Chapter Twenty-Eight
Knowing nothing is happening Thursday and Friday makes me feel like I’m on vacation. Yes, I have my usual motel duties, and we have the dive-in movies. I’m not driving to Bakersfield, and I’m not confronting my old wounds and slaying dragons, so it feels nearly peaceful.
Nathan and I hole up in his room, unusual because I still feel weird about being in a guest’s room, but here we are.
“This feels naughty,” I say, stretching out on the end of his bed while he sits at his desk, typing and looking furious at the world.
He just looks that way sometimes. It’s intensity. It’s caring. It’s part of who he is.
I’ve inhaled two of his thrillers, even with everything that’s going on. They’re like the man himself. Sharp, insightful, hard in some ways. His main protagonists are so emotionally invulnerable, I want to punch them in their rock-hard stomachs. There are no romances in his books. Sex, liaisons, but nothing I’d call a real romance.
Typical, and he isn’t typical in so many other ways.
He turns and looks at me. “I’d report you to HR, but I think that’s ... you.”
“Maybe.” I roll over onto my stomach. “I ship Tanner with Monica, by the way.” His main military man and his friend slash colleague are, in my opinion, crying out for some bedpost-rattling sex and a happy ending.
“Nope,” he says.
“You can’t tell me what I ship, Nathan.”
He looks at me. “I can tell you what I don’t intend to write.”
“Boring!”
“Why is that boring?”
I throw my hands into the air. “Like, goddamn, Nathan, he’s always saving the world, and she’s there for him. Don’t they deserve some happiness?”
“Some people can’t be happy. They have missions.” He turns back to his computer, and I wonder if he means him. I also wonder if he’s working on Sarah’s book.
I stand up and move behind him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders. He doesn’t pull away or hide the screen from me.
“How is the mission?” I ask.
“I’m . . . done,” he says.
It’s so final and so strange, even to me. “Oh. Nathan, I’m ...” I don’t know if I’m supposed to be happy for him or if this is another form of losing her.
Writing about her, pulling her words from her journals and turning them into a story, would have kept her close to him. Now it’s just done.
I take a breath. “Can I read it?”
He stills beneath my touch.
“I don’t have to,” I say, starting to pull away, but he puts his hand over my wrist and holds me there.
“You can.”
We stay like that for a second, and I can feel his heart beating under where my arm rests against him. Hard. Steady.
I close my eyes. “Only if you’re okay with it.”
“I want you to read it,” he says, and his voice is stronger now, surer.
He emails me the document, and I get my laptop and sit in his bed. I start reading, and I’m not sure what I expect from this book. From this faithful adaptation of a woman’s life, written by the man who loved her.
But it’s somehow more, somehow deeper than I could’ve imagined.
It isn’t just Sarah I’m reading about, but Nathan. Because I can see her through his eyes. I can see how much he admired her. I can see her achievements through the lens of someone who loved her so much, and it humbles me.
I have never had a single person in my life who looked at something that I did in this way. I don’t feel envious, not really. I’m in awe. That somebody like him can see a person that way even after everything he’s been through.
That this kind of love and connection can exist in the world.
Nathan offers to get us lunch, and I nod in agreement as I shift positions and stretch across the bed with the laptop in front of me, my chin propped up on my hands.
He talks about how they met. How deeply she accepted him. There is honesty in these pages, about all the ways in which they clashed through the years. They’re both active people. Nathan loves to hike. Sarah always wants to be outdoors with her horses, or entertaining friends, and Nathan wants to spend hours working on his book. She’s proud, but she doesn’t quite understand him. I realize that’s the lens he sees her through as well. He is astonishingly proud of everything she does. He doesn’t love horses, not like she does. He understands that it matters to her, and because of that it matters to him. They pour so many resources into her endeavors. It is a very real support.
He finds a way to love it because she does.
I find the capacity for that fascinating too. I also know what it’s like, to be the partner who’s slightly more introverted, and I’m not even as introverted as Nathan. But I didn’t want to go to industry events all day every day in the way that Chris did. I had to be dragged to them sometimes, and it felt like putting on a mask to get ready to go. I can see a sensitivity in the way he and Sarah handled this with each other that I didn’t experience in my own relationship. I think that maybe their commitment to being different and supportive is a very rare thing.
I think how much it must’ve meant to him, coming from a family where he was very different from his parents, from his brothers, and finding someone who not only accepted him but who did it while not being exactly the same person he was.
That is a gift.
I can’t help but love Sarah as I read this book. Her drive is singular, to the point where, when she is diagnosed with cancer, her primary concern is still making it to the Olympics. She doesn’t want anyone to know she’s sick. There are times during her illness where that puts a massive strain on her and Nathan, even as he recognizes that this is her life and she has to be able to go out the way that she wants to. She doesn’t want to extend her life for four or six months longer if she misses out on the things she loves the most.
She doesn’t want to lie in a bed. She doesn’t want a surgery that will make her worse and not heal her entirely.
I feel his tension in that, his acceptance, but I also feel her bravery. Her strength. There is so much certainty in her. Of course, her choice costs Nathan. It costs him time. He’s the one left with the whole life to live after.
