Tear You Apart (21 page)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

I am okay.

This is what I tell myself to get through the day, when I make the motions of living. Cook, clean, laundry, pay the bills, take out the trash, unload the dishwasher. I have done all these tasks and can’t remember doing them.

In the shower, in the dark, I put on the songs that make me think of him. I know I shouldn’t. This is masochism. This is as self-harming as if I took a razor to my wrists. This is worse, because if I slit my wrists I would die, and I am still very much alive.

I go to my knees in the shower, in the dark, and the music plays and the water is hot and it pounds on my naked skin, and I press my face into my hands.

I grieve.

I have never mourned the loss of anything in my life as much as I mourn for the loss of what I didn’t really have.

I had thought I might cry, of course. The music. The dark. The shower. But what I do is not crying. I break and shake and shatter; I am undone.

I am torn apart.

When have I ever wept this way? Even as a child, an infant, never. Everything with him has been a list of nevers. This is another. Because even though the shower is my favorite place to cry, it’s never been like this, so fierce and raw and hard that I can’t breathe.

Of course I can’t breathe; isn’t that how it’s been with him since the start? I gasp and choke, I clutch at my face, my fingers dig deep into the meat above my heart, and I open my mouth and cry and cry and scream.

The sounds of grief and pleasure can be so much the same. Am I crying or coming? Who would be able to tell? I’m not sure
I
can determine the difference. The rush and rise and force of this feeling is no pleasure, not like an orgasm, but the relief of it spilling out of me is almost the same.

There is a pain in my heart, a real physical pain. Because my heart is breaking. It is broken. I press my hand against it, and imagine the beat of it has stopped—but it hasn’t. It goes on and on, and each time it is sharp and stabbing, a knife beat.

Afterward, still dripping, I look in the mirror and do not know my face; I have made myself a stranger. I didn’t know it was possible to cry so hard you give yourself a black eye, but there it is, the visible proof of my grief, the dark red burst of blood in the soft places of my skin.

I am not okay.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Every day I wake up thinking this will be the day I stop thinking so much about him, and every night I go to sleep with the ache still as firmly entrenched in my heart as it was the day before.

It is almost impossible to fully grieve in the presence of others. When you need to break down, you always have to do it alone. My pretty breakdown takes place in public bathroom stalls, where I stifle my sobs with the back of my hand and force myself to breathe. It happens without warning, when Jac talks of wedding dresses and bridesmaids and the cost of carved roast beef instead of chicken Cordon bleu, and I pretend to sneeze, complaining of allergies to explain my red eyes.

I’m on a different sort of train now. Jac is the engineer of this one, her sister and I along for the ride. Kat has her own ideas about what sort of wedding she’d like, but she’s letting her sister call the shots.

“You don’t have to do what she wants, you know.” I tell her this in the dressing room of the bridal boutique, where she’s trying on another gown we both know she won’t like. My Kat’s not a frills and flounces kind of girl.

She looks in the mirror at the beaded bodice, letting her fingers run over it. “This is pretty, Mom, don’t you think?”

“It’s beautiful.”

She eyes the price tag and gives me a wry grin. “It’s five grand.”

We both burst into laughter that has Jac pounding on the dressing room door. I put a hand over my mouth to keep in the laughs that threaten to become sobs; I close my eyes when Kat leaves the room to show her sister the dress she will never, ever buy.

These are my girls, my life. So I pull my shit together and watch them parade around in dresses the way they used to when they were small and playing princess. They are beautiful. They are my pride. They are the best thing I have ever done.

Jac, typically, finds three dresses she can’t decide among. Kat stands quietly in front of the triple mirror, studying her reflection and smoothing the fabric of a simple satin gown in a vintage style. But when I ask her if she wants to buy it, she just shakes her head.

“No, Mom,” she says. “I’m not sure about it.”

“Then you shouldn’t get it.”

Kat, face solemn, nods. She smooths her hands down the front again, then gives me a small smile. “It’s pretty, right?”

“It’s beautiful, honey. Very you.” I haven’t checked the tag on this one, but what is money for if not to spend? “But you shouldn’t settle. Not when it should be something so special. You should make sure it’s what you really, really want. And even then,” I say with a small laugh, “you’ll probably look back on it in twenty years and wonder what on earth you were thinking.”

She turns to me. “Do you?”

