What happened to pink? In third grade, I liked pink.

“Greer,” I say. “Do you still love Kit?”

I don’t know where that comes from. Greer has never even hinted at still having feelings for Kit. But how many times has she told me that art begins to flow from a source of hurt?

“Art is the blood that comes from a wound. You can’t let it scab; let it keep bleeding. Let it bleed until you have enough blood to paint with.”

Her face changes with my question. There is a shift in her eyebrows, a dulling of her eyes.

“The truth, Greer,” I say. I’m holding my breath. The answer to that question is so fragile I’m afraid the air from my lungs will break it. She turns to face me, holding the hair back from her face with both hands. The tattoos on the underside of her arms are visible against her white skin. BE THOU on one side, YOUR ART, on the other.

“Yes,” she says. “I am.”

I look away from Greer and back out at the water. Kit, the pied piper of love. How many others were there? Girls at work? Girls in his graduate program? I laugh at my own stupidity, but the wind catches the sound and carries it away.

“Oh shit,” I say, dropping my head into my hands. This was really messed up.

When we climb back into her car, we’ve yet to say anything else to each other. A line I have never seen before appeared between Greer’s eyes after her confession, and has yet to smooth away. I sit slouched in the passenger seat, my mouth dry, and a heaviness weighing across my chest. Her car smells like leather and lemons. I breathe it in as we follow the line of cars off the ferry. I remember the pictures I took and scroll through them to distract myself. There is a picture of her surrounded by the pastel sunset. It’s so vibrant. The light catches the top of her exposed shoulder, where there is the hint of a tattoo. It’s beautiful. I post it to Instagram—because it’s probably one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken—hoping Kit sees it.
Look what I have of yours. It’s purple!

I caption it with Greer’s words.
Who wants to hide from the truth? Maybe people who have had too much of it. Or people who have had too little. Or people who are too shallow to appreciate its hard edges. #TRUTH

The ride from the Kingston ferry to Port Townsend is about an hour, depending on how fast you’re driving. During that hour, the photo of Greer gets three thousand likes, and my Instagram gets a thousand new follows. I track the likes to two blogs who reposted the picture, crediting me, each blog having over thirty thousand followers. I read through the comments on the photo, blushing at the things they say both about Greer, and the mysterious photographer. Kit is not one of those likes. He liked someone else’s picture a few minutes after I posted the picture of Greer, so I know he saw it.

“Whoa,” Greer says, when she opens her Instagram. “That’s a great picture.”

“A fluke,” I say. “I’ve never taken anything as good as that before.”

She puts the car in park outside of the cannery. “So, maybe today is the start of great pictures. Make sure your next one is better.”

I purse my lips. “Okay.”

I make to open my door, but Greer grabs my hand and squeezes it.

“I’ve moved on, Helena,” she says. “You can love someone your whole life and not know why. You can even live with it. This doesn’t change our friendship.”

I smile tightly. “Of course it doesn’t. Because he’s not mine. If he were, you wouldn’t be okay with me.”

“That’s not true,” she says. “I want him to be happy.”

“That’s easy to say until the person you love is happy with someone else. Girls always choose men, and men always choose the wrong girls. It’s an endless cycle.” I wonder if she was helping herself or helping me when she forced me to go to the wedding with her.

This time, she doesn’t try to stop me when I get out of the car. The beige bitch can say things that make sense too.

There’s a lot of rebuilding to do after your heart breaks. For instance, you have to rearrange your perspective. What is important now that I have no desire to eat, drink, work, play, love, sleep, talk, or think? Healing. You have to focus on the minuscule, stupid things that make you happy every day. Like taking out your box of socks and touching each one. Posting beautifully depressing pictures of Port Townsend to Instagram, which generate thousands of likes. I get paid by third party advertisers to wear this and post that. I’m just a beige bitch with something to say. Wine makes me happy. Every night I drink an entire bottle and stare at my favorite wall. I even like the way it feels when I wake up to a headache, my stomach rolling from a hangover. It gives me something to focus on other than the melancholy of my heart. My mood changes by the hour, which makes me feel like a crazy person. Like yesterday, when I stood looking at the water and didn’t think about drowning myself, I felt proud. But two hours later I held a bag of rat poison in my hands and wondered if it was delicious. Greer tells me I have to take back my power.

“What power?” I ask her.

She screws her face up in deep thought before she finally says, “Do you know how in
Pirates of the Caribbean
when Calypso…”

I’ve never met anyone who delivers Disney analogies with such a punch. I get it. I think. It makes me laugh in any case.

I’m different. Kit showed me things, so I focus on that—the things I’ve learned rather than the things I’m not getting to experience. I’ve noticed that people don’t really look you in the eye, because their eyes are somewhere else. Pointed inward. I make it a point to look everyone in the eye so they know I’m seeing them. That’s how Kit made me feel—seen. I want to see people. I’ve also noticed that the more you see people the more they want to trust you with their secrets. Phyllis tells me that she gave a baby boy up for adoption when she was fifteen. A customer tells me that she collects rocks the color of her ex-boyfriend’s eyes, and that her husband thinks her rock gardens are just a love of minerals. A stranger tells me that she was raped two weeks ago. It goes on and on. When you care, people can feel it. And then, in my new position as town secret carrier, I realize that Kit made me a better person.

