Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Three
An hour later we’re in the shower and I finally get to see 2-in-1 as God intended it. Miles is wearing a crown of suds that’s only getting bigger the more he scrubs.
“Your poor hair.”
He frowns at me, still scrubbing. “What’s wrong with my hair?”
“You might as well just use nail polish remover.”
“Huh?”
“First order of business as your lov-ah,” I say, and grin when he grimaces, “is to get you on the conditioner train.”
“There’s conditioner in 2-in-1! It’s half of the 2.”
“Why don’t you use those?” I ask, pointing to the bottles of shampoo and conditioner he once used on my hair after dunking me in the sink.
“They’re yours.”
I blink at him. “They’re mine? You bought shampoo for me, like, two months ago? How’d you know I’d be showering with you, you pervert?”
He laughs and elbows me out from under the water to rinse the suds off his head. “I wasn’t plotting to get you to shower with me. But you already had a toothbrush in my cup. You were already switching my toilet paper to your preferred setting. You were sleeping on my couch and eating my food. I thought a shower was highly probable. Get back under the water, you look freezing.”
He snicks open the shampoo bottle and hands it to me. I wince getting my haircut wet and gently massage my aching hair.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, eyeing me carefully.
“My scalp is getting used to its new reality.”
He gives me a naked, soapy hug. “ I’m still getting used to the new reality.”
I rinse and he hands me the conditioner next.
“So…” he says, glancing at me. “Was your reaction to my room because my room is weird?”
I laugh. “No! There’s nothing wrong with your room. It’s really lovely. My reaction was because I’m me. And anything new is weird.”
He sighs, hugging in next to me under the spray to rinse. “Len, I don’t think I’m gonna keep this apartment.”
“Wait, what? Your bedroom is not weird! Seriously! I’m sorry I panicked. Don’t take it to heart!”
He turns the shower off and distributes towels. “It’s not that…Actually, it’s part of what Reese and I were talking about earlier.”
I scramble to catch up. “She asked you to leave ?”
Miles mentioned a long time ago that he keeps the studio apartment because even though he owns this place, if Reese asked him to leave, he’d go. But I always thought that was overprecautionary.
“No! No, but we talked about how our relationship might…thrive…if I weren’t looming ominously over them. Her words, not mine.” He laughs. “She mentioned that it might feel good to call me up when she wanted me around, rather than just assume I’m always there whether she wants me or not.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Well, I think…I think she’s really gonna try. To include me in her life, I mean. Things have changed a lot. Mostly thanks to you. So, that feels good. And forcing my way in…hasn’t worked, so if she’s telling me this will work for her, then I’ll listen.”
I’m momentarily distracted by his toweling style. Dripping feet on the bath mat, first his face, then he scrubs his head, arms, back, then ties the towel around his waist. He doesn’t even notice how rough he is with himself. Meanwhile I’m wrapped like a newborn.
“But you live here, Miles. Your dad left you this apartment.”
He heads to the bedroom and I drift after him. “It’s never really felt like mine. It was Reese’s first and I think, given our situation, that doesn’t feel right.” He pulls clothes out of his drawers. “There’s a reason this room feels so different than the rest of the house. It’s the only room I had anything to do with. The rest is all Reese. Besides, I’ve got this place and some of my stuff here, the studio and some of my stuff there, and my house upstate with stuff there too.”
“Yeah, wow. Three places. Now that you mention it, I’m kind of dating, like, a mogul.”
He laughs and shakes his head. “It’s more like you’re dating someone who’s been incapable of setting up a real life. But I wanna really settle in somewhere.”
“So…what would your plan be?”
“Well.” He glances at me, stepping into underwear. “I’m not going to kick you out of the studio. But we can’t both fit there. So I’ll have to find someplace. Hopefully close to you and Reese and Ains. And I was thinking…that I’d sell this place.”
“That makes sense. So you could buy a new place?”
“Or.” He sits down on the bed next to me. “Or I’d have some capital to get a business off the ground.”
“Oh, Miles, really ?” I toss my arms around his neck and get him wet with my hair. He laughs and squeezes me tight, rearranging the towel over me so I don’t get chilly. “It’s such a good idea. All of it.”
“It’s time. Both feet in.”
“Cannonball, right?”
He nods. “I’ll wanna keep my place upstate, of course, but yeah. It’s time to…work on Anders’s room. Anyways. Lots to think about.” He looks grumpy and pleased at the same time.
“Don’t worry,” I tell him with a pat. “I’ll help you get your life on track. I’m very organized and put together.”
For that, he tugs me back onto the bed.
—
All the leaves drop, we get a few flurries, and I take to carrying a hot cup of tea with me around Miles’s apartment. Miles drives upstate for a day to meet with his old bricklayer mentor and returns home with a plan of action for his business. And with Anders’s framed football jersey.
