4. Emily
— · —
Emily
The night before the reunion, I pack like a woman planning an escape, because that’s exactly what I am.
Henry’s downstairs watching something with the volume up, so I’ve got the bedroom to myself and a suitcase open on the bed.
On top go the clothes anyone would expect, the sweaters and the jeans and the one nice dress I’m bringing in case there’s a dinner.
Underneath, where his eyes would never bother to go even if he looked, I tuck the things that actually matter.
My birth certificate. My social security card.
The envelope of cash I collected back from Mrs. Potts’s this afternoon after returning the rental, every soft worn bill of it.
My grandmother’s ring, the little gold band with the chip of a stone, the one I’ve kept hidden for two years because Henry asked once, in that flat tired voice, why I needed to hang onto old family junk.
I zip the case and stand there in the middle of the room.
This is the part where I’m supposed to feel something.
I look at the bed we’ve shared for two years, at the closet split down the middle into his half and mine, at the bathroom where we used to fight over the hot water back when fighting over the hot water was the worst of our problems. I wait for it to hurt.
I wait for the grief to come up and grab me by the throat like it’s supposed to.
It doesn’t. What comes instead feels a lot more like the moment right before you step off something high, when your whole body goes light and certain.
I run my hand over the comforter, once. Not because I’ll miss it.
More because I want to know I was here, that this was me deciding for once instead of just going along with whatever Henry wanted.
That’s new. I pack a bag he knows nothing about, and tomorrow I walk out, and nobody talked me into it or out of it.
It’s mine. Feels strange to even think it.
I carry the suitcase down and set it by the front door.
“All packed?” Henry doesn’t look away from the TV.
“Yeah.”
He pats the cushion next to him and I sit, because it’s easier than not sitting.
His arm comes around my shoulders, heavy and familiar, and I have to hold very still so I don’t shrug it off.
He smells like the same soap he’s always used.
A week ago that smell meant home. Tonight it just makes my skin crawl.
“I’m gonna miss you, babe,” he says.
I’ll bet. I bet the second my bus pulls out of that lot he’s halfway across town with his real life. “It’s only three days. You’ll survive.”
He squeezes my shoulder and goes back to his show. I sit there in the curve of his arm, counting the hours until morning.
***
He insists on driving me to the meetup lot, which means I get one last car ride pretending to be his wife.
He hums along to the radio the whole way, tapping the wheel, in a good mood, lighter than I’ve seen him in weeks.
Of course he is. He’s about to have the house to himself, has three whole days to play family with Carmen and that baby and not one person around to ask questions.
I stare out the window and let the houses blur past and say nothing, because every word I actually want to say would blow the whole thing wide open before I’m ready.
He notices the quiet eventually. “Hey, honey. Is something wrong? You’ve been kind of quiet the last few days.”
How nice of him to notice now, after a week of me moving through that house like a ghost. “Nothing’s wrong. Just excited for the trip, I guess.”
“Yeah?” He smiles, satisfied, and goes right back to humming.
That’s all it takes, because he isn’t actually looking at me.
He never really was. If he were paying any attention he’d have caught a dozen things by now: how I pull back from his hand, the cash gone from the envelope, the fact that I haven’t met his eyes in days.
He doesn’t catch any of it. Funny. All those years I thought he was watching me too close, and it turns out he wasn’t watching me at all.
“Hey, babe?” He glances over. “Try not to spend too much, okay? I gave you thirty bucks, that should cover snacks and whatever.”
Thirty bucks. Three days, and he hands me thirty bucks like it’s a gift, like he’s not dumping the rest of our money on Carmen and that baby across town.
It’s not like I’m sitting on a fortune myself, just the few hundred I scraped together over the years, zipped into my suitcase where he’d never think to look.
But it’s mine and he has no idea, and I have to stare out the window so I don’t laugh right in his face.
“Sure,” I say. “That’s plenty.”
He reaches over and pats my thigh, easy, like he owns it. “And hey. Don’t go reminiscing too hard with any old boyfriends up there, all right? You’re a married woman.”
That one nearly does me in. He’s got some nerve, this man, lecturing me about old flames while he’s got a whole baby stashed across town with Carmen Halter. I keep my eyes out the window and let a slow little smile pull at my mouth, because two can play the sweet-and-poisonous game.
“Don’t worry about me, babe.” I turn and pat his hand right back, same easy way he did mine. “I’m sure I’ll be way too busy thinking about you. You just hold down the fort. Wouldn’t want you getting lonely all by yourself in that big house.”
He smiles, pleased as anything, completely missing it, and God, that’s almost the best part. He has no idea I just wished him three nights alone with the family he thinks I don’t know about.
We pull into the lot and he parks and takes my hand, his thumb running over my knuckles, over the wedding ring I’m still wearing because it isn’t time yet. A missing ring is exactly what even Henry might notice. Soon. Not yet.
“I wish these three days would go by fast,” he says. “I’m gonna miss you.”
Sure he will. He’ll miss me the second he needs his shirts ironed. “You’ll be fine without me. I have a feeling you’ll keep yourself plenty entertained.”
He leans in and kisses me, and I let him, because it’s the last one.
The poor idiot doesn’t even know it. He tastes like coffee and the gum he chews, like three years of my life, and I feel exactly nothing, not a flicker.
I grab my suitcase out of the back, shut the door, and step away from the car.
He pulls out of the lot with a little wave, and I stand there on the curb with everything I own in one bag, waiting for the bottom to drop out of me.
For the panic. For the regret. It doesn’t come.
What cracks open in my chest instead is so light and so clean it almost scares me, because it isn’t grief at all.
It’s relief. I watch his taillights shrink down the road until they turn off, and I keep expecting the feeling to curdle into something I should be ashamed of, and it just doesn’t.
