Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
You met someone? You were planning to go on a date?”
These are the first things Jonah asks when they step inside the house, which Ellie pleaded with him to come back to with her. Bunny and Frank are gone, likely hours into their sunny trip. Maggie is—well, not here? The home is so quiet that their footsteps echo as they stomp through it. The only sound other than their angry voices comes from outside—the gentle, incessant hum of the generator, still running, and the men from the power company who chatter and pack up their tools, ready to wrap up another long day.
“No!” Ellie kicks off her tennis shoes in the entryway and then moves into the kitchen. “Or, yes!” She reaches into the cabinet for some ibuprofen to help dull the pain. “I don’t know, Jo!” She fills a glass from the faucet, swallows two brown tablets. “I’m not sure what’s happening—what’s real, what’s not—anymore.”
Ellie takes a seat at the kitchen table and looks around the room. She’s spent hours of her life right here in this exact space. It is so full of history. Today, the walls are white—Swiss Coffee, the paint can had read when Ellie picked it—but before, when Maggie was little, there was a time when they were canary yellow and, for a brief window, a pale, icy blue. When Ellie was young, Bunny went through a bad wallpaper phase, dressing the walls in Laura Ashley–style floral prints and regrettable rooster motifs.
Now, as Jonah takes a seat across from her, squeezing his temples as if for dear life, Ellie longs to peel away all the layers on these walls and go back and back and back through the decades her family has lived inside them. The pain. The joy. The good times. The hard ones. She wishes she could see them spread out wide before her so she could pinpoint for herself the exact minute when things began to go wrong.
“What would have happened if I wasn’t there?” Jonah asks. His face looks like a distress signal. “Would he have walked away?” His forehead creases. “Would he have stayed?” He repositions his weight on the chair. The wood emits a low creak. “Would you have let him?”
Ellie thinks of that old book. The one she read all those years ago, back when she was a single, twentysomething woman who felt so desperate to find her way. Thirty-five thousand choices, all in a single day. It feels to her right now—the chalky, medicinal taste of those brown pills still lingering on her tongue—like too much to bear. For every small choice we make, we walk both toward and away from a prescribed version of our existence. Life is like skipping stones. The instant you make the choice to release that warm, smooth rock from your hand, a series of chain reactions is set into motion. The ripples you’ve created spread and spread and spread.
Ellie doesn’t answer. Instead, she volleys a question back to him. “Would you have gotten married if you hadn’t run into me earlier in the week?”
Neither of them responds. Because the painful truth is that they don’t know. Who or what might they choose if they each lived a life away from one another? What lives might they have chosen for themselves if they hadn’t—back in their real one—crashed right into each other that very first day? What if she turned left instead of right? What if he did? What other versions of themselves are out there, just out of frame and waiting for them? For every new door we open in our lives, another one must remain closed. With each new choice we make, no matter how small it may seem at the time—to grab a coffee, to stay put a minute longer, to go home and sulk or not—we commit ourselves to a particular path. A certain destiny. And, often without ever realizing it, we commit all the people we love to this path, too.
“Why didn’t I do something more for myself in our real life?” Ellie poses, pivoting the conversation by a few degrees. It’s a rhetorical question, one really meant for herself, but still she asks. She can’t stop thinking about the specific life they chose—that she chose—and all the lives they might have lived with or without each other. “The bookshop,” she continues. “Or a friend.” The pills are kicking in now, the pain in her back starting to subside, though a new one—a burning, searing emotion—ignites inside her chest. “I gave the two of you all I had,” she admits. “And in the end, it wasn’t enough.”
Jonah looks at her inquisitively. “Ellie, I—I never asked you to give up those things. Those were choices you made, not me.”
In the months that led up to Maggie’s departure, Ellie wanted someone to blame, and she often chose Jonah. It was easier than blaming herself, even though that was where the blame belonged. The choices were always hers. Jonah simply did his best to support them.
Through the window, Ellie sees that the late-day sun is setting. The sky is touched by clouds, their edges appearing as puffy as a child’s drawing. In the distance she notes the sweep of cornflower-blue sky becoming a different shade. Midnight blue, another of Maggie’s old favorites. For a split second, her heartbeat drumming the inside of her throat, Ellie wonders if her daughter—wherever she is, or whoever she is right now—can see this same sky, too.
“Why didn’t you fight harder?” she asks him. “When I first said it. Why didn’t you fight harder to make me change my mind and to keep me around?”