I wear Miles’s old black hoodie every single second that I can, but Miles’s only rule is that I have to be naked underneath it. I think this is because he knows if he lets me wear it out of the house, it’ll be mine forever. He puts his head underneath that hoodie while we watch TV. Puts his hands underneath it while I attempt to pour a bowl of cereal. Strips it off me and pushes me down on his bed. We easily cross all three sex positions off the list. I beg him to get a fireman costume so we can finally live out number one on the list but he claims that the or something has already fulfilled it.
We spend three weeks only peeling ourselves off one another so that I can shower and go take care of Ainsley.
He’s stopped tagging along with me and Ainsley for the most part. When he wants to hang out with Ains, he texts Reese and sets a time. Reese excitedly informs him that an apartment opened up in Harper’s walk-up a few blocks away.
He becomes a staple at Sunday dinner and my dad has—thankfully—stopped punishing him with grappa.
He signs a lease for the new apartment and starts putting his things in boxes. It aggravates me so much that I start hiding in his bed and regularly get him off-task by unzipping his pants.
“Lenny, I have to get this done!” he asserts, love-drunkenly sagging down to his own knees to meet me on the floor. He’s panting, I’m panting. For all his bossy words, he’s tenderly nuzzling my neck and rubbing his hands over my back. Blowjobs make him extremely affectionate and I bask in his afterglow. “I really do,” he tries again.
“I hate your new apartment. It’s different.”
“You haven’t even seen it yet,” he says firmly. And then much more gently, “What are you so scared of?”
“I don’t want to say goodbye to anything else in my life, ever. I love this apartment. I fell in love with you in this apartment.”
“Trust me, Len. The thing you think you love about this apartment is actually me. ”
Well, he’s right, of course.
Then he’s all packed up and moved out. We hand over the keys to the new owners, and then we begin unpacking him in his new place. There’s a lot more pants-unzipping but now that the moving part is over, Miles doesn’t protest it in the least.
It takes time to get everything set up the way he wants it. His new place is far smaller and older. There’s creaky, original hardwood flooring and tin ceilings. He’s taken approximately two hundred photos of the tiny stained-glass window in the kitchen. He’s adamant that it looks different in all lighting.
He’s moved completely out of the studio, which has left more space for me, but honestly, I rarely stay there anymore.
Finally when we’re just careening into winter, he and I lie in his new bedroom, in his old bed, and enjoy a lazy Sunday. He’s reading and I’m laid across him, looking out the window at the chilly blue.
“Miles?”
“Hm?” He doesn’t look up from his book.
“Can you promise me something.”
“Maybe.”
“Can I die first?”
He turns a page in his book. “Sure.”
“Hey.” I lunge up and attempt to yank the book from him, but he must have been expecting the sneak attack because his grip is like iron. “That was a very emotional question I just asked. And that’s all you have to say?”
“Was I supposed to argue with you?” He pries my fingers off his book and smooths out one of the wrinkled pages.
“You’re supposed to take it seriously at least! I’m talking about dying over here. Isn’t that a pretty serious cry for help?”
“Cry for help? No.” He snaps the book closed. “For attention? Definitely.” He puts the book on the nightstand and gets out of bed and opens the top drawer of his dresser. The one with the workout clothes. “Come on, then.”
“What? What’s this?” My plan has gone south very quickly.
“You want attention, you’re getting it. Get your running shoes on.”
“I don’t want attention anymore. Now I want a divorce.”
“You said we can’t joke about divorce. Besides, we’re not even married yet.”
“I know you’re trying to distract me with marriage talk, you wily fox! Hey! Get off me!”
He’s attempting to squeeze me into a sports bra.
“Jesus Christ, these things are like a torture device!” He’s just snapped himself with the elastic.
“I prefer it when you take the bra off me.”
“Me too,” he says on a grunt.
“You’re not going to give up on my cardiovascular health, are you.”
“Never.”
I glare at him, push him aside, and put on my own workout clothes. “It’s terrible to be loved! Who wants to jog!”
“Yes. A true burden, all.”
“I’ll run, but I’m not happy about it.”
“I can accept that.”
“And you better put out tonight,” I grumble.
“Understood,” he says with a grin. But then the smile falls and he steps back. Studying me. “Cry for attention or not…you weren’t serious, were you?”
I’m digging through my drawer for the matching athletic sock. “I mean…obviously one person can’t promise that to another.”
My unsaid but hangs in the air between us: But how could I ever go on without him?
He studies me again for a long moment and then leaves the room. He’s back just as I’m tying my hair up into a stubby little bun. He has something in his hands that he holds out to me.
“Your Nancy Drew notebook?”
