I grew up believing that was possible. An enduring love, never-ending, bigger than life itself. In my bones, I wanted a love like that for my own.
Tiny, baby, idiot Lee.
Luckily, my father showed me the truth beneath the veneer, in the first of what I now call Lee’s Four Major Heartbreaks. The four heart-cracking, life-altering experiences that shaped me into the worldly, glamorous, not-at-all-bitter Miss Havisham I am today.
The First Major Heartbreak started innocently enough. I was sixteen, in my father’s office, using his old dinosaur desktop to write an essay onThe Scarlet Letterfor class. (I know, I know—it took a few years, but even I eventually appreciated the irony.) My mother was at my dad’s bookshelf, sorting through old books to find giveaways for the library. My father was out at a work dinner.
And I accidentally opened his email. I’ve often thought about the different turn my life would’ve taken if only I hadn’t pulled up the internet browser to sneak a peek at SparkNotes—yes, I know there’s a lesson in there—causing his Gmail account to spring, unbidden, to the screen. Normally, I wouldn’t have looked. Dad email accounts were presumably 90 percent TurboTax reminders and 10 percent golf coupons. Except the subject line on the first email caught my eye:I miss you—come back.
It turned out to be a love letter from a woman named Michelle. And it was the first of many, I discovered, as I scrolled and scrolled. All of them were signed with a familiar send-off:Forever and a day, Richard. Forever and a day, Michelle.
I do regret gasping. After that, I couldn’t stop my mother from reading over my shoulder. Not that I was in any shape to hold her back, because the minute I read enough, I froze. Not just in body, but in time.
Or at least I tried to. In that instant, sitting at his desk, I rejected the idea that time would progress, that the world would keep turning. That I would continue to tick along according to the current script, in which the hero had just been revealed to be a villain. Everything inside me refused it. My body turned still as a statue.
Unfortunately, as I have learned over and over, there’s too much in life you can’t control. I could not stop time, or stop my mom from crumpling to the floor behind me. I could not hold off the moment of confrontation when my dad came home, or the days and weeks of screaming between them. Worse: the cold, bitter silence that followed. By the end of fall semester junior year, my parents had reached out to a lawyer. On my last day of school that spring, they signed divorce papers.
Dad moved in with Michelle from the emails. My mother, in contrast, was more alone than I’d ever realized a person could be. My sister, Alexis, was only twelve. So she was sad, of course, but not sad like me. Not too depressed to skip summer camp with all her friends.
The day my father officially moved out of our house, my parents forced me to help him. He insisted he would always be my dad, and he wanted to spend time with me. When everything was in the U-Haul, and there was nothing left to do, he’d turned to me and said,I still love your mother, Lee. Sometimes these things happen, and there’s nothing you can do. And I’d thought,Oh. Right.My dad loved my mom, but he was still leaving her. Which meant love was not enough. It was a wake-up call.
My dad and I had always been close. He’d always existed on a different plane from other people. But at that moment, he fell like a shooting star, straight to Earth. Hearing him say those words, I realized I had nothing left to say. I didn’t want to give him any more of my heart—any more ways to hurt me.
So from that day on, I didn’t speak to him. Didn’t say another word. He married Michelle, moved from Austin to San Antonio, hosted Christmases with her kids. I didn’t answer his calls or texts, didn’t come for holidays, threw away the care packages he sent. I cut my dad out of my life.
He was the first cheater to break my heart, but not the last. Apparently, it took getting punched in the chest a few more times to truly learn my lesson. Less than a year later, in my Second Major Heartbreak, Danny Erickson—my first serious boyfriend, the boy I lost my virginity to—not only cheated on me, but publicly humiliated me in the process.
And then there was Andy Elliot, college boyfriend and Third Major Heartbreak, who’d announced his infidelity via an STD that left me peeing fire. Last, there was grad school Ben, the Fourth and Final Major Heartbreak. The ironic thing about Ben was thatIturned out to be the cheater. I guess you could say I was guilty of breaking my own heart in the end.
When Ben fled the state five years ago, I’d come to grips once and for all with the idea that there was no such thing as true love or happily-ever-after. Since then, I’d decided to treat love accordingly, with the lack of gravity it deserved.
I sighed and looked up at my living room ceiling, tipping the wine to my mouth. On the couch next to me, Bill and Al were purring. If only I’d stopped dating people after Danny Erickson and never made it to Ben. If only I’d known then what I knew now, and had left that bar in grad school the minute Ben walked in, skipping the year and a half of soaring joy and sinking pain that was so much better and then so much worse than anything I’d felt with other boys.
Or, at the very least, if only I’d juststuck to the rules: kept things light and distant, staying in control, leaving before it got serious. With Ben, I’d lost my head, and now I was paying the price, even five years later.
I clanked the wine bottle on my coffee table and stood. My two cats stared up at me, blinking sleepily.
Or maybe I was thinking about this all wrong. Tomorrow, my story with Ben would resume, like someone had cracked our chapter back open and erasedThe Endfrom the last page. Now they waited, pen in hand, to write a new ending.
This was a chance to right my wrong. I could play it friendly, professional, distant—in other words, in control. I could have a new ending, the one I wanted, where it was clear to all involved that I was cool and indifferent to Ben. No more reckless emotions, like the first time. No more cringeworthy bad behavior. I would stick to the rules, do a little fence-mending and then we’d go our separate ways. Not only would that approach mend wounds, but it would ensure Ben didn’t feel tempted to harm the Green Machine bill out of a sense of revenge.
That was the answer. I’d pass my bill, make historyandfix the glaring black mark on my conscience. Untie the knot of guilt and shame that had, if I was being honest, twisted up my heart for five long years.
No time to waste. I hurried off to bed.
3
Grace Under Fire
The Texas State Capitol has always reminded me of Daedalus’s labyrinth, large and elaborate and winding. It could be because I was studying Greek myths the first time I toured it at the tender age of eight, and was also plagued by a truly unfortunate sense of direction. But in my defense, the capitol is made of red granite, an oddly exotic color for a government building—something you might be more likely to find on, say, the isle of Crete.
As I grew up, both a feminist and an environmentalist in the staunchly red state of Texas, the idea that the capitol building housed a flesh-eating man with a bull’s head struck me less and less as fictional, and more and more as an apt metaphor.
But today, there was no doubt Ben Laderman—at this very moment, holed up somewhere inside—was my Minotaur. And for all my wine-induced bravado last night, my hands trembled as we walked up the steps to the capitol.
The truth was, I’d imagined running into Ben a hundred times since we broke up, picturing exactly how I’d react. There was this one time I’d been sitting with my mom and Alexis in an airport parking shuttle, when a man Ben’s height and coloring lugged his suitcase up the steps. For one dizzying second, thinking it was him, my heart had tried to beat its way out of my chest. Even though the man quickly revealed himself to be a Ben imposter, the buzzing adrenaline hadn’t washed out of my veins until hours later, near the end of our flight.
How surreal that I was minutes away from actually facing him.