I think of my wedding dress. I’d wanted to wear my grandmother’s 1940s suit with its padded shoulders and peplum, the sleek skirt. My mother had talked me into a mermaid-style dress, a monstrosity of lace and satin that had never fit quite right no matter how many times we’d had it altered. I haven’t looked at my wedding pictures for a long time.

“Yes. I’d have picked something different. So you should make sure,” I say, looking across the room to where her sister is now twirling in front of the mirror in a fourth choice, “to pick something you really really love, at least right now, because that way even when you look back and can’t believe you picked it, you’ll remember how much you loved it when you did.”

Kat, like me, is not a hugger, but she hugs me now. Tight. “Thanks, Mama.”

Jac comes over with a hand on her hip. “I didn’t find anything I really liked. Oooh, Kittykat, that’s nice.”

Kat and I share a look. I gather both my girls to me, squeeze them hard. “Dinner,” I say.

Ross calls as we’re leaving the boutique, and though it’s supposed to be girls’ day out, he meets us at the restaurant. How could I tell him not to come? They’re his daughters, too, and he sees them even less than I do.

We go to one of our favorite places. I haven’t been there since my birthday, and I’m suddenly starving for their good Greek salad, the gyro platter. We order too much food. And because we took a cab to the store and Ross will drive us home, drinks, too. It’s still strange for me to have cocktails with my daughters, who will forever be tiny and precious to me even though they’re all grown up.

It’s the best time I’ve had in a long while, the four of us laughing and retelling our favorite stories. This is what I love best about our family, all those shared inside jokes. Vacations, holidays, school plays. The good times, and the bad ones, too. All our lovely misadventures that have made us the unit we are today. The girls don’t live with us anymore, but we will always be a family.

How can I think of breaking this? And thinking that, I break. In the bathroom, in the stall, I cover my mouth with my hands. Press the heels of my palms to my eyes. I shake and shake, sickness like a hurricane rising in me, and the world spins.

Outside the stall there’s laughter and the sound of rushing water, so I shake myself until I can stand. I wash my hands. I splash my pale face, avoiding the sight of my own eyes. I press my lips with color, my hand steady and unfaltering.

The best thing, I think, and the hardest thing, are the same.

Chapter Forty

I am the architect of my own unmaking.

I check my email ten times in as many minutes. Refresh. Refresh. My cell phone stubbornly doesn’t chime or ping or ring with an incoming message of any kind. No email, no text, no instant message, not even a fucking “thumbs-up” on my stupid Connex status.

I delete him from my contacts so I won’t check again. I delete everything, every way I’ve ever had of contacting him. I put my phone in my purse, which is on the shelf in the closet, and I close the closet door and walk away from it.

I want him.

I want him so much it makes me shake, as if I’ve had too much coffee or run a race or gone without food for days. That’s exactly how it is, as if I’m starving, only it’s not food I want and need and crave, but Will.

I want him the way I want a cold drink on a hot day or a soft place to sit when I’ve been standing for too long a time. I never took up the habits of smoking or liquor or drugs. I’ve never had an addiction, but I think I understand now what it must be like. I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want him.

More than anything else, I want him to want me.

I know this is crazy, insane. I know it’s wrong. And as I pace, biting my thumb and feeling my stomach roil with tension, I don’t care. The phone in the kitchen rings. I can’t answer it. It won’t be him; he wouldn’t call me at home. I’m sure he doesn’t have the number, though it wouldn’t be difficult at all to look it up, if he wanted to. But he doesn’t, I think, as the ringing stops and the silence is louder than any phone could ever be. But not as loud as the sudden thunder of my beating heart as it fills my ears, and I put a hand on it to make sure it doesn’t beat right out of my chest.

I can’t stop thinking about the taste of his skin. The smell of it. How smooth it was beneath my fingertips when I traced every rib. My fingers curl, remembering the jut of his hip bone and the thickness of his cock. I close my eyes and hear the soft hiss of his breath when I stroked him, up and down. When I sucked him until he came in my mouth.

It’s been two months. Summer’s long gone. Winter’s on its way.

I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by colors, sounds, smells that don’t “match.” But now the world is gray. No color. If there is a song, the notes have all gone sour. The space without Will is immeasurable, and I cannot bear it.

No color. No music. No scent. I’m in a void, formless, nothing even to press against. Nothing to anchor me to this life.

How will I live without my ocean?

There’s nobody to share this with. I could tell Naveen, allow him to be the shoulder on which I weep, but I’m too aware of how he came to me once with this same pain, and how I’d been so harsh. Too, there’s the thing with Naveen that we never talk about, that unfinished business we’ve both agreed to leave forever undone.

