12. Kai
— ? —
Kai
She’s at the Beverly Wilshire.
It takes me a day and most of a night to find out, a day of calling everyone who might know, pulling every string I can reach, calling in things people owed me and hoped I’d forgotten, a night of pacing the floors of our empty house, checking my phone every thirty seconds, leaving voicemails that get increasingly desperate as the hours crawl by and she doesn’t answer.
It’s a concierge who finally gives her up, a man I’ve tipped for years, and he does it in a voice that makes it clear he thinks less of me for asking.
My hands are shaking so badly when he says the name of the hotel that I nearly drop the phone.
I know I should wait until morning, give her space, approach this like a rational adult instead of a man who feels like he’s drowning in his own living room.
But I can’t sleep or eat or do anything except replay the sound of that door closing behind her, over and over, the most final sound I’ve ever heard.
I show up at the hotel at three in the morning because I can’t wait any longer.
The lobby is hushed and nearly empty at this hour, just a night clerk behind the desk and a security guard who eyes me suspiciously as I cross toward the elevators.
I’m still wearing the clothes I had on when she left, wrinkled now from hours of pacing and driving and clutching at my own hair like a madman, and I probably look like hell, and I don’t care.
The hallway on her floor is silent, thick carpet muffling my footsteps, tasteful wallpaper and soft lighting creating an atmosphere of elegant discretion, a place where people come to escape their problems in comfort and privacy, a place where scenes aren’t supposed to happen. I’m about to make a scene anyway.
Her room is at the end of the hall, and I walk toward it with my heart going so hard I can feel it in my temples and behind my eyes, each step like walking toward the edge of a cliff, like the moment before you jump and there’s no taking it back.
I stop in front of her door and just stand there, trying to compose myself, trying to figure out what I’m going to say.
I had speeches prepared on the drive over, logical arguments and emotional appeals and promises I was certain would convince her, and now they’ve all evaporated, leaving nothing but desperation and the overwhelming need to see her face.
I knock.
“Erika.” My voice comes out wrong, worn down by a day of calls and voicemails and the hours of talking to myself in an empty house. “I know you’re in there. Please. Just let me talk to you.”
Silence, the heavy silence that presses against your eardrums and makes you doubt your own sanity.
I knock again, harder. “Please. Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking. Give me five minutes and then I’ll go, I’ll leave you alone, I’ll do whatever you want.”
More silence, and it stretches out so long that I begin to think she isn’t in there at all, that she saw me coming and slipped out through a service entrance and I’m pouring my heart out to an empty room.
Then I hear it, footsteps soft against carpet approaching the door, the click of a deadbolt turning, and the door opens, just three inches, held in place by the security chain she’s left engaged.
Through the gap I can see her face. No makeup, eyes swollen and red-rimmed from crying, hair pulled back in a messy ponytail that’s coming loose, and she looks wrecked and lovely and already a thousand miles away, even though she’s standing right in front of me.
She’s wearing one of my old t-shirts, the faded gray one from college that she used to steal from my closet because she said it smelled like me, the one I thought I’d lost years ago in a move.
She must have grabbed it by accident when she was packing, must have thrown it in her bag without even realizing, and the sight of her wearing my shirt while she cries over the end of our marriage breaks a part of me I didn’t know could still break.
“It’s three in the morning.” Her voice is flat, exhausted, giving nothing away.
“I know. I couldn’t sleep.”
“Not my problem anymore.”
“Erika, please…”
“Go home, Kai.”
“I can’t.” The words crack out of me, broken and desperate and nothing like the composed speeches I’d prepared.
“I tried. I went back to the house after you left and walked through every room and it felt like a graveyard. Your shampoo is still in the shower and your books are still on the nightstand and your pillow still smells like you, but you’re not there, and without you it’s just walls and furniture and stuff that doesn’t matter. ”
“You should have thought about that before…”
“I know.” I press my palm against the door frame, needing something solid to hold onto. “I know I don’t deserve another chance.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I love you.” The words come out raw and unvarnished, stripped of all the careful phrasing I’d planned. “Because the thought of losing you makes me feel like I’m dying.”
She stares at me through the three-inch gap, and I search her face desperately for some sign of softening, some hint that my words are reaching her, and I can’t tell, because her expression is a wall I don’t know how to climb.
“I filed the papers yesterday.”
The words hit me like a physical blow, like someone reached into my chest and squeezed my heart until it stopped, and I actually stagger, have to grab the door frame with both hands to keep myself upright.
“Don’t.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine anymore. “Please. Don’t file them. Give me time to prove…”
“Time for what? To change?” She laughs, and the sound is hollow and bitter. “You’ve had four years, Kai.”
