Chapter Thirty-Three
Rose finally opened those eyes he loved so much. They were somehow darker than he remembered. Different, even, from the eyes he’d stared into the last few days, desperate for a second chance.
“Where were you, Landon?” Rose asked.
“What are you talking about?” he asked earnestly. Then? Now? In this low light, time had lost all sense of linearity.
“I needed you,” she said. He caught a glimpse of her as she’d looked fourteen years ago: the most unusual mix of credulous and hardened. “I needed you so much. And you didn’t try. God, it just—” She held her head in her hands, shaking it this way and that. “It kills me that you didn’t try.”
That was all it took, and he was there again, hugging his legs into his chest so tight he could feel the imprint of his feet along his spine.
Conor had taken one look at him in the dark, on the couch in the basement, crumpled into himself, and decided to move in.
When Landon’s thoughts raced, Conor played mindless television on loop.
When his stomach emptied involuntarily, again and again, Conor washed his face with warm washcloths and found him clean clothes.
When he woke from sweet dreams back into the nightmare, Conor held his hand.
He knew Rose had been there, somewhere. She had been there when the doctors told them what Landon, in his carelessness and distraction, had done.
She must have been there when he’d collapsed on the couch and didn’t get back up for days, all but ignoring his body’s pleas to take care of its most basic of functions.
He hadn’t managed to push through the shame and shock to make the journey upstairs to confirm.
Landon had never wanted to have this conversation.
It was why he had written their story down.
It was why his second chance with Rose had dazzled and charmed him, adopting a pseudonym as much about winning her love in two lifetimes as it was about becoming somebody new.
If he was somebody new, he would not have to say it out loud. He could just live.
But here she was, forcing his hand. So he named the big, terrible thing.
“It was my fault,” he said.
Silence stretched between them.
“It was my fault,” he said again. The words tasted stale and rotten, aged as they were by the long months he had held them back.
“It was my fault.” Once he’d started, he could not stop.
“It was my fault. My fault, my fault, my fault.” He pounded his forehead with his fists.
“It was my fault.” He closed his eyes and imagined Cordelia’s face, imagined, as he had so many times before, taking his foot off the brakes and rolling through that intersection to the other side—delivering his child safely to the other side, before that truck had had the chance to barrel into them from behind, where he never could have seen it coming.
“I should be dead,” he said. “I wish I was dead and she was here every day, Rose. How could I have been there for you? You deserved help. Support. You deserved to be as far away from me as possible. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep—” The pain hit him in the chest, sudden and sharp, and he doubled over, trying not to retch onto the floor.
“She was always there, in my dreams. Alive. Then I would have to leave her. Every night, having to leave her.” He shook his head.
“It was fucking hell. It was torture. And it was my fault.” He looped the phrase over and over, the words and their impact circling back around to slap him in the face. “It was my fault.”
Rose sat up in the bed, and he wondered what the movement had cost her.
She needed rest and sleep. Not this. There he went again, taking from her.
“You’re wrong,” she said. Then her expression shifted.
Her voice was certain and clear. “I never thought that. I never thought it was your fault. Not once.”
“Rose—”
She placed a hand on her forehead and sat up a little higher. “How could you have possibly thought it was your fault?”
He shook his head wildly. “I was driving the car—”
“It was not your fault, Landon,” she said.
“Do I wish we hadn’t left the house that morning?
Yes. With everything in me. But we did leave.
And we left because we were giving ourselves a chance.
I’m the one who holds this, Landon. I’m the one who distracted you.
It’s my fault.” She laid her head in her hands.
“From the moment she was even a thought, all I wanted to be was a good mother,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “And I couldn’t protect her.”
Landon stared at her, fighting his every instinct to reach for her hands. “I couldn’t protect her, either.”
“It was my fault,” they both said at the same time.
“I don’t blame you,” she said.
“How could I blame you?” he said.
Landon had carried the weight for so long it had fused to his bones, grown heavier with every passing week, every unanswered question, every sleepless night. And now, this. To find that they’d both been pushing the same boulder up a hill alone when they could have been using four hands.