No, I carry this alone.

It’s my pain, and I gorge on it, the blood-copper taste of it, the slicing, bitter sting. The venom. I glut myself with it, and I do it all in the stolen moments I have when I’m alone. In a bathroom, washing my hands. In the upstairs hallway as I carry a basket of laundry, and suddenly the floor tips and I stagger so that my elbow bangs against the framed pictures on the wall. Memories captured and held under glass. A trip to Disney, swimming lessons, weddings, graduations, christenings.

Our wedding.

The dress I didn’t love but wore to please my mother. My brother’s wife in emerald-green, Ross’s sister in the same color, identical dresses for very different women. And Ross in a black tuxedo with a vest and tie, his hair long in the back. So impossible now, looking at it, that we were ever so young.

That we were ever so in love.

As the nights come earlier and colder, I go to bed beside Ross at the same time, instead of waiting for him to be asleep by the time I slip between the sheets. Some nights he rolls toward me, hands roaming, and I give up to him. Some nights I crawl toward him over the bed and use my mouth and hands to get him hard. Make him come. So that I can pretend everything is fine, that this has not been undone. We have more sex than we’ve had in years, and yet I never come.

As snow falls outside and the holidays come and go, I make mistakes at work and have to redo everything, over and over again, obsessively fixing invoices and order forms and invitations to shows. I take calls from Jac, who’s increasingly frantic about the planning, and make them to Kat, who’s uneasily silent about the entire process. I watch Naveen moon his way around the gallery, sneaking away for lunchtime trysts I’d be jealous of if I were capable of feeling anything beyond this dull nothing.

“How much longer?” he asks me one day in late February, when I’ve spent the morning arguing with caterers and easing Jac out of a bout of hysteria because the shipping for the monogrammed chocolates she wants for the tables is more than the candy itself. He’s caught me at the coffeepot for my fourth mug of the day. I will never sleep tonight. “Until I get you back?”

It’s the wrong question to ask, but maybe the right time. The coffee I don’t even want sloshes when my hand shakes, and I put the mug back on the counter. I take a breath to give him some lame answer, but all that comes out is a slow, sighing sob.

We’ve been friends for a long time, so when Naveen pulls me close, I let him. I fit nicely against him, my face in the curve of his shoulder. He smells good. His voice, murmuring soothing phrases that don’t make much sense, nevertheless smells of cotton candy and caramel apples. Naveen’s voice is a carnival, and I need one.

“What’s wrong, Betts? Tell me, love.” He nuzzles the sensitive skin of my neck, and I’m done for.

Once, long ago, in a dark dorm room with The Cure playing low, Naveen kissed me. I hadn’t been expecting it then, and can’t say I’m expecting it now, but maybe this time I’m the one who kisses him. I can’t be sure. All I know is that our mouths meet, tongues sliding, his warmth against me where lately I’ve felt only cold. His hands rest on my hips, then slide upward to curl around my ribs just below my breasts. We kiss on the mouth and then he’s sliding his lips to my throat again. There’s the press of teeth.

His hair curls like silk against my palm when I cup the back of his neck.

We do not fuck.

When he looks at me, finally, it’s with an expression I don’t want to see. Regret.

“Betts, I’m—”

“Don’t.” I extricate myself from him to straighten my clothes. The coffee from my mug’s spilled all over the counter, and I look for a cloth to wipe it up.

“I’m sorry,” he insists on saying.

My shoulders sag. I hold on to the counter, not looking at him. “Shh, honey. Don’t.”

“No. No, I’m sorry. That was really shitty of me—”

“I said don’t!” I lower my voice at once, though we’re the only ones in the gallery today and there’s nobody to hear. “I don’t want you to be sorry, Naveen. Please, God. Don’t...be sorry.”

And then I laugh and laugh until I cry, because Naveen is my dear friend and I love him, and more than twenty years ago we almost-but-not-quite fucked and now here we were again. Almost-but-not-quite.

When I cry, he holds me. It’s a different kind of release, but maybe one I needed more. I wish I could let it all go. Ugly snot crying. Sobs. But I can manage only silent, trickling tears against the front of his shirt while he strokes my hair.

“What is it, love?” Naveen doesn’t ask who.

I look at him with wet eyes, streaked mascara. He’s seen me worse than this. “It...hurts, Naveen. That’s all. It hurts so fucking much.”

And then he folds me in another hug to whisper into my hair, “Yes, love. I know.”