We walked toward each other and met in the middle of the hall, and I couldn’t stop myself from jumping into his arms. I was lucky I didn’t knock him over. I felt him laughing as he said, “OK, fine. I missed you, too.”
“I’ll leave you two alone,” the attendant said, and walked back to where he and Jack had come from. Jack set me down, and as I held his hands, I looked at him more closely, trying to make sure he really was OK. He seemed to find that amusing.
“Did I pass the inspection?” he asked.
“The physical part. As for the behavioral part, that remains to be seen…” It was hard for me to joke just then, and I dropped it right afterward. “I know you wanted me to come earlier, Jack, but I had so much studying, and…”
“Relax,” he said. “It’s not like I came to see you, either!”
“That’s different!”
“It still counts…” Guiding me toward a glass door, he asked, “You want to see outside?”
I hadn’t imagined the grounds were so big. There was a soccer field, a pool, stables…it looked like some millionaire’s estate. We didn’t go far, though: Jack wanted to sit on one of the stone benches on the patio, undera wooden gazebo-like structure covered in ivy. All around, I could see other residents stretched out on the lawn.
It was hard to know what to say, and I found myself sticking to the obvious at first. “You’ve put on some muscle, it looks like. I guess they have a gym here?”
“Yeah,” Jack replied.
“Maybe you’ll start running with me when you get out.”
“Sure.”
“It’s prettier here than it looks in the flyers. What’s your schedule like? Do they give you enough time to enjoy all this?”
“More now than before,” he said. “At first, I was under lock and key. Now, I have meetings and therapy in the morning and then I’m free the rest of the day. In the afternoon and evening, there’s activities: meditation, yoga, swimming. I tried yoga, but I’m not what you’d call flexible. What I really like is the animal therapy, that contact with another creature is something beautiful. Art therapy on the other hand is lame. Speaking of art—”
“Yeah,” I cut him off. “I’ve been using the paints you gave me.”
“And…?”
“They’re incredible. Like I said, school’s killing me, so I’ve had to restrain myself. The art is my getaway, my happy place. Of course, Sue’s bitching because the apartment smells like paint and turpentine, but I can’t help it, I keep the balcony door open constantly and it doesn’t help! I even tried covering up the scent with Mike’s disgusting body spray. Thankfully, Will and Naya are cool about it.”
“Those two…” Jack responded. “Will told me aboutit. It doesn’t even seem real.”
I smiled and said, “I’ll bet it does to them.”
He nodded. “Will’s over the moon. I’ve always known he’d be an amazing dad.”
I couldn’t say I had as much faith in Naya. I wanted to believe she’d be a good mom, but I’d been trying to work on stuff with her, and the results were disastrous. All she had to learn was how to change a diaper, rock a child to sleep, give it a bath, feed it, but of the four dolls I’d bought her to practice on, she’d stomped on two of them in a fit of anger and thrown another one out the window, so… I wasn’t especially confident.
I said that they were lucky they had friends to help them out, but it felt…not insincere, but beside the point, because we both knew I wasn’t there to talk about Will and Naya. I was there to talk about him. But to do it, he’d have to make the first move. The ball was in his court, but he still didn’t have the courage to open up to me. And I didn’t want to pressure him, but I also didn’t feel we could keep putting it off. To try to ease him into it, I reached out and touched his hand, and when he met eyes with me, I asked him, “How are things going here?”
He shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I’m not sure if I’m ready to go back to the real world.”
I hadn’t expected that response. And though it hurt, I told him, “If you need time, Jack, take as much as you need.”
“It’s not that, Jen. I’m better. I can leave, I know I won’t be in danger. It’s not that, it’s that I don’t want to think about what’s waiting for me on the outside: the movie, promotion, interviews. Just the thought of all that is, I don’t know…almost irritating. Like, if I’m being honest with you, it makes me want to throw up.”
He sighed and bent forward, resting his elbows on his knees. I tried to process what he was saying. “You want me to take the wheel?” I asked. “I can be your secretary. Trust me, I’ll tell every last one of those people to go piss up a rope!”
He giggled. “That would be nice, actually. But no. I can’t put my life off forever. At the same time, I want to ask, is it really too much to be ableto come out of here and just take care of myself without having to worry about all those so-called obligations?”
No, it wasn’t too much to ask. Not to me. I didn’t know what his colleagues and manager would think, but I also didn’t care. And if Jack was talking to me about this, it meant that he cared more about my opinion than anyone else’s. The glitz and glamour, all that could come in due time. What mattered now was that Jack was OK.
“I’ve got two ideas,” I told him.
Looking so small, so vulnerable, he rested his chin on his balled fist and asked me, “Which are…?”
