Chapter Thirty-One
NEW CITY, NEW ME, IS the plan.
I pick a place clear across the country from him, a city that's never heard me laugh, which turns out to be its own specific brand of lonely, and I get off the bus with my two suitcases and my orange pill bottle and my heart that isn't mine, and I start over the way I'm apparently very good at starting over.
I wait tables. I sleep on a cot in a share with four other girls chasing the same dream, and I audition for anything that'll hold still long enough to be auditioned for.
And I am, technically, fine.
That's the word I use in my head when the ache tries to start a conversation.
Fine. I'm fine at the diner and fine on the cot and fine in the audition rooms. I'm fine right up until the smallest hours, when the four other girls are breathing slow and even and I catch myself doing the exact thing I swore on the bus I'd stop doing, which is lying still in the dark and listening for a man who used to move through his whole apartment without making a sound.
Listening for footsteps on the far side of a wall that's three thousand miles away now and belongs to somebody else's life.
And then I remember, fresh, every single time, like it's brand new every time, that this is the silence I picked.
That nobody took him. That I set him down with my own two hands and walked, and a girl doesn't get to cry about a weight she chose to carry to the curb herself.
And the heart doesn't help. The one that was never even mine to give him picks those exact hours to go reaching after him, like it knows the way back even when I've made very sure the rest of me doesn't. It never once listened to me about him.
I don't know why I thought leaving would teach it to start.
I cry about it anyway. Into a cot pillow, so the other girls don't hear. It's the one thing I let myself have, and I keep it small, and I'm done before morning, every time.
Because somewhere over a state I couldn't name, on that bus with my forehead against the cold window, I decided something. He was right.
Not about the cruel. He was wrong about the cruel, so wrong, and some furious little part of me is going to go on knowing that till I die.
But underneath the cruel, down in the ugly true part, he was right.
I owe her more than this. More than taking the second chance her heart bought me and spending it falling for the man she loved, in the home they must have shared, wearing the very thing she left behind.
So I take my second chance, and I aim it at something that isn't him, and I try, every clumsy day, to be worth a heart I got handed by a stranger I never even got to thank to her face.
The breakthrough, when it comes, comes the way these things come.
A tiny indie nobody expects a thing from.
A director who looks at my grounded, real, two-suitcases face and sees something he can use.
A part that's small on paper and turns out to be the whole beating middle of the movie.
I get the call standing in the diner in my apron.
I've booked the lead.
And I stand there in the middle of the lunch rush, phone shaking in my hand, the best news of my whole scrappy life pouring straight into my ear, and I do what I've done my whole life, the one reflex nobody ever managed to train out of me.
When something wonderful happens, you call the person you love.
So I reach for my phone to call the one person on earth I want to tell.
Then I remember I don't get to. That I never really got to.
That the whole time I lived in his beautiful silent home I was only ever borrowing him, same as I'm borrowing everything else that beats and breathes in me.
So I put the phone back in my apron pocket, and I go take table nine their fries, and I let the best day of my whole career be completely, perfectly, and entirely alone.