Chapter Thirty
Jo
It took me ten minutes into my medical school lecture on depression for me to realize I had it. The lecturer had listed the
diagnostic criteria—insomnia, excessive guilt and worthlessness, depressed mood, loss of pleasure or enjoyment, difficulty
concentrating—and I’d ticked them off in my head impassively and thought, Huh, maybe I need to get checked out. Six years prior to my matriculation, a former student died by suicide after failing an important exam, and thanks to his
parents’ impassioned advocacy, our otherwise garbage student insurance covered four free counseling sessions a quarter. And
so for a year, I sat in front of a fortysomething-year-old white woman who reacted to my least troubling childhood anecdotes
with abject horror and offered little more than breathing exercises and a psychiatry referral to get me on meds, and waited
to get better. Then residency started, and there was no time to be depressed, no sick days to call out on the mornings when
just existing felt onerous, only phone calls from exasperated night floats asking when I was coming to relieve them.
Depression was a luxury, I realized quickly. People like Ezra, people with trust funds and pseudo-employment, could afford to sink into melancholy. But the rest of us had to eat. Ezra had a whole host of resources—twice weekly therapy sessions, bimonthly psychiatrist visits, weeklong mindfulness retreats—none of which fit into my schedule. And so I’d filled the hole in my heart with work, scheduled virtual visits with Rochelle in times of crisis, and convinced myself that I was okay, most of the time.
And I was okay, until I wasn’t.
“How are you feeling?” Mal said. He grasped my shoulders tight, like he thought I might pull away. Which was ridiculous, really.
Pulling away from Mal felt impossible now. His voice had been the only thing to reach me in the darkness, an unrelenting reminder
that I wasn’t alone, even when I wanted to be. “Did you eat?”
“What, aren’t you going to feed me?” I said, screwing up the corner of my mouth. “Pity. I’m too useless to figure it out for
myself.”
Mal’s expression soured. “Don’t call yourself that,” he said. “It’s not a joke.”
I held back a laugh. I felt tired, giddy, and so desperately, vacuously empty, which was still better than how I’d felt for
the last few days.
“Come on, Mal,” I said. “It’s objectively true. I’m unemployed, and I’m so completely incapable of taking care of myself that
I apparently need two grown adults to babysit me.”
I surveyed Mal’s face for his response, expecting annoyance, disgust, irritation. A part of me hoped for it, really. You’re too good for me , I wanted him to realize. You should go find someone less broken. Someone who can take care of you too. Not someone like me, who intermittently ceases
to function.
But instead, what I got was concern.
“I hate how you’re talking about yourself right now, you know,” Mal said. “But fine. You think you’re useless? Let’s fix that.
I’m putting you to work.”
Standing, he walked to the kitchen. I followed, bemused by his conviction and the aggressive way that he tossed a head of
broccoli and fileted salmon onto the counter.
“You’ll handle the broccoli,” he said, bending to retrieve a cutting board from the sink. I watched him with a mixture of
fascination and guilt, stunned by how comfortable he looked in my kitchen, the ease with which he procured supplies I’d probably
have to ask Dahlia to find. Silently, I took up the task, washing the broccoli before picking up the knife.
It took only a couple of chops for Mal to snatch it right back out of my hands.
“It’s better if you cut the florets off the base. Cut the bigger pieces in half. Like this,” he said, stepping in close beside
me to demonstrate. His arm brushed against mine, and I nearly jumped back, startled by how the simple, inadvertent touch left
my skin buzzing. Good god, was I this touch starved? Were my neurons so scrambled that they were starting to mix up self-loathing
with horniness?
Mal, for his part, looked unaffected. Which was annoying, because he also looked hotter than I remembered, the veins and sinews
in his forearms bulging as he worked. He looked down at me, his expression tender, then bumped me with his hip.
“Your turn,” he said, handing back the knife and heading for the spice cabinet.
