Chapter 34
The drive home from the garage is as familiar as it is excruciating.
Which is, ironically, also how I’d describe the sound of Ro’s voice emanating through the car’s speakers.
The distance I hear in his tone makes him nearly unrecognizable to me.
A stranger. Still, I let the entire voicemail greeting play.
It’s torture to hear him this way, but it’s also the most I’ve had of him in too long. I can’t hang up.
I search Ro’s deep timbre for a hint of the warmth I remember.
Pause to hear a smile alter the shape of his words the way it always does.
Neither comes. Because this recording isn’t my Ro.
And the truth is, he was never really mine at all.
I don’t blame him for ignoring my calls while he goes back into his real life.
Ro’s real life.
For as close as he’d felt to being mine, Ro’s real life is one I know very little about.
I can’t begin to guess how he’ll spend his first day back in the city, or who he might spend it with.
When we walked those streets together, they felt like they belonged only to us.
The thought of him stepping in our footprints with someone else leaves me sick with regret.
I shift into park in the driveway and reach for my phone, but I don’t know who to call. Ro’s gone. Liv’s with Travis. And me feeling sorry for myself isn’t a good enough reason to pop Zola’s newborn bubble.
I’ll pop Mom’s instead.
1:37pm
Me: How’s it going up there?
Mom: Hi! I actually left right after you did. I’m exhausted.
If she’d been on her way home, she would’ve said so. Mom’s going to get her rest in a bed that’s not her own.
I wait the requisite beat or two it usually takes to feel the way I always have with the confirmation that Mom’s chosen a new guy to fall into—disappointed, abandoned, angry. Even after my conversation with Zola, I’d expected it, but my indignation doesn’t come.
This pang in my chest actually feels closer to envy. Jealousy that after the night we just had, there’s someone waiting to wrap Mom up in their arms. Jealousy that no matter how many times she’s been hurt by the fall, she remains unbroken by it. That her heart is just as open now as it’s ever been.
In a week or a month, there could be leopard slippers and red wine—she’s got to know that as well as I do, but she’s not scared of it. Not enough to build up walls to hide behind. And for the first time in my life, I don’t know that it makes her wrong or reckless. It might just make her brave.
Me: Get some sleep. I love you.
Mom: I love you too.
Eventually, I’ll go back up to the hospital, but for all the ways my world has shifted, I think I’ve earned a few hours of rest, too—my bed, my sweats, and my favorite guilty pleasure.
—
Ten minutes into one of my forever top five Dateline episodes, I’m shifting in the bed like this mattress is to blame for my discomfort.
The police tape, the body bag, the grieving friend reflecting on how the dearly departed lit up a room.
My stomach churns and I’m no closer to finding the thing I’d been so desperately craving—that comfort that comes with the absolute certainty of a sad story’s sad ending.
The dreams they shared, the plans they made. The finality of words left unsaid and love left with no place to go. None of it feels like entertainment anymore. It’s a tragedy.
A voiceover plays as the scene cuts to a backdrop of a staged morgue. I rip out my AirPods, fumbling to lock the screen before the next heartbreaking scene can be set.
My eyes, reflected in the screen’s total blackness, are red-rimmed. My skin, clammy from a smattering of tears I hadn’t even felt fall. I hardly recognize the person staring back at me.
Losing Ro is one thing, but when did I lose myself?
I want to unthink the words as they form, to deny them, but the truth is I am lost. I’ve been lost, trading out one mess for another, and it’s not working anymore.
I can’t keep my own life at arm’s length forever.
And it’s not a matter of knowing or deciding what comes next, because life is happening in real time, all the time, without warning.
That’s the design. A constant series of terrible and beautiful moments butted right up against each other.
And I can’t escape that. I don’t want to anymore.
But right now—in this moment when I do get to choose—why would I pick anything other than a happy ending?
I switch over to Zola’s Netflix account, and I’m greeted by British baking shows and shiny plastic real estate moguls posed under waxy palm trees. There are no boogeymen on her landing page. It’s bright and beautiful and all the things I’ve been too scared to admit to wanting.
Until now.
I click the first title in her watch list, and I’m transported into the big emotional swell of whatever romance Zola probably fell asleep to last night.
Even without knowing anything about who these characters are, or how they got to this moment, I can’t look away.
Every word of their declarations draws me in, and before I know it, I’m rooting for complete strangers to find their way back to each other.
It’s not just their words, though, it’s the way they see each other. It’s how he seems to know all the reasons she’s hard to love, but he wants to do it anyway.
And when they kiss, a spark of something vaguely familiar ignites in my chest. My breath hitches at the memory of when I’d last felt that spark—with Ro. When I was undeniably, inexplicably happy.
The credits roll. But it’s not enough.
I start the next movie in the queue. Another romance where I don’t want to know what these characters had to endure to earn their happily ever after. I just want to feel what they feel when they get it.
More. I need more.
So that’s what I give myself, jumping from sweeping romance to sweeping romance. And when my eyes finally give in to the exhaustion of my sleepless night at the hospital, it’s long-awaited first kisses, second chances, and forgiveness that play out behind my eyelids.
Love: shiny and happy, and just within reach.
—
In my dreams, I find him, but when I wake a few hours later, the sun still high overhead, Ro exists only in my memory again. I’m not ready to leave him there.
I call one more time to tell him how wrong I’d been. How sorry I am that it’s taken me too long to see what he seemed to always know, but again there’s no answer.
I don’t pause to make a plan or to contemplate exactly what I’m racing toward as I trip over myself to get out of this house. There’s no more time to waste. I have to get to him. I have to make things right, to see if we can be all right.
I’m one foot from the door when my shaking hands, clumsy with adrenaline, swipe at my purse and spill its contents onto the kitchen island. I curse the mess delaying me by even these few seconds.
But then I see the business card. Life delivering something beautiful, even in the mess.
5:14pm
Me: Hi, this is Ro’s friend, Kaia.
Me: You said to text if I ever needed anything.