Tuesday, May 23
“I’m sorry, okay? Please, Nadia, please pick up. I really need to talk.”
I listen to Liv’s voicemail over and over while I sit awake on the cold bathroom tile. I try typing a message out to her three, four times but I don’t know how to explain any of this. It’s all too much, too long.
Where do I start? How do I even begin to explain what’s happened since we last spoke? That my silence was only one part righteous anger—another part humiliation?
I press my eyes shut and fat tears roll down my cheeks. I miss my sister so much it hurts. It’s like I haven’t slept in years and the entirety of what I’ve done is physically weighing on my brain, pressing it down into my spine so powerfully I feel like my eyes might explode out of my head.
I’m curled around the toilet bowl in the hall bathroom, sweat pouring down my back. Marco’s here with me, in my parents’ Shore house. He says he likes it. Would he tell me if he didn’t? He only has to pretend for eight more days.
I suppress a small whimper, holding back a bigger, heavier, pain-filled sob. What’s that old adage—a hit dog will holler? A sick woman sobs.
The last few days have been consumed with trying. Trying to keep my pain at bay. Trying to keep Marco from noticing something’s wrong. Trying to act like this version of myself I’ve been isn’t a flickering mirage, bound to disappear if he gets any closer.
I force up what’s left in my stomach, praying this will relieve some of the leaden dread pulling me toward the center of Earth, collapsing me in on myself. It doesn’t.
I rinse out my mouth and then crawl into bed, skating through the freezing sheets until I find Marco’s warm body. He’s almost always boiling hot. That’s something I’ll remember about him—about us. I’ll see his face on the cover of Variety, and I’ll remember, decades before, the way his tanned, soft summer skin felt when it met mine.
“What’s wrong?” he whispers, turning toward me, his mouth finding my forehead. I breathe in his scent. Do you really love me? I want to know, even if it hurts my feelings. I want to know everything he’s ever thought; if we had met in a different way, I’d spend a lifetime teasing each thought out, turning over his opinions like precious artifacts. “Hey, tell me what’s wrong.”
It’s happening again. Not like last time. But almost. “I’m sick,” I whisper.
A hand replaces his lips on my forehead. “You’re okay.”
I laugh a little through my tears and he pulls me close, wrapping heavy arms around me. He presses his lips into the salty rivulets on my cheek. “You’ll feel better soon.”
“What’s this?”
I look up from the paperback I’m trying—and failing—to read, my body wrung out and tossed over the love seat. I can’t get the letters to stop swimming across the page in a purple-green swirl. I keep blinking hard. That usually does the trick. Not today.
Even the early-morning sunbeam, the one I’ve loved since I was a child, hurts today.
When I lift my eyes, I find Marco standing in the long, dark hallway that leads to my parents’ bedroom holding up a gallon Ziploc bag.
My breathing stalls for a moment. My hearing dims.
The bag is filled with orange pill bottles, and they rattle as he lifts them.
I must have mindlessly left them out when I was looking for . . .
Looking for my medicine. Trying to make up for lost time.
Fucking idiot.
I push myself upright, letting the book fall from my hands. It hits the floor and slaps shut. “My migraine medicine.”
Marco looks between me and the bag, his expression unreadable. “How many migraines do you get?”
I grit my teeth, forcing myself upright and across the room to snag the bag out of his hands, maybe a little too forcefully. “To be a woman is to suffer.”
He takes this, both my cutting remark and the overly aggressive act, on the chin. But when my back is to him, he asks, “Why’d you cut your hair?”
I freeze, turning toward his voice. “What?”
“At dinner, Soph said something about your hair. Your mental-breakdown haircut or something.”
“Uh, yeah.” I shrug a shoulder, trying to still the storm brewing in my chest. “I just wanted a change.”
He’s not looking at me. He tangles a hand in his hair, a nervous habit. “That’s it?”
I nod. “I promise. I was ready for something new.”