“I didn’t know I needed to change. I was blind, I was so focused on work and proving myself that I couldn’t see what was right in front of me…”
“Whose fault is that?”
I don’t have an answer. I have one thing, and I don’t know how to say it through a door chain, so I don’t.
What I said in Dora’s kitchen was true for about a day.
I couldn’t feel it, so I said it wasn’t there.
It took her walking out to find out that I couldn’t feel anything because I’d gone numb from the neck down, not because it was gone, and I’ve never in my life been so sure of a thing as I am of it standing in this hallway with my hand on the frame, and it’s the one thing she won’t believe if I say it, so I stand there and let her think I have no answer at all.
“Go home,” she says again, and starts to close the door.
“I’m not signing.”
She stops. “What?”
“The papers.” A desperate resolve hardens inside my chest, the only solid thing left. “Whatever you file, I’m not signing. I refuse.”
“You can’t just refuse…”
“I can and I will.” I meet her eyes through the gap, pouring everything I have left into my voice. “You can hate me. You can never speak to me again. But I am not letting you go without a fight.”
“That’s not your choice to make.”
“Maybe not. But I’m making it anyway.”
She stares at me, and her expression shifts, not into forgiveness, not softening, but some flicker of reaction that tells me my words have landed somewhere.
“Thirty days,” she says finally. “And then it goes through with or without your signature.”
The door closes in my face.
I don’t hear her walk away. That’s the thing I hold onto, standing there with my forehead an inch from the wood.
The chain doesn’t rattle back into place right away, and there’s no sound of footsteps on the carpet, just the faint give of the door under a weight on the other side that could be her hand or her back or nothing at all, and I stand there and let myself believe it’s her, that she’s three inches of wood away with her palm flat against the door the way mine is, and after a while the lock turns the rest of the way and her footsteps go, and I’m alone in the hall with my hand still up like an idiot.
I stand in that hallway until my legs go numb beneath me, until a night manager in a pressed suit appears at my elbow asking if I need assistance, until the gray light of dawn starts seeping through the windows at the end of the corridor, and I stand there because leaving feels like giving up, and I’m not ready for that yet.
Eventually, I go home. The city is empty at that hour, the boulevards wide and gray and mine, and I drive them the way I used to when I was sixteen and couldn’t sleep, aimless, too fast, past the restaurant with its chairs stacked on the tables and the turnoff for Dora’s and the exit for the ballroom where she stood on a stage without me, every landmark on the route home a place I wasn’t when I should have been.
The papers arrive four days later. The envelope is thick and cream-colored and impossibly heavy for paper, and a courier brings it, a young guy in a uniform who makes me sign for it on a little electronic pad, who has no idea that he’s just handed me the death certificate for my marriage.
I thank him automatically and close the door and stand in the foyer holding the envelope like it might bite me.
I take it into my study, my father’s study, really, because the furniture is his and the books are his and the heavy wooden desk where I sit down is the same one where he sat when I was a kid, watching him work and thinking that someday I’d be just like him, successful and important, a man who built things that mattered.
I wonder what he’d think if he could see me now, sitting in his chair holding divorce papers, having destroyed the one good thing I ever built.
I open the envelope. Inside there are forms, so many forms, pages of language about who gets what that I read slowly, carefully, forcing myself to absorb every word even though each one feels like a knife, the architecture of an ending laid out in black and white.
At the bottom of the last page there’s a line for my signature.
The pen is right there, in the holder on my desk where I always keep it, and it would be easy, sign my name, send it back, let her go, accept that I failed, that some things can’t be fixed, that four years of marriage are about to become a footnote in both our lives.
I stare at the signature line for a long time.
Before I put the pages down I pick up my phone instead, and I don’t know why until I’m already scrolling, and then I find it.
The photo she sent me at five o’clock on the night of the ceremony, the one I never opened because my phone was dead in a restaurant with the wrong woman.
Champagne silk. Diamonds. Her chin up, her eyes bright, standing in front of our closet mirror looking like someone worth showing up for, and under it, See you there.
7 p.m. Don’t be late. She was so sure I’d come.
You can see it on her face. She’d already forgiven me for being late before I’d even failed to show, because that’s what she’d been doing for four years, forgiving me in advance, and I never once noticed the cost.
I put the phone down face up on the desk, her face looking at me, and I fold the papers carefully, put them back in the envelope, open the bottom drawer of my desk, and lock them inside. The drawer clicks shut.
I sit in the silence of my father’s study, surrounded by his furniture and his books and the weight of his expectations, and I try to figure out how to win back a woman who has every reason to hate me. Thirty days. I don’t know where to start.