Chapter Twenty-Three #2
Helen waited a few minutes to make sure he wasn’t coming back, then she tucked tissues in her underarms to soak up the sweat
before going to her boss’s office.
“He hates me, Darius,” she said. “I don’t think I should work with him anymore.”
Darius was one of the company’s vice presidents, and he was hands-on with the clients too.
“No, Helen. Stan loves you,” Darius insisted. “He said that to me last week.”
She scoffed. “He did?”
“He just signed Boom Now for a series of three more TV spots with us.”
Her boss leaned forward, elbows on his desk, and steepled his hands beneath his chin. His face held a hint of apology, but
mostly he looked pleased.
“You’ve done wonderful with him, Helen.” Darius smiled. “In another five years, you’ll easily be a VP here too.”
“What are you doing?” Tyler had a confused expression.
He’d finally caught Helen, and he couldn’t fathom why she would be lying on her back on the living room floor crying at two
o’clock in the morning.
Tyler sank heavily onto the couch.
Helen sat up, but she remained on the floor. She rubbed her knee. It ached worse at night.
Every now and then, a small part of her felt hurt or mad that she could be crying in the middle of the night and Tyler had no idea.
But it was just a very small part of her.
Mostly, she was truly glad the concept of this darkness simply didn’t occur to him, because he didn’t move through the world with unspoken words eating at his brain and sharp edges catching on the day’s end.
Sometimes Helen felt like the mast and keel careening dangerously toward jagged rocks and Tyler was the helm reminding her to pull starboard.
But lately she’d stopped telling him about all of the jagged rocks because there was just too much to tell.
“I don’t get it,” Tyler said. “If something’s bothering you, why don’t you talk to me?”
“If I literally told you every thought that entered my brain, it would drive both of us mad.”
“Well, this clearly isn’t working either,” he said.
“Are you mad at me?” she asked.
“Mad? No. Frustrated, yes. Confused, yes.”
Helen took a deep breath. “I don’t think I want to buy a house.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to buy a house,” she repeated.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t.”
“Since when?”
“I’m not sure.”
Tyler lowered his head. He looked tired, and for the first time ever, a little old. Helen could suddenly imagine him gray
and stooped. If only a little messenger had been able to fly down from the heavens or the future or the secret places where
little messengers reside and whisper in her ear: Tyler will never get the chance to be old and gray and stooped. If she had known that right then and there, every single thing that was eating at her would have fallen away. She would have
boxed up her daily worries alongside her material belongings and run away with Tyler to someplace safe, if such places even
existed.
Instead, Helen quietly said, “I’m sorry.”
Tyler lifted his head. “Is this about us, or is this about a house?”
There was worry in his eyes. Helen knew she should hug him and tell him everything would be okay. Except nothing felt okay.
“It’s not about us,” she said. “It’s just—I haven’t been happy. Not with my job, not with anything.”
“I know.”
“You know? Then why are you so confused to find me like this?”
“Lately, you haven’t been as talkative or funny or . . . I don’t know. But it’s winter. It’s rainy and gray, and you’ve been
busy. I didn’t think you were crying in the middle of the night.”
“Well, I have been.”
Tyler sighed. “I feel like this is a longer conversation, but I don’t know that my brain is firing on all cylinders at two
in the morning.”
“That’s okay. I don’t really have anything to say anyway.”
At that, his eyebrows drew together, and she realized that Tyler was probably thinking the same thing she was. If she had
nothing to say, then where did that leave them?
They sat in silence for several long moments, then Helen said, “Are you hungry?”
“No.” Another long moment passed, then he said, “Are you?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a frozen pizza.”
She wiped her nose. “That sounds kind of good.”
Tyler stood. “I’ll turn on the oven.”
But when Helen ate the pizza, even that tasted like a cardboard imitation of something that was supposed to be spicy and tangy
and just wasn’t anymore.
As the grayness of winter morphed into the soggy days of spring, Tyler encouraged Helen to talk more about how she was feeling,
but since she didn’t really understand exactly what she was feeling, sometimes there wasn’t much to say. Even worse, there
were things she couldn’t say because it would hurt Tyler, things she didn’t even want to admit to herself. Like how she couldn’t stand the sound of
him clipping his toenails. And how when she was in bed with him, she imagined she was any other woman with any other man.
She didn’t even want him to kiss her when they parted ways in the elevator. And she was bored out of her mind sitting across
from him at the dinner table.
Sometimes when she looked at his face, all she felt was numb.
And the worst part was that she started to wonder if she’d always felt this way about him.
Maddie from Boom Now called Helen one morning in March and said, “Stan went into cardiac arrest at the staff meeting yesterday.”
Cardiac arrest. That sounded especially dire. “Is he okay?”
“He was out. No pulse, and one of our interns did CPR. He didn’t die. He’s still in the hospital, though.”
“Oh, thank God.” Helen wanted to ask if Stan was brain-dead, but she couldn’t think of a way to phrase the question that didn’t
sound hopeful.
“He’ll probably make a full recovery,” Maddie said. “Eventually.”
“Wow.”
Maddie then informed Helen that Boom Now would like to finalize the can’s wraparound design ASAP with design #4—which Helen’s
team had completed five months earlier, but never mind; Helen obviously didn’t mention that, nor did she mention that currently the team was on design #37.
Helen wrote #4 on a yellow Post-it and said, “Please give Stan our best, and tell him we hope he recovers quickly.” She searched for the
appropriate words of comfort. “And that we look forward to talking to him again soon . . .” She trailed off because the last
part wasn’t true.
Maddie laughed. “Sure, Helen. I’ll tell him the next time I’m sitting vigil at his bedside,” and Helen knew then that she
wasn’t the only one Stan had been abusing.
When Helen hung up, she texted Tyler:
OMG. Can you meet me on the rooftop in ten minutes?
Tyler responded right away:
Yeah. Is it bad?
She felt a pang in her chest, realizing that of course her husband would assume that anything and everything she had to tell
him these days was bad news. She texted back:
No! Not bad!
On the rooftop, Helen’s face crumpled when she saw Tyler walking toward her. He had two to-go coffee cups.
When he handed one to her, he said, “It’s not too hot. I checked it.”
She took a grateful drink—vanilla latte—and then said, “Stan almost died.” Tears started to spill out of her eyes.
“Oh, Helen.” Tyler put his arms around her, and she tried not to get her mascara on the collar of his gray button-up shirt.
He rubbed her back, then after a minute said, “But you don’t like Stan.”
“I know. And he’s not on the account anymore. Maddie’s in charge now.”
“Oh.” Tyler stifled a laugh. “So these are happy tears?”
“Sssh. You can’t say that out loud.”
“This is all off the record.”
“I’m a terrible person.”
He squeezed her. “Our little secret.”
A wave of solace washed over Helen. She could say anything to her husband, and he’d always be on her side.
She lifted her head to look at him. “He went into cardiac arrest at their staff meeting. I bet he was shouting at someone.”
Tyler touched her hair softly. “I knew you didn’t like him, but I didn’t realize you hated him that bad.”
Helen lowered her eyes and sighed. “I didn’t realize it either.”
Renting a kayak was Helen’s idea. One Saturday morning in April, she woke up, and even though all she felt like doing was
drinking five cups of coffee while curled up on the couch, a little voice in her head urged her to try harder. So she said,
“Let’s do something today.”
Tyler had long ago stopped suggesting activities because she always said she was too tired.
But that morning, he rolled over in bed and said, “Okay. What?”
Helen was looking at the weather app on her phone. “It’s supposed to hit sixty-three today. Let’s do something outside.”
“Could you hike?”