He recoils. “What makes this a Nancy Drew notebook? The fact that it’s a notebook at all?”
“Obviously.”
“Here.” He wags it at me until I take it. “I actually thought this issue might come up at some point.”
I open the notebook and see pages and pages of his scribbled notes about babysitting. My heart skips when I get to his list, untitled, that has almost everything crossed off. The Kiss Lenny list.
He hands me a pen. “There’s plenty of space for more.”
“But you’ve already kissed me! Like every single part of me!”
“You’re the only one who thinks that list is about kissing. That list is about making sure you’re okay.” He takes a step toward me. “And I’ll never stop adding to it. And if I died first…then you should never stop adding to it.”
—
“What’re you looking at?”
“Nothing.”
We’re drinking an afternoon coffee on his new (used) couch. He’s watching a sport (that I don’t even bother to identify) and I’m scrolling on my phone.
There’s a pause where I think I’ve thrown him off the trail.
But then he lunges out of nowhere and snags the phone halfway out of my hand, tipping it so that he can see. “Are you staring at pictures of me?”
“No! Who cares!”
“ Why? ”
“I’m not mooning over you. I’m trying to decide which photo of you to print out and put in my locket.”
He pauses and this time I can’t take the silence. His expression is inscrutable, his eyes bouncing between mine. “Really?”
“You’re obviously the other half of my locket.”
He clicks off the TV.
I crawled away from him during the scuffle, so he firmly grabs my ankle and pulls me back under him. He kisses me deeply, slowly.
When he comes up for air his eyes are serious and kind. He points at himself. “Lenny, the other half of your locket has something to tell you.”
“Hm?”
He holds me tenderly, softly, firmly. His eyes darken. This must be serious. I come to attention.
“It’s time,” he says.
I instantly know exactly what he’s talking about and I start shaking my head. “No.”
“It is.”
“No. No no no.” Tears are pricking my eyes.
“Shhh.” He kisses me long and slow until I’m calm again, and then he pulls back. “I was waiting for you to get there on your own, but…but I think you need me to take charge on this one.”
“I can’t do it, Miles.” I’m instantly crying again. “I can’t move out of that apartment. I can’t go back there. I can’t pack up all her stuff. Give it away or throw it away? How can I do that?”
“I’ll help you.”
“Miles, I can’t. ” But I know he’s right. That apartment has sucked almost my entire savings away. And it’s an artifact of a former life. I don’t just mean the life I used to have with Lou. I mean that having my belongings and residences be scattered, abandoned, messy, and something to cringe away from…that’s who I was before I met Miles. He and I, we’re moving past that. It’s not who I am anymore. Clinging to that apartment is clinging to a moment in time that’s gone. If I want to step into this life with Miles, fully into it, I need to follow his lead and step fully out of the pieces of a past life I’ll never have back.
“You can.”
“It’s gonna be so bad,” I sob, hands over my face.
He hugs me tightly, because I’ve just agreed that it’s necessary. So terribly necessary. The only way out is through. He gently kisses the backs of my hands and when I peek up at him, all I can see is how proud he is of me.
“You know,” he says cautiously, “I think cleaning out the apartment will go faster with more people.”
“Okay,” I whisper. “I’ll ask my parents to help. And Jericho.”
He’s blinking at me in complete surprise. He thought that was going to be a battle. There’s been no one but him who’s been allowed to see me disintegrate. And surely I will disintegrate when tasked with sorting Lou’s belongings.
But maybe it won’t bring everyone down with me. Maybe instead it’ll be the other way around. Maybe they’ll bring me up, where the light is.
—
I wake up at the studio the next morning. I roll onto my side and the locket falls out of my shirt and onto the pillow. Clicking it open, I can’t help but grin at the screengrab of Miles in a ruffled gray blouse that I glued in there yesterday. Me and Lou and Miles, all in one place.
Something occurs to me.
I text Miles one sentence: I want you to meet Lou.
He texts back immediately: When and where.
Forty minutes later, we’re holding hands next to a hot dog cart, both of us staring up the foreboding steps of the Met.
He squeezes my hand and I turn to look at him. His head is cocked to one side, Are you sure? written in his eyes.
I sigh and tug him after me.
I ignore the first floor and take the elevator up. I hope she’s still there. We find our way through the maze of paintings that George and I hid our pain inside a few months ago. And finally, there we are. The gray clouds and the skull in the sky. The single, living flower.
“?‘Go to the Met as often as possible,’?” Miles quotes as we stand in front of Georgia O’Keeffe. “I guess it’s one we’ll have to cross off over and over.”
I frown a little. “I thought it would feel a certain way. To cross everything off the list. To get it all done. But…in reality. In the world that doesn’t have an actual plan…I still haven’t been to Lou’s grave. Not since her funeral. And there’s a lot of other things to do still. I guess it all feels a little arbitrary. The things I actually wrote on the list.”