Pouting, I went back to work. By the time I was finished, Mal had already prepped and seasoned the salmon and was laying the fillets side by side in the foil-lined basket of Dahlia’s air fryer. He started it, washed his hands, then walked back over to me.
“Much better,” he said, scraping the florets into a bowl with a quick flourish. He gave me a curious look, then said, plainly,
“You really weren’t joking about not knowing how to cook, were you?”
“I had no one to teach me,” I said plainly.
Mal nodded sagely, tossing olive oil, salt, and a rapid sequence of added spices to the bowl. Then he leaned in close and
pressed a tender kiss to my forehead.
“Well, you do now,” he said. “We have a lot of meals ahead of us. Just you watch, I’ll make a chef out of you yet.”
Tears pricked my eyes. There you go again , I thought. Doing the most. Just like yesterday. I got you, he said in his email, offering to financially support me through my crisis.
“Why are you doing this, Mal?” I sighed, throwing the broccoli into the oven with a clatter. “Why are you here?”
“Hmm?” Mal hummed. He’d brought dinner rolls with him and organized them onto a baking sheet. Then he smiled at me and said
lightly, “Come on, Jo, you know why.”
“Because you love me?” I said, watching his feet as they stepped closer to mine. “I’m not sure if I know what that means.”
Mal cupped my face, and, unbidden, I leaned into the warmth of his hand.
“It means I want to see you happy,” he said gently. “It means I want you to win, and that I want to be the one beside you
when you do, the one to comfort you when you don’t. It means I don’t go more than an hour without thinking about you, and
when I think about where I’ll be next year, or in the next five, or the next ten, you’re always there with me.”
My tears pooled into the crease of his palm, and he wiped them away, pulling me into his chest. It must have been the writer in him that gave him the ability to say the exact right thing to me at the right time.
“Me too,” I whispered. “That’s how I feel about you too. I want you to have the world, Mal, and you can have it. I mean, look at you. Look at how many people you’ve touched with your work. You love me because you think I push
you forward, right? Because I see you? But what if that’s an act? What if I end up holding you back instead?”
I could feel the exact moment that Mal’s heart stuttered under my cheek, felt his arms tighten around me just before he pulled
back to look me in the eye.
“It’s not possible for you to hold me back,” he said. “Even if you can’t do anything for me ever again. Even if I take care
of you like this forever. I’ll be happy to just be yours.”
I’d never cried as a kid. It was as though the part of me that was supposed to feel had gone dormant after age ten. Prudence
had told me to make myself useful, and so I did, ensuring I inconvenienced her as little as possible before disappearing altogether.
My emotions finally woke up in college, but even with Ezra, I knew not to take up space. To him, my slumps were short-lived
and self-limited, small periods of exhaustion-induced gloom from which I would assuredly bounce back. And I always did, like
a ball against a hard wall, a rubber band stretched thin and then let loose again. He’d never seemed to wonder if I would
snap, because I had never let him in close enough to worry. I was the strongest person he knew . Little did he know that the love he had for me was based on a lie.
But Mal had seen me at my lowest. He’d smelled my Frito stink. He’d seen me bedraggled, dressed in my last clean shirt, and he was still holding me like I was the most precious person in the world. My chest throbbed, and I sucked in a breath, looking everywhere but at him, at our tile floor that needed cleaning, the heathered pattern of his shirt.
“Ezra’s in love with me,” I said abruptly, unsure of how else to respond, how to communicate the transfiguration his words
had triggered in my soul. “That rumor is true. He told me himself Sunday morning.”
Mal nodded, his expression curiously passive. “I figured,” he said.
“I don’t love him anymore,” I said.
The smile that broke out across Mal’s face was sunlight therapy, a lightning flash in the midst of my melancholy. He dropped
his head against mine, and for a moment, I couldn’t tell whether the heartbeat I felt galloping against my chest was his or
mine.
“I figured that too,” he said.
And then he kissed me, and for a brief moment, the world seemed a less desolate place.