Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
ALL STEAMED UP
LOUISA
There is a pounding on the door that wakes me up immediately. I didn’t bother going to bed last night, or the last three. Not the one in my apartment, and not the one I’ve curled into for the last months.
Besides the night we spent together, it was the first time sleeping in my own apartment since we started this whole thing.
And let me tell you, I slept horribly. (Don’t tell him.) I thought being in my own space, alone, would give me the chance to reset myself.
To not wake up to him handing me a mug, or asking what I’m recording today. (Because he does that.)
But we were together here.
And while I knew he regretted it, I didn’t realize how much. Knowing that he got out of bed that morning, to make sure I wouldn’t get the wrong idea.
I stayed here to not let myself fall into this illusion of him I’ve made up in the folds of kindness and imagination. He couldn’t let me bask in the morning light of it a little longer, because my feelings are such a liability to him—no, not feelings. Love. (Maybe just my love.)
It doesn’t matter how amazing it was (which it was.) I know that’s not a lie.
But I don't understand how he can just move on. Maybe that’s the point, maybe that’s what he’s trying to avoid by ‘not wanting me to get the wrong idea,’ like I am a problem he has been quietly enduring.
All the small chaos of me, tallied up behind my back into evidence that my feelings are, as suspected, too much.
I've been told that before. Just never by someone I’d started to believe might think otherwise.
So as someone is pounding on my door, I am not a woman who slept, I am a shell of a person who rehearsed her own humiliation until the sun came up. (Again.)
I pull myself off the bed and into the hallway, still in the oversized t-shirt I never changed out of, and I crack the door open. Not sure who I am expecting at 8 a.m. on a Monday morning. (I know who I’m hoping.)e left when I asked him to.
He’s texted me since, the minimal logistics of our fake life, keeping it all clean, so he will be able to extract himself easily as he originally planned.
Except for the one where he said, again, that we need to talk.
But I can’t. For the first time in my life, I’m hiding from a conversation, because I knew it was temporary, but I’m not ready to hear (again) just how temporary.
So I retreated to my apartment, where I’ve DoorDashed every meal and spent the weekend buried in work.
At least for him, perfect timing with the recording studio, because as I moaned and screamed, he didn’t show up at my door. And while I had a real memory to work with this time, I also had one for the great heartbreak third-act break-up scene.
But when I open my front door, it’s not him. (Of course not.) It’s a gangly, odious man, dressed in an ill-fitting suit.
“Mrs. Ellis,” he says through his nose. Handing me a business card with the same seal that started this entire ruse. United States Immigration and Customs. “I’m hoping to speak to you and your husband, is he home?”
He is peering through the door, looking for signs of Hudson in my apartment, of course, there are none to be found. My mouth is immediately dry and my stomach knots in a way to tell me this is a bad situation. (Like I don’t already know.)
And like everything. I make it worse.
“He’s in the shower, it will be a while.”
Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! I might as well come clean now, this is a disaster I’ve backed myself into in all ways.
“I can wait,” he says as he slips his narrow body through the door and takes a seat on the sofa to do just that. He makes himself comfortable, and doing so strips me of any comfort I had. (Which was already teetering after recent events.)
I shouldn’t even be here right now, but we slept together, and I couldn’t spend another night in the same space, not yet. Knowing that he would be just across the living room, filled with regret, just wasn’t something I could deal with immediately.
I hurry into my bedroom. “Just getting dressed,” I call through the door, in a voice I intend to sound casual and which sounds like someone doing an impression of casual. I pull on leggings because I refuse to face my fate without pants.
I step into the bathroom, look around like someone might be able to apparate in and save me. But I pull back the shower curtain and open my favorite (weirdest) part of the apartment. My shower window. I hang my head out and wonder if an escape is at all possible. (It’s obviously not.)
I step out of the shower, but turn on the water, because I have committed to the bit and the bit requires my husband in the shower. But not before texting said (fake) husband as quickly as possible.
sos! immigration here
This will be the last crazy thing he has to deal with.
Though now that I’ve backed myself into a corner of my own chaos, I don’t know that there’s really anything anyone can do.