Even so, her decision isn’t selfish, and he never comes close to painting it that way. Her decision is the sum total of her life and her legacy. The writing is his determination to honor it.
Nathan comes back with food, but I’m lying here crying very real tears as Sarah wins her final gold medal. Thin and ill, with people making comments about eating disorders while in reality colon cancer has ravaged her body. She doesn’t let it affect her because she knows her strength. She was a very strong person in ways I’m not sure I’ve ever had to be. In ways I know I’ve never had to be. I’m not sure I’ve ever known who I am with the level of certainty that Sarah Hart did.
I realize that Nathan could only know her this well after she was gone. He knew her the whole time, but he got her side of it after. I can’t help but feel a sense of tragedy in that.
Or maybe it isn’t tragic. Maybe it’s just a miracle to be known this way, no matter when it happens.
He sits in his desk chair, holding the bag with our food, and I keep reading, overwhelmed by a swell of emotion. The book doesn’t end with her dying. It ends with that medal. I lay my head down and weep. He says nothing.
I can’t say anything.
Not for a while.
When I finally do find words, I just want them to be the right ones. Our grief is different. My loss doesn’t mean that I perfectly understand his. Or that I have all the right words. He had to love her while letting her do things that physically hurt her. He had to love her while watching her die slowly over eighteen months. And ever since then he’s carried this great need to tell the story.
“I’m sorry if it’s offensive,” I say, “that I finished something that took you three years in just about four hours.”
He shakes his head. “That’s the best compliment I can get. I guess it’s readable.”
I laugh, watery and emotional. “Barely. It’s really beautiful.”
He nods, and I see heaviness in his eyes.
“You finished,” I say.
He nods again. “Yes. I did.”
There is a finality to it, as there is with everything he does. This certainty. He told the story. The story of this beautiful, defining relationship. The story of this person. Because yes, their love was part of it, and the way he loves her is key to it, but ultimately, it is the story of a singular woman and how she lived. How she made sure to leave on her own terms, even if she wouldn’t have chosen to leave when she did.
“I can see why she’s the love of your life,” I say softly. “It was really a lovely relationship.”
“Yeah. I’m lucky,” he says.
But again, there’s that finality.
It’s like the fall of the guillotine.
Losing Sarah has separated him off from possibility, and that’s what he wants .
He did it. He was her husband, and it’s over now.
Now he’s done this.
I’m desperate to know what that means for him. What will become of him now? Will he go back to Bainbridge Island and rot away in his office while he writes books about other people? Characters he will never give a romance to, because obviously he wants to avoid the implications of romance. I’m worried, because I know about my own tendencies.
Yes, I came here. I revamped the motel, I did make friends. I also know I spent a long time keeping parts of myself locked away. I have too much in common with him not to worry about his isolation.
“Maybe I’ll travel the world,” he says.
I don’t believe him.
I can see that he doesn’t see anything magical in the world anymore. He is fixed. He doesn’t feel wonder. He is locked still in that old world, where all the joy has been leached out. Of course I selfishly want him to see a different possibility. A different future. Though, it’s more than that. He can be done. Done with love, as much as I wish that weren’t the case. I don’t want him to be done with life. With the world. With magic. I feel a small amount of hope because he’s had sex with me. That sounds silly. In reality, sex, the way we’re doing it, is just to feel good. Just to feel close. It’s alchemy between two bodies. I know there are cynical versions of that, but what we have isn’t cynical.
“Well, you’re done with this ,” I say. “I’m on track with my book again. We should go camping.”
“Camping?”
“Yes.”
“You have a dive-in movie.”
“Yes, I do, and any number of people can set it up for me. Let’s get out of here. Let’s get out of ... your head.”
I want him to feel some magic. I want to. I need it.
“You have camping gear?” he asks.
I laugh. “Believe it or not, I do.”
In the early days, there were renovations, and also, sometimes being contained in four walls felt too claustrophobic. Being alone with my thoughts without the feedback of birds or the sun or something other than the echo in my skull.
“Well, okay then. I can’t see a reason not to.”
I can’t tell if that means he wants to or not.
I get off the bed and move over to where he sits. I grab his face, and I stare into those green eyes. “Okay, but that’s not enough. I want you to come camping with me because I want you to see the sunset. Because I want you to see the stars. I want you to fuck me outside because that sounds amazing and I’ve never done that before. I want you to see that there are good things.” My breath hitches. “I want me to see that there are good things. It’s been a lot of pain for a long time. We deserve something.”
It’s on the verge of being a declaration, and he doesn’t pull away from me like I’m afraid he might. Instead, he hangs on to my wrist and looks back at me.
“Those are some pretty damn good reasons,” he says.
There’s a desperation there. I recognize him for what he is. A man who hit a blank page in his life. A man who doesn’t know what happens next. I can feel him almost reach out to me. I can tell what he’s thinking. The almost is good enough.
“We deserve a little treat,” I say.
He laughs at that. “Yeah. If anyone does.”
I savor this victory, small though it may be. I give thanks for these two empty days. Because apparently Nathan and I needed empty days more than I realized.
We’re both so good at filling time. With books and writing and, for me, the busyness of the motel.
Slowing down always felt too scary. Now I realize I was running from exactly what I needed.