35 - GOING HOME
Lacey
The cab to the airport was the longest twenty minutes I'd ever spent next to Janice.
She sat against the far door with her bag in her lap and didn't reach for me, which was kind of strange.
Janice always reached. A hand on my knee, my wrist, the back of my neck—she touched the way other people breathed.
Now she kept her hands folded on the bag and watched the harbor slide by, and twice I felt her draw breath to speak and then stop.
I looked out my own window. The silence filled the car like water.
She was abashed. I didn't have a word for how strange that was, because abashed was not an emotion I had ever associated with Janice. Janice was the one who knew. Who never hesitated, never second-guessed. Whatever had happened in that cabin had reached into her too.
She wanted to talk about it. I wasn't ready. I'd done most of it already, alone, with the ceiling going gray and then white. By the time the sun got to it, I knew what I'd decided.
At the gate, she bought me a coffee I didn't ask for and set it in front of me like an apology she couldn't say out loud.
I drank it. Seven dollars. She had paid for the flight and the cabin and the drinks and now the coffee, and in four days I had not paid for one thing, and I sat there holding the cup and could not work out which of those was making my chest ache.
On the plane I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep so I wouldn't have to not-talk to her.
It didn't keep the cabin out. It came back in pieces, and the pieces had changed—the same moments, but I was looking at them now from the wrong side, the side where I knew how it ended.
The exact second I'd said no. How long after that she'd still been moving.
She had used me. I'd gotten there in the dark of the cabin, and I hadn't been able to un-get there since. Not cruelly. Not even on purpose, exactly. She'd told herself a kind story about what she was doing and believed it, and the believing was what let her do it.
My jaw ached. I'd been holding it. Somewhere under all of it, where I didn't want to look, the want was still there, not gone, not even close to gone.
I'd told her I wasn't angry. I knew she hadn't believed me, and sitting there with my eyes shut I wasn't sure I believed me either. It wasn't anger.
I felt her shift beside me. I kept my eyes closed. It didn't work.
"Lacey." Low. Careful. Not the certain voice from the cabin—a smaller one. "I know you're not asleep."
I opened my eyes and looked at the seatback in front of me.
"You said you weren't angry. You haven't looked at me since last night." A pause, and I heard her choose the words, which Janice never did. "I thought I knew where we were."
I let that sit longer than was comfortable. The old reflex was to rescue her, to say it's fine, we're fine, smooth it flat so we could both stop feeling it. I felt the reflex come up and I let it pass.
"Where did you think we were?"
"Lacey—"
"On the ship. The third night. Where did you think we were?"
She was quiet a moment, feeling for the floor. "I thought I was giving you something. I've watched you keep yourself shut all these years. I thought if anyone could open that for you without it costing you, it would be me." A breath. "Because I love you. I wasn't going to be careless with it."
"I believe you." I kept my voice level. "But that's not my understanding."
"Then tell me how you see it." She wanted to know where she stood.
I looked at the seatback in front of me. It was easier than her face.
"You knew before I did," I said. "What's in me. What it is that says yes before the rest of me has caught up to the question. You knew it was there. You've always known. You knew exactly where it was." Now I could feel the anger, just starting.
"Lacey, I would never have—"
"I know you wouldn't." I didn't let her finish it because she didn't need to; I believed that part too, and it wasn't the point, and we'd be here all night if I let her lay down every true thing as if the true things added up to the answer. "That's not what I'm saying."
She stopped. Waited.
"You thought it was safe because it was you." I said it gently, because it wasn't an accusation, it was just the message under what she'd said. "That's what you've been telling yourself since we got off that ship. If it was going to be anyone, better me. I'd never hurt her."
"Yes." Quiet. Relieved. "Yes. That's exactly—"
"You were the least safe person in the world for it to be."
She went still.
"Not the most. The least." I made myself keep my voice even, because the evenness was the only thing keeping me from somewhere I didn't want to go.
"Anybody else, I'd have had a chance. A stranger doesn't know where the wire is.
A stranger feels around, gets it wrong, and somewhere in me a hand goes up.
But you. You knew right where it was and you went straight to it, and there was nothing in me that knew to put a hand up, because the part that would have was the part you were—"
I stopped. Not because I lost it. Because I watched it reach her.
It moved across her face how I imagine it moves across mine when a diagnosis I've been resisting finally fits—the small collapse of an argument you'd been standing on, the floor of it just gone. Janice did not look away from me while it happened. I'll give her that, always.
"Oh," she said. Very softly. "Oh, God, Lacey."
Her eyes filled. She didn't blink it back the way she would have once, didn't tip her head or find something on the ceiling to look at until it passed.
"I'm not telling you to feel terrible," I said. The plane hummed under us. A cart rattled in its track somewhere up the aisle. "I can see you already do. I'm not doing this to make you feel it."
"Then why?" It wasn't a deflection. She genuinely didn't know, and not knowing was so unlike her that it sat between us like a third person. Her voice had gone thick around the edges.
"Because it’s not about you, Janice.” I turned and looked at her then, straight on, which I hadn't done since we sat down.
"Because the old way, you'd have managed this.
You'd have found a way to make it smaller, and I'd have let you, because you're better at the inside of my head than I am and I've spent years grateful for that. And I'm not doing that this time."
She held my eyes. She didn't try to make it smaller. That was new, and we both felt it be new.
For a while we didn't say anything. The seatbelt sign came on with its little tone and neither of us moved to check the buckle.
When I spoke again it was quieter, because the next part wasn't a blow. It was just true.
"You understand this better than I do," I said.
"Whatever it is. I don't even have a name for it, the—whatever—that turns me into a person I don't recognize, that says yes when I haven't decided anything.” I watched my own hands in my lap, the ones I wasn't using.
"I'm going to need you to explain it to me.
Sometime. What you see when you look at me.
Because you see it and I'm still mostly guessing. "
"I will." It came out wrecked, barely voiced. She wiped her face with the flat of both hands, fast, almost angry at it. "Whenever you—"
"Not now." I didn't say it sharply. "Not for a while. Right now, I need to think, and I need to do the thinking by myself, where you're not in the room being smarter about me than I am." I let out a breath. "That's the part I have to learn how to do. Be in my own head without you in it."
She nodded. She understood that one all the way down, I could tell, and it hurt her, but she understood it anyway.