So I commit to the bit and as I’m leaving the bathroom and say to absolutely no one (but loud enough for someone to hear), ‘Babe, uh, Immigration is here.’
My reflection in the mirror is the only one that responds. (And she looks pissed.) Knowing that every minute this goes on, I’m only making it worse. (Well, there’s a metaphor for ya.)
Maybe I can fill him with water, tea, poison (not poison), and eventually he will have to go to the bathroom, and my husband will still be in the world’s longest shower, so he will have to leave and go somewhere else.
And at that point I just run out the door and pretend this never happened.
That’s plausible right? (Of course not, Louisa, what is wrong with you.)
The only thing more fake than my already fake husband? Talking to him in an empty bathroom.
Maybe I just say ‘oops I actually live next door, I just sleepwalk and get confused.’ He’d buy that, right? (Get it together.)
Before I take the steps to meet my fate, I take a long, slow inhale through my nose. The version of me watching this play out is getting steamed over by the hot, running water. But I see her doing the four counts before blowing out the breath.
I step out of the hallway where my bedroom and bathroom connect, fake laughing at something my fake husband didn’t say because there is absolutely no one there.
“Can I offer you something,” I ask. “Tea, how about a coffee—” The man, whose first name is Dick (appropriate), last name Ricktor (somehow also appropriate), opens his mouth like he’s about to speak. “Actually I don’t think I have any coffee. Tea it is!”
He had clearly been moving through my small living space. Nothing is physically out of place, but it’s like I can see every step he took. As he stood in front of different parts of my life to pass judgement. (He’d probably really like my dad.)
“Nothing,” he says. He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at the recording booth. “What is that?”
“Recording studio. I’m a voice actor.”
“Mm.” He writes something down, I don't know what, and that makes me nervous because I don't know what about ‘recording studio, voice actor’ requires notation, but apparently it does. “You work from home.”
“Yes.”
“Full time?”
“Yeah, mostly.” My phone is face down on the counter and I am willing it to buzz with everything I have.
Ring so I can kick him out, goddamnit. (It doesn’t.) “I also, well, I used to work at a coffee shop, but that's on hold right now while the immigration process—” He holds his hand up to stop me as he picks up the framed photo from my bookshelf.
The one of me and Theo at what must be a Christmas two years ago when he was in town, both of us in terrible sweaters with our arms around each other, squinting into the flash.
“Family?” he asks.
“My brother, he’s in London.”
“Your parents?” Something tightens in my chest. Not fear exactly, but discomfort at a question that is easy to answer and hard to say.
“They’re in England also. They moved back a few years ago.
” He sets the photo down and picks up another frame.
This one of Chandler and me at her art show in college, and next to it one from a gallery show last year.
“No wedding pictures,” Dick (literally) says. A statement so clearly pointed, he either thinks I’m an idiot or I don’t care.
“It was very intimate. No phones,” I say.I start following him around my apartment as if I’m imaginary saging everything he touches.
Another knock on the door. (Fucking. Great.) Seriously, the universe is punishing me with the worst morning.
This is more than bad luck. I look up to the ceiling, imagining the sky all the floors above it, hoping the clouds can hear my prayers.
‘I know someone else must have needed my good-luck day, but please please please for the love of everything, can I please just have the good luck for a little bit this morning? And I promise you can have me trip and fall or get stuck in an elevator, whatever you need, later.’ I say to no one but myself.
Knowing there’s no one to save me this time. When I should have just been honest, or a version close to it. But no. The knock at the door is louder, great. This is it. The police have come to take me away. ‘Sorry Louisa Evans, time to go, say hi to the queen.’ (I’m sure that’s how it will go.)
I squeeze my face through the gap and there is Hudson, in a suit as his Monday-through-Friday uniform would require.
But his hand presses flat against the door, ready to push it open without hesitation.
He looks furious. And I’m sure I can think of a few reasons why.
(And I would bet they all are my fault.)
But he still came.
Lotta good it will do considering he’s ‘in the shower.’
His dark eyebrows press together in a way that looks like he could have broken down the door if I hadn’t gotten here by the next knock. (He might still.)