Contrast is important in life. We understand what light is because we can compare it with what we know is dark. Sweet is made sweeter after we eat something bitter. It’s the very same with sadness. And it’s important to experience sadness, to embrace it in order to truly know happiness. I was just a flat line until he came along. And maybe now I’m hurting. But isn’t that what love is supposed to do? Make you feel, make you brave, make you look at yourself more carefully?

A month after Kit’s swift departure back to Florida, a package arrives for me at the cannery with his return address scratched in the upper left corner. I weigh it in my hands, and let my fingers explore through the envelope. Pages. Pages, and pages, and pages. I don’t open it, because I know what it is. The words that he wanted to say. That we didn’t have time to say. I have those words too. I’m not ready. For weeks, I carry it in my purse just to feel the weight of it on my shoulder. Unopened. A little bit ignored. I’m afraid to touch those pages. They could tell a very different story than the one I’m expecting, but Kit’s approach and appearance in PT makes me believe.

One day, shortly after Christmas, I walk to a bar on Water Street—called Sirens. There is still tinsel draped across the back of the bar. One side of it has come loose of the tape and loops down lower than the rest. It depresses me. I slide onto a barstool and order whiskey straight up, turning my back on the droopy tinsel. The bartender slides the glass over without meeting my eyes.
Seasonal depression. Yeah, me too, buddy.
I take a sip and flinch. Drinking is a good plan. You want to ignore your inner pain and pour fermented corn down your throat so you can ignore your pain some more. It’ll burn harder than your heart.

“Bad day?” A man’s voice—chalky, rich. He’s sitting directly across from me on the other side of the bar. He’s in the darkest corner, which makes it hard for him to be seen. I wonder if he planned it that way.

“Did the whiskey give it away?” My voice is raspy. I lick my lips and look away. The last thing I feel like doing is bullshitting with a stranger in a bar.

“Plenty of women drink whiskey straight up. You just look like you took a sip of battery acid.”

I laugh.

I turn to him, despite myself. “Yeah. It was a really bad day. But, they’re mostly like that.” I spin my glass on the counter and narrow my eyes on the shadows, trying to see his face. His voice is young, but his presence is old. Maybe he’s a ghost. I make the sign of the cross under the table. I’m not even Catholic.

“A man,” he says. “And a broken heart.”

“That’s fairly obvious,” I say. “What else causes a woman to walk into a bar at three o’ clock on a weekday and drink battery acid?”

Now it’s his turn to laugh.
Young—definitely young.

“Tell me,” he says. And that’s all he says. I like that. It’s like he just expects you to spill all of your secrets, and I’m sure many do.

“Tell me,” I say. “Why you’re drinking alone in the darkest corner of the bar, trying to pry the hurt out of strangers.”

For a minute he’s quiet, and I think I’ve imagined the whole conversation. I take another sip of whiskey, determined to keep my face still as I watch the place where he sits.
A ghost!

“Because that’s what I do,” he finally says.

I’m surprised he answered, though it’s a cheap, noncommittal answer.

“What’s the point of making conversation if you’re going to be guarded and give me rehearsed answers?”

I can feel his smile. Is that even possible? It’s like the air carries everything he does and lets you know.

“Okay,” he says slowly. I hear him set down his glass. “I’m a predator. I wait for women to tell me what they want, and then I convince them that I can give it to them.”

I laugh. “I already know you’re a man. Tell me something new.”

He shifts on his stool and light hits his face. For a moment I see a beard and a very sharp blue eye.” My heart races.

“What’s your name?” he asks. I blink at the terseness in his voice.

“Helena,” I say. “And you’re right. I do have a broken heart. And I don’t drink whiskey. What’s your name?”

“Muslim,” he says. He waits like he expects something from me. When I don’t respond, he says, “Tell me about this man you love, Helena.”

The man I love? I suck in my cheeks and stare at the place where he’s sitting like I can see him.

“Tell me about all the women you didn’t, Muslim.”

He slides his glass back and forth across the bar top, considering me.

“It’s your power move,” I tell him. “Getting women to tell you their truths while you hide all of yours. Is that right?”

“Perhaps.” I hear the catch in his voice.

“What causes you to want that power?”

He laughs. It’s a deep, throaty laugh.

“The lack or distortion of something usually causes a deep need for it,” he answers. “Wouldn’t you think?”

“Unless you’re a sociopath. Then you just crave things because you were born with the need. Are you a sociopath, Muslim?”

“My truth for yours,” he says. His voice slays me. It makes me feel lightheaded with all of that richness. A grating finery. I want to kiss him based on his voice alone.

“All right,” I say slowly. I turn my body toward him because I’m really getting into this. “He’s my former best friend’s fiancé. They have a baby.” I tell him the story of Della’s time in the hospital, and of my time with Kit and Annie. When I’m finished, there’s a flash of light as he lifts his glass to his mouth and takes a sip.

“Yes, I am,” he says. It takes a minute for me to realize he’s answering my question and is not commenting on what I told him. “I find out what makes people tick, and then I use it against them.”

“And when you say people, you mean women?”

“Yes,” he says.

I am a little stunned.

“Don’t you … don’t you feel bad about that?”

“I am a sociopath, remember?”

“But you’re not supposed to admit that,” I say quietly.

And then he says, “Does he feel the same way about you that you feel about him?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “He feels something.”

“So why aren’t you doing anything about it?”