Three days. I have three days where nobody knows where I am every minute, where nobody’s counting my dollars or my hours, where I get to be a person instead of a wife.
I haven’t had that in so long I’d half forgotten it was a thing I was allowed to want.
***
The lot’s already full of people I half recognize, faces I haven’t seen since they were seventeen, thicker now, softer, some of them with kids on their hips.
Seven years does a lot to a graduating class.
I drag my suitcase up onto the curb and stand at the edge of the crowd, scanning for anybody I actually want to talk to, very aware that I’m the only one here who showed up with everything she owns.
Nobody else is looking at their luggage like it’s a life raft.
I make myself loosen my grip on the handle.
For one queasy second the old high-school dread rises up in me, the certainty that I’ll stand here on the outside of every little cluster like I always did, the girl nobody saved a seat for. Then I hear my name.
“Emily!”
Tara. She’s cut her hair, she’s got laugh lines she didn’t have before, and she’s still the best thing this whole place has to offer. She’s already barreling toward me with her arms out.
“Oh my God,” I say into her shoulder, and she’s squeezing the air out of me.
“It’s been, what, forever? Forever.” She pulls back to look at me, hands still on my arms, and her eyes go over my face like she’s checking I’m really here. “You look exactly the same. How are you? How have you actually been?”
And there it is, the question with the little hook in it, the one I’ve been dodging for two years. I open my mouth to give her the easy answer, the fine, the good, the same line I hand everybody, and then over her shoulder I see him.
Richard Reed.
He’s leaning against one of the pillars by the bus with his hands in his pockets, and the seventeen-year-old version of him that’s lived rent-free in the back of my head for years just got bulldozed by whatever this is.
He’s bigger now, filled out through the shoulders and the chest, his face stripped of the soft boyish edges, all clean lines and stubble.
In high school he was the prettiest boy in the building.
Now he’s just hot, hot enough that you look and then make yourself quit looking.
It’s honestly a little unfair. And here I am gaping at him with my dead marriage zipped into a suitcase at my feet, which would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
“Earth to Emily.” Tara’s grinning. “You’ve been staring for a solid ten seconds. It hasn’t even been five minutes and you’ve got me feeling like we’re back in eleventh grade.”
I swat her arm and feel the heat climb up my neck. “Sorry. He caught me off guard.”
“Yeah, no, I don’t blame you one bit.” She drops her voice and leans in. “When I saw him earlier even I got a little weak in the knees, and I don’t even go for guys.” She winks.
I laugh, and it’s the first real laugh I’ve had in days.
God, I missed her. Years of nothing between us and it folds away the second she’s standing in front of me, like we picked up a conversation we paused last week.
She’s still got that grin that always made me feel like we were in on something together.
There’s a whole speech sitting behind my teeth, everything about Henry, about Carmen and the baby, about the bag at my feet, and I want to hand it all to her right now.
But there are too many people, too many old faces who’d love a fresh piece of gossip about quiet little Emily Anderson, so I swallow it down and promise myself I’ll tell her the second we’re alone.
They start loading the bus, and Tara loops her arm through mine and tugs me up the steps. We grab a pair of seats and I slide in by the window. Somebody settles into the seat across the aisle, and when I glance over, it’s him.
“Oh,” I say, far too quickly. “Hi, Richard.”
He turns and smiles, slow and easy, the same smile that used to wreck me at seventeen.
My stomach does something embarrassing. But he doesn’t say anything right away, and the old familiar panic kicks in, the certainty that of course he doesn’t remember me, why would he, I was the girl who faded into the lockers while he was busy being the whole school’s favorite.
“It’s Emily,” I add, and I hate how small it comes out. “In case you don’t...”
“I know who you are.” His mouth tips up at one corner. “I remember you, sunshine.”
My heart trips right over itself.
Sunshine. Nobody’s called me that since high school, and he just drops it like it’s still ours.
He started it the year we were stuck on student council together, after I griped one afternoon about hating summer and how the heat just sits on you.
That was it. I was Sunshine after that, and he never dropped it, not once the whole rest of that year.
Did wonders for the giant pathetic crush I was already drowning in.
Tara’s elbow finds my ribs, and she is not even pretending not to smirk.
“Long time, Reed,” I manage. “You been well?”
“I have.” His eyes drop, just for a second, to my left hand where it’s resting on my knee, to the wedding ring still sitting there. “You too, I take it?”
I look down at the ring like I’ve forgotten it’s there, and my thumb goes to turn it around my finger, a habit I picked up somewhere in the last couple of miserable years.
Henry’s there in my head for one ugly second, the thirty dollars, the kiss I felt nothing for, the bag at my feet with my whole life zipped inside it.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “All rainbows and unicorns over here.”
Richard tilts his head a fraction, and his eyes sharpen for a second, like he’s heard the thing under the thing. But he doesn’t push. He just holds my gaze a beat longer than he needs to, then lets it go and faces front as the bus lurches into gear.
And God help me, even that small thing, that he looked at me like he saw straight through the lie and chose to be kind about it, lands somewhere it has no business landing.
I’d forgotten this part. How he used to make me sharper just by being near, how ten seconds of his attention left me feeling more awake than I’d been in weeks.
It’s stupid. I’m a married woman with a suitcase full of my own escape sitting at my feet.
I have no business feeling anything at all.
Tara leans in close to my ear. “Hey. Everything okay?”
I keep my eyes on the back of the seat in front of me and nod, because if I look at her right now I’m going to tell her everything, right here on a bus full of people I went to high school with, and I am not ready to fall apart in front of all of them yet.
Soon. Just not yet. The bus pulls onto the highway, carrying me away from Henry, from that house, from the whole ruined shape of my old life, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I have no idea what happens next.
And the strangest part is, I’m not even scared of that.
Not yet.