Results May Vary (23 page)

My mind focused in on one of his words, instantly narrowing everything down to a pinpoint. “So I don't know if you know it, but you just said ‘There is' something about you and him. ‘There
is,
' present tense, as if whatever that something was is currently active.” I waited for him to respond to this, but it was just silence. Again. “Adam. Are you still seeing him?”

“I will stop,” he whispered. “I will stop, and I'll come home.”

I gave a half sob, half laugh. “Yeah. Sure. I could have sworn you told me it was over back in August, and then again back in November, but clearly I misunderstood you. I see that now you are sincere. So, if I called him in a minute, to tell him you're ending it, where would he be? You know I have his number. I can enter the number”—I rustled in my bag, temporarily forgetting Ruby had kidnapped my phone—“and where would that phone ring? Did you go to the living room so you could talk to me while he sleeps?”

“Caro. Don't do that. Please don't do that.” His voice was thready with panic.

“Why not? You want to be the one to do it? Or you don't want to do it at all?”

“Caroline. Sweetheart, please. Just don't.”

I could hear my own hitchy, uneven breathing. “You can't stand the thought of it. You don't want to leave him at all.”

“I think I'm in love with him,” he whispered. And they were his first words in any of this, since it all began, that rang in my ears with the pure sound of truth. “I love both of you. What the fuck am I supposed to do about that?”

“You were supposed to choose. You were supposed to choose
me,
because you promised me you always would. Because you fell in love with me
first.
” There were more sophisticated things I wanted to say, but the alcohol blurred them all away. All I could process, all I could articulate, was that I hurt. Even after this long, it hurt. And I despised myself for reaching out to him in a moment of weakness, and setting myself up for another blow. But at least perhaps, this time, it was the final one.

“I'm still in love with you, too.”

“Too bad,” I hissed. “You can't come home to me, because I'm not your fucking home. You do not have a decision to make; you already made it. And guess what I didn't tell you, Adam? I'm sleeping with somebody else. He can't get enough of me. And I can't get enough of him, 'cause let me tell you, he fucks me better than you ever did. And if you think I'm lying? I will be happy to send you a motherfucking
photograph.
”

Touch a string, and it will vibrate even if it should long have yielded no tone.

—Bettina von Arnim to Frau Rath Goethe

After seven and a half winters in western Massachusetts, I thought I'd seen the far end of cold, at least as far as the usual range of human experience went. But standing on a plateau on the edge of the Grand Canyon in January, while a desert wind whipped my face and roared in my ears and thrust frigid hands into every hollow place in my body—that was the limit.

“Why are we doing this?” I said to Ruby through uncontrollably chattering teeth.

“You always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”

“Don't recall specifying January,” I said. “Or hungover.”

“The hangover's your own fault,” she said, which was unarguably true. My brain had bounced around my skull all the way to Arizona.

I could have bailed on coming, of course. Sanity would have dictated that I stay in our cushy bed at the Venetian, carefully waiting to move until the sliver of sunlight through the curtains didn't feel so much like a knife blade pressing between my eyes. But that would have meant being trapped in that room with my thoughts.

“Don't let him ruin this for you,” Ruby had said, and it was that that got my feet to the floor. That, and the memory of how she'd found me the night before, when she came back from the bathroom: sobbing into my arms on the Formica tabletop of a Las Vegas Denny's. It had not been a high point in my life. But she hadn't said “I told you so,” or scolded me for stealing her phone; she just sat down next to me and put her head on my shoulder till I stopped crying.

“Let's go back to the hotel,” she'd said. “Do you still want to go to the canyon tomorrow? I think we should go.”

I'd nodded, happy to let my little sister mother me. The Grand Canyon thing had been my idea in the first place, and I knew by insisting on it she was trying to buck my spirits up. However, neither of us had been prepared for the cold.

Ruby shuffled closer and hunched her body against me. “It is pretty damn beautiful,” she said.

I untucked my chin from the neck of my down puffer and looked around me. We were standing in the (mercifully short) line for the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a cantilevered, horseshoe-shaped glass walkway that had been built on the far western end of the canyon as a destination within driving distance of Las Vegas for family-oriented or party-weary visitors such as ourselves. Clumps of pale gray clouds piled up on the never-ending horizon and in the immense dome over our heads, and in the thin midwinter light, the landscape was a leached sandy beige. The legendary canyon just looked like an enormous dry ditch.

“Can you imagine what it looked like before the Colorado River got dammed to water every lawn in Las Vegas?” I said.

“And the entire state of Arizona. I know.”

“It used to be something magnificent.”

