20. Emily #2
A laugh tears out of me, awful and wet. I want to cross the kitchen and take it all back, tell him forget it, I’m staying, I love him, the words right there and easy now of course, now that leaving is the thing that proves them.
But he’s right. That’s the thing. He’s right, and I can’t unhear it. I can’t know if it’s real from inside the warm safe middle of his life. I have to get out there on my own, cold and scared, to find out if I still want him from the outside.
“I’ll call you,” I say. “Every day, if you want. I’m not vanishing.”
“Okay.”
I get to the doorway and I can’t make myself step through it, because there’s one thing I cannot leave this house without him knowing, the one thing my silence might make him doubt.
He could stand here and watch me go and tell himself I’m leaving because I don’t feel it.
I’d rather do anything than let him believe that.
“Richard. Look at me.” I wait until he does. “I love you. I need you to hear it before I go, so you don’t spend one second thinking that’s not why I’m doing this. It’s the opposite. I’m doing it because I do.”
And there it is. Out loud, clean, finally, and the joke of it is it only came easy once saying it couldn’t keep me here, once there’s no roof or paycheck or warm bed riding on it, just me meaning it on my way out the door with nothing to gain.
He doesn’t flinch and he doesn’t soften. He just looks at me, level, his eyes too bright.
“I love you too,” he says, quiet. “Whatever you decide out there, that part’s not going anywhere. Now go, before I stop being good about it and ask you to stay.”
So I go. I make myself pick up the bag and walk to the door without looking back, because if I look back I’ll fold, and folding is the one thing that won’t fix this.
I text Tara from the car before I’ve even pulled out of the driveway, because my hands need something to do that isn’t turning the key back off.
Can I come stay with you for a while? Something happened.
I’m okay, nobody’s hurt, I just need somewhere that isn’t here.
The three dots come up almost instantly, like she sleeps with the phone in her hand.
Already making up the couch. Drive safe.
Door’s unlocked. And then, a second later, because she’s Tara: I’ve got wine and zero judgment. Get over here.
I cry most of the drive. Not the pretty kind.
Tara opens her door before I’m even up the steps, like she’s been watching the street for my headlights. She takes one look at my face, then at the bag in my hand, and pulls me inside without a word. I make it about four steps into her living room before I come apart completely.
“I think I just left him,” I tell her, into her shoulder. “I had the one good thing and I got so scared of it I walked out the door.”
“Did you, though?” She steers me to the couch, hands me a glass of water I don’t want. “Tell me what you actually want. Not the fear. Not the story Henry put in your head. What do you want, Em?”
“Him.” It comes out instant, no hesitation, the truest thing I’ve said all day. “I want him. I want the onion fights, the ruined sauce, the books. The staying. I want him.”
“Then why are you sitting on my couch?”
“Because I don’t know if I’m allowed to trust that.
” I wipe my face with the back of my hand.
“It’s been eight weeks, Tara. Eight. I was married two months ago.
What if this is just, what if I’m the saddest cliché there is, the woman who runs straight out of one set of arms into the next because she can’t stand to be by herself for five minutes?
What if I love him for real, but it’s too soon, and the too-soon is the thing that kills it later?
People don’t survive going this fast. Everybody knows that. ”
“Everybody knows a lot of things that aren’t true.
” Tara folds herself onto the cushion beside me.
“But okay. Say you’re scared it’s a rebound.
Scared it’s too fast. Scared you’re just grabbing the nearest safe thing.
Those are real fears, I’m not going to talk you out of them.
” She holds my eyes. “But here’s what I keep noticing.
You didn’t grab the nearest safe thing. You just left it.
On purpose. You walked out of the safe warm house and showed up on my doorstep to be uncomfortable instead.
A woman running from herself doesn’t do that.
A woman who’s actually trying to figure out what’s real does. ”
That gets through where nothing else has, and I have to put the water down before I drop it.
“He told me to go,” I say. “He could’ve talked me into staying. I’d have let him. And he told me to go instead, because he wants me to be sure more than he wants me here. Who does that?”
“A man who’s not Henry.” She says it gently. “Which I think you already knew, and which is maybe the scariest part. It’s easy to leave somebody who’s bad to you. It’s terrifying to walk away from somebody good, even for a little while, even for the right reasons.”
“That’s why I left.” And saying it out loud makes it solid, the first solid thing in this whole wrecked day.
“Because he’s right. I can’t know if I’m choosing him or just hiding in him until I’ve stood on my own at least once.
And I never have. Not one day of my life.
I went from one place to another so quickly.
If I don’t do this part by myself, I’ll always wonder.
And so will he, and it’ll sit there between us forever. ”
Tara is quiet a long moment. Then she nods, slow.
“Okay,” she says. “Then stand. Take however long it takes. And when you’re solid on your own feet, you decide, with your eyes open, and not one second before.” She squeezes my hand. “You can stay as long as you need. There’s wine and a terrible couch and a cat who will judge you. It’s all yours.”
And that night, for the first time since I was a teenager, I fall asleep somewhere that has nothing to do with any man at all. No Henry. No Richard. Just me, on Tara’s terrible couch, in the dark, completely and utterly on my own.
It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done.
It might also be the first free choice I’ve made in ten years, and I lie there in the dark holding onto that, because it’s the only thing I’ve got.