Chapter 39
Chapter Thirty-Nine
ASK ME ANYTHING
HUDSON
We didn’t have time to have the conversation we need to, and this isn’t the place to have it. So before I disappeared behind this door, I did the only thing I had time to do. I just let the words form on my lips, clearly, making sure she could see them if she was looking.
I spent months hiding the reality of it from her, it was not a good strategy. I'm aware of that now. I knew it at the time.
“This should be fairly straightforward,” the agent says, typing something for the record.
“Everything appears to be in order.” She says it with reassurance.
But I have enough awareness that just because something is right doesn’t mean it works out.
I have seen airtight cases fall apart on technicalities.
I have watched the correct outcome fail to materialize more times than I can count.
Being right, in my experience, is the beginning of the argument, not the end of it.
And this is the one argument I cannot afford to lose, because for once, I’m not here to win something for myself. No matter what she thinks.
“Are you ready to get started?” She lowers her glasses from her head, and faces the computer screen. Prepared to run through a list of questions that decide whether or not my marriage, my wife, passes the test.
Well, I am really fucking good at tests.
I nod.
“How long have you and your wife been living together?”
“Almost a year,” I say.
“And you were neighbors before the marriage.”
“Yes.”
“What was that like?”
The honest answer is the only answer I have left.
“We wasted a lot of time,” I say. “We hated each other, we were at war.” I pause, to think about the nights my feet would carry me to her door.
When it was always my hidden heart pulling the strings.
“Mutually, enthusiastically, I told myself it was irritating. It was easier than the alternative.”
“Which was?”
“Admitting that the reason I ended my relationships, the reason I positioned myself in ways she would have to interact with me, was because she was the only thing I could hear, out of an entire city, not because she was loud.” I pause. “Because she became the only part of my day worth hearing.”
The agent clicks to another screen, typing something in.
It’s funny how someone’s life can be reduced to this.
That proving she’s loved by someone whose love is worth as little as mine, is somehow the final step between belonging somewhere and being removed from it.
That love, the most unquantifiable thing that exists, gets filed and rubber-stamped by a stranger.
“Can you describe a typical morning in your home, with your wife?”
“I’d be glad to, because when I’m out of here, I need to make sure that every morning I have after this one is just like it.
” I laugh to myself as the words come out, knowing how true it is.
But I strengthen my voice, because there’s no better use of it than right now.
“Which is to say, I have absolutely no fucking idea what it’ll be.
” She looks away from her screen, and turns to me, curious about what I’ll have to say.
“She wakes up before she's ready,” I start. “Every morning with an alarm that she argues with.” I can see the case agent more interested with everything I say. “She doesn’t eat breakfast, but she stands in front of the cabinet to decide if it should be coffee or tea, which she doesn’t know until she reaches for a mug.
And when she does choose a mug, she apologizes to the ones left behind.
All this time, she’s about half dressed, if I’m lucky.
” I hear the agent let out a soft chuckle that feels counter to the job she’s trying to do.
“Which means I have to fight myself to go to work, because you wouldn’t want to leave her either.
” I take a breath, and watch the agent as she assesses the situation.
This is only half of it, Louisa still has to sit in the chair and do the same thing.
“I’m sure your system flagged the dates,” I say, going off script from the simple question I was asked.
But with Louisa, there’s never a simple answer, and I would never want there to be.
“The timeline and sequence of events that a computer looks at and finds convenient, or suspicious, it finds whatever it’s been programmed to find.
” I take another breath as I prepare myself.
“But a timeline can't tell you what I know. And I know everything.”
I lean forward on the desk.
“You want to know her brand of tampons, no problem. You want to know how much she feeds the sourdough starter or its name, I'll tell you. You want to know what her yawn sounds like when she’s fighting sleep versus rising from it, because they are different, completely different, and I know, because both stop my heart.” I let the room be quiet for a moment.
