19. Josie
JOSIE
The house is dark when I get there and I leave it that way.
I make it inside on autopilot—keys in the bowl, out of habit, like it’s any night—and then I just stand in the middle of the living room in the dark, in the trouble dress, arms around myself, and the adrenaline that got me home picks that exact moment to leave.
It goes all at once. Like a plug pulled.
One second I’m standing and the next the shaking’s back, worse, whole-body, and my stomach rolls up into my throat and I have to sit down on the arm of the couch right now, head between my knees, breathing through my mouth in the dark until the room stops tilting.
Nauseous. Wrung out. Tired in a way that’s got nothing to do with sleep, tired somewhere structural, like whatever holds a person’s shape from the inside just clocked out.
When I can stand again I get out of the dress.
That’s its own small horror movie, alone in the bedroom with no lights on—the trouble dress, the zipper I can’t reach, the zipper that has never once been my job, and I stand there with my arm bent up behind my back like a woman in a straitjacket, yanking, and it won’t come, and four hours ago his knuckles went down this same zipper slow enough to make me forget my own name, and now I’m fighting it alone in the dark and losing, and I end up hauling the whole thing around sideways and wrenching it down with both hands hard enough that something in the seam gives with a little tearing sound.
Fine. Good. I’m never wearing it again anyway. I leave it where it falls, a green puddle on the bedroom floor, and stand there in the dark in my underwear with my arms around myself, and the house is so quiet I can hear the water heater tick.
His T-shirt’s on the hook on the closet door. I look at it a long, long time.
I put on my own.
It’s the smallest declaration of independence ever filed—one woman, one closet, one cotton shirt with a feed store logo instead of the soft gray one that smells like him, that I’ve slept in a hundred nights, that my body is asking for right now the way it asks for water—and nobody will ever know it happened, and it takes everything I’ve got, and I do it anyway, and then I stand there in my own shirt in my own dark bedroom feeling like I ran a marathon to cross three feet of carpet.
I don’t cry. I already did that. Whatever I had, I left it on the county road—I cried so hard between the clubhouse and here that my ribs ache and my eyes have gone dry and hot and swollen, past-crying, and now there’s just this ringing empty quiet where all of it was.
My phone’s been buzzing in my bag since the county road.
I finally look at it, sitting back down in the dark: three missed calls, Levi.
A text, Levi: please tell me you got home ok.
that’s all. you don’t have to answer anything else.
Another one, eleven minutes later: I’m so sorry, Jo.
And one from Dot, from before any of it, 9:52, a photo—me and Levi at the toast, his hand around mine, both of us smiling at a hundred people, the string lights gold over our heads, the whole lie of it framed and flattering—with a line of little hearts under it, you two! !!
Nine fifty-two. Four minutes after the drink table. There’s photographic evidence of the worst minutes of my life and we look happy in it.
I type home to Levi, one word, because the alternative is him driving out here tonight, and send nothing to Dot at all, and turn the phone face-down on the cushion, and that’s when the jewelry box is in my hands, before I fully decide to get up.
I don’t turn the light on. I know the way—bedroom, dresser, third step past the doorframe where the floor creaks—and I bring it back to the couch and sit down in the dark with it on my knees and dig under the tangle of chains I never wear, and there it is.
Folded in its tissue. Soft at the crease from a week of my thumb.
Two lines. I can barely see them in the streetlight through the blinds. Doesn’t matter. I could draw them from memory.
And staring at them pulls me straight down through the floor of tonight into Tuesday—one week ago, the bathroom, the gold light through the frosted glass, the Hendersons’ dog barking, me on the toilet lid laughing that one cracked laugh with my wrist against my mouth—God, I was so happy.
That’s the part I can hardly stand to hold now: how happy, how bubbling-stupid-scared happy, terror and joy stacked up so high I couldn’t see over them, whispering hi to a poppy seed, planning charters, planning the look on his face—that girl on the toilet lid had the best secret in Montana and a four-day plan and no idea, none, that the man she was planning it for had already?—
The memory surfaces whole and bright, holds for one breath.
Then tonight swallows it back down.
Same test. Same two pink lines. Same hands, even, still shaking, just shaking different now. And everything the lines mean has gained about a thousand pounds between Tuesday and right now. This morning they meant a moment under the string lights. Now they mean: I can’t just leave.
Because that’s the thing, that’s the math sitting on the couch with me in the dark.
Some other Josie—last year’s Josie, the one with nothing but a Civic and a lease—she could pack a bag tonight.
Be at her sister’s in Billings by two a.m., block his number, start over, let him find out from somebody at Dot’s counter what he lost. I can see her doing it.
I can watch her do it like a movie, and there’s a bitter little piece of me that wants to be her so bad right now.
But I’m not carrying just my own life out that door anymore.
And I think about my mother—I don’t want to and I do anyway—thirty-one years married to my father, and the particular quality of quiet in that house.
How she’d stayed for us, that was the story, stayed and stayed and turned into someone who watched the driveway.
I can see her at the kitchen window right now if I let myself, dish towel over one shoulder, watching headlights slide past on the road and not saying anything, ever, about what she was watching for.
I used to swear to myself in that house, teenage-fierce, knees up on my bed: I will never stay anywhere out of arithmetic.
My sister swore it too, louder, and kept it—Billings, one suitcase, nineteen years old, never looked back.
I kept it by finding Paradise Valley and a man who loved me with his hands, and I was so sure I’d escaped the family business.
And here I am at twenty-six in a dark living room, doing arithmetic in the dark.
Except it’s not the same arithmetic. It isn’t. I press the heel of my hand hard against my sternum, against the ache there, and I make myself say the true thing, out loud, alone, to a dark room:
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
That’s it. That’s the whole truth. Not staying-no-matter-what, not leaving-tonight.
I don’t know. Whatever this is going to be—whatever wreck or repair or long ugly reckoning—it starts with him knowing what I know, and me finding out who he is when he knows it.
It starts with the truth standing all the way up between us for once.
And underneath the not-knowing, doing slow laps, there’s the question I can’t make stop: was I easy to do this to?
That’s the one with teeth. Not why did he—I’ll get the why eventually, whys are cheap—but what did she have, what was the room like, did he think of me at all, did he think of me and do it anyway, which is worse, or not think of me at all, which is worse than that.
I sit in the dark running my thumb over the crease in the tissue and interrogate a motel room I’ve never seen, furnishing it, unfurnishing it, hating myself for the decorating, and somewhere in there the poppy seed’s heartbeat is already going—the internet says probably by now, this early it’s just a flicker—a flicker in the dark under my hand, in a body that feels like a town the morning after a flood.
Both of us in here, little one. Both of us finding out on the same night what he is. I’m so sorry about the timing.
Just not tonight. Tonight I can’t. I’m so empty a strong draft would take me.
Headlights swing across the living room wall.
Slow. Then the particular crunch of his truck’s tires in our gravel drive, an engine I know as well as his voice going still, and then nothing—no door slam, not yet, just his headlights burning through the blinds in two long stripes across the ceiling and me sitting dead center of the dark couch, two pink lines in my fist.
I don’t get up.