Chapter Two
Two
For the record, I’m not a total loser.
I, for instance, have places to go and people to see.
Or rather, I have one person to see and one place to go with that particular person.
It’s the next night after I found Vin’s lease, I haven’t seen him since he walked out of our apartment, and having plans with someone who wants me around feels a bit, oh, vitally important right now.
Luckily, I’ve already received the very common You’re doing what I tell you to do tonight text from my best friend, Raffi.
Raffi is the sort of person who can take an unbothered shit in a public restroom. When he wants to fuck someone, he asks, nicely, if he can. Generally the answer is a yes. He’s messier than he is handsome, more colorful than he is stylish, and wears mittens instead of gloves in the wintertime.
Our friendship is laughter-forward with top notes of Project Runway and Bruce Springsteen. Base notes of showing up for one another on our darkest days. Which we’ve both, unfortunately, had a lot of this year.
He’s lived in this new apartment for two months now, but I’m still not used to the fact that he doesn’t live in my guest bedroom anymore. It feels weird to have to knock on a front door to access my best friend. He’s supposed to just already be sitting at my kitchen table.
I knock and hear him throwing the locks from the other side. I’m already calling to him. “Hurry up, hurry up, I have to pee! Oh—”
I cut off because it’s not Raffi who’s opened the door. It’s my husband.
Okay, one more thing to know about Raffi:
He’s Vin’s little brother.
Which is how I met Vin.
So. Yeah. That’s a thing.
“Hi,” he of the green eyes says to me. He’s also fled our marital home and come to Raffi’s.
“Hi?” I reply, because what is anyone supposed to say in this awful situation?
The moment stretches and he scratches the back of his neck. “I was just gonna go. I know you two have plans.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“You, uh, have to pee?” He’s stepping aside from the door, beckoning me in.
I can hear Raff loudly singing a Madonna B side while water splats onto the shower floor. The bathroom is clearly occupied. “I’ll wait.”
“Okay.”
I still haven’t entered Raff’s apartment. “I put your mother’s birthday gift on your bed.” Which you’d know if you’d come home last night. Which you didn’t.
“Oh.” He doesn’t even ask what it is.
“I got a portrait framed for her. I picked it up yesterday.”
“From St. Michel?”
“Yeah.”
There’s a long pause. He’s looking at the floor, then glancing up at me. His eyes are green fire. “Did you check it?”
Since when does he care if I check St. Michel’s work? “I’m sure it’s fine.”
His gaze drops. “Right.”
I can’t help it. My eyes narrow and something hot and ugly licks to life in my insides. That was not a thank-you. For organizing and executing his mother’s gift, in time for him to drive it up for her birthday tomorrow, no less.
“You can check it, if you want.” If you’re so worried about it, dickhead is what I definitely don’t say.
“Okay.”
I can’t help it. I have to ask. “What are you going to tell her?”
“Who?”
“Your mom.”
“What am I going to tell her about what?”
What other topic could I possibly be addressing right now? “About us.”
“What about us.”
I’m going to either scream or burst into tears. Why is he making me say this out loud?
“That you’re moving out.”
My blood is firework-fizzling with adrenaline, everything is fuzzy around the edges. Almost nothing could have hurt me more than this emergency exit strategy, this I’m-getting-out-of-here-without-even-a-word.
His nostrils flare and his lips purse. Looking into Vin’s eyes used to give me the same sense of safety that tucking blankets up to my chin does.
I used to call him Vinny Green Eyes. But now, with his new beard obscuring the bottom half of his face, he looks like a different man.
His eyes are suddenly so fierce upon me that it physically hurts to hold eye contact.
Luckily, he rips his eyeline away and slowly scrubs his hands over his face, beard and all.
“I’m not going to tell her that,” he says low.
“Yeah. I guess that makes sense considering you didn’t even bother to tell me.”
His face just sort of shuts down. I’m fatiguing him already.
Throughout our marriage, interactions between us have often had this sort of pacing:
Long pause…Finally Vin says something.
I immediately reply!
Long pause…
This pattern repeats into infinity.
He lets out a long breath (after the requisite long pause). “And what am I supposed to say?”
“I don’t know, Vin. Words might have been nice.”
