One True Loves (31 page)

He looks at me and he breathes in and then breathes out, all with great effort.

“Do you want to sit?” I ask him, pulling him toward the sofa. I sit him down and I take a seat beside him. I put my hand on his back. “It's OK,” I say. “You can talk about it. You can tell me anything.”

“I just . . . I hate even thinking about it,” he says. “It was . . . awful. All of it. Losing my finger was maybe one of the most painful things I've ever been through. I have been working so hard to block it out.”

I am quiet in the hopes that he will keep talking, that he will continue to be honest with me and with himself, that he will share what he's been through, what plagues him.

“I sliced it almost clean through,” he says finally. “Trying to open an oyster with a rock. I thought it might heal on its own but it wouldn't. I lived with it growing more and more infected until I finally just had to . . .”

I can see that he can't bring himself to speak the words.

But he doesn't have to.

I know what he can't say.

He had to cut off his own finger.

Somewhere in the years he's been gone, he was forced to save his hand the only way he could.

“I'm so sorry,” I say to him.

I can't imagine what else happened, how many days he went without food, how near he came to grave dehydration, the searing pain of being stung over and over as he was trying to swim to rescue. But I am starting to think that he will tackle that pain when he is ready, talking and admitting more as he grows stronger. It will be a long process. It may even be years until he can unpack it all. And even then, he'll never be able to erase it completely.

The same way I'll never be able to erase the ache of grieving him.

These are the things that have made us who we are.

I step away from Jesse for a moment and head into the kitchen. I look through the cabinets and find an old box of Earl Grey.

“How about some tea?” I offer.

He looks up at me and nods. It is so gentle as to be almost imperceptible.

I put two mugs of water in the microwave. I grab the tea bags.

“Keep talking,” I say. “I'm listening.”

His voice picks up again and I realize that he must have, whether it was conscious or subconscious, been waiting for permission.

“I think I've been trying to
undo
the last however many years,” he says. “I've been trying to put everything back the way
it was before I left so it can be as if it never happened. But that doesn't work. I mean, obviously it doesn't. I know that.”

I stop the microwave before it beeps, pulling the mugs out and putting the tea bags in. The smell of the tea reminds me of Marie. I sit back down next to Jesse, putting his steaming cup in front of him. He takes it into his hand but he doesn't drink it yet.

“I'm not the same person that I was back then,” he says. “You know it and I know it, but I just keep thinking that with a little effort, I can change that. But I can't. I can't, can I?”

He puts the mug down and starts gesticulating with his hands. “I don't want to spend the rest of my life in Acton,” he says. “I've spent too long trapped somewhere I didn't want to be. I want to go back to California. I respect that Blair Books means as much to you as it does, but I don't get it. We worked so hard to move away from New England, to get away from the life that our parents were pushing us toward. We sacrificed so much so that we could travel, not so that we could stay in one place. I don't understand why you came back here, why you chose to spend your life here, doing exactly what your parents always told you you should do.

“I'm really, really angry, deep down in my heart. And I wish that I didn't feel that way and I hate myself for feeling it. But I'm furious that you could fall in love with someone else. I know you say that it doesn't mean you forgot me, but, you know, at least right now, it sure sounds like it to me. And I'm not saying that we couldn't get past that, if everything else about us made sense, but . . . I don't know.

“I'm mad at you and I'm mad at Friendly's for turning into a Johnny whatever you called it. I'm mad at almost everything that changed without me. I know I need to work on that. I know it's
just one of the strings of issues that I'm facing. I know I said that now was supposed to be the easy part but I don't know why I thought that. Coming home is hard. This was always going to be hard. I'm sorry I didn't see that until now.

“Of course I've changed. And of course you've changed. There is no way we could be the same after losing each other; we meant too much to each other for that to happen. So, I guess what I'm saying is that I'm miserable and I'm angry, but I guess I do get it. What you said in that letter makes some sense to me. You had to let go of me if you were ever going to have a chance at a normal life. I know you loved me then. I know it wasn't easy. And, obviously, I know this is hard for you, too. I'd be lying if I said that I didn't see what you see.”

He puts his arms around me, pulling me close to him, and then he says what has taken us days to understand.

“We loved each other and we lost each other. And now, even though we still love each other, the pieces don't fit like they used to.”

I could make myself fit for him.

He could make himself fit for me.

But that's not true love.

“This is it for us,” Jesse says. “We're over now.”

I look in his eyes. “Yeah. I think we are.”

After everything we've been through, I never predicted it ending like this.

Jesse and I stay still, holding each other, not yet ready to fully let go. His hands are still a little bit frozen. I take them in my own. I hold them, sharing the heat of my body.

He pulls one hand away to brush a hair off of my face.

I think, maybe,
this
is what true love means.

Maybe true love is warming someone up from the cold, or tenderly brushing a hair away, because you care about them with every bone in your body even though you know what's between you won't last.

“I don't know where we go from here,” I say.

Jesse puts his chin on my head, breathing in. And then he pulls away slightly to look at me. “You still don't have to be back until late tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“So we can stay,” he says. “For another day. We can take our time.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm saying that I know what's ahead of us, but . . . I'm not ready yet. I'm just not ready. And I don't see why we can't spend a little bit more time with each other, a little bit more time being happy together. I've waited so long to be here with you; it seems silly to squander it just because it won't last.”

I smile, charmed. I consider what he's saying and realize that it feels exactly right to me, like being handed a glass of water just as you realize you're thirsty. “That sounds good,” I say. “Let's just have a nice time together, not worry about the future.”

“Thank you.”

“OK, so until tomorrow, you and I will leave the real world on the other side of that door, knowing that we will face it soon. But . . . for now, we can let things be the way they were, once.”

“And then tomorrow we go home,” Jesse says.

