8. Margo #3
My mother cooks as if she’s feeding a village. And somewhere in the middle of it, without my noticing exactly when, the knot in my chest loosens a single, careful turn.
It isn’t until Sandy is down for the night, tucked into my old bed under the same faded posters and water-stained ceiling I fell asleep under a thousand times, that I finally sit at the kitchen table with my parents and tell them the whole of it.
The christening I stood at the back of. The photographs I wasn’t in. Dorothy in the powder room, seaside experiment, said like I was a phase. The night he didn’t come home. The roses. The ring I left on the nightstand where he couldn’t miss it.
My father listens to all of it with his hands wrapped around a mug that’s gone cold, and when I finish he’s quiet a long time.
“That boy sat at this table,” he says finally, slow, “and he looked me in the eye, and he told me he knew what he was asking. Taking you off to that world. He said he’d spend his whole life making sure you never regretted it.
” He turns the cold mug a quarter turn. “I believed him. I’m not often wrong about a man. ”
“You weren’t wrong. He meant it.” My voice cracks. “That’s almost the worst part. He meant every word and it still wasn’t enough.”
“Do you regret it?” My mother, gentle, from across the table. “Any of it?”
I think about the question honestly, because she’s asking honestly. Do I regret Sebastian. Do I regret the five years. Do I regret the whole gilded, lonely, beautiful disaster.
“I regret forgetting who I was,” I say. “I got so busy being an Austen I couldn’t have told you the last time I ate a pomelo or wore that bracelet or laughed the way I laughed at nineteen.
I disappeared into him. And the awful thing is he didn’t even ask me to.
I just did it, one piece at a time, until there was nothing of me left over for anyone to miss. ”
My father looks at me for a long moment.
“Then remember,” he says. “That’s all. You’re home. Remember who you were before you started subtracting yourself.”
Later, when my parents have gone to bed and the house has gone to that deep coastal quiet you can’t get anywhere else, Julie stays.
She’s on the floor with her back against my chair, and I’m looking out the kitchen window at the dark water, and she says, without any of her usual noise, “Can I ask you the only question that matters, and you don’t have to answer out loud?”
“Go on.”
“Forget him. Forget his witch of a mother, forget the papers, forget what everyone thinks you should do.” She tips her head back to look up at me. “What do you want, Margo? Actually want. If you could have the true thing.”
And I look out at the sea, the same sea I ran to at nineteen, the same water that carried him away, and the answer rises up so fast and so whole it steals my breath, and I don’t say a word of it.
I want him to fight for me.
Not with money. Not with a helicopter or a settlement or a boutique full of the wrong flowers.
Not a statement his people write and he signs.
I want him to show up here, in the mud and the fish smell, with his terrible island hands, and I want him to look at me the way he looked at me on those cliffs when the only thing he had to give me was a bracelet he made himself.
All I want is for him to see me.
I want him to choose me. I want him to become the boy who climbed my window again.
Just once. Before I let him go for good.
“I don’t know,” I tell Julie, out loud.
She looks at me a beat longer, and she’s known me since we were both small enough to fit in one bath, so I don’t think she believes me. But she lets me have it.
“Okay,” she says softly, and leans her head against my knee. “Okay.”
My phone lights up on the table between us.
We both look at it.
SEBASTIAN, the screen says, and beneath his name, in small gray letters that turn my stomach over: forty-seven missed calls.
Two days. He hasn’t stopped through every hour of every leg of me running, his name surfacing, sinking, and surfacing again, and me silencing it every time, unable to answer him and unable, quite, to block him out of my life with one clean tap.
The phone buzzes in my hand.
Forty-eight.
“You don’t have to,” Julie says quietly.
“I know.”
I watch it ring. I watch his name sit there, lit, wanting me, and I think about a boy hanging off my house by one hand, and a man who couldn’t feel me leaving a bed we shared, and I can’t make the two of them be the same person no matter how I turn them in the light.
The call rings out. His name fades.
And I get up, and I cross to the window, to the same bedroom-window view I kissed him under a lifetime ago, when the sea breeze came in cold and the whole town slept and I still believed a plan could keep me safe.
The moon’s laid a long silver road across the water. The waves keep coming in, the way they always have, the way they will long after all of us are gone.
Somewhere out there, on a ship pulling further from me by the minute, my husband is finding out what it’s like to reach for someone who isn’t there to be reached.
I know exactly how that feels.
I’ve been reaching for him for five years.