“You're depressing me,” Ruby said, digging her pointy chin into my shoulder through the thickness of my coat. “Come on; the line is moving.”

We shuffled forward, into the visitors' center building and then along the route toward the entrance to the bridge. When I saw the open sky spread out before me, I stopped.

I've never been terrific with heights, and the glass-floored Skywalk, dangling from the top of a cliff almost a mile above the canyon bottom, was intentionally made to agitate the stomach contents of people like me. I stepped forward, and stepped back.

“Come on,” Ruby said. “It's completely safe. You know it is. They must have built this thing to handle like five times the stress it actually carries.”

“I do know it is. I know it here,” I said, pointing at my head, “but this part of me has a different idea altogether.” I pressed my palm into my belly and tried to feel brave.

“Yeah, but that part of you is wrong. Just come out with me. Here, hold my hand.”

Adam wouldn't make me do this,
I thought. I'd planned to see the canyon one day with Adam, who knew my fear of heights, and never wanted me to feel scared or uncomfortable.

Adam was also over.

I bit down so hard my jaws ached with strain, and I walked. I walked right past Ruby's outstretched hand, only stopping when I reached the railing. The reassuringly high railing. And then I looked down.

“You ran away so fast you almost took out that little old lady,” giggled Ruby.

It was evening, and we were drifting on bent legs, half afloat in the warm water of our hotel pool, well fed on burgers and many, many miles from the yawning chasm of America's greatest natural wonder.

I shuddered as I remembered the dizzying view through the floor of the Skywalk. “Korean tourists are inherently hardy,” I said.

“I'm glad we didn't have to put that to the test,” Ruby said. “You did it, though. You walked out!”

“If you can call it that,” I said. “I was having this big ‘You go girl' moment with myself and then as soon as I made it I turned around and booked it the hell out of there.”

Ruby chuckled again. “Well, I mean, yeah. But you did do it. How come you even wanted to see the Grand Canyon, anyway? If you're so scared of heights?”

“Because it's the Grand freaking Canyon. I'm an American. And it looks beautiful in pictures.”

“Beautiful…and like a canyon.”

“Look, I thought it would be more Caroline-friendly, all right?” I floated backward until I reached the wall of the pool, hooked my arms on the edge, and pedaled my feet slowly through the water. My body looked vulnerable, oddly raw and half-baked, through the green underlit water. “You know what made me walk out there?” I said, after a moment. “Thinking Adam wouldn't have encouraged me to. He knows how scared I get, so he would have said, ‘Oh, you stay here, I'll tell you how it was.' And then I wouldn't have done it.”

“Good for you, then.”

“I'm so tired of him being my frame of reference for everything, Rube. I'm so tired of thinking about him. I'm sure you are profoundly tired of listening to me talk about him.”

“That's going to change eventually. It just will. There was no way he wasn't going to be on your mind today, after last night.”

“That's true,” I sighed, tipping my face back to look at the sky, still filled with light even at nighttime. Loose gray clouds drifted against the blackness above them. “God, I feel so stupid. I feel like I wiped out all the progress I'd made at feeling better, just so I could get slugged in the face with the same shit all over again.”

“Here's the thing, though. You've been putting all this emphasis on figuring out why Adam did this to you. Why he lied, why he hid things, why he cheated. And I get that the nature of his sexuality feels like an important part of that, but honestly? I don't think it is. Being bi doesn't mean someone is inherently likely to cheat. If you make a commitment to one partner then you're supposed to stick with it, no matter what sexy bits you like to play with. And he failed. Which means the reason he did it is that he's selfish. I think it is literally as simple as that.”

I scooped up a handful of water, then watched as the drips splashed back into the pool from between my loosened fingers. “I guess. I just can't let go of this idea that there has to be more to it than that, because
he
was better than that.”

Ruby looked at me for a moment, then one corner of her mouth lifted sadly. “I don't know, Care. I think maybe the hard part here is that you need to accept that he wasn't. He isn't the man you thought he was.” She slid closer and leaned against the wall next to me, her hair trailing through the water in a soft swirl around her shoulders. “I saw this thing on the Internet somewhere. It's funny, ninety-nine percent of what you see on the Internet is such horseshit, but I saw this thing a little while ago that stuck with me, and what it said was, ‘People can only give you what they have.' And I see you fighting to put what Adam did into some other frame of reference, like there's some deeper explanation that would justify it a little bit. You want it to make sense. You want there to be a reason that will let you still value him, somehow. But the fact is, he failed you because he didn't have the strength to stop himself. It just wasn't there. What he had was love, but not the other stuff. He didn't have the integrity to make the right decision. And that's really all it comes down to. That is the truth at the heart of Adam.”

