“I’m fine. I just wanted some water.”
As I run the faucet and fill a glass, I hear Brian sink back down at the kitchen table. I turn around and stare at him. “You don’t drink,” I say.
He lifts his glass and drains it. “There’s a lot of stuff I never did before that I’m doing now.”
It is so strange to be here in our kitchen, to see him in the flannel robe I bought him two Christmases ago, to know what it is to be held by him and how our bodies fit together and to think I will likely never do that again. I will never kiss him, I will never taste the salt on his skin, I will never pull his hips to mine.
We’ve sat here dozens of times before in the middle of the night—celebrating a promotion of Brian’s, talking about a client of mine, worrying about a fever Meret has, crunching numbers for a monthly budget. This is familiar ground, and also completely unfamiliar.
How do you undo intimacy? How do you go back to being acquaintances, when the other person knows every inch and groove of you, every irrational fear, every trigger?
He turns, his eyes tracking me. “There’s one thing I can’t figure out. Why were you so mad at me for what happened with Gita?”
Her name, inconceivably, still shivers through me. “I don’t know. Maybe because a part of me felt like I’d given up Wyatt years ago, and it wasn’t fair that you’d get to think about someone else.” I hesitate. “Maybe because you stopped short of…cheating. And I don’t know if I could have.”
At my confession, a shocked laugh bursts out of Brian. “Wow,” he breathes. “Okay.”
We sit in the silence for so long that it presses against my eardrums. “I know it’s not worth much, but I’ll always love you.”
“Just not enough,” he murmurs, and I flinch. When he looks up at me, though, it is with kindness. “You should sleep.Oneof us should, anyway.”
I nod, setting my glass in the sink.
“I know it’s stupid, but the house feels different with you here. More…right.”
When I turn around again, his hands are curled around his whiskey glass. “It’s not stupid,” I say quietly, and I leave him sitting in the near dark.
—
IAM SWIMMINGin flames. Ash sits on my tongue, my eyelashes, my skin. I roll to my side and see a dragon made of smoke, fire belching from its jaws. I turn the other way, and stare into sightless eyes.
I stagger to my feet, trying to find my voice, but it’s muffled by the cries of others. I am walking on cobblestones made of the dead. I need to find him. I need to find him.
The soles of my feet are bare and pressed to glowing coals. I look down, squinting through a blizzard of cinders, and see a faint line. One blue. And beside it, one black.
I start moving.
Demons scream to me. One in the shape of a child without a face. One is a woman broken over a metal spike, her arms and legs still wheeling. I keep my eyes on my feet, shuffling one foot in front of the other, each ankle rocking on two syllables:Wyatt. Wyatt.
In front of me is an inferno. Behind me is an angry ocean. I am supposed to know the answer to something but I cannot remember it.
A monster rears up in my face, bloody and clutching me.
But this one is shouting to me.Dawn! Dawn.
I choke on his name.
“Dawn!”
My eyes open on a gasp. I am sweaty and trembling in Brian’s arms. “You were having a nightmare,” he says. His hand skates down my spine. He seems to realize that he is sitting on the edge of the sofa and that I am wearing a T-shirt and underwear, and he lets go of me as if I really am on fire.
I can still feel the shape of his hands on my skin. “You’re okay,” he whispers, and I believe him.
—
WHAT SURPRISES MEis how slow the break is. Not a clean cut, not a guillotine, but tugging and pulling and dislocation. So much has to happen before that final separation. I realize that, partly, this is because neither Brian nor Wyatt will force my hand. I can envision my future, but it’s superimposed on my past. When I am with Wyatt, it feels like seeing the world for the first time, in colors so rich they don’t have names. When I am with Meret and Brian, it feels like sifting through every treasured tapestry of memory. Who could ever choose one at the expense of the other?
The day after I get home, Kieran bullies me into going to the hospital for a CT scan to be read by his supervising doctor, the best neurosurgeon in Boston. Although I haven’t had any pain or complications, I know he will not trust my health until he sees me with his own eyes.
