Joy Moore Twelve Months Ago
Joy Moore
EXCERPT FROM UNTITLED JOINT MEMOIR WITH BENNY ABBOTT
Twelve Months Ago
I rehearsed for hours in my head.
It’s not you, it’s me. Don’t take this personally. I am drowning.
What I eventually said over breakfast one windy morning last October: “I need space.”
Xander stared at me over his toast and scooted his chair a few inches away.
“In a broader sense,” I added.
He raised an eyebrow. “From me?”
“Just a few hours.”
“Right now?”
I matched his raised eyebrow with a raised shoulder. “Whenever it’s convenient.”
“But the stalker.” He’d recently begun using that word. I hated it.
“You said your friend had an extra ticket to that premiere tonight, didn’t you? Why don’t you go? I’ll stay home and lock the doors.”
We’d been joined at the hip for several months straight. I wasn’t sure what he would say.
“This year’s been a lot, hasn’t it?”
His tone was nebulous but his words were reassuring. “A lot” was an understatement. The tour. The new house. The sta—no, I refused to use that word. The superfan. I nodded.
“Is there anything else you want to tell me? Do you not like the way I chew my food?”
An uneasy sensation began to form in my stomach. “You chew just fine.”
“Do I bore you?”
“Xander.” I forced a laugh.
He looked at me as if my face was out of focus. Outside, the wind whistled through the trees. “Some people would see it as a burden, being married to someone with your condition.”
Numbness spread through my body as I cast about for a response.
I should’ve known this was how he would react.
And yet as cruel as these words were, I knew also that they were true.
Some people would see it as a burden being married to someone with my condition.
I would see it as a burden being married to someone with my condition.
It wasn’t like I enjoyed having to abide by a rigid schedule.
It wasn’t like I delighted in playing medicinal whack-a-mole with my symptoms whenever conditions changed.
“I don’t see it that way.” He tweaked my nose. “But if you need space, you get space.”
BY 6:00 P.M., the Santa Ana winds were in full effect. They rattled the windows as Xander examined himself in the bathroom mirror. He tilted his head and undid the top button of his black oxford shirt. “Do you want me to bring anything back? Popcorn? Junior Mints?”
Perched on the edge of our clawfoot tub, I ran a hand through the bubbly water. “I’m good.”
He stared at me as a mother might entrusting her infant to a sitter for the first time. I patted his back as he hugged me. “Go. Stay out as late as you want. Have fun.”
The moment the lock clicked on the front door, my entire body relaxed. I. Was. Alone. It had been literal months since I had last been alone.
Friends, it was like I was transported back in time.
I was twenty-one again, dancing in my underwear in my first solo apartment.
I soaked in the tub with an overfull glass of wine, watched a saccharine rom-com in bed with a carton of greasy chow mein, and painted my nails while singing along to Fleetwood Mac.
I was a goddamn female cliché. It was beautiful.
I was still awash in this glow of revelatory freedom when the power went out.
“Xander?” I said reflexively, and then cursed myself for my codependency. I could handle this alone. It was probably just a fuse. Lighting the way with my phone, I found the breaker box beside the stairs. Everything seemed in order.
As I stepped out onto the terrace, a gust of warm wind whipped the door from my hand; it slammed against the wall with a loud bang, and I let out a yelp.
“Chill out,” I whispered to myself. From my perch, it appeared the entire neighborhood was down. The moon was but a sliver in the sky.
“Joy?”
I turned toward the voice and found Carlotta waving a flashlight from her back porch. Holding my hair against the wind, I met her at the fence.
“Do you need any candles?” She pointed the light up to her face.
Though we’d chatted regularly when I first moved in, I hadn’t seen Carlotta in well over a month, and I was startled by the change in her appearance.
She wore a headscarf and wide-rimmed glasses, and she had no eyebrows. No hair at all, in fact.
I declined her offer, attempting to be casual, but she’d already clocked my reaction. “Yes, yes, I have cancer. No use tiptoeing around it.”
Xander had become friendly with her partner, Emil.
It started with Xander borrowing a ladder, and the next thing I knew Emil was his twice-weekly personal trainer.
Xander was even making plans to buy the MG Emil was restoring.
I’d be shocked if Carlotta’s health never came up, but if it had, Xander hadn’t mentioned it. “I’m so sorry.”
Through the fence, in the dark, in the squalling wind, she gave me the lowdown: leukemia, acute lymphocytic. Her second time in five years. She’d finished the induction phase of chemo, was presently in remission again, and would soon begin the second phase of chemo.
“Quite the slog,” she said.
I offered to help with anything she needed, and she surprised me by taking me up on it. “Come over Saturday? I need to turn over my planter beds, and gardening is not Emil’s speed.”
I promised I would be there, she asked if I was sure I didn’t need any candles, I said I was good, and we returned to our separate houses.