“Yeah,” I say. “And we start to learn how to live without each other again.”

“You'll marry Sam,” Jesse says.

I nod. “And you'll probably move to California.”

“But for now . . . for one more day . . .”

“We'll be Emma and Jesse.”

“The way we were.”

I laugh. “Yeah, the way we were.”

J
esse builds a fire and then joins me on the sofa. He puts his arm around me and pulls me into the crook of his shoulder. I rest my head on him.

It feels good to be in his arms, to be satisfied with this moment, to not wonder what the future holds. I relish the way he feels next to me, cherish the joy of having him near. I know I won't always have it.

It starts snowing again, small flurries landing on the already white ground. I get up from Jesse's arms and walk over to the sliding glass doors to watch it fall.

Everything is quiet and soft. The snow is white and clean, not yet crushed under the weight of boots.

“Hear me out,” I say, turning back to Jesse.

“Uh-oh,” he says.

“Snow angels.”

“Snow angels?”

“Snow angels.”

As soon as we step out into the snow, I realize the flaw in my plan. We will sully the unsullied snow by walking in it. We will crush the uncrushed just by being here.

“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” Jesse asks me. “Imagine how good it will feel to watch a movie inside by the fire.”

“No, c'mon, this is better.”

“I'm not sure about that,” Jesse says, and from the tone of his voice, I now understand why people sometimes describe the air as “bitter cold.” The cold is not bitter. They are bitter about the cold.

I run ahead, hoping he'll catch up to me. I try to remember what it felt like to once be a teenager with him. I trip and let myself fall. I drop face-first into the snow. I turn around. I see Jesse running to catch up with me.

“Come on, slowpoke,” I say as I stretch my arms out and widen my legs. I windshield-wiper them back and forth, until I hit the icy snow that has crystalized onto the grass beneath it.

Jesse catches up and plops himself down next to me. He extends his limbs and starts pushing the snow out of the way. I get up and watch him.

“Nice work,” I say. “Excellent form.”

Jesse stands and turns to look at his creation. Then he looks at mine.

“You can say it,” I tell him. “Yours is better.”

“Don't beat yourself up,” he says. “Some people just have a natural raw talent for snow art. And I'm one of them.”

I roll my eyes and then step lightly in the center of his angel where the footprints won't show. I lean forward and draw a halo where his head once was.

“There,” I say. “
Now
it's art.”

But I have made a rookie mistake, out here in the snow. I have turned my back to him. And when I stand up, he pelts me with a snowball.

I shake my head and then very slowly and deliberately make a snowball myself.

“You don't want to do that,” he says, just a hint of fear in his voice.

“You started it.”

“Still. What you're planning on doing would be a mistake,” he says.

“Oh yeah? What are you gonna do?” I ask, slowly sauntering up to him, savoring the very trivial power I currently wield.

“I will . . .” he starts to say, but then he swiftly leans toward me and knocks the snowball out of my hand. It hits my leg on the way down.

“You just hit me with my own snowball!” I say.

I gather up another one and throw it at him. It hits him square in the neck. I have declared war.

Jesse gets in a snowball to my arm and one to the top of my head. I get one that hits him straight in the chest. I run away when I see a huge one forming in his hand.

I run and I run and then I trip on the snow and fall down. I brace myself, waiting for a snowball to hit me. But when I open my eyes, I see that Jesse is standing right above me.

“Truce?” he asks.

I nod and he throws the last snowball far out in the distance.

“How about that warm fire and those blankets?” he asks me.

This time I don't hesitate. “I'm in.”

When we're thawed, Jesse heads to the stack of books and movies that have been sitting in this cabin for years. There are supermarket paperbacks so well-worn that they have white line creases on the spine. There are DVDs from the early 2000s and even a few VHS tapes.

We pick out an old movie and try to turn on the TV. It doesn't respond.

“Is it just me or does it appear that the television is dead?” Jesse says.

I look behind to see if it's plugged in. It is. But when I hit a few buttons, nothing happens.

“It's broken,” he says. “I bet it's been broken for years and no one thought to turn it on.”

“A book, then,” I say, walking over to the stack of paperbacks. “I've come to realize it's a wonderful way to pass the time.” I glance through the spines of the books on the shelf and spot a thin detective novel that I've never heard of among the John Grishams and James Pattersons. I pull it out. “Why don't we read this?”

“Together?”

“I'll read to you, you read to me,” I say. Jesse isn't entirely sold.

The sun starts to set and even though we aren't in danger of being cold in here, Jesse adds logs to the fire. He finds an old bottle of red wine underneath the bar and I grab two jelly jars from the cabinets.

We drink the bottle as we sit by the fire.

We talk about the times we made each other blissfully happy, and we laugh about the times we made each other blisteringly mad. We talk about our love story like two people reflecting on a movie they just saw, which is to say, we talk about it with the fresh knowledge of how it all ends. All of the memories are ever so slightly different now, tinged with bittersweetness.

“You were always the voice of reason,” Jesse says. “Always the one stopping us from going just one step further than we should.”

“Yeah, but you always gave me the courage to do what I wanted to do,” I say. “I'm not sure I would have had the guts
to do half the things I did if I didn't have you believing in me, egging me on.”

We talk about our wedding—the ceremony by the lighthouse, our brief dalliance here, our reception down the street. I tell Jesse that my memories of that day aren't darkened by what happened later. That it still brings me nothing but joy to think about. That I'm thankful for it, no matter where we have ended up.

Jesse says he's not sure he agrees with me. He says it feels sad to him, that it represents a painful naivete about the future, that he feels sorry for the Jesse of that day, the Jesse who doesn't know what is ahead of him. It feels like a reminder of what he could have had if he hadn't ever gotten on that helicopter. But then he says that he hopes, one day, to see it the way I do.