5. Geo #2
The tour has a three-day break, and I’ve spent forty-eight hours on planes and in airports, traveling from Berlin to Los Angeles with nothing but a carry-on and a desperate need to see my daughter.
Things have been bad. I know things have been bad.
The statement hit harder than I expected, the comments turned vicious, the thinkpieces multiplied, and Geo won’t answer my calls.
There’s a video floating around that Vivian swears she didn’t send but that someone clearly did, and everything is spinning out of control in ways I don’t know how to fix.
But I’m going to try. I’m going to walk through the door with Val’s favorite stuffed animal, a new one, bigger and softer than the rabbit, a ridiculous pink elephant I found in a Berlin toy store, and I’m going to hold my daughter and tell my wife that we need to talk. Figure out what comes next.
The Uber drops me at the foot of the driveway at 6 p.m. The sun is setting behind the hills, painting the sky in shades of gold and pink, and for a moment the house looks exactly the way it did on the day we moved in. Full of promise. Full of possibility.
But then I notice that Geo’s car is gone.
And the windows are dark.
I let myself in with my key. “Geo? Val?”
Silence.
The foyer is dim, the evening light filtering through the windows in long, dusty stripes. I flip on the lights. Everything looks the same, the furniture in the right places, the art on the walls, the shoes by the door. But it’s wrong. Pieces are missing.
“Geo?”
I climb the stairs two at a time, my heart starting to pound.
The master bedroom door is open. The closet is open.
Empty.
Her clothes are gone. Her shoes. Her makeup. The photo albums we kept on the shelf by the window, the ones she spent hours organizing, the ones that held every memory of our life together.
All gone.
Val’s room is worse. The bed is stripped, the mattress bare. The stuffed animals are gone. The books are gone. My daughter’s room looks like a crime scene. Like someone came in and erased her, carefully and completely, leaving nothing but furniture behind.
I find the ring on my pillow. A simple gold band, catching the light from the window. Beneath it, a note in Geo’s handwriting.
I heard everything. You sold us.
And beside it, a photo. Me and Vivian in Paris, 2 a.m., my arm around her waist.
I sit on the bed. The bed where my wife slept alone for months while I was on tour, building a new life with someone else. I hold the ring in my palm, the ring I placed on her finger five years ago while promising to love and cherish and protect.
The metal is cold.
I try to call her. The call doesn’t ring. It just ends.
Blocked.
I try to text. The message doesn’t deliver.
Blocked.
I try email and it bounces back immediately. Social media, and her accounts are gone, every one of them, like she’s simply ceased to exist.
I open the video file. The one that Vivian swears she didn’t send, the one that’s been making the rounds despite our attempts to suppress it.
My own voice plays back at me: She makes me feel like I’m drowning.
I watch myself explain why my wife isn’t enough. Why our marriage isn’t enough. Why I chose music and fame and Vivian over the woman who gave up everything for me.
I watch myself destroy everything that mattered.
I sit in the empty house, holding a wedding ring that no one wears anymore, and understand for the first time what I’ve done.
She is gone.
Really, truly gone.
And it’s my fault.
Later that night, after the silence has become unbearable, I find myself in the closet.
Not looking for anything. Not doing anything productive. Just standing there in the dark, surrounded by my clothes, my shoes, the trappings of a life that suddenly feels like a costume I’ve been wearing.
And then I see it.
A garment bag, pushed to the far corner. The only thing of hers still left in the house.
I know what’s inside before I unzip it. I know the color, the weight, the way the fabric moves. But I unzip it anyway, slowly, carefully, like I’m handling glass.
The gold dress spills out into my hands.
It’s the same shade she wore when I proposed. The night I sat up until dawn writing a song I could never finish, while she slept in my bed, her hair spread across my pillow, her breath slow and trusting.
The same shade Vivian wore to the VMAs.
I didn’t notice at the time. Or maybe I noticed and didn’t let myself think about what it meant.
I sit on the closet floor with the dress pooled in my lap, and I remember.
The night she came to the studio wearing this. The hope in her eyes. The way she’d done her hair and her makeup, the way she’d tried so hard to look like the woman I fell in love with.
You look nice, I said.
Nice.
She put on the dress from our engagement, the dress I told her made her look like sunlight given form, and I said she looked nice and went back to the piano. Back to Vivian. Back to the song that seemed so important at the time.
I hold the fabric to my face. It still smells faintly of her perfume, the one she used to wear before Val was born, the one she stopped wearing because she said it was too much trouble.
I find her old demos on my phone. The recordings from years ago, before it all came apart. Her voice fills the closet, clear and beautiful and so full of life.
One track is just her singing in the kitchen, humming a melody I don’t recognize. She didn’t know I was recording. She was just singing, happy and unguarded, the way she used to be before I made her feel like she had to be quiet.
I play it until the sun comes up.
Halfway through the eighteenth play, I come apart.
The grief hits me like a wall of water. I can’t breathe or think. I can only feel, the loss, the regret, the devastating understanding of what I’ve thrown away.
I cry until my chest hurts. Until my throat is raw. Until I’m curled on the floor of my own closet, surrounded by expensive clothes and a gold dress and the sound of my wife’s voice singing a song I never bothered to learn.
I’m lost.
I lost her.
And no amount of success will ever fill the space where she used to be.