Chapter Fifty-Six
As I drove us back to Starlight Palms in Ruby’s car, she explained that Leonard had indeed chosen a natural burial. It would take forty days for his body to be composted into soil.
Today was day six.
He had requested that Ruby and I be present when his soil was spread. I could do that for him.
All good stories have a wedding and a funeral. It seemed that my time at Starlight Palms would have both.
Hollis sat waiting on Ruby’s couch when we returned.
“Yes,” Ruby said the moment she walked in the door, like she was announcing a ceasefire.
Hollis hardly noticed me as she stood and berated Ruby with questions about where she’d been and told Ruby how she had been so, so worried and that if they got married, Hollis was too old for this kind of worrying.
Ruby walked to Hollis and enveloped her.
“Hold on. Yes?” Hollis asked. “Did you just say yes?” Briefly, she looked over Ruby’s shoulder to me and I gave a nod and a small smile before seeing myself out.
With Marlon at the boarders’, I came home to an empty apartment.
The furniture was still there, but every sign of Eli was gone.
The only thing out of the ordinary was the slim white box on the kitchen table.
Atop it was an envelope addressed to me.
Eli’s harsh and angular handwriting had practically cut through the page.
I ran my fingers along the back of the paper and felt the indentation of his letters there as I began to read.
Vera—
I’ve just finished clearing the apartment of the last of my things. Like I said before, the place is still yours if you need it.
I haven’t been my best self for the last week or so. I know that.
You infuriate me. The way I feel about you infuriates me.
I don’t know how to have anything in between or casual with you. I don’t know how to tell you to go back to LA and explore this opportunity with Brody. That would be the mature thing to do. That would make me the bigger person. You’re supposed to let something go so that it can come back to you.
But like I said when I followed you to New Orleans: I want to be everywhere you are. I want to be the only person you ever wake up next to again. I don’t know how to feel any other way. I don’t know how to do this halfway. I want something you can’t give right now.
I don’t trust myself to be here when you get home.
I don’t trust that I will be the person who tells you to spend time on yourself when you could be spending it with me.
But you deserve to figure things out without me complicating it all.
You’ve taken care of everyone but yourself for so long, Vera.
You deserve to choose yourself and I think both of us need you to make that decision without me.
This whole letter feels wrong. I want to stomp around like a caveman and keep you to myself. But I’m scared that if I try to do that, there will be nothing left of you to have.
So maybe I’m weak to say all of this in a letter instead of to your face. But when you’re ready, so am I.
—Eli
PS—I decided to give you your Christmas present a few weeks early. If you decide to give it back to me, I’ll throw it in the pool.
I stared at his letter for a few minutes, rereading bits and pieces.
I wanted so much of what he wanted. But I didn’t know how to have it.
The temptation to just drive straight over to his house and tell him I was ready was a bottomless ache.
But I couldn’t cheapen his letter like that.
If I went back to Eli, I needed him to know I meant it. I needed to know I meant it.
Decomposition Day 9
He gave me a brand-new laptop and I couldn’t even bring myself to peel the cellophane wrapper off the box.
I didn’t trust him not to throw it in the pool either, so I left it on the kitchen table, and it haunted me like creaking floorboards in an old house. The only way to stop your mind from playing tricks on itself is to ignore the sound all together.
Decomposition Day 11
I sat at the kitchen table with a half-eaten bagel.
I’d seen Eli around the main building, but only in spare glimpses.
It had me wondering if he was avoiding me or if I saw him so much before because he had always sought me out.
Either way, it seemed unfair that he would ask me to take time to myself when he had the nerve to walk around with that honey-blond hair falling in his eyes, overdue for a haircut, and the veins in his forearms twitching as he shoved his hands into his pockets.
I licked the Nutella off my butter knife and then used it to open the plastic covering of the laptop box. The lid of the box slid off with a satisfying pop. It was the nicest laptop I’d ever had.
No, not had. Because this couldn’t actually be mine. I’d find a way to give it back to Eli without him throwing it in the pool.
I peeled back the interior packaging to find a brushed gold laptop. My fingers hovered above it, but I put the lid back on the box before I could let myself get too familiar with this laptop that definitely did not belong to me.
