Twenty-Four
Twenty-Four
Home.
Ellie pulls into the driveway and finds Jonah waiting for her on the porch. He sits on the bench swing, gently rocking back and forth, like he and Maggie used to do together on warm days when she was small. He’s cleaned himself up since their last meeting—his hair is neatly trimmed, the edges clean around his face, and he’s put on a fresh button-down shirt and nicely cut jeans. It occurs to Ellie that he looks like he’s going on a date, only she doesn’t know if it’s the one he’s about to share with her, or a different one in this uncanny life with his fiancée.
Ellie shifts the car into park and steps out, her eyes focused only on him. She walks, one step and then another, closer to the house, not sure what either of them will say or do when she arrives. Hug? Kiss? Cry? Fight? Her hands tremble, like she’s a schoolgirl about to come face-to-face with her crush. She tugs at a loose piece of her hair, like she used to do when she felt nervous as a child.
“Hi.” One side of Jonah’s mouth lifts into an uncertain smile, like he’s unsure if this is the correct thing to say.
“Hi,” Ellie says and stuffs both her hands into her pockets. The late-spring air is warm, comfortable, that ideal temperature when you’re not hot or cold, but just perfect. Even so, a chill runs through her body. She contemplates walking back to the car for her book bag so she can grab her cardigan and slip it on like a security blanket.
Nearby, the men from the power company are two stories above them in their giant crane. The tools they use—whatever it is they’re actually doing up there—send a shower of electrical sparks down toward the ground. Above them, the May sky is a brilliant blue. Cornflower, Ellie thinks, the name of Maggie’s favorite crayon color.
One of them needs to say something now. Who could ever know where to start? How will they even begin?
“Hey, Ellie.” Jonah’s voice—him saying her name—sounds so comfortably familiar.
She lifts her face and meets his eyes.
“Would you like to go for a walk?” he asks.
Another shiver runs through Ellie’s body, though this one feels different.
“Yes,” she says.
They walk. All through their neighborhood, along the ribbons of alabaster sidewalks. Beneath the blooming dogwoods and Japanese cherry trees, the delicate petals falling all around them like a soft snow. They walk past their first apartment—that sweet little duplex with the pleasant back porch and the yellow bathroom tile—and past their starter home—that charming money pit they brought Maggie back to after they were discharged from the hospital, and where they’d paced the hallways night after night trying to get her to sleep, and where Ellie and Jonah had nearly lost their minds with happiness the first time they heard her laugh.
They keep going.
Together, they walk past the old playground, with that terribly steep plastic slide, and Maggie’s elementary school (which, at one point in time, was Ellie’s elementary school, too), where dozens of small children are outside running for playtime. The whole time they walk, Ellie and Jonah are quiet, both of them listening to the breeze and the birds and whatever thoughts are bubbling up in their respective minds.
“Would you like to sit?” Jonah finally asks when they arrive at the small park across the street from the schoolyard, and gestures to a wooden bench.
The park itself is not big, only a few blooming trees, a small fountain, and a half dozen benches for people to take a pause and think or read or talk or cry or whatever it is people need to do in places like this.
They both take a seat, though not too close to each other, neither of them quite sure of how distance should or should not function between them right now.
“I contemplated if I should come see you again,” Jonah admits, his face directed straight ahead at the schoolyard, where all those happy children still play. The breeze blows and sends a thick strand of his dark, silver-accented hair waving across his forehead. “I’m still not sure what’s right.”
In the near distance, a teacher blows a whistle.
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew what was happening from the minute you saw me?” Ellie asks, her hands set on her thighs, her gaze cast forward. “On Monday,” she continues, “when you crashed into me. Why didn’t you say something right away?”
Jonah takes a long time to answer. He just breathes and breathes and breathes. “This is what you said you wanted, Ellie. To see what life would have been like if we’d never existed together, you know?” He shrugs his wide shoulders. “For all I knew when I first saw you Monday, maybe you wouldn’t have remembered me.” He sighs sadly. “Or maybe you wouldn’t have wanted to.”
She shakes her head, suddenly annoyed. “I mean, yes and no. I sort of think waking up and finding ourselves in an alternate version of the present might have warranted a conversation or something, though, right?”
“Look.” Jonah turns away from the schoolyard. “I don’t know how we ended up here.” He offers her an exasperated face. “I woke up in this place just like you.” He opens his mouth to continue, but pauses, and instead pulls in a long breath.
“What?” she asks, sensing something. “What is it?”
“It’s—it’s nothing.”
“I know that tone,” she points out. “It’s not nothing.”
He sighs, something about the sound revealing to Ellie that he’s stuck at the intersection of sadness and embarrassment. “All those months, Ellie, you spent time wondering about what life might be like without me. Without us. You said those words—or some version of them—to me so many times.” He bites his bottom lip. “Maybe I just finally needed to do the thing I never seriously did back then.” He pauses, then presses on. “To see and consider for myself what my life might be like without you.”
The words hit her right in the chest, as heavy and hurtful as bricks.