Miles cocks his head to one side, his brows drawn. “The things you wrote on the list? I thought…I thought Lou wrote that list for you. Things for you to do to live again after she…”
“No.” I shake my head. “I wrote that list for her. A long time ago. For after her hysterectomy. When…going on with her life didn’t feel possible for her anymore.” My eyes mist. “She carried it with her for a long time. That’s why the paper is so raggedy. Right before she died she had it laminated and gave it back to me.”
I take it out of my pocket and hand it to him. He holds it up and studies it. It spends so much time in my pocket, under my fingers, it’s weird to see it out in the daylight, in the world.
“What’s the last thing on the list?” Miles asks, handing it back to me.
“What do you mean? We checked everything off.”
He shakes his head. “The paper is folded there, see? If you hold it up to the light, there’s something written.”
I still.
Heart racing, I slide my fingernail between the curling lamination and peel it slowly open, careful not to tear the paper.
And there, written in her artsy handwriting, with a pencil she’d surely just been sketching with, are Lou’s last words tome.
Get over it already, loser.
And her best gift to me, always, is that there is genuine laughter mixed in with the jagged, heart-torn tears. I clutch her handwriting to my chest and bury my face in Miles’s sweatshirt.
“She knew, Miles,” I say when I come up for air. “She knew that there isn’t actually a checklist for learning to live again. She knew that some days you do it and some days you don’t.”
Today, all I can do is bring Miles to a place where I feel Lou. And the rest is for another tomorrow.
I take a deep, watery breath and gesture to the painting. “Miles, meet Lou Merritt. The love of my life. Lou, meet Miles Honey, the other love of my life.”
He waves at the painting. “Hi.” He looks down at me. “Was this one her favorite?”
I laugh. “I have no idea. Actually, maybe this one is my favorite.” It’s a striking idea, considering I’ve never had an opinion on fine art in my life. But maybe I osmosed a love of art just from loving Lou. “I feel Lou in the Met. Every time we used to come here together, she always wanted to stay longer. So if her spirit is somewhere still…I hope it’s here. And now she can spend as long as she wants.”
Miles nods and we fall thoughtful.
“I’m taking good care of her,” Miles assures the painting. “I feel like I know you. I see you in Lenny every day.” He squeezes me while tears fall. “I love you.”
For a moment, I think he’s telling Lou that he loves her, but when I look up, his eyes are on me. It occurs to me that he does love Lou. Because he loves me.
We study the painting until other people come, and then we mosey through the museum. We look at the art, but it’s mostly just an excuse to hold hands. When we circle back down to the gift shop I get lost in the section with all the silk scarves. Miles finds me ten minutes later and he has two books in his hands. “You think Lou would have liked this one on Louise Bourgeois or this one on Monet better?”
“Oh, that one, I think.”
“Great.”
I follow him curiously and watch as he purchases it. “You’re going to read a book that Lou would have liked?” I ask with wide, brimming eyes.
He hands me the bag. “No. You are.”
“Me?” I blink and peek inside the bag.
“Yeah. It’ll be good for you. Think of it like taking vitamins.”
I scowl and try to put the book back in his hand. “I hate doing things that are good for me.”
“No, you don’t.”
We’re both smiling because he’s right.
We button our coats and step outside, back atop those sweeping steps. To our shock, while we were inside, the world has been completely iced over. Everywhere we look, rain is freezing in drippy stalactites. Off the bumpers of cars, from the spokes of parked bicycles, from the drooping umbrella spires over the hot dog carts on the corner. The words steaming hot have a crown of ice.
The world is fresh and frozen, and Miles and I turn a full circle to appreciate the spectacle, the rare beauty of it. The cars migrate slowly from one intersection to the next; the people grip one another and take baby steps.
I’ve been gifted with this day. Frozen in time. A day where everyone moves slowly and carefully. Where the world is cast in diamond. Where the sunshine, never promised, is achingly bright and cold and there’s nowhere to hide.
I thought it would be immeasurably painful for me to walk this familiar museum again, to know that the closest Miles and Lou will ever get to actually meeting is in my own heart. But instead, I get to see the world—this whole life—in a sparkling and miraculous light.
Miles is smiling and shaking his head at the unexpected gorgeousness of the world and so am I. What a perfect day to have torn some of this pain out of my heart. I shiver and clutch him and we hobble down the block toward the park.
We slip and slide and walk like ducks, white-knuckling each other’s coats. We are side by side, sweating and freezing at the same time, laughing and yelping, both terrified of falling and exhilarated with every step we take toward home. Toward whatever comes next. And if that isn’t living, then I don’t know what is.