He seemingly accepts this answer, this new half lie, with a nod. “I have to get going—I’ll see you later. By the way, you left your phone on the bed. You have about eight missed calls from your sister.”
“Oh . . . ” I’m almost knocked backward. I lower myself back down into my reading chair. He hasn’t accepted anything. Instead, I feel like he’s collecting evidence. The proverbial monkey’s paw curls a finger, and suddenly, our intimacy—this weird cosplay—feels like a weapon. I should say, Why were you looking at my phone? But I’m stunned silent.
“You should call her back,” he says simply, before pulling his car keys from his pockets and reaching for the front doorknob. He shifts from foot to foot, ready to leave, but I know if he leaves right now, it’s with something unsaid. Maybe he can hear my thoughts, feel the anxious thunder of my heart. Just fucking say it.
With a final, blank look back at me, he asks: “Did it bother you when I said you should be grateful for your life?”
Yes. “No. It was an emotional moment for you. I . . . I completely understand why.” I tighten my hand on the bag of bottles.
He drops his gaze from mine. “Look, I might have to go to LA for a few days. I got an invitation to be a part of this inaugural exhibit,” Marco says. “Which makes our situation even more complicated. I’d need to be there for at least a day, plus two days for travel, and I feel like a dick, since I just told you . . . to be grateful.”
I try making a joke. “I’ve been to LA before, it’s not anything worth—”
“I mean, we’re almost at the end here, Nadia. If I leave today, when I come back we’re over.”
His words hit me. Square in the chest. And I even make a small, injured noise from the impact. “What a way to put it.”
“It’s the truth, though, isn’t it? In a week, we’re breaking up.” There’s something in the way he says truth—breaking. Before I can get my bearings, he blurts out: “I want you to come to LA with me. I want you there with me. I need you there with me.”
“Marco,” I say slowly, carefully. “I can’t do that, you know that. I would love to, but I told you before—before we started dating and before Rome. My life . . . my job. It’s all here.”
He forces a breath out from between his lips, shoulders rounding forward. My words sink into him like a knife.
“Okay,” he says, dragging a hand back and forth over his chin, working at the skin, leaving a path of pink in his wake. Marco abandons leaving, temporarily; he steps over my discarded book and comes toward me, lowering himself down into a squat. Here, we’re at eye level. “Quit your job, then.” I don’t even need to hear the words—I can read it in his eyes, his features that hold in them a strength I can only dream of. I want you brims in them, dark and sweet and honest. “I’ll support you for now, that way you can travel. Evergreen can still be your home base. Just come to LA, and then we can figure it out.”
“What?” An incredulous laugh rips through me. I sit up straight in the chair, dropping my feet to the floor. My calf muscles twitch. “Have you lost your mind? We agreed to date for the month of May and now you want to support me financially?”
His expression crumbles. For the first time ever, Marco looks pissed. Actually angry—his features are hard, the heavy, shadowed lines in his face cutting through all his prettiness. “Then what are we doing? Just torturing ourselves?”
“I don’t know, Marco,” I push back. “This was your idea. You wanted an end date.”
“That’s not fair, Nadia.”
“Why? Because I agreed? You also agreed. I didn’t know you were even thinking about keeping me—”
“Of course I am. I’m here with you, giving you as much of myself as I can. I said so in Italy, Nadia.”
“You didn’t say it directly. I-I wasn’t—I didn’t think you wanted a serious relationship.”
“Okay, fine. Let me say it right now. I know I’m inexperienced, but I want to try. Even if I fuck up entirely, please stop pushing me away, because I can feel what you’re doing. You’re getting ready to run. But I have to even if I fuck u—”
“I have lupus.” The words tumble out of my mouth so fast they all come out in a jumbled string. My voice bounces off the ceiling.
Marco stills. Everything about him comes to a complete stop. He holds my gaze, unblinking. “What?”