They both cling to silence again. Off in the distance, the children enjoy their final few minutes of unstructured freedom before the remainder of the school day and its schedule takes control of everything again. Ellie watches them all, a feeling pulsating in her belly, one that simultaneously feels like love and like pain. She’s flooded by a million remembrances. Walking Maggie to school every weekday morning, her small, doll-size hand tucked safely in her own. Ellie and Jonah laughing and crying happy tears as they sat side by side in the school’s multipurpose room every year at the holidays to watch Maggie and her peers parade around onstage, all of them dressed up like cardboard snowflakes and merrily singing off-key.
Back then, as they were living through all those moments they both knew would ultimately come to serve as some of their life’s happiest memories, Ellie felt like what she and Jonah were really doing was creating a sort of glue, one that would hold them together tightly. But that was before Maggie grew up and left. Before all the fighting got underway like a theatrical production she and Jonah had been forced to attend but that neither of them had ever wanted to see. Before Ellie knew firsthand all the different ways a woman’s heart can break.
In the distance, the teacher blows the whistle again. The children hustle into a chaotic line and march their tiny bodies back inside the building.
“I followed you that morning,” Jonah finally admits. “I parked down the street a little ways before the house a few hours after I woke up and pieced together what was happening. I was right behind you the whole time, but you never even noticed me.” He’s quiet, thinking, then continues. “When I woke up in my hotel room Monday, before anything had even really happened, I felt like the whole earth had shifted.” He rubs his hands across his thick thighs. “I figured it was anxiety. I knew you had planned to call the attorney and that we’d finally arrived at the day when things—” He sighs, waves a hand in front of him. “When all this—us, no longer being together—became real.” Nearby, a pair of runners, dressed in all sorts of spandex, sprint past and through the park. “I called you a dozen times to ask you not to make the call, and to tell you we needed to talk things through again, that we were wrong, that it was all a misunderstanding, that we were making a giant mistake.” He drops his head into his sizable hands. “I don’t know why I waited, Ellie.” He rubs his fingers through his hair, turning it back into a mess. “I called and I called, but you never picked up.”
She turns her whole body now to look at him. “I lost my phone at the airport the night we flew back,” she explains. “I’ve been completely untethered all week. I told you that.”
He pulls his posture up, straightening himself. “I tried to call Maggie after I called you.” He closes his mouth and inhales a long, deep breath through his nose. “It didn’t go through.” He shrugs. “It was one of those weird error messages.” Jonah shakes his head. “I don’t have a clue what that means.”
Ellie has so many questions, though none of them seem quite right. Her eyes burn with the threat of tears. She blinks, releasing one of them, and inhales a long, slow breath, too. For now, she decides to just listen.
“At first, I thought I was hallucinating or dreaming or, I don’t know, that maybe I was dead or something,” he explains. “It was around then that my phone rang. I assumed—hoped—it was you calling, but when I answered, another woman’s voice was there, telling me I was running late, that I needed to come meet her right away.” His chest shakes with a soft laugh. “I have no idea why I went,” he explains. “Curiosity, I guess. Or a search for answers. When I met her down at the coffee shop, she started to talk so fast, it was like she was throwing a hundred different clues at me.” His lips—his soft, generous mouth—lift into something that almost resembles a smile. “None of it made any sense, of course. It still doesn’t.” Finally, he turns to look at Ellie again. “Some things don’t.”
They’re so close Ellie can make out every small detail of his face. The smattering of sunspots on his cheeks. The 11 lines that have formed between his brows over the years. His pores and the exact shade of his complexion, which is somehow always both pale and a tiny bit tan, enough for him to look healthy.
“I’m supposed to be getting married this weekend, Ellie,” he says.
It feels like someone stabs her in the heart—over and over—with a million tiny pins. “I know.”
“So, what should I do?” he asks. “Which life am I meant to pick?” He tilts his chin to look at her. “I don’t know how to get back to the way things were.” He inhales deeply, his shoulders rising right before he exhales. “And what’s worse is that I don’t even know if you’d want me to.”
Close by, the park fountain bubbles a gentle background melody.
“I miss you,” Ellie says, plain and simple. “We made a mistake. A terrible one.”
“I know,” he agrees. “But now that we’re here—” He stops himself, sighs out so many feelings. “I—I worry that it’s too late.”
She wants to reach out her hand and touch him, to cup the curve of his jaw in her palm, or to feel the coarseness of his hair between her fingers, to let her face fall onto his chest and to listen to his heart as it beats and beats and beats. Instead, she poses a question.
“Did you mean to crash into me?” she asks. “Or was it really just an accident?”
“Which time?” On the sidewalk in front of them, a young couple walks by pushing a baby carriage. “This week? Or all those years ago?”
Ellie watches them walk away. “Both.”
“It’s hard to say,” Jonah admits. “I don’t think I’d ever choose to crash a vehicle into you.”
Although neither of them has moved, something about the space between them suddenly feels both smaller and infinite.
“Maybe something or someone else chose for you,” she suggests, remembering her old belief, the one she abandoned long ago.
“And what’s that, Ellie?” he asks, waiting for her to say it.
Ellie takes a deep breath and then another. “Fate,” she says.
“No,” he instantly counters, surprising her. “That’s where you’re wrong. It wasn’t fate,” he explains. “It was me.” His voice is both stern and tender. “I’d find you in any lifetime, Ellie Adams,” he says.