“Eventually,” he says. “I promise.”
45
BEN
DECEMBER
Amanda leaves for Boston early. Changes her shifts at the hospital so she can fly on the twenty-second, a few days sooner than planned. She doesn’t have to tell me that this is a giant fuck-you mostly to me, not that she wants more family time with her extended clan; she just wants less time with me. She’d asked me to come one last time a few nights ago, implored me to be spontaneous, grab a ticket and join her, but I was resolute.
“There’s Joey,” I said. “We’re going to get a new puppy too once they’re back from Hawaii.”
She crossed her arms and left the room. We’d both understood that this wasn’t just about spending Christmas back east; it was about starting new traditions and a new chapter. And we also both knew that because I was unwilling to do either, even if simply disguised as a last-minute plane ticket, that we were all but done.
She e-mails me from the plane to say that I shouldn’t call over the holiday, shouldn’t be in touch.
I e-mail her back to say:I understand.
She wrote back:I thought it would be different this time.
And I reply:I’m sorry.Because I am. Though I find that I am enormously relieved once I hit Send. It was a passive way to break up, I suppose, but I didn’t need fireworks, and she didn’t need the bullshit. We’d been through enough of that.
Then I return to my laptop to finish the manuscript.
I’d decided last week, after I left her on the night Monster died, that I was going to go for it: lay it out for Tatum, project what I hoped the ending would be, could be. I hadn’t been this bold in my writing in years, hadn’t had to pour any vulnerability or raw honesty intoCode Emergency(obviously), hadn’t really had to on any of the other scripts either. When was the last time I wrote something just for myself? I hunched over my laptop and considered this.All the MenandOne Day in Dallas, even though they earned me early accolades, the countless, uncredited rewrites on other people’s work, theAlcatrazseries—none of them laid me bare likeRomanticah, which I’d written to get over my breakup with Amanda, which I’d written because I allowed myself to be vulnerable. Since then, I’ve been so much less so in my work. Less human. Less open. Less brave.
Not unlike Tatum, I’d erected my own walls, placed myself in my own bubble. For different reasons, sure, but when you’ve burned everything around you and no longer have the protection of those safeguards, do those reasons even matter anymore? Tatum and I had both insulated ourselves from each other, and the only way,the only way, to find each other again is to stand there, bare, with the ashes of our wreckage at our feet, and acknowledge that we see each other’s nakedness.
And so I write the ending I hope for. Maybe she’ll see it as a cop-out, that I had to put it in writing rather than standing in front of her proclaiming my regret. And maybe she’ll reject me all the same because I have been a shitty partner, and I have cheated and been unsupportive and been petty and unkind. But I love her. I still love her, and now I can only hope that this is enough.
She and I are past words. Now we are on to promises.
So I’m finally writing something for her, the promise that I made too many years ago that has gone unkept.
I’m keeping it now.
I type faster than my brain realizes is possible.
A happy ending. That’s what I’m going to give us. I’m going to rewrite that day in November, Leo’s birthday, when I waited for her, hoped she’d come. I change it now: that I didn’t see her there, at the fence by the beach on the chilly morning, so instead she called to me—Ben! Ben!—and I glanced up toward her, squinted and then saw her clearly, and suddenly, she was there all along.
Not Amanda. Tatum.
She showed up that day, and I saw her.
I rewrite the truth of our history until we find ourselves happy again.
I hit Save.
I press Print.
Between Me and You.
I compile all the pages, find gift wrap in a kitchen drawer, tie it in a bow.
Maybe it will be something. Maybe not enough. But maybe it will be too.
46
TATUM
