Chapter Twenty
Twenty
I don’t cry until I call Winona, but the second I hear her voice I lose mine.
It’s replaced by tears that pour militantly down my cheeks, sobs that shock me with their force.
It’s just a breakup, I recognize, with a guy I dated for less than five months and with whom I should have known it would never work.
But it still feels like my world is ending.
Brandon has Sophie this weekend, and so Winona comes over. We eat my leftovers and top it off with vanilla ice cream from the pint and put on old slasher movies rife with blood and gore and no romance subplots.
“I feel so s-stupid,” I stammer, as Winona rubs circles into my back.
My head buzzes from the whiplash; I can’t believe that tonight is real.
That it could contain so many contradictions.
I replay the events in my mind, trying to figure out where it all went wrong.
How Julian could go from picking out jewelry for me to ejecting himself from my life in under two hours.
“You’re not stupid, he’s stupid,” Winona declares.
Furious Winona is a rare but fearsome sight.
Woe betide Julian if he runs across her in the street; she’s not above a public beatdown.
“What did you tell me, when Brandon asked for the divorce? That we are not taking responsibility for men’s shitty behavior.
That we aren’t internalizing their mess. ”
I look up at her in wonder, my misery temporarily replaced by admiration.
The heartbreak I am enduring now will fade.
Julian and I have no earthly attachments to each other, and so he will eventually disappear from my life, like Eric once did.
I won’t know whom he dates next, which companies he’ll invest in, or what he thinks about Frank Ocean’s next album when it finally drops.
But Winona is forever linked to Brandon.
They share a child, and they may someday share grandchildren.
They’ll have to take pictures at Sophie’s graduation ceremonies, negotiate holidays, shake hands with each other’s partners.
And through all of this, Winona has to set her head high and do what is right for her child, even if that means putting aside the mortal hurt Sophie’s father dealt her.
“How did you get over it?” It’s the first time I’ve ever asked. I haven’t gotten over it, and Brandon and I had an entirely platonic relationship, one based on trust that he callously defiled.
Winona turns to give me a wry smile, then flips our blanket over our shoulders and nuzzles into my side.
“Who said I got over it?” When my eyes widen, she laughs. “My husband cheated on me with a twenty-two-year-old white girl. That’s not something you just get over. Some days I still wake up feeling like the old hag he probably thinks I’ve become.”
“The finest hag on this side of Chicago!” I declare, aghast. “Winny. You’re gorgeous. You know that. I could probably walk outside right now and put together an impromptu barbershop quartet to sing for your heart.”
“Oh, I’m aware,” Winona says, coyly. “I recruit an outside opinion every now and then to confirm it.”
The way she says it makes me sit up straighter.
“Hold on,” I say. “Are you seeing someone?”
“Maybe,” Winona says. “Maybe multiple someones.”
I squeal so loudly that Onix lifts his head to glare at me.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask. “This is an enormous development, Winny, how could I not be updated—”
“I don’t know, because telling my best friend that I’m getting dicked down every other week would be a little insensitive while she’s enduring several months of involuntary celibacy,” she says.
“And, before you ask, no, none of it is serious. I’m dating like a man. Swiping for hotness and proximity.”
This makes me laugh out loud, and I drop my head onto her shoulder. I know that I am still in the numb phase of a breakup and that it will take a few days for the true agony to hit, but right now, sitting on my couch with my best friend at my side and my dog dozing at my feet, I almost feel okay.
“You know what?” I say. “Hell yeah.”
We laugh, and though I desperately want details, I don’t know if I can take them tonight, and Winny doesn’t burden me with them.
Three slashers later, we crawl into bed together, just like old times. She falls asleep what feels like hours before I do. I watch the city’s lights sift through my curtains, listen to the distant sirens fire from fifteen floors down.
When I finally close my eyes, they open again to white.
“Forgive me,” a voice says.
I swivel to find its source. Julian sits on the floor in front of me, but he’s not quite the Julian I know; the squareness of his jaw softened, his skin smooth and unshadowed like it hasn’t yet met a razor.
He’s barefoot and dressed all in white: a loose linen shirt, linen pants.
He hides his eyes behind a curtain of thick, dark curls.
I recognize this version of him. He’s the boy from the painting in Julian’s living room, the one who had yet to know loss.
“Oh, fuck you,” I hiss.