“I know that she turns her phone off when she’s waiting for news about something, otherwise she’ll check it every minute.
That’s not hyperbole. Literally. Every. Minute.
I know she misses the idea of a home she didn’t have, so she satisfies homesickness with a kind of terrible cookie.
I know she counts to four when she’s trying not to fall apart, and I know she does that, because I taught her, on the scariest night of her life, when she showed up at my door and trusted me before she had any reason to.
” My jaw tightens. “I know which side of the bed she’ll migrate to by two in the morning.
I know there is not a person she comes in contact with whose life she won’t ask about, and she’ll leave with more information about a stranger than your file could possibly have on her.
Just excited to know them. And she means it.
Every fucking question.” I look at the agent directly.
“I am sitting in this chair because the love of my life happened to be born somewhere else. That’s it.
That’s the whole story. The life she made, the one she chose, the life we have, is here, and I’m not going to let that go.
” My pulse is thumping, and it’s the pace in which I deliver everything I need to say.
“I have loved her longer than any paperwork can prove and I will love her long after I walk out of this office.” A beat passes, short and shallow. “So go ahead, ask me anything.”
LOUISA
He grabs my hand as we pass each other in the doorway, it's brief, his fingers wrapping around the inside of my wrist where my pulse is, which feels intentional even if it isn't (it probably is), and I look up and his mouth opens, ready to say something.
“I'm sorry, you cannot communicate until both interviews are complete.” The agent’s voice is absolute as she steps between us. I yank my hand back, and his face when I do it will be the only thing I think about for the next thirty minutes.
“Mrs. Ellis,” the agent says, gesturing toward the door.
As I step past him into the room I hear it, so quiet it barely qualifies as sound, just the shape of the word formed close to my ear. “I’m sorry.”
I don't turn around, I just walk through the door and I carry it in with me, that whispered sorry sitting in the center of my chest like a stone I don't know the weight of yet, ready to sink down through my stomach. Sorry for what? Sorry for the apartment, for the lie. Sorry for the last two weeks. Or sorry for something else, something larger, the ‘I love you’ he mouthed across the room before he went in, three words I saw clearly. The risk he said I’d have to be willing to accept. I accepted it. It’s that I’m the liability he didn’t.
And right now, in the most important performance of my life, I have no script, no character to hide behind. It’s just me, Louisa James Evans Ellis.
Maybe it’s time to leave the performance for the recording booth.
She starts with the practical questions, the golf-ball-sized hail of specifics.
Rug colors, thermostat settings, which side of the bed.
Things I know from living in his space, from learning the geography of him from proximity alone.
I answer everything and from some blessing from the universe, my voice stays level.
(Good job, just like that, just keep doing that.)
“And how long have you and your husband been living together?”
“I moved in officially when we got married. We were neighbors before, so the transition wasn’t—” I pause thinking about it more honestly than I should be. “It felt natural,” I say. “More natural than it should have, you know, given where we started.”
“And where was that?” she prompts, typing notes as I go. Like she can just shorthand my life away.
“Hating each other,” I say. She looks up at me at that, giving me space to continue.
Maybe hoping I hang myself by saying too much.
I can hear Hudson in my ear, telling me to just say enough, and nothing more.
Well, sorry, Hudson. If you haven't noticed by now, I am more.
I might as well be myself if this is about to go up in smoke.
“We fucking hated each other.” I say it, and her eyes give way to the smile she’s not allowed to have while on the clock.
“We shared a wall and spent months making each other miserable. Lobbing insults at each other, even the occasional official building complaint.” I look down at my hands, always hoping they will hold an answer they never do.
Using my thumb to spin the ruby, twirling it on my ring finger where I can’t imagine the absence of it now.
“We were good at it, too good at it, which looking back really should have been a sign.”
“A sign of what?” she asks.
“That we didn’t hate each other, not at all.” I look up. “And I don’t know that we ever really could.”
She makes a note, and I feel the dread of what’s coming, the way you can feel weather changing before it arrives.
