Chapter Twenty-Three #3
Raff scrambles up from his pretzeled doomscrolling. “What?”
“Go do an errand for me.”
“Okay!”
I’ve been pawning off errands and tasks to Raffi left and right these days. I’m humbled by how fast he obliges. I guess nobody wants to be the baby brother for the rest of their life.
I give him directions, explicit instructions, and cash. He puts the cash back in my hand. “Please. What is this, milk money? Either let me pay for it or Venmo me later. Cash is just embarrassing.”
“See? Old-fashioned.” I point at myself.
“Old-fashioned is cute,” Vin says, coming in through the door and taking his boots off. “I wouldn’t know what to do with you if you were cutting-edge.”
“Back in a jiff.” Raff scoots out the door.
“Where’s he going?”
“You’ll see.”
Tonight, I join Vin in the shower because why not? He’s my husband, after all. He’s in love with me, after all. Because somebody has to wash this day off him. Somebody has to open their arms wide for all that care, all that persistent love.
Of course, he’s the one washing me. Of course, we end up on the bed, turning the bedsheets translucent with my soaking wet hair. Of course we get back in the shower and are so hopped up on endorphins we just can’t stop smiling.
I’m smiling for another reason too.
We’re in pajamas and chopping vegetables at the counter, side by side, when there’s a noise that makes us both jump.
It’s just Raff. Rattling back through our door. He comes in with a dazed expression on his face.
“What’s wrong?” Vin is bristling, stepping toward him, but I’m pretty sure I already know what’s happening.
“Nothing…” Raff says, kicking off his shoes, crossing the room, and handing the package off to me. “I just…met someone.”
“On your errand? Jesus Christ, you can’t swing a dick without finding somebody to flirt with,” Vin says, hands on his hips.
“I think the dick-swinging might be why he meets people to flirt with,” I say, with a grin, because I know exactly what happened and I’m determined to relish every second of this.
“No, no,” Raff says, sitting down at the table. “I think I, like, really met someone. Someone…”
He’s run out of words to describe this someone, so I helpfully fill in some blanks. “Was he about this tall? Salt and pepper? Probably wearing some silk garment worth more than a monthly mortgage payment? French accent? Somehow made you feel like dirt and ten feet tall at the same moment?”
Vin looks from me back to Raff. “You met St. Michel?”
Raff spins in his seat. “You know him too?”
Vin shrugs. “Sure.” And then he turns to me. “What’d you have framed?”
“I’ll show you once Raff is done turning into Jell-O. This is fun.”
“I’m done, I’m done,” Raff says with a wave at me. But he’s not. He’s thinking about St. Michel with a blush in his cheeks.
I can’t help but get Raff in a headlock. “St. Michel is good at loving people in pieces,” I tell him. “He says relationships should work for the people who are in them.”
“Stop!” Raff is covering his ears and melting down toward the table. Then he’s jolting upright. “Should I ask him on a date? No, he’s way too cosmopolitan for that. I should follow his business on IG and—and—”
“Raff, I sent you over there in short shorts and a sun hat. With this mustache? And your thighs? I’m sure he’s clocked you. Play it cool for a few days. Then go back and get something framed. He’ll be feeding you oysters and tying you to his bed frame in no time.”
“Do I like this?” Vin asks no one in particular. “Hard to say.”
“Okay.” I unhand Raff and pick the package back up, walk it over to Vin. “You got one for me framed. And now I got one for you framed.”
He takes the package and holds it, his eyes flicking to mine. He doesn’t even have to see it yet, to confirm. My heart is in this package, he just knows it.
He pulls the paper off all at once and his eyes instantly fill. Raff comes to look over his shoulder.
It’s a drawing of a thought. Of a hope. Something I’d like to understand.
It’s the three of us, sitting around a table, maybe at a café, drinking coffee.
And in this drawing, we are older. In this drawing, we are perfectly fine.
In this drawing, we are living very, very normal lives.
Which is to say, layered lives. Lives shot through with crimson.
Lives with pillowy, inviting shadows in the corners of darkened rooms. Lives that sometimes wake us up in the night.
And lives we talk about, and draw about, when we have to set them down.
Daniel’s voice fills my head. Roz, there are clearly moments, ideas, concepts, memories in your head that are dying to be drawn. And you’ll understand them differently once you do.
“This, I think, is the reason I’ve been so pulled toward drawing,” I tell them. “I needed to get this idea down. Us. Together. Old. I think I needed to see it to believe it, you know?”
Vin wipes his eyes on his sleeve. “I know exactly what you mean. It’s the same reason I’ve told the story of that night”—he points to his framed photo, of the night we met, on the wall—“a few different times at Sooth,” Vin says in a gruff voice.
“To explain how I feel about you, Roz. But also because I go back to that night. Over and over. I need to tell it to believe it. That we were ever that young. That we were—”
“Safe,” I supply, and point at the title of my drawing, written in the corner. “It’s the same thing I write whenever I draw you. Like I can protect you, by enshrining the moment or something.”
“The end is the beginning,” Raff whispers, and puts his head on Vin’s shoulder. “That was the name of one of Vin’s stories about the night you two met. The end is the beginning. That night was the last time you two were ever not together. That part of your life ended. And the rest began.”
And the accident, that was an ending. A very clear ending.
But right now, in this moment, when Vin gets his tools out from the closet and puts up the framed drawing next to the framed photo on the living room wall, it also feels like it was a beginning.
What if we never get over it? I’d asked Vin.
And I think…I think the answer is in that drawing and in that photo.
Maybe we never really get over anything.
It just becomes…a part of your drawing, a part of your story.
You adapt, you grow, you think about it less.
You form new habits. You meet new people.
But getting over it? Making it like it didn’t even happen?
I don’t know. If you want it like it never happened…
that’s just denial, right? We have to learn how to accept it.
It happened. It’s real. We’re here on the other side.
We’re smiling from the other side. Crying and wailing from the other side.
Yes, cooking from the other side. Holding each other and feeling perfectly fine on an awful lot of days.
Later, when Raff goes home, Vin and I lie on the couch and look at the art on the wall.
“It’s so cool, baby,” he says. “That you’re learning how to draw.”
“I feel like what I’m doing is learning how to see.”
“Me too,” he agrees. “Storytelling, it’s like I’m learning how to think.”
And I pull him down, over the top of me. He knows better now than to give me his weight. So he just cages me in with his elbows. We become our perfect unit. Our two becomes one. Me and Vin against the world.
But no, that’s not right.
It’s me and Vin, a part of the world.
Me and Vin, thank God, here, alive, together, injured and healing.
You can’t delete a chapter and get the same ending. And I no longer want to try. I want all of it. Every tangle. I’ll draw right off the edge of the page.
Him and me, we’re shooting for infinity.