She laughed, a sharp, surprised burst, a much-needed release valve to the pressure trapped beneath her sternum. He continued, “And you’ve never thought about going back?”
She tried to drink from her water glass, her throat suddenly dry, but discovered it was empty. “Of course I have,” she said. “I think about it all the time. I’ve just…I’ve worked really hard over the past few years to get healthy, and happy, and stable. I don’t know if I can stay that way if I go back into that world.” She shifted in her seat. “It also kind of feels like…I don’t know. That ship has sailed. I’m thirty-five. I had my chance, and I couldn’t handle it. I fucked it up and threw it away.”
“It doesn’t sound like you threw it away to me,” he said gently. “It sounds like you chose to protect yourself.”
She looked down, unable to meet his gaze, and said nothing.
“So you don’t do it at all anymore? Even just for you?”
She shook her head. “I’ve tried to write again. I can’t. There’s just…nothing. I sing in the shower sometimes, does that count?”
She wondered what fourteen-year-old Merritt would say about that, the Merritt for whom music was as much a part of her as her liver or her spine or the birthmark on her ankle. The magic decoder ring that enabled her to make sense of the overwhelming world around her and the jumbled feelings inside her.She’d walled off the part of herself that wanted to connect that way, bricked it up alive like that Edgar Allan Poe story that had given her nightmares as a kid.
It hadn’t been a choice. It had been something she’d known, with perfect clarity, as soon as she’d regained consciousness. Like a switch had flipped, and that part of her life was over. It was the trade-off for making it out of her twenties alive.
And most of the time, she was fine with that. She just needed someone to tell her what the fuck else she was supposed to do.
When she felt brave enough to look up at him, his brow was furrowed, like he was trying to calculate something. “You said you stopped at twenty-five; you’re thirty-five now, and you moved here two years ago.”
“Right,” said Merritt. She had an idea where this math problem was going.
“So…what were you doing in between?”
Good fucking question.
Those first years had been a blur of two steps forward, one step back. In and out of treatment a few more times. She’d lost at least three months on a medication that made her sleep eighteen hours a day, then another three on one that left her unable to sleep at all, chain-smoking and watchingFamily Feuduntil the sun came up. Therapy four times a week: CBT, DBT, EMDR. Meditation, and long walks, and teaching herself to cook comforting, nourishing meals.
She recognized how privileged she was to have all the time and resources in the world to focus on nothing but her recovery—but then again, that was also why she’d needed that much help in the first place. And maybe, in retrospect, it would’ve gone faster if she’d had something other than herself to think about.
Once she’d reached a shaky equilibrium, she’d wasted evenmore time trying to convince herself she could slip right back into her old life, ignoring the gaping hole at the center, the pitying looks, how empty it all felt now, how she had no real reason to be there anymore.
But mostly, she’d fallen in love—or something resembling it—over and over. Fallen in and out of relationships she’d hoped would heal her, with people who’d ultimately been in love with the idea of trying to save her. Riding that emotional roller coaster was the closest she’d gotten to the rush she used to get from music. It required its own kind of creativity, building a private world with another person, a one-of-a-kind closed circuit of intimacy.
None of them lasted, though. Always too much, too fast, too intense. How could it not be, when she had nothing else to throw her energy into? That had been the hardest drug of all to quit, but she was proud of herself for going cold turkey (Alan notwithstanding) since she’d been living here.
She didn’t know how to tell Niko thatthis—being on the board, getting involved with the community, doing whatever small part she could to make Crested Peak a little bit better—was the closest thing she’d had to a real direction in years.
And shedefinitelydidn’t know how to tell him that when she looked at him, all she saw were her most toxic patterns itching to repeat themselves.
“I don’t know,” she said with a helpless shrug, which was the most concise version of the truth. There was a long, loaded pause before she met his eyes again. “Now you have to tell me something embarrassing in exchange.”
“None of that was embarrassing,” he said.
“Okay. Tell me something vulnerable.”
He looked down at his empty glass for a beat. “You know what you said before? About how I have a lot of friends?”
She nodded slowly.
“I’m not sure that’s really true. I do know a lot of people, but I’m not that close with any of them.”
She frowned. “What about Jo and Simon? Or Dev?”
He shrugged. “I’ve had a lot of roommates over the years. We hang out, we have a good time, but we never talk about anything serious. And then they move away and move on with their lives. And Dev…well, you know him. It’s hard to get him to open up. I think your sister might be the only one who can.”
Merritt rolled her lower lip between her teeth in contemplation. “I don’t think that’s so unusual. Especially for men. You get socialized out of having deep emotional bonds with each other, or with anyone except your romantic partners.”
His mouth twisted, and she immediately wished she hadn’t said anything that could remotely be considered invalidating. “Maybe that’s it,” he said. “But sometimes I feel like…like it’s just the way people see me. Even my exes. I’m the fun guy, or the guy who can help them out, fix something, do them a favor. I don’t know if they’re interested in knowing me beyond that.”
