Ben’s smoking? When did Ben start smoking?I knew he dabbled after Leo died, but as a habit, no, I had no idea.
I narrow my eyes into slits. How have we gotten so far apart that I don’t know that my husband has taken up smoking?
I know how, of course, but that doesn’t mean I want to remember.
“Write something for me,” I used to say, like it was all I ever wanted in the world.
He never did.
He checks his phone with his free hand, then shoves the phone back in his pocket. Is he hoping it’s me? I reach for my own phone and consider, fleetingly, typing ... I don’t know what.
I put my phone back into my own pocket. I don’t want to text him, I don’t want to communicate in parsed words like that anymore. I want to go to him, down the rest of the steps, tell him that I’m here, that we should start over. But I find that I can’t move. Not yet.What if he doesn’t want me? What if he says no? What if he doesn’t see in me what I see in him now?
A blond surfer washes up next to him, then tucks her board beneath her arm and turns left down the beach toward the empty lifeguard station. It’s dangerous out there in the surf with no one watching. Doesn’t she know this? I want to run down there and tell her to be careful, to protect herself. I wouldn’t, not just because it would seem paranoid, pushy. But because I’ve stopped enjoying the casual company of strangers, of small talk or chitchat with the Gelson’s cashier, because everyone watches me now, and nothing can truly ever be casual. It’s all documented and photographed, and even if someone isn’t holding his phone aloft with the camera app open, someone is tweeting about it.
All a choice,my therapist reminds me.Move to Montana,she’ll say.You could.I could, but I choose not to. Instead, I’ve constructed this protective bubble around me and allowed that to convince me that I am safe.
Ben turns, heads back toward me, and I duck, like this stair railing can conceal me. I right myself.No. I’m here, I’m here because I wanted him to see me, to know that I showed up to honor him and Leo and us.I inhale, exhale, steady myself and start down the remaining steps, still watching him, still wondering if maybe he’ll see me first.
He slides on his flip-flops, then freezes, peering at a runner pointed toward him.
I recognize the swoosh of her red hair—I’d spent enough time googling her—even from here.
She stops right in front of him, the surprise on his face morphing to happiness.
Amanda.
Heat rushes to my cheeks at the embarrassment of witnessing this. He’d told me it was over between them; I’d chosen to believe him.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
I spin and race up the steps, race back to the Escalade, fat tears startling me in the reflection in the window before I pull the door open and slink inside. I thought I’d prepared myself for heartbreak. Yet even after everything, I hadn’t realized that Ben and I would really split in two.
37
BEN
NOVEMBER
Amanda stretches out in her sleep, rustling the duvet, shaking the mattress. I’d forgotten how she did this, even back in New York all those years ago—a lifetime, really—when we’d mostly stay at her place—a one-bedroom off Astor Place, because I was living with my parents. How she’d hog the bed as if she were the only one who should be in it. I watch her sleeping, then her toes scrape against my shin, and she sighs—eyes still shut, red hair spilling over my pillow—and drifts back to wherever her dreams have taken her.
I ease out of bed and then peel off my shirt, then boxers, and step into the shower, trying to wash off the saltwater and the sand. Also to rinse off a film of something else: that I had been waiting for Tatum, yet I left with Amanda, as if they were interchangeable.
We’d barely made it back to my apartment. She’d jogged to the beach, so we’d taken my car, driven back to my place in some sort of frenzy, like dogs in heat. She’d told me that she didn’t really expect to see me there, mourning Leo, but then when she did, she couldn’t not stop, she couldn’t not say something, because seeing me was the entire point of coming.
“Like, I’d gone that far,” she laughed, then moved her hand across the headrest of the seat and rubbed my neck. “I guess I figured what the hell, what did I have to lose? You’d already ended it with me two and a half years before. So, like, why not?”
She knew about my marriage, of course. Most of the planet did. I hadn’t called her when Tatum and I split, hadn’t even thought of her much other than in the context of her being the last woman I fucked other than my wife, before I learned how to navigate the one-night stands that weren’t too frequent anyway.
But she had shown up, and Tatum hadn’t, and I figuredMaybe that means something,maybe I misread what Tatum had wanted recently—to try to sort things out, to quit with the lawyers, and maybe I underestimated Amanda, so we drove home like a tornado was chasing us, abandoned our clothes by the door, and fell into bed like star-crossed lovers in a movie where they’d been kept apart too long, like they were foiled by every obstacle in their past and could finally now, desperately, be together.
The spray of the hot water hits my face. I know it is nothing like this; I know ours is not the stuff that inspires fairy tales. Fairy tales do not start and end with your ex-mistress showing up and rescuing you when you were waiting for a sign from your wife, whom you miss desperately and whose trust you have detonated perhaps beyond repair. I wonder what Leo would say about all of this. Probably that I am being an idiot—I can hear him say this:Dude, you are being such a fucking moron. Tater-tot is the best, why aren’t you just telling her?
He would have been thirty-six today. His face, beautiful and unlined, plays over and over again in my memory. Who would he be now? Would he be happy?
I lean over, try to touch my toes, stretch out my hamstrings and back. It’s harder than it once was, though I am also taking better care of myself, now that I have free time to go running, hit the gym, lay off the scotch that had helped nurse my wounds for the first year or so. I consider that happiness is a moving target: how can I possibly know if Leo would be happy when I don’t even know how to define this for myself? With Amanda. With Tate.
I’d held it against her—that she knew about his relapse and kept it from me—for a long time, the better part of that first year when I had this new apartment, and I fell asleep with my empty tumbler in my hand. I wore it plainly on my sleeve, like it was a bruise that shouldn’t heal, that couldn’t heal, and that she’d pelted me and caused permanent damage. I pulled out old photos of Leo, reread e-mails he’d once sent. It was as if this revelation of his relapse reopened the grieving process for me, as if I could trip down endless what-ifs that I had mostly put to bed after we buried him. I replayed all the what-ifs now: how I’d have sent him back to rehab, how I’d have ensured that he stayed the course.
