Chapter 1 #3
But when I did, I didn’t have to explain to Jesse how the absence of a person can be larger than the presence of others in your life; how grief recedes but loss is exponential; how there’s always a tickle in the back of your mind, like a melody whose notes you’ve forgotten.
How you can be doing the most innocuous thing, like watching a little girl and her mother getting matching glittery pink manicures, and realize that you are crying.
Or how, during a run, a stitch in your chest might double you over not because you are out of breath but because you are alive, and someone else is not.
Jesse and I reacted in polar opposite ways to our tragic childhoods.
I became an island, surrounding myself with books instead of friends and getting straight As and perfect SAT scores, determined to not add to the shadows in my father’s eyes.
Jesse, on the other hand, became an utter delinquent, desperate for the attention of parents distracted by his siblings’ drama, as subtle as a five--alarm blaze.
He drank, got high, shoplifted, and lit fires that he then watched firefighters (including his own father) put out.
Growing up with the notoriety of being that poor girl, I gravitated toward a career that clearly is a psychological defense mechanism for the emotional fallout I’ve dodged for twenty--five years.
After 9/11, my father fell headfirst into a black hole of conspiracy theories.
In spite of his intelligence—-he is a forensic engineer, an expert witness who travels all over the country to testify in lawsuits about structural damage claims—-he became obsessed with the idea that the U.S.
government was behind the attacks on the Twin Towers.
Since I am a public servant—-and also, well, rational—-it is a topic we studiously avoid.
Thank God I have Evie. My stepmother had been my biological mother’s best friend, and after the attacks, she was the glue that held my father together and took care of me.
When I was a toddler and started asking about the strange woman in pictures in our house, sending my father into a new spiral of grief, Evie took all the memories of my mother—-photos, artwork she had done, jewelry she owned—-and carefully packed them away so that we wouldn’t have to rip a wound open every day.
I learned years later that she and my father argued over this, that it nearly killed her to erase my mother from her own home, but that it was the only way she felt like she could protect us from hurting even more.
Over the years, she’s made an art out of that.
I can’t imagine a time when Evie wasn’t in my life, and maybe my father couldn’t, either, which is why they eventually married.
Evie always knew what I needed before I had figured it out: a shoulder to cry on, a day of playing hooky with her, a Magnum bar in the freezer after a grueling biology midterm.
She was smart and cool and funny, the mother my friends wished they’d had.
If anything, I felt guilty for sensing the hole left behind by my biological mother, since I had a surrogate one who’d filled it completely.
Jesse’s father became an alcoholic after Anna died, although he’s been sober now for over a decade.
Jesse’s mom, Sara, in an effort to stop smothering her surviving daughter with attention, started working part--time for the lawyer who’d represented Anna in her trial.
Jesse also completely reinvented himself.
He quit drinking, and I’ve never even seen him take a Tylenol.
He graduated from the police academy and worked his way up to detective.
By the time I met him in 2020, he was working with the Providence fire chief on arson cases and fully trained as an expert in lie detection. It takes one to know one, he says.
But the person who’s changed the most, of course, is his sister Kate.
She runs a dance studio in Upper Darby, where Jesse grew up.
I’ve watched her at the barre, teaching students, and I’m always amazed by how someone whose body betrayed them could be in such control of every muscle and limb.
She’s married to Gary, a URI professor. They have an eight--year--old daughter named Anna.
Jesse opens the door to our condo and tosses his keys on the side table. I dump my backpack on the couch, pulling out my work phone and making sure the volume is turned up. Just because we completed a massive FAA--directed exercise today doesn’t mean there won’t be a real emergency tonight.
I feel the heat of Jesse’s body as he comes up behind me, pulling the elastic from my braid and unraveling the strands, then wrapping the red ribbon around his wrist like a kabbalah string. He pulls my hair to one side and kisses my neck. “Go shower off that flop sweat.”
I turn, indignant. “I didn’t flop sweat!”
He laughs. “Then I’ll shower off my flop sweat and you make dinner.”
“On the other hand, my hair still smells like smoke.” Jesse is a far better chef than I am; he’s spent enough time with the fire department, taking shifts cooking for everyone on call.
In the bathroom, I peel out of my jeans and shirt and turn on the faucet in our shower.
Immediately, I am shot with a spray of water in my face.
“Dammit,” I mutter. There’s been something wrong with the showerhead for a while now—-either zero pressure or, like tonight, a stream like a charged fire hose—-but neither of us has had time to address it.
By the time I put on Jesse’s faded Bruins sweatshirt that’s probably as old as I am and a pair of leggings, brush through my wet hair and rebraid it with another red ribbon, the table is already set with two steaming plates of pesto pasta, a glass of red for me, a ginger ale for him.
He’s washing out the pots he used—-is there anything in the En-glish language sexier than that sentence?
—-and I stealthily watch him. The muscles of his back shift under the soft fabric of his Providence PD tee and he’s humming as he scrubs.
Suddenly he turns around, his eyes as blue as the heart of a flame. “Busted,” he says, his lips twitching.
“Stop being such a cop,” I joke.
“Stop being such a perv.”
You wouldn’t know that Jesse’s about to turn forty unless you looked closely at those eyes and marked the faint lines at the corners.
The age difference worried me a little when we first started dating.
But then he just gradually became a habit until any concern faded away.
I’d go to the office and find him waiting there with coffee milk, because he knew I liked it.
I’d go for a run in Roger Williams Park and bump into him.
I’d drive to the grocery store only to have him pull into the parking spot beside me.
Maybe it was fate, maybe it was just that Rhode Island is a small state—-but Jesse became part of my routine so seamlessly that by the time I noticed, I didn’t want to recall what my days had looked like before he was embroidered onto them.
I ate my pasta like I always do—-shoveling food into my mouth as if eating is a contest, or as if I’m worried I’ll be called in to the office before I finish. Jesse frowns. “One day you’re gonna choke.”
“How fortunate,” I say around a forkful of rotini, “that I am married to someone who is trained in first aid. Also, this is delicious and thank you and I love you.”
Jesse was married once before, when he was around my age.
He got divorced when his wife ran off with her female Pilates instructor.
They run a wellness retreat in the Maine woods now.
He swore off relationships until he met me, despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold.
He was ready to commit long before I was.
“Not till I’m twenty--seven,” I’d told him.
“My prefrontal cortex is still growing and I’m more likely to make a mistake. ”
“You’re not going to make a mistake just because you’re young,” Jesse had argued. “When you know, you know.”
“Like you did?”
That shut him up for a little while, and he agreed to move in together without a solid plan for the future—-something that, given my job, was truly ironic.
He promised he’d wait for my brain to mature.
He swore that I would never have to change his diaper or wipe his drool when he was elderly.
But then one night he came home from work after running a polygraph on the primary suspect for an arson case.
It was an unhoused guy with mental illness who had started a fire that killed two victims—-a couple that had just signed the paperwork with the bank to own the house.
Jesse had been uncharacteristically quiet when he got home. He sat on the couch, a storm behind his features. We both had careers where, every now and then, we saw something we would never be able to unsee. I’d taken his hand. “Wanna talk about it?”
His jaw worked before he was able to push out a word. “Newlyweds,” he said. “The couple that died? They thought this was the beginning of their lives, not the end.” He turned his fierce gaze to me. “I don’t want to wait, Molly. I don’t know how many days I have left.”
I swallowed, seeing it all: the ghost of death that had roared like a lion today, the unwavering compass of his commitment to me, the vulnerability of loving someone—-which also opens you up to the gutting potential of losing them.
“See? I told you you’re old,” I choked out, a bad attempt at a joke when what I meant was Yes.