It would have been impossible to say who moved toward who first, their bodies drawn to each other like magnets as they were.
Their lips met softly, tentatively, as though it were the first time.
She sighed into him, her mouth as stale as his.
He cupped her cheek in his hand and smoothed her tangled hair.
And he had the clearest thought—as close to a vision as he’d ever had—that maybe the passing of time was ceremonial, the way the ancients thought.
Not the modern world’s graceless obedience to sequence and increment, but the stunning imperfection of human memory and the movements of heavenly bodies.
Maybe the moon that lit their bed last night was the same one that had shone through the plastic blinds in their dorm room when she’d run her hands down his chest, when he’d first seen her unguarded and bare.
Maybe tomorrow they would stand in that musty barn she’d fallen in love with, drinking warm cider and crisp wine while they danced for the first time as husband and wife, sweat dripping down their foreheads and pooling in their clothes.
Maybe yesterday she’d already told him she did not blame him.
They were everywhere and nowhere, the kiss full of grief and love. He pressed his forehead to hers and whispered, “You kept your name.”
She smiled sadly. “I grew into it so well, I felt it a shame to leave it behind.”
Landon pulled back a touch, the list of things he needed to atone for still feeling miles long. “Do you remember her?” he asked. “Other Rose?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “None of this feels real. How is that even possible?”
“I don’t know how these drugs work any more than you do,” she said. “It’s just like other Rose told you. I’m the guinea pig.”
The Jamie inside him felt enormously guilty. “I shouldn’t have lied to you.” He shouldn’t have done a lot of things.
“No,” she said, “you shouldn’t have.”
“And I shouldn’t have come between you and Graham.” He didn’t mean that, but knew it was something he should say.
Rose laughed. “Give Rose some credit, okay? She made up her own mind.”
“She really was something,” he said, wondering what she would say if she were here. “I’ll give you that.”
“Did you love her?”
The question disarmed him, but he hadn’t come this far only to lie to her now. “No,” he said, finally admitting it to himself. “No, we didn’t have time for that. But she helped me, she really did. I was happy. And God, that’s no small thing.”
Rose bit her bottom lip, and he couldn’t tell if his response had pleased or upset her.
“I wish you hadn’t left.” Part of him knew he shouldn’t have said it, that he should have let them live in this time outside of time a few minutes longer. But Landon never passed up an opportunity to put his foot in his mouth. “I wish we had just talked, back then, just like we’re talking now.”
“Me too.”
“It would have changed everything.”
Her body stilled. “It wouldn’t have.”
It was all so clear. Why couldn’t she see it, too? “Of course it would have. We would have found our way back to each other, just like we’re doing now. You don’t blame me. You didn’t blame me, even then. I thought that you left because of me.”
“Oh, Landon.” She breathed the words more than she spoke them.
Landon sifted both hands through his hair.
The beeping of machines was starting to get to him, and he wished pulling the plugs wouldn’t mean jeopardizing Rose’s well-being.
“It wasn’t your fault. And there was nothing you could have done or said that could have made me stay.
Those two things can be true at the same time. ”
God, this woman. This beautiful, complicated, maddening woman. “I don’t understand.”
“I left because I couldn’t live without her.”
“I didn’t want to, either.”
Her eyes glazed over. “You should have taken the pill.”
“I was waiting for you!” He was yelling, and he knew there were a thousand reasons he shouldn’t be. “But you’re here. We can do this together.”
She looked at him with pity. “We won’t be us. That’s the entire point.”
He shook his head hard enough to rattle his brain. “There are parts of us we can’t shake. I know it. I saw it!”
Her jaw set. “The drawings.”
“Yeah,” said Landon. “The drawings. How can you lie there and tell me your other was nothing like you? She knew our daughter.”
“She didn’t know why she was doing it. To her, it was just a compulsion.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I remember it.”
“Yeah, well I misremember a lot of things, and you’re usually the first to point them out.”