“Went out, knew it was her by what was left of her hair, but she’d blown her face off with a twelve-gauge shotgun.”
“Oh my God, Gabe,” I moaned, and overwhelmed, my head dropped so I shoved my face in his chest.
He cupped the back of my head.
“She was fucked up, but she hid that part of how she was,” he said. “I had no idea she was even close to that place. No fuckin’ idea.”
I pressed my face harder into his chest.
“I dream of it sometimes,” he whispered. “Finding her by the river.”
I pushed up to press my face into his neck and struggled to round him with my arms.
He turned so I had my back to the couch, we were both on our sides, and I could hold him better.
“I wonder, if I’d stayed with her—” he began.
I pulled out of his neck and gripped his head in both hands. “Stop it.”
“I gave up on her, Willow.”
“She gave up on herself, baby,” I returned. “It’s an ugly truth, but it’s still truth. What she went through with that guy, maybe he took too much, there wasn’t anything left for her to work on. But what she decided to do to end the pain is not on you. And the bottom line is, obviously, she was in pain, and it was her life, so she got to decide what to do to stop that pain.”
I could tell he listened to me, he heard me, but he had to give it all to me, and there was more, so he gave it.
“You should have seen her parents at the funeral,” he said.
Oh God.
“They were nice to me,” he continued. “They always liked me. They had hope when we were together. But I felt their blame.”
“I’m not gonna talk shit about them, I don’t know them, and they lost their daughter,” I replied. “But they did that before she went to Alaska. And I wasn’t there, I don’t know if they were doing what you said, or you’re simply taking it on. But if they did it, it wasn’t right, and they probably know that deep down. But it wasn’t right, Gabe.”
“Yeah,” he muttered.
“Yes,” I stated forcefully.
He came back to me, gave me a small smile, it chased itself away, and he said, “Day-to-day, what we had, babe, it was good. I was genuinely in love with her.”
“I can’t imagine you’d stay if you weren’t.”
“Yeah, but I came to the understanding it was all surface good. If anything needed to be deep, intimate, that was a no-go zone. It wasn’t that the sex was shit, but it was shit, and I exhausted all the tools I had to get her there with me.”
Of course Gabe was that guy who would try to work with a woman he cared about to get them where they needed to be with intimacy instead of just chalking her up to “shit in bed” and dumping her.
“That’s an important part of a relationship, baby,” I reminded him.
“I know, but it wasn’t just that.”
“I know, you said all it was. And you’re a deep guy, Gabe. You’re intense. Observant. Self-reflective. Ambitious. It isn’t asking much to expect the same from your partner. Maybe not all of that, all you are, but…something.”
“That’s what I thought, until I saw her by the river.”
I pushed my face into his neck again.
His first love.
He found his first love’s dead body by a river.