His mouth opens, then closes. His lips purse again and his eyes pinch closed. He’s got both hands laced over the top of his head. He tries to speak but falters again. Tries again. “Roz…Nothing…has been the same since the accident—”
I can’t help it. It’s a defensive thing. My hands fly up and cover my eyes. “Can you not bring up the accident without a warning? Please?”
I hate the word accident. It has a certain slicing ring to it that makes me instantly queasy. The rest of his sentence slips in through the wound of hearing that word when I didn’t expect it. Nothing has been the same…Yeah. No shit.
“I can’t do this,” he mutters. His hands drop down and he crowds the doorway, trying to get past me into the hallway, but I don’t cede ground.
“So you’re just—” My voice gives way. “You’re just leaving.”
“No. I mean I literally can’t do this.” He points at his heart and then at mine.
By which I think he means deal with me in any capacity.
“Wow.”
This feeling in my gut? It’s like if someone threw you a surprise party but for bad news. “Eight years, Vin. Eight years and you’re just done without even a word.”
There’s a snap in his gaze. A pulse of fury. At me. An emotion so strong it gusts off him. When he speaks, his voice is low and strung as tight as a cello. “Roz. If you think—”
“You’re here!” Raff is slamming out of the bathroom with a little purple towel cinched around his waist. “Sorry, sorry! Lemme just get dressed and I’ll be ready!”
And then he’s locked in his bedroom and Vin and I are locked in silence, breathing hard and looking anywhere but at each other.
“There are two months until the lease starts,” Vin says tightly.
“Oh, great. Wonderful. Should be a really comfortable living situation until then.” I thought our permafrost was bad before this? I can only imagine how the next two months are going to feel. Like getting slowly crushed to death by a glacier, probably.
His eyes are closed again. He’s so frustrated he’s practically vibrating. He takes a long, slow breath. Seconds tick past. “Do you want me to move in with Raffi in the meantime?”
Obviously I’m handing him knives here, but I didn’t, actually, expect him to stab me with them. I make a sound that I hope registers as disgust, and not as mortal pain. “No. No, I don’t even want you to tell Raffi this is happening.”
His eyes search mine until I look away. I can feel his questions, but he doesn’t ask them. “Okay. Fine. We won’t tell Raffi.”
“Yet.”
“And I’ll stay in the guest room.”
“Great.” He’s been there since Raff moved out anyways.
Raffi is going to be coming out any second and if he sees us in this standoff, he’s going to know something is terribly wrong without us having to tell him.
I finally step aside, my arms tightly crossed against my chest. I point toward the hallway with my chin. “If you’re leaving, then…” Do it now.
His eyes drop. “I’ll go.”
And just like that, we’re sliding past one another in a tight doorway. We don’t touch, our hearts pass within an inch.
And that, friends, is what a conversation with my husband is like!
Okay, okay, so maybe I haven’t been a total peach this year either.
Those first few weeks after the accident…
A snapshot: Me awake at four a.m. in sweatpants I haven’t changed in two days.
I’m on the couch in the living room so I don’t wake up Vin, who is sleeping fitfully anyways.
The lights are off even though I know I should just give in and turn them on and read, because who am I fooling?
I’m not going to sleep. Then there’s a noise, it’s Vin.
He’s up and stumbling out of our room. Shoot.
He woke up and I wasn’t there. He’s come to find me.
But he hasn’t. He doesn’t notice me on the couch.
He goes straight for the industrial-sized bottle of ibuprofen on the kitchen counter.
He takes the medicine and drinks straight from the faucet, rests against the counter with his eyes closed, goes back to bed.
And then I’m awake before sunrise, sweating and aggravated, clinging two-handedly to a cup of coffee that does nothing but make me nervous.
Check the schedule for doctor’s appointments, phone calls with our lawyers, and errands (usually to the pharmacy) that need to be done.
Make breakfast. And then the fun stuff. Changing Raffi’s bandages, administering pain meds.
He was badly concussed from the accident and had to have major surgery on his dominant arm, so…
in addition to housing him in our guest room I was also helping him get dressed and wash his hair and eat.
I was the only one of the three of us who wasn’t injured enough to have to take leave from work, but I took it anyways just so they’d have someone there to put meals on the table and count NSAIDs.
Vin’s injuries were technically less severe than Raffi’s—he hadn’t needed surgery—but he still needed everything else.
Pain meds, bandage changing, and PT so he could get used to how to move his body with a fourteen-inch scar down his back.
Then the months after the accident…