She would not, not ever.
“No, no no no—you take that back. You don’t say that to me. I don’t want you to be sorry. Don’t you ever be sorry for me. Goddamn, Holden, I don’t want fucking sorrys, don’t you get it? That’s the whole point.Iwant to be the one who cares.Iwant to be the one who heals.Idon’t want to be fucking broken anymore. I don’t want you to look at me with those sad fucking moo eyes like I’m so pathetic. Go look at someone else. Go look at the other three hundred and twelve passengers who died instead of me.”
She was really crying now, and it was awful, it was awful.
But somehow she couldn’t seem to stop. It all just kept coming, one terrible thing after another.He might as well know it all now, she thought, though that hardly helped. Nothing could help her now.
“Why did they die instead of me? I don’t understand. There was a doctor on there who was close to inventing a cure for cancer. A cure for cancer! And I know...I know there was an opera singer too. I looked her up—her name was Maria Entilles. She could do all the notes, she could do the whole scale, she was amazing. I’m not amazing. I can’t even leave my house, in case everyone looks at me like you’re looking at me now.”
“It’s just the shock, honey. It’s the shock, that’s all. It’ll fade.”
“It won’t fade. It never fades. No matter how long I go it doesn’t go away. I thought everyone had forgotten once, sometime after it happened. But then this woman saw me in the grocery store and...and...I just don’t want it to be like that anymore. I want to be normal. I want to be Alice Evans.”
“But that’s who you are to me. I promise, that’s who you are.”
“Not anymore. Now you’ll always see something else instead.”
“I won’t. I won’t. Soon you’ll see. I won’t.”
“And if you don’t? If you just go on believing I’m Alice—if in time you can accept that and the pity leaves your expression...what then? What happens to us then? Do you really think we can be a normal couple? We’re not a normal couplenow. I’m so fucked-up I don’t even think I could write an essay about what a normal coupleis, let alone be a part of one. I can never be a part of one.”
“You don’t mean that.”
She didn’t entirely, but how could she say now?
It felt so real when she said the words aloud. Everything seemed logical and right, as if she’d just found the pieces to an impossible puzzle and finally made them fit. There was just one piece left, really. One practical point to make.
“No, I don’t. But I mean this—I don’t want to be a part of one with you. I’m only making things worse for you, I know I am. I’m just digging you in deeper—so deep that one day you’ll wake up and wonder how you found yourself in this fucking abyss. This fucking codependent, dysfunctional mess.”
“Is that really what you think we are?”
“Yes. Yes. I do. I wish I didn’t but I do.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have a choice,” she said, then did the worst possible thing she could, a thing she knew she would regret always. They would never come back from this. Once she’d done it that was it, but she went ahead anyway.
She opened the door.
“Goodbye, Holden,” she said.
While in her head her real words sang.
Goodbye, Bernie, my love, my only love.
Chapter Twelve
This time there were no beautiful letters or carefully put together packages. Of course there weren’t. She’d exploded all over him like a nuclear bomb. People who exploded did not get declarations of love. They got a long, aching silence and then nothing, followed by some snide comment in an interview a few months from now.
Yeah, I thought she was cool, he’d probably say.But then it turned out she was an ungrateful, lying maniac who threw my wonderful gesture right back in my face.
Though even as she was imagining the words, she knew how unlike him they sounded. He would never be so indiscreet. He would never talk about her like that. He wasn’t that kind of man, no matter how hard she tried to make him be in her head.He’s probably laughing with his posse about me in some strip joint, she thought, and then wept into her hand. She wept not because it was likely to be true.
But because she knew it wasn’t.
He was a good man. He was such a good man. He was too good for the likes of her, really. He deserved someone better, someone who didn’t hope for beautiful letters again, but instead thought of sending ones to him. She knew he did, the moment she saw him on some late-night talk show.
He didn’t have to say. The sight of him was enough—like an electric shock amidst the numbing flicker of the stuff she was channel-surfing through. It lit her up, though she tried not to let it. She tried to pretend he just looked like Holden Stark, instead of the man she loved. He was a distant thing again, a once-was crush.
