104 Ginger
104
Ginger
We made dinner not long after putting Leon down in the guest bedroom, pushing the bed against the wall. It was a simple meal: spaghetti with sauce from a jar. When I kept bugging him, Rhys finally admitted with a laugh that he’d barely even used his kitchen.
“All this is just…” I looked around.
“What?” he asked, sitting down.
“It’s just not you. I don’t like it.”
“Yeah.” He sighed and twirled his noodles around his fork.
We didn’t talk about anything that mattered during dinner. I just told him stuff about Leon: that he’d be starting day care soon; that he’d already taken his first steps (with a bit of help), but that he still preferred crawling and dragging himself around; that he was in love with Donna and a stuffed elephant he always slept with… Rhys smiled, eyes glistening, as he listened and asked questions.
I don’t know which of us said we should go out to the yard after dinner. We lay on the damp grass by the pool under a tree with twisted branches, a mimosa, maybe. Rhys had his arms folded behind his head and was staring into the dark sky while our bare feet touched.
Crickets could be heard in the background. I realized that, for the first time since we saw each other at the hospital, silence wasn’t enough.
“What happened to you, Rhys?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
Continuing despite my fears, I asked, “Did you want to end it all?”
“No. Jesus, Ginger, no.”
He turned to me. His eyes were bright, nervous, staring straight into mine. He looked surprised by my question, but I hadn’t been able to suppress it after reading all those messages in one go and seeing him so lost, like a little boy.
Because that’s what he was. In some way, Rhys still had a child’s soul. Despite the darkness in him. Despite the way he glowed. Despite how together he seemed to the people who didn’t know him. A Peter Pan in Never Never Land. A Little Prince on his asteroid. I could see what was missing in him, his weaknesses, his fear of confronting his father.
“Things just got out of hand. I wasn’t thinking that night. I hadn’t been thinking for a long time. I was up against the limit.”
“Why’d it happen, Rhys?”
“I don’t know…”
“I should have been there to help you.”
“You tried.”
“Not enough.”
“I never let you help me.”
“And I hated that part of you.”
“I know. It’s just that the emptiness…” He brought a hand to his heart and looked up in the sky. “I feel it right here. Always. And I can’t handle it. And then, when I’m in the spiral, it’s like I don’t feel anything. Nothing good, nothing bad. Just nothing.”
I turned and sank my fingers into his hair, just for the pleasure of doing so, of feeling us connected again physically, knowing he was close to me, real. “You never thought that maybe there’s no need to fill in the emptiness?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe the emptiness just is. Like the holes in Swiss cheese. You don’t look at them and think you need to fill them. They don’t need to be filled in to make things better.”
“Maybe I’m like that, like a piece of Swiss cheese.”
“Sure. Or like the moon, Rhys.”
“Why the moon?”
“It’s full of craters, but they’re pretty, aren’t they? Way more so than if its surface was just smooth. You’re like the moon. All of us are—we’re all imperfect. But so what? We can live with that. We should live with that.”
“Come here.” He hugged me.
We stayed like that a few seconds, holding each other as if the world would fall apart if we ever let each other go, as if his body pressing into mine were the only thing that brought order to the universe, held the chaos at bay, maintained calm.
“Promise me you won’t do that again,” I whispered, trying not to cry. “And don’t lie to me like you did that day when you left the restaurant. Don’t you dare.”
“I swear I won’t, Ginger. I really swear it.”
I looked at him, smiling nervously, because his hands on my waist were burning hot, and his breath, so close, was tempting me.
“I saw you have all my books…”
“I read them too,” he said with a chuckle.
“For real? You read them all?”
“Of course! Who do you take me for? I also… I tried to imagine why you chose them, why you decided it was important for each of those stories to be told.”
“Don’t make me cry, Rhys.”
He smiled slyly and looked down at me, turning inward slightly. My head was resting on his shoulder. “What happened with James?”
“You waited long enough…”
“It was killing me,” he admitted, and despite everything, I smiled. “I was dying to ask you. But if you don’t want to tell me…”
“No, that’s not it. It just hurt. Not because of us, but because of Leon. I kept thinking about him, and that made me feel guilty. I guess it didn’t work because we just weren’t in love. We did love each other. And that was nice at first. But later, the feeling wasn’t strong enough. It wasn’t how it had to be. It wasn’t everything it should be.”
“How should it be?”
As he asked that, his long, warm fingers played with mine on the dew-covered grass, and my heart beat faster.
“Rhys, you know the answer to that question.”
“I want you to tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“You do though. You told me once.” His thumb rubbed the back of my hand. “ It’s feeling a tingle in your stomach when you see them. Not being able to stop looking at them. Missing them even though they’re right there. Wanting to touch them at all hours, talking about any- and everything, feeling like you lose all sense of time when you’re together. Noticing the details. Wanting to know everything about them, even the stupid stuff. You know what, Rhys? I think it’s actually like being permanently on the moon. With a smile on your face. Without fear. ”
I didn’t want him to see me trembling.
“How can you remember so perfectly everything I wrote?”
“I’ve reread it lots of times.”
“Still…”
“And back then, I was on the moon.”
“Rhys…”
“No. I fucked it up, Ginger. For years I’ve been stumbling over the same obstacle, and I’m the one who put it there. I was wrong. And now…”
“Everything’s changed,” I managed to say.