“Mrs. Ellis,” she says. "Can you tell me about your husband?” I can do this, I’ve prepared this, I know every minute detail about his habits, his history, even now, his body.
“He went to Columbia Law, he works in mergers and acquisitions at—”
“Not his resume,” she clarifies. “Who he really is.” (Maybe I can’t do this.) The answer if it was asked three minutes ago, compared to three weeks ago, versus three months ago. Every one would be different.
“He’s a private person,” I say, and hear immediately how inadequate it is, how catastrophically insufficient for what I actually know about him, and something about the gap between those two things, between ‘private person’ and the full impossible truth of him, between what I just said and what I actually know, is so enormous and so absurd that I huff a laugh.
Which becomes another, eventually has me throwing my head back in the United States Immigration office, completely cackling while my life in this country hangs in the balance.
“I'm sorry,” I manage, gasping. “I’m so sorry, I—” Another wave of it, helpless, the kind of laughter that has tears behind it but hasn't decided if they're needed yet. “You want to know how well I know a man who made himself virtually unknowable, that’s—” I press my hand to my mouth. “And the most ridiculous part is… I do…I know him!” I say. It comes out through the last of it, the laughter going quiet at the edges, leaving something more honest underneath. “Better than I’ve known anyone, better than myself, that’s the thing.
I know exactly who he is.” I pause to take a breath.
“Because he showed me, he is someone who loves people with everything he has, he just makes it so—” I stop, the anger from earlier is still there, but tastes different on my tongue.
“He’s the most impossible person to love in return, because he makes it that way, not because it’s who he is, it's who he thinks he needs to be.” The room is very quiet.
“All the while waking up every day and loving me in a way no one ever has.”
She’s watching me with more intention, hanging on every word that has not even remotely answered the question in a way that allows her to check the box.
“I’m sorry, this is very unprofessional, but you have to see how this is funny.
” I hold my face in my hands. “I narrate audiobooks,” I say.
“I’m sure that’s somewhere on your screen, Louisa Evans, insufficient career for exemplary status, isn’t that right?
” She gives a single nod. “But I voice romance novels, mostly. I can breathe life into an entire love story, beginning to end, listeners drown in every word of it, in the highs and lows of the most passionate, torrid love affairs. The greatest love stories you can ever imagine, I speak them into existence.” (Okay, also some insane.) But I’m building strength, my voice getting bolder as I continue.
“And right now I cannot find a single word for the most honest love I have ever felt in my life, even when I am so mad at him.” A breath that comes out ragged.
“Which is funny… Or maybe it will be… Later.” (Assuming it’s not the reason they stamp a big fat ‘rejected’ across my name.)
“You can relax, Mrs. Ellis, this is all just a formality now,” she says finally. And my face must contort into the ‘huh’ that is on the tip of my tongue.
“What do you mean?”
“I already spoke with your husband at length.” She looks at me steadily.
“Whatever happened today before you walked in here, it doesn’t matter.
Not to the United States government. That man left this room and there was not a single person on this floor who didn’t know exactly what they’d just heard. ”
The understanding of what she says washes over me. How is it that everyone around us, people we’ve never met, and those that know us best, seem to be able to say the one thing we haven’t been able to. Not out loud.
“You’ll receive written confirmation in four to six weeks,” the agent says, clicking closed the files on her desktop. “But your application has been approved.” She pauses, and shifts her glasses back to the top of head as I sit here frozen. “Congratulations, Louisa.”
I stand from the chair, stunned in silence for more reasons than I know what to do with.
On the list of confusing, this one takes the cake.
Everyone around us has been reading the same story, we just kept insisting we were in a different one.
We were so committed to it, so convinced we were performing something for everyone else’s benefit, as a means to an end, that we missed the only real thing right in front of us.
We weren’t pretending to be in love. We were pretending we weren’t.
And we were the only ones fooled.