“I tried again to ask him why he did it. And all he could come up with was ‘There's just something about him and me' and ‘I felt a pull.' He thinks he's in love with Patrick.
In love
. I don't even…I don't even know what to do with that.”

There was a long pause, partially filled by the dance-lite soundtrack pumping from every speaker surrounding the pool. “Is that all he said?” Ruby's voice was quiet.

“No. He said ‘I'll end it,' followed quickly by panic when I threatened to do it for him. Jesus, it was so fucking horrible,” I moaned, and sank all the way under the water as if that would let me escape the humiliation and pain. But no; it was down here, too.

When I surfaced again, Ruby was regarding me gravely. “Care, I have to tell you something.”

“
Do
you have to?” I said. “I'm a little fragile right now.”

“I think I do. I wasn't sure before, but from what you said about Adam being in love with Patrick…Here's the thing. Adam has always liked guys.”

My lungs released the breath I'd been holding in one quick puff. For a second there, I'd thought she was going to tell me there was another affair. “No, he said it was a recent thing. A curiosity thing. ‘Exploration.' ”

“It's not.”

“I mean, I know it's not usually, but he said—”

“He's lying.”

“Why would you say that?”

“A few weeks before your wedding,” she said, and another big breath froze in my chest as I realized this was not merely an opinion. It was a story. A story I had never heard until today.

“A few weeks before my wedding?” I mumbled.

She bit her lip and nodded. “I heard something.”

“What?”

“You remember my friend Amy Kerson, right?”

“Sure.”

“Well, we were hanging out one night at her Hamptons place. Her brother Brett was there too.”

“Adam always hated that kid.”

And then I caught it—the faintest pucker of her eyebrows.

“Ruby, please tell me what Brett Kerson had to say.”

She licked her lips. “Amy asked me something about the wedding. Brett was…surprised. That you guys were getting married. When I asked him why, he said…he said Adam was gay. He said, he might think he could manage it now, but it would surface eventually.”

My brain, peering around the corner at what she might say next, did not like the view one bit. “Why, he thought Adam was giving him sexy eyes or something?”

She shook her head. So slightly I knew she didn't want to move it at all. “He said they had a relationship, Care. A really intense one, like, they slept together and everything, until Adam ended it. It happened when they were sixteen, the summer before your junior year. The summer before he met you.”

It was stunning, how absolutely I accepted it. Even while I drew my breath at that moment, I remember thinking,
I wish I could pretend I didn't believe this,
but it was like looking at a photograph that you don't notice is slightly out of focus, until you see the next frame: The softened edges suddenly crisp. I couldn't disbelieve it, not even for an instant.

Brett had been one of the most popular guys in our grade, the way the drama kids always were at a nerd factory like Stuyvesant. Engaging, charismatic, brilliantly talented. I'd always figured Adam's loathing of him was like the way two magnets with the same charge will repel each other—magnets only have use for the metal that clings to them. But this wasn't like that at all.

Adam had been the metal.

Adam hadn't hated Brett for being competition; he'd hated him for being desirable. I remembered that night at his parents' farmhouse, my trembling breath, my incandescent wonder that we were sharing these amazing things for the very first time, with each other. When in fact, the only first I'd been for Adam was a vagina.

And my sister had known it. Known it, and hid it, for over ten years.

I stared at her, trembling, sick with shock. “You
knew
? You knew this thing about him, this thing that ruined my marriage, and you
kept
it from me? How
could
you?”

My voice had started out as a whisper, but by the time I got to the last sentence I was screaming, and Ruby flinched in the face of it. “Care, I'm so sorry. The thing is, I didn't know. I didn't know
what
I knew. I knew Adam had been with a guy once, but by that point it was seven years before, and you'd never even hinted that it might be a thing with him, and—”

“I hadn't hinted because I had no idea!”

“I know. I know. But just listen to me for a second. I was only eighteen, and I had no idea what I should do. It was three weeks before your wedding, which was the most important thing in our family right then, since the minute you got engaged, so I knew Mom would blame me if I did anything to mess it up. And honestly, I was scared that
you
would blame me, like I was trying to rock the boat on purpose.”

“I would never have blamed you. Ruby, I deserved to know! How could you have held this back from me?”

“You're saying that with hindsight, though.” She was staying calm, and her calmness was beginning to infuriate me. It wasn't like her. And I wanted to keep screaming. “Can you honestly say that if I'd told you what Brett said back then, you would have believed me? Or would you have accused me of making it up for drama?”