Chapter 63
Tyler
We whiled away the rest of the weekend on cloud nine. It was, for two whole days, nothing but swimming in the ocean and screwing
in the shower and tearing through books from Meredith’s library on the hot, white sand. By Sunday night, Katie and I were
sufficiently sun-kissed and objectively oversexed and had curled up in my bed to watch an art house film I’d downloaded to
my computer months ago. Katie, who was wearing nothing but my college sweatshirt and her underwear, had been drifting in and
out of sleep for over an hour, rousing only to kiss my shoulder, trace my cheek, or make fun of my stupid movie directly to
my face.
“Hi,” she said, rubbing her eyes, reaching for me.
“Hey,” I said. “Welcome back.”
“What’d I miss?”
“Okay, well, the clown just realized he left his shoes in the clown car, but it was stolen by a band of raccoons, so now he’s
just walking around Paris crying and barefoot, and he’s forgotten how to speak, so when people approach him, he can only communicate
through balloon animals, and—”
She was already thwacking my arm, and I could not stop laughing, and neither could she. And then, all of a sudden, she was
quiet. She was shaking her head, tracing the roman numerals tattooed onto the top of my rib cage. Her eyes had welled, and
her voice came out quiet and cracked.
“Do you get one of these every April?”
I nodded.
She circled each set again. And then again.
“Nine years,” she said.
“Nine years,” I repeated.
She exhaled. Her fingers, still circling on my skin. “Do you ever think about why you started?”
I pulled her closer. “With the tattoos? Addictive personality, I guess. Something to do, something to build on, to distract
myself. There was this artist who I went to meetings with in Providence, and I’d always wanted to get one, and—”
“No,” she said. “I meant with the drinking. I meant with the drugs. Why’d you start?”
Her hand was flush against my chest now, and my heart was racing underneath it. I took a long, strained breath. I’d told my
story a thousand times in meetings I’d led, in stepwork I’d done, with newcomers I’d met. But somehow, sharing it with Katie
was different. Sharing it with someone who didn’t have a bad bone in her body—and who’d paid dearly for the fact that I did—was
different. And still, I knew I had to tell her. Knew I had to let her in.
“My whole life,” I said, “I wanted to be somebody else. I was just a kid. I didn’t even know who I was yet, not really, but
I hated myself anyway. For as long as I could remember, I wanted to be Mikey. I wanted to be you. I wanted to be anyone other
than who I was and feel anything other than the way I felt.”
Katie inched a little closer. Her face was so calm, so kind. There was no sign of disgust, no changing of her mind. No taking
back of anything we’d done or anything she’d said.
“What did you feel?” she asked.
I had turned that question over with Arthur a hundred times—with whatever therapist my shitty insurance would pay for a hundred
times. But here, with Katie in my arms, the answer came out in a croak. Came out as though it’d just occurred to me for the
first time.
“Like a mistake,” I said.
Her face faltered. It fell. “Tyler, no. You’re wrong. People love you. You’ve always been the most important person in the
room. Do you know how many people would kill to be that? To think like you do? To have what you have?”
My frown grew heavy, and my eyes stung. I covered my face, knowing the warp of my brow and the clamp of my jaw would give
me away anyway.
“Why didn’t he stay?” I said. “Why wasn’t I enough for him? Why’d he stop coming to see me? Why’d he bring me into this world
if he didn’t want me?”
“Tyler . . .”
My face was hot and wet and burning, and oh—I was crying, wasn’t I? Hard, boiling tears rushed down my cheeks, blurring my
vision, choking my voice. I shoved the pads of my palms into my eyes and bleated—a hot, humiliated wail.
“Fuck,” I said, rubbing at the sockets. Rubbing the evidence away. “Don’t look at me. Don’t look at me, please.”
Katie pulled my hands off my face. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
I let out another bleat. Twenty years of stoicism about my deadbeat dad, and here I was, crying like a baby over the oldest
trope in the book.
“This is so fucking embarrassing. Why do I suddenly care so much? What do I think he’s going to do, show up out of nowhere and read me a bedtime story? Take me to the fucking park? Tell me he’s proud of me? Tell me, despite everything, I turned out all right?”
Katie was still cupping my face.
“Your father,” she said, “was an idiot. I mean it, Tyler. He didn’t deserve to know you. He must’ve been the biggest idiot
in the whole wide world.”