I smile at Eric. I try to arrange my mouth in a way I should remember but that feels entirely impossible now. I do not know who I am anymore. I have no idea how to do any of this without her.
“Katy, you’re grieving,” he said to me last night. “You’re in crisis; you can’t decide this now. People don’t get divorces in the middle of a war. Let’s give it some time.”
What he did not know is that I had. I had given it months. Ever since my mother got sick, I’d been thinking about the reality of being married to Eric. My decision to leave Eric had less to do with my mother’s death and more to do with the remembrance of death in general. Which is to say I began to ask myself if this was the marriage I wanted to die in, if thiswas the marriage I wanted to see me through this, my mother’s illness, and what would, impossibly, remain after.
We didn’t have kids yet—we were still kids ourselves, weren’t we?
Eric and I met when we were both twenty-two, seniors at UC Santa Barbara. He was an East Coast liberal, intent on going into politics or journalism. I was a Los Angeles native, deeply attached to my parents and the palm trees, and felt that two hours away was the farthest I could possibly go from home.
We had a class together—Cinema 101, a prereq we were both late in taking. He sat next to me on the first day of the spring semester—this tall, goofy kid. He smiled, we started talking, and by the end of class he’d stuck a pen through one of my ringlets. My hair was long and curly then; I hadn’t yet started straightening it into submission.
He pulled his pen back, and the curl went with it.
“Bouncy,” he said. He was blushing. He hadn’t done it because he was confident; he had done it because he didn’t know what else to do. And the uncomfortableness of this, the ridiculousness of his, a total stranger’s, pen through my hair, made me laugh.
He asked me to get a coffee. We walked to the commons and sat together for two hours. He told me about his family back home in Boston, his younger sister, his mother, who was a college professor at Tufts. I liked the way he saw them, the women in his family. I liked the way he spoke about them—like they mattered.
He didn’t kiss me until a week later, but once we started dating, that was it. No breaks, no torrid fights, no long-distance. None of the usual hallmarks of young love. After graduation, he got a job at theChroniclein New York, andI moved with him. We set up shop in a tiny one-bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I worked as a freelance copywriter for anyone who would have me, mostly fashion blogs whose hosts were grateful for help with language. This was 2015, the city had rebounded from financial ruin, and Instagram had just become ubiquitous.
We spent two years in New York before moving back to Los Angeles. We got an apartment in Brentwood, down the street from my parents’ house. We got married, we bought a starter home, farther away in Culver City. We built a life that perhaps we were too young to live.
“I was already thirty when I met your father,” my mother told me when we first moved back. “You have so much time. Sometimes I wish you’d take it.” But I loved Eric—we all did. And I had always felt more comfortable in the presence of adults than young people, had felt since the time I was ten years old that I was one. And I wanted all of the trappings that would signal to others that I was one, too. It felt right to start young. And I couldn’t help the timeline. I couldn’t help it right up until last night, when I suddenly could.
“I brought over the mail,” Eric says. My mother is dead. What could any piece of paper possibly say that would be worth reading?
“You hungry?”
It takes me a moment to realize that my father has asked this of Eric, and another second to understand that the answer is yes, actually, Eric is nodding his head yes, and a third, still, to realize neither knows how to prepare a meal. My mother cooked for my father, for all of us—she was great at it. She’d make elaborate breakfasts: goat cheese frittatas with scooped-out bagels. Fruit salad and cappuccinos. When my fatherretired five years ago, they’d begun to eat outside, setting up on the veranda for hours. My mother loved theNew York Timeson a Sunday, and an iced coffee in the afternoon. My father loved what she did.
Chuck, my dad, worshipped Carol. He thought she hung the moon and painted the stars in the sky. But the deep secret, although it couldn’t have been one to him, is that I was her great love. She loved my father, certainly. I believe there wasn’t a man on earth she would have traded him for, but there was no relationship above ours. I was her one, just like she was mine.
I believe my love with my mother was truer, purer, than what she had with my father. If you’d have asked herWho do you belong to, the answer would have beenKaty.
“You’re my everything,” she’d tell me. “You’re my whole world.”
“There are some leftovers in the fridge,” I hear myself saying.
I think about dishing lettuce onto plates, heating the chicken, crisping the rice the way I know my dad likes.
My father is gone, already in pursuit of the La Scala chopped salads that are no doubt soggy in their containers. I can’t remember who brought them over, or when, just that they’re there.
Eric is still standing in the doorway.
“I thought maybe we could talk,” he says to me.
I left last night and drove here. I let myself in like I had thousands of times, with my own key. I tiptoed up the stairs. It was nearly midnight, and I poked my head into my parents’ bedroom, expecting to see my father fast asleep, but he wasn’t in there. I looked in the guest room and didn’t find him there, either. I went down the stairs into the family room. There hewas, asleep on the couch, their wedding photo in a frame on the floor.
I covered him. He didn’t stir. And then I went upstairs and slept in my parents’ bed, on the side that was hers.
In the morning I came downstairs to find my dad making coffee. I didn’t mention the couch, and he didn’t ask me why I was up there, or where I had slept, either. We’re forgiving each other these oddities, what we’re doing to survive.
“Katy,” Eric says when I don’t respond. “You have to talk to me.”
But I don’t trust myself to speak. Everything feels so tenuous that I’m afraid if I even say her name, all that would come out would be a scream.
“Do you want to eat?” I ask.
“Are you coming home?” There is an edge to his voice, and I realize, not for the first time in the past few months, how unused to discomfort we both are. We do not know how to live a life that the bottom has fallen out of. These were not the promises of our families, our upbringings, our marriage. We made promises in a world lit with light. We do not know how to keep them in the darkness.