Jonah closes his eyes, remembering. “I did, Ellie. You just didn’t hear me.” He opens them. “You never heard me.”
Ellie looks all around the room again. The memories are everywhere. They’re as omnipresent as the air. “I want to go back,” she whispers. “I want to go back to the start. When she was small. When she still needed me.” She sighs with everything in her. “I miss that part of my life so much.”
“But you can’t, Ellie. And neither can I,” he states.
“Why?” she asks, not actually expecting him to have an answer. No one does. It’s so unfair, these unbendable rules of time.
“Because she doesn’t need you in the past,” he explains. “She needs you now, back home, back in the present. The real one.” He exhales a sad, heavy breath. “And so do I. But ...” He trails off.
“But what?”
“But I don’t know if we can get back there,” he says. “I worry that we’re too far past it now.”
Neither of them speaks. Their words, their memories, they’re all just floating here.
“What was that?” Jonah asks, concern cropping up in his voice. “Did you hear something?”
“Hear what?” Ellie asks. “I don’t hear anything.”
Jonah moves closer to the window and peers outside. “I thought the generator made a funny noise.” He brushes the idea off. “Never mind,” he decides. “It was probably just in my head.”
For an extended beat, they stand a few feet from each other, watching and waiting.
“I think I’m going to go,” Jonah finally says, his tone ringing with sadness. “I don’t think I should be here right now.”
“Go?” Ellie asks. “You’re leaving? To go where?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “To get air. To take a long walk. To think.”
A feeling of panic begins to rise in her, bubbling and bubbling like boiling water. “Are you coming back?”
Jonah shakes his head. It’s clear from his expression that he feels every feeling, and yet is all out of them, too. “I don’t know, Ellie. I don’t think it’s up to me.”
Her eyebrows lift in two uncertain arches. “What do you mean?”
“You’re the one who got us here.” He takes a step into the entryway. “I can’t fix this. It’s up to you.” He takes another step away from her and then opens the door. Before he leaves, he meets her eyes. When he does, it feels to Ellie like it’s both for the first and the last time. “You’re the one who needs to make a choice and decide how this story ends.”
Ellie is alone, still seated at the kitchen table. Jonah was right earlier. Something is wrong with the generator. It’s clicked off, and she hasn’t a clue how or why. The whole house is dark except for the faint glow from the glass-enclosed candle she’s lit on the counter and the pale hints of blue moonlight that stretch through the windows.
Knock, knock, knock.
Someone is here to see her. Again. She doesn’t know who. She hopes it’s him, that he’s come back, but she can sense already that it is not.
Only a few hours earlier, Ellie felt like she was on the right path to fixing this mess. That she was putting the pieces of her life back together one by one, like building something with a set of wooden blocks. But that was before. Now?
Knock, knock, knock.
Ellie stands and walks across the kitchen’s black-and-white floor, like she’s done a thousand other times. What if she ignores it? What if she goes back to the table and pretends she didn’t hear? What then? Can she hide from whatever it is that waits for her right now on the other side of the door? Can she choose to turn around, to pick a different destiny for herself and for this whole life she’s living in instead?
Knock, knock, knock.
But this isn’t the answer. Ellie knows this. You can’t turn your back on your choices or the path you’ve picked. All you can do is face them.
She opens the door. The porch light is out, like all the other lights inside. Even so, she doesn’t need it to see him, to recognize the lines and curves of his face, to immediately know something is wrong.
“Dad?” Ellie poses. “What are you—why—how are you here?” she stammers.
“Christ! Don’t you check your phone?” Frank stands on the porch, a look of worry painted across his aging face. “You’re always yelling at me about that, and yet—”
“What?” Over her father’s shoulder, she sees a yellow taxi—its headlights still beaming—parked in the driveway. “I told you. I lost it. The other day. I haven’t—”
“They bumped our flight back four times,” he explains. “They finally let us board, and we sat on the tarmac for three hours. But by the time we deboarded—”
“I—I don’t understand,” she interjects, confused. “So you never went? You’ve been up here the whole time?” She’s spinning, her thoughts circling around and around like a broken toy. “Maybe there’s another flight. Maybe we can still get you both there tonight.”
“Tonight?” Frank scoffs. “Ellie, there’s only one place we’re going right now.”
Ellie widens her eyes in question.
“The hospital,” he explains. “I’ve been calling and messaging you for hours. It’s your mother,” he states. Ellie feels her heart drop into a free fall. “She’s sick.”