The curse makes his head rear back, and his wide, sad eyes are Julian’s brilliant brown. His lips twist, quiver, and for a second I wonder if he’s going to cry.
“You have to understand,” he says. “I did it for you. To protect you.”
My laughter pierces the air and lingers like a thrummed chord.
“To protect me?” I repeat, incredulous. “You hurt me, Julian. Even though you swore you wouldn’t. And now you can’t even face me as yourself. You’ve got to put on this weird paragon of innocence costume instead, like the selfish, manipulative bastard you are—”
He slides forward on his knees until he’s almost sitting between mine. When he raises his head, he’s my Julian again, fully grown and filled out. He wraps his arms around my legs, prostrating himself to me, and I hate myself for not finding the fortitude to shove him away.
“Yes. I’m a selfish bastard,” he confesses. “Greedy too. I just wanted to be with you. To love you—”
I recoil. Even for my subconscious, this is cruel.
“Don’t,” I start.
“To love you,” he repeats firmly. “I wanted to love you. And god, Sean, I did. I do.”
They’re words he’s never used in real life, and hearing them from this apparition cements me as the pitiable, foolish woman I feared I’d become.
I can hardly believe myself, that I could so desperately want to hear that Julian loved me that I would settle for recreating this encounter in my mind, one in which he begs on his hands and knees for me when in reality he’d walked out my door without looking back.
“Julian, please,” I say, clenching my teeth to keep from devolving into sobs.
His hands scrabble up my legs until they reach my hips, more beseeching than amorous, his head bent low over my lap in worship. His tears fall, heavy as heartbeats, onto the thin white silk covering my thighs.
“I love you,” he says. “In a way that I never thought myself capable. More than I’ve ever loved anyone. That’s why I had to walk away.”
“Stop.” My breaths are coming hard and fast; any minute now, I will break. “Go away. Let me sleep, Julian, please. I’m so tired.”
Julian goes still. I don’t turn away, breathing in, out, anything to keep from shattering in front of him. I am a bubble about to burst, and he waits me out for what could be minutes but feels like an eternity.
Eventually, as I knew he would, he gives up. I feel his grip slacken, his hands smooth down the path they followed until they hang limply on his lap.
“Okay,” he says. Then, more firmly, “Okay. But promise me something.”
I owe him nothing, but I am curious enough to hear his request.
“What?” I ask.
“Promise,” he says, “to forget me.”
I don’t answer him, but we both know that I will be doing no such thing.
I don’t dream of Julian again after that.
It’s disorienting, at first. I didn’t realize how accustomed I’d gotten to his company in my subconscious until he longer occupied it, until my dreams went back to being improbable reenactments of my memories and thoughts rather than the coherent visions I’d had when I was with him.
He disappears out of my life with the abruptness of a thunderclap and leaves no wake behind: no social media accounts to stalk, no selfies together to moon over.
Work has always been a gas, capable of filling the entire space of my life if I let it, and so I do.
I pick the most complex cases off the add-on board and sign up for every research project, come home late, eat like shit, play with Onix, shed tears onto the keys of my piano.
Whenever I use Palette’s devices, I look out for Leila, but she’s apparently away for “training,” and they send a plucky new guy in her stead.
To make matters worse, I get sick again.
My head hurts all the time and I sweat through my pajamas every night.
Everything turns my stomach; just the smell of Larry’s daily egg and bacon bagel leaves me retching.
I feel like I’m crawling out of my skin.
I feel, I write in my symptoms journal, like I’m going to die.
“Is everything okay?” Pamela asks me one evening, after we’ve finished the day’s cases and everyone has cleared out to go home. Her frown tells me she’s asking out of genuine concern, not just because she wants the tea. “You’ve been…off lately.”
The look I give her must be acerbic, because she holds up two hands in defense.
“I don’t mean in the lab!” she explains. “You’re actually more efficient in there, somehow. Which is freaky, because you look tore up.”
She’s not wrong, but I still grimace.
“Thanks, Pamela.”
“I’m not saying it to be a jerk,” Pamela says. “I’m saying that something is clearly wrong, and that you should think about going to get checked out.”
I think of my symptom journal, of my primary care doctor’s already million-dollar workup, my recent trip to the emergency room. There is nothing wrong with me.
Still, I head to his office one more time.