“Not the important things. Not us.”
“Two years have passed, Rhys.”
“And yet I feel like it’s just been a few months since I said goodbye to you at the end of the summer we spent together, because in all the time since, I’ve felt nothing. It’s as if I didn’t exist. Ginger…” He reached up to stroke my cheek, and I flinched. I could tell he was nervous, uncertain. His fingers traced the outline of my lips. “Don’t you feel anything anymore? Don’t you feel me?”
What could I tell him? Yes? That he was one of the reasons my relationship with James had fallen apart? That no other man could come out on top when I remembered everything he had made me feel, how well we knew each other, for better and for worse, and how unconditionally I loved him, tenderly, but also like an addict? It was true what I had said about that long-ago night, that he shined so brightly I could see nothing else…
He must not have understood my silence.
But in my heart, I wished that he had.
His lips touched mine. That’s all—just a touch. It was almost nothing, but I felt it the way I’d never felt anything else. Reticent, unsure…from Rhys, it felt almost dainty, because I remembered him as savage, intense, hungry. Anything but tender.
“Let’s try, Ginger,” he whispered against my lips before kissing them again, slowly, softly. “I’ll give you everything you want. You and Leon. I should have from the first day I met you. I thought about it too. I swear I did. At the airport in Paris, when you were about to turn around and get in line. You were just a kid. And I wanted to kiss you so bad. And I should have. And, dammit, I never should have told you not to wait for me after what happened on the Ferris wheel. I should have told you I’d come back in a few months after signing that contract to go to Australia…”
“Rhys, don’t do this.”
“And then came the worst part. That summer.”
“We can’t change what happened.”
“I was crazy about you. I was so in love, I got angry at myself and at you, at both of us, the closer we got to your departure. I didn’t dare put myself out there. It was like I had vertigo. I should have gone with you, because if I’m honest, there was nothing I really cared about keeping me here. Just a bunch of smoke and mirrors…”
“Rhys, stop torturing yourself like this.” I wrapped my arm around his waist.
“All I want is to be with you and to compose. Wherever. In London. And I’ll buy a house in Australia, a little old one we can renovate, and we can take our vacations there. We can have a cat…”
It sounded perfect. Magical. But distant.
“Rhys, look at me. Breathe. Take a deep breath.”
He did. He breathed in several times, not taking his eyes off me, telling me so much in the silence broken by the beating of two hearts.
“I don’t want to lose another second.”
“I know.” We were so close.
“You’re my anchor. I needed time to understand that. But remember how you asked me about this tattoo when we saw each other in London last time? Well, I got it for you.”
I saw it despite the darkness. A little anchor on the back of his hand, near the half moon and the musical note. I ran my fingers over it and wanted to cry. I realized that everything was different here, tonight, under the stars. We were ourselves, but different. We were ourselves beyond lust, beyond desire. We were what was left afterward, under all those layers that come together sometimes but other times get mixed up and cover things. We were trust, care, friendship, love, knowing each other.
But we weren’t in the right moment.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Which?” I asked.
“If you still feel me…”
“You know I do, Rhys. You know I always will.”
“Then…”
We couldn’t stop touching each other, even if just subtly. My fingers in his hair, his hand on my face, his arms around me…
“You need to put yourself back together right now,” I said. His expression was bitter, so I grabbed his hand. He could barely look me in the eye. “I love you, Rhys. But I want you to be okay. And you need to go see your dad. You know that, right? You need to because I know you, and I know if you don’t, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
Rhys lay back, looked into the sky, and rubbed his face with his hands. I watched his chest rise and fall as he sighed and rested a hand over his heart.
“I’ll be there on the other side of the screen.”
“I’m going to fucking need you…”
“I know.”
“Shit.”
“What are you so afraid of?”
“I don’t know. Him saying something that hurts me again. Or not knowing how to forgive him or ask for forgiveness. I talked about this with my mother…” He shook his head. “Until pretty recently, she thought I didn’t know. That was the one thing my father asked me before I walked out the door. Not to tell her. And I didn’t. I don’t know why. I guess because my mother had such a hard time when she was sick, and I didn’t want to pour salt in the wound. I know, Ginger. It’s been like a snowball, just getting bigger and bigger. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand how families could spend so many years together and just up and stop talking, but then I grew up, and things got complicated. And pride came in. Mine. His. And the years passed, and then I got what we’re looking at now. Something just completely shattered.”
“You can still fix it.”
“He’s dying, Ginger.”
“Exactly. For that very reason.”
“What if it doesn’t work out?”
“Well, Rhys, then at least you tried.”
“I missed you so much,” he told me.
“I missed you too.”
I rested my head on his chest. He kissed my forehead, then looked back up into the sky, and I did too. The moon was a slender sickle, barely visible.
“The third book I decided to publish,” I went on, “was about the tie between two people. I remember this one phrase about how it didn’t matter how much time had passed, how many changes the people went through in their lives, that bond was still there. A thread that trembled, got pushed and pulled, frayed, but never broke. Maybe that’s what the thread that unites us is like, Rhys.”
“I hope so, Ginger. I really do.” He squeezed me, then whispered in my ear one of my favorite phrases from The Little Prince : “ I wonder whether the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again .”