“I have an autoimmune disease. Lupus.” I drop my eyes to my feet, my comically jovial pink toenails. “I was diagnosed six months ago. It’s . . . not deadly, not at first. But I was really sick back then, and that’s when I lost my job. Because I—um, I couldn’t do it anymore, and so they fired me. And I was so depressed I . . .” I bite down so hard on my lip I can actually taste blood. “I tried to kill myself.” Then, I laugh.
He doesn’t say anything.
When I look up at Marco, he swallows hard. “Oh my God.”
“This . . .” I hold up the gallon bag. “Is my medicine. I’m supposed to take it every day. But it’s been hard the last week so I’m starting to feel really bad. And, um, I hurt my hand”— I hold up my bandaged palm—“at work yesterday and it’s not healing well. I may need to go to urgent care later. So, yeah. I can’t go to LA. Because I’m not well enough and I definitely, definitely shouldn’t put my body under more stress.”
“Stress?” he says. Marco closes his eyes for a moment, bringing his thumb and finger to pinch the soft skin between them, then he casts his gaze to the ceiling. “Sorry. This is a lot.”
“It is,” I agree. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.”
“Are you still . . .” He clears his throat, bringing his gaze, glassy and distant, back to mine. “Contemplating suicide?”
Humiliation burns in the back of my throat, like hot bile. “Not currently.”
“And your sister? She’s calling because she’s worried about you?”
“We got into a huge fight. She thinks I’m fucking my entire life up, every second of every day.”
“Because of me?”
“Because of everything, Marco.” I flash him a sad smile. I can’t hold back anymore; hot tears brim in my eyes. “Because I’m broke and I don’t really have a job and I don’t really have friends—except Soph and Allie, who almost have to like me, because they’re scared for me, too—and I don’t even really have you. She didn’t want me to be with you; she thinks you’re using me, that I’m pathetic for agreeing to this. And I can’t blame her for thinking that way because . . .” I laugh again as the tears fall, heavy and slow, pulling through the little red rashes beginning to form on my cheeks. “I can’t even actually have you. I had to lie in order to have you for a fraction of a month.”
He doesn’t move to comfort me, and I don’t blame him. Instead, Marco pushes his hands through his hair again and stares wide-eyed up at the skylight as a cloud passes by, stealing away the sunshine.
“Nadia,” he says finally. He still won’t look at me. “I can handle this.”
“Can you?” I ask in a whisper. “I can’t come to LA or New York or Rome or wherever your photography takes you. I can stay here, in Evergreen, and I can live a small, manageable life where I’m healthy enough. And that’s it, Marco.”
“But you did—”
“I did,” I cut him off sharply. “I did, and I’m suffering for it. My body hurts. I hurt.” I feel a strange and terrifying—familiar—sense of acceptance. I stand on steady feet, leaving behind my book and medicine. Then, I move around him toward the hallway. I need to lie down.
“I know I need to say something,” he calls after me. I stop walking and, with my feet quiet, it hits me how utterly still the world has gone around us. No birds chirping. No music from the radio. No noise floating in from the street. “I know I do. Just give me some time. A moment to . . .”
I turn back and Marco’s watching me, eyes fixed in a severe look—an unfamiliar look. He’s a stranger after all, isn’t he? We’re strangers. His full lips have completely disappeared into a straight white line. “You don’t have to do anything, we can just do this, as . . .” I pause to inhale as much air as I can. “We can just do this as we planned.”
He doesn’t meet my gaze. “Were you ever going to tell me the truth?”
“Not if I could help it,” I say. Then I add, in a pathetic, small voice, “I really like the version of myself I get to be with you.”
He recoils, an unstoppable, biological response to me, physically turning himself toward the door where he now has a white-knuckled grip on the handle. Go, I think. Go now and finish us off.
Eventually, in a voice barely more than a whisper, he says: “Will you be okay if I leave?”
I reply, “I don’t think I have a choice.”