Decomposition Day 14
It was Saturday and Ruby had an appointment to go wedding dress shopping at ten in the morning, but I woke up at four and couldn’t go back to sleep.
I tried sitting on the couch and watching old episodes of Gilmore Girls, but eventually I wandered toward the kitchen and I couldn’t do that without walking past the laptop on the table.
As I made my coffee, I watched the box like it might move if I looked away.
When my cup was done and doctored to my liking, I sat down in front of the box and tried to sip my coffee, but it was too hot.
“Fuck it,” I muttered, and slid the lid off the box.
I cracked open the laptop and was immediately prompted to choose my settings and preferences.
As the sun began to break, I found myself staring at the empty laptop. Before I could talk myself out of it, I uploaded the photo I’d taken in New Orleans of the Touchdown Jesus statue in St. Louis Cathedral in the Quarter and made it my screensaver.
I finished my cup of coffee and relocated to the couch, where Marlon curled up on my feet.
Soon, I was signed into my inbox and penning an email to Brody. When I left LA, I’d told him I needed time.
I didn’t need any more time.
Brody,
First, thank you. Your offer meant a lot to me. But I have to say no.
Please understand that I’m not saying no so that I can take this project elsewhere or anything like that. I need to say goodbye to The Wunderkind. It’s not a world I know how to live inside of anymore.
I’m scared. This might be the biggest mistake of my life. But I have to trust that my best is yet to come.
—Vera
Decomposition Day 16
I bought screenwriting software. It was on sale, and I decided that even if I never used it, I was at least stimulating the economy.
Ruby found her dress. It was the first one she tried on, but of course we had to go to four other stores and try thirty-nine other dresses before she knew the first one was the right one. Considering the story of her and Hollis, I found that rather poetic.
Decomposition Day 17
I opened the software just to make sure it worked. It did. The page was as blank as I expected it to be.
Later that night, I began to transcribe Leonard’s drafts.
I didn’t know why, but it seemed like a way to warm my creative muscles.
It felt like I was teaching my body how to write again.
Of course, Ruby and I would never try to sell anything of his that he hadn’t explicitly decided was finished, but I didn’t want to risk the papers getting destroyed.
Especially now that I knew what the fuck the cloud was.
Sort of.
Decomposition Day 24
Tess:
The renovation is done. I’ve decided I don’t have to kill my family. Besides, they never use flattering pictures on those true crime documentaries.
Vera:
congratulations on choosing a crime-free life.
Tess:
Hey now, I said nothing about going cold turkey. Just laying off the murder.
Tess:
Is the blank page still taunting you?
Vera:
the page is no longer blank, but it is still taunting me.
Tess:
You’re such a good girl for Mommy.
Vera:
you are probably the closest thing I have to a daddy.
Tess:
Now go write Daddy some more words. And what do you think about making the trip to LA for a housewarming? I guess it’s more like a house reheating. A house microwave. You can spend the night. We can get high after the kids go to bed.
Vera:
can we watch Donnie Darko?
Tess:
You and that fucking movie.
Vera:
I’m starting to doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Decomposition Day 28
“This is the kind of thing I want to write,” I said as I dug another pickle from the very fancy jar Tess had been sipping from. She’d hosted her house reheating the weekend after Thanksgiving, and we were subsisting on leftover finger foods and charcuterie accoutrements.
“Absolute drivel that makes no money and the only people who like it just pretend to understand it?”
“You don’t understand my creative vision,” I said as we watched the credits for Donnie Darko roll.
“I want to make the kind of thing that you see when you’re nineteen and still quote random lines from because you can’t get it out of your head, so you make your best friend watch it with you twenty years later. ”
She sighed and yanked the remote off the coffee table, which cost more than the value of my earthly belongings and which Tess said was originally chipped when it arrived, so she strong-armed the manufacturer into replacing it before she had to tap into a kid’s college fund, which she was not beyond doing.
“I’m turning on The Princess Diaries,” she said, before chugging pickle juice straight from the jar. “My brain needs a detox. I’m way too high for Jake Gyllenhaal in a scary rabbit costume to be the last thing I see before I fall asleep.”
Decomposition Day 31
This morning before work, I began inputting the notes I’d compiled for my own project and since I wasn’t done, I put the laptop in my tote bag so I could continue during my lunch break.