The silence was jarring when I slipped back through the terrace door, the darkness engulfing. With my phone light, I found my candles, and then I called Xander. Voicemail.
It was time for bed, but I knew he’d be home soon, knocking things over in the dark, so I decided to wait for him.
I waited thirty minutes, then an hour, knowing it would mess with my routine, and still he didn’t arrive, nor pick up his phone.
Benny didn’t answer either, though this was less surprising since he was visiting his sister in Connecticut.
I am not melodramatic. In fact, I had taken the last few months in relative stride. We’d exercised caution with regard to the superfan because that’s what you do when an invisible stranger trails your every move. But now, alone in the dark, I let my imagination run wild.
If he knew where I was all hours of the day, he without doubt knew I was home alone.
Every true crime story I’d ever heard came back to me in a flash.
Were our gates secure? Was our lock easy to pick?
What if my phone ran out of charge? Why didn’t we install a landline?
Would someone hear me if I screamed for help?
I lit more candles, but the resulting shadows haunted me.
Each time the house creaked, each time the windows rattled, my entire body seized with tension.
I’m embarrassed to admit how quickly I spiraled.
The power was restored before Xander returned. He found me on the kitchen floor, asleep, knife in hand.
Needless to say, he found this alarming. So alarming that he had a baby monitor delivered to the house the next day. The kind that connects to your phone so you can watch the feed from anywhere.
“You’re kidding,” I said as he was setting it up. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“If we’d had this last night I could’ve saved you from that … scene.”
“Or, you could’ve answered your phone.”
“Let’s not make a big deal out of this.”
Rage filled me so quickly it scared me. “Not make a big deal?” I shouted. “You think this isn’t a big deal?”
“Joy, calm down.”
Has there ever been an occasion, in the history of time, when it was a good idea for a man to tell a woman to calm down?
I was not going to calm down. I could admit my behavior the previous night was not ideal, but Xander had to see he was taking this a step too far.
He’d crossed the one line we had left. The one line.
Shaking, I threw the monitor at the wall, spraying the room with splintered plastic. “WE DON’T HAVE A BABY.”
“And maybe that’s for the best.”
Reader, I threw myself at him. I wanted to claw his eyes out. Rip his chest open. Drink his blood. Look at me NOW, I wanted to say. Does this look helpless to you? But he had me on my back before I could so much as yank a hair from his head.
“Stop,” he said, pinning me down. “Stop fighting.”
I didn’t stop. I fought so hard, for so long, I ended up passing out. When I came to, he was pressing a cool, wet cloth to my neck. “Needing help is nothing to be ashamed of,” he said quietly.
He fixed a bowl of soup and drew me a bath. “I’m sorry,” I whispered as he shampooed my hair.
“Thank you,” I whispered when he put me to bed.
The following afternoon, Benny showed up to record.
Xander was home, of course, hovering nearby as Benny filled a glass with water and downed it in two long pulls.
Wiping his mouth, he gave me a once-over.
“Why are you wearing that? It’s ninety-eight degrees.
” I could feel the heat coming off his skin; his forehead was beaded with sweat.
“The boy band?” I tugged at the sleeves of my sweatshirt, hyperaware of Xander’s gaze. For breakfast, he’d made berries-and-cream crepes with freshly squeezed orange juice. I wasn’t hungry but I’d cleaned my plate. “How was Connecticut?”
Benny mopped his brow with a paper towel. “Thirty degrees cooler.” His sister had taken him to a few breweries. They’d eaten pizza in Mystic. Spent a day shopping. “Sarah insisted I needed new shoes.” He directed all of this to me, despite Xander’s close proximity.
“You got new shoes?”
His eyebrow twitched. “Seriously, why are you wearing a sweatshirt?”
I wanted to tell him. I could make it into a joke.
Listen to this crazy thing that happened last night.
Look how easily I bruise when someone is holding me down with their knees.
Isn’t it wild the way fingers can imprint on your skin when someone crushes your arms?
Instead, I looked Benny straight in the eye and told him I was having a bad period.
It pains me to say there were other scenes like this. Other arguments. Other sweatshirts on hot days. “You’re lucky I’m so patient with you,” Xander would say.
Every time, I promised myself I would tell Benny what was happening, and every time, I found an excuse not to.
He and Luna were still working on their own marriage.
I didn’t want to saddle him with another set of problems. Besides, telling Benny would only force my hand, and what cards was I playing with anyway?
Xander was inextricably entwined with every facet of the podcast. With every facet of my existence. It was so. Exhaustingly. Complicated.
Like a dying star, I began to collapse into myself. And as he always had, Xander took care of me. Fed me. Brought me pills. Escorted me to doctor’s appointments. To appease him, to thank him for his service, I kept my mouth shut.
I know what you’re thinking. I know. But that isn’t even the worst of it.