Thomas looks at her like she’s speaking a foreign language. “I don’t know?”
“You don’t know? It’s a pretty big difference,” says Rachel.
Thomas shakes his head again. “I guess it was in between? I don’t know. I can’t read her. Maybe I’ve never understood her.”
I anticipate his next move before he makes it. Thomas starts to walk away. I grab him by the jacket. “Come on,” I say. “Tell us more. What happened? Why are you freaking out?”
He keeps walking toward the exit, politely disengaging himself. We follow him, trying to keep up. Even in his frustration, he walks with a determined, steady pace.
“This is a bad idea,” he says, exiting the tent.
On the other side, facing the ocean, we hear the pop of fireworks and the pleased applause of the gathered group. The exit where we stand is empty of guests. Everyone is outside in a large clump. Out of the corner of my eye, I think I see the red-shawled psychic, but when I look back, it’s just a guest in a long, red gown.
“Why is it a bad idea? Tell us what happened,” Rachel pleads as Thomas is beginning to walk toward the sandy parking lot.
My heels are sinking in the sand, and it’s hard to keep pace with him.
“Because I can’t do this!” erupts Thomas, losing his composure. “Because I’m tired of it. I’ve been through too much to put up with these mind games. If she wanted me around, she would reach out to me. We could have morning coffee. We could go for a walk. We could do a hundred things easier than this. We share a wall, for Christ’s sake! What’s the point of all this back-and-forth? I loved her, even proposed to her once, and she rejected me. I reached out again, and she rejected me. All she’s done is reject me, and I’m exhausted. The last couple of years have been hard. I lost my wife just five years ago, and before that, I watched her get sicker and sicker with every passing day, unable to help.” His voice breaks. “I can’t keep putting myself through this.”
Rachel and I watch his impassioned speech in a sort of awed silence, neither of us seeming to know what to say next, because he’s right. We’ve been unfair to him, forcing him into this uncomfortable, vulnerable situation with no guarantees of a positive outcome.
“I’m sorry,” I say in a small voice, barely perceptible over the fireworks.
Thomas’s face softens. “I’m sorry, too,” he says. “But I have to move on.”
With that, he walks away toward his car. Rachel trails after him, turning only once to say goodbye.
“We tried,” she says with a sad smile. “It was really nice meeting you.”
I watch them leave until I can no longer make out their figures fading into the dark night.
On the ride home, Rose doesn’t speak. We sit in a companionable silence, lost in our own thoughts. Before us, the beach road is bumpy. It looks ominous without the illumination of the bright sun, all those rolling dunes rocking the car up and down.
I feel terrible for putting Thomas in an uncomfortable position, and even worse for Rose. All I want is for her to be happy—it’s what I want most in the whole world—and I thought Thomas was special enough to make it happen. What if I was wrong?
I let my mind drift to thoughts of Henry, about the wedding he’s planning, one not unlike the party we crashed tonight.
Before him, I never gave much thought to what kind of wedding I’d like to have someday, or whether or not I even wanted one. After witnessing my parents’ failed relationship, I didn’t allow myself to envision a future that involved a white dress.
Henry was different. He treated life as if the universe was conspiring on behalf of his every happiness. He took what I thought of as extraordinary blessings—financial stability, a happy home, a loving partner, healthy children—and assumed them guarantees. A happy life was his destiny, and he stretched toward it effortlessly and eagerly.
He once told me that my problem was a matter of mindset.
“If you expect good things to happen to you, they will,” he said. “But you always expect the sky to fall.”
What I wanted to retort is: “If you expect bad things to happen to you, you won’t be as devastated when they do.”
Henry with his big family could never understand. Henry with his fifteen cousins, his over-the-top family reunions, the weddings with their own hashtags, his protective shell of money and familial loyalty. He was shepherded through life by a million gracious, outstretched hands.
For a while, I let myself slide into this vision. It was as simple as letting the tide take you.
Lottie was sort of like Henry in that sense. A widow herself, she certainly wasn’t ignorant to life’s challenges, but she was forcefully optimistic. When I worried about something bad happening, she would offer the opposite perspective.
“What if it all works out?” she’d say. “What if the future is even better than you imagined?”
Even throughout her diagnosis and the subsequent treatments, she remained positive. I guess I thought if we completed her bucket list, if we lived like we were her, this mindset would magically soak into us, too.
But in the end, Lottie’s positivity wasn’t enough to save her. We still lost her. Maybe, in the end, relentless positivity is never enough.
