Chapter Twenty-Three #2
I wanted to be there, you know, so bad. To see you.
But, equally, I didn’t. Who knows what I wanted.
At least your mom wasn’t there. I felt a distinct relief about that.
Thank you, anxiety, for helping me avoid it, even if it meant that I was still stuck in the ruthless void of unanswered questions.
We were a week past Janite’s move. I was scared to see your house empty.
Or, maybe worse, to see someone else living there.
I looked away from your house as I walked past it.
I averted my eyes. It was another thing I just couldn’t do, because my body was suddenly a hundred doors, shutting in a panic.
I felt you there, urging me to look, but I fought you.
I’m sorry. It was weird, how close you seemed sometimes.
It was like you were right there with me, and I’d say, I’m so sorry.
I love you. Mars, Mars! Where are you? These were the things I needed you to know, and the thing I needed to know.
I rang Mrs. Fosmire’s doorbell. I could avert my eyes all I wanted, but there was the end of the dock where we swam, and the lake, and the boats, and our city, and our state, and our world, and you were everywhere.
At first, I only saw Mrs. Fosmire’s scowling face through the mesh of the screen door, and then she opened it.
She seemed as cranky and pissed as ever, her face hard and resentful of all that life had brought her.
I’d never been so glad to see anyone in all my life.
She took that box and gave it a gentle Frisbee toss, and then she reached her arms out to me, because I was suddenly crying.
She let out an impressive stream of fucks. They sounded rough and right when she linked them to other words like unfair and wrong and horrible. They sounded impassioned and heartfelt when she linked them to words like special and loved and one of a kind.
She didn’t cry, but when I stopped, I could see that her eyes were watery. I saw something else, too—that her eyes went on and on, that she was familiar with this particular planet, the one that was new to me, but that we were both on.
How many times had you told me that connection could save you? Standing there with Mrs. Fosmire, I actually felt ever so briefly that I might survive this.
“You come and see me anytime,” she said.
I was thankful that Mrs. Fosmire’s was the last delivery of the day.
I was a mess, and suddenly exhausted. That dock—it might as well have been the aisle of a church, the way it seemed that the walk back down it, back to my car, would be a last walk, a march from my old self to a new one that seemed too far away to even see.
The walk was something to face, and I could do it, okay? Mrs. Fosmire was there, and I could.
Good luck with that, my anxiety said.
I peeked at your houseboat, a few floats away.
It looked unchanged—the tiny cottage with the shingles worn and fading from sun and time.
There was the blue door, and Janite had left the flowerpot on the porch, and she’d left the set of table and chairs, where you and I sat all the time, eating food and looking all lovey at each other as music poured from the open windows.
Maybe it belonged to the people who rented out the house and would be there for the next renters.
Other people would sit in those spots, unaware of who’d been there before.
Those windows were all shut tight, though.
They were always open when we sat out there.
I inched closer. All right, I would look! It would be my last chance, because I was going to tell Maurice and George that this place was off-limits from here on out. This was a goodbye. The only one I’d get.
I cupped my hands around my eyes, peered in the living room window. And then I pulled back in shock.
Oh, shit! Shit!
It was full of boxes, stuff packed, but not entirely.
A chaos of objects here and there—crumpled newspaper, a marker with a cap off, the barely legible scrawl of Kitchen, Living Room on the cardboard containers.
A sheet was thrown over the couch. I recognized it.
I’d lain in that sheet. The way objects had a history was unnerving.
I’d always thought so. A trip to Goodwill always left me feeling weird and haunted.
All those possessions sitting silently with their stories and secrets.
She was still here, oh my God!
Oh, no. No! She saw me! Fuckfuckfuck! She was in the kitchen, holding one of those giant tape dispensers, pointing it absently forward like a flashlight in the dark.
It was winter, but she was in denim shorts and a T-shirt.
I recognized that shirt, too. It was your Arcade Fire one, with the drum set and instruments ablaze.
I understood it—why she’d want to wear something of yours.
But then, wait, I realized…Maybe it was hers, and you’d been the one to borrow it.
This is how connected you’d been, mother and child, in ways I couldn’t really understand. I was a child, but not a mother.
I wanted to run, but she hurried to the door and opened it before my feet could move.
“Margaret! Thank God!” she said. Now her arms were around me.
It seemed inexplicable, after what I’d done to you.
She was clutching me to herself and crying now, and I didn’t sob as I had with Mrs. Fosmire.
I was in shock and suddenly overwhelmed.
I couldn’t breathe, and, thankfully, she let me go, and I tried to balance myself again.
There was something about her that always made me feel like that. That I couldn’t get air.
“Janite, I’m…” What? Sorry, so sorry. So very sorry, enough that I’ll never forgive myself.
“I was hoping to see you before I left. Things have just been…” She swirled her arm in circles.
“I was supposed to go last week, but it’s been one thing after another.
The truck got delayed, and then Jake said we couldn’t sign the new lease until the end of the month, and then I lost my phone, and—it’s just been too much. Come in! Please.”
She held my hand, something she’d never done before, and pulled me inside.
It was a tornado of stuff, a tornado of memories, too.
Janite dropped to the couch covered in that sheet, exhausted.
She dropped her head in her hands, too weighty to even carry, and then I saw her shoulders move up and down, and she began to howl. “Why, why, why?”
In some ways, it was the only question. The only one without an answer somewhere, too. Where and what and who, you could always count on. Why, though, that was a whole other story. Why was skittish and unreliable and stubbornly withholding.
I sat beside her on your sheet. Our sheet. It was all too much. I put my arms around your mom, and found myself rocking her. I didn’t know what else to do.
But then she gathered herself. She shook her head, and a shiver went through her, like some exorcism in those movies I refused to watch.
In some ways, I did understand this; it was familiar, the way the pain came in racking waves and then left you empty and stunned.
“How can he be gone?” Her eyes pleaded. “I am gutted. I am a wreck. I’m barely alive myself. ”
I couldn’t speak. I could tell my role was to be the strong one, so I didn’t dare. I only shook my head. It was all I could do and still hold it together. From there, I could see those boxes labeled with the black marker. Bathroom. J’s room. But two sat next to each other. Mars. Living.
“You meant so much to him,” she said. What was ours was ours, so she likely had no real idea.
Meant so much was not love, the way we felt it, real and deep.
The way it was interrupted now, without a natural conclusion, leaving it in some strange limbo like Voyager itself, built to last five years but still going on and on.
But Janite didn’t say what I feared she would; she didn’t speak to the ways I hurt you.
It gave me hope, you know. If you didn’t tell her we broke up, maybe we hadn’t. Maybe we were still together.
“He meant so much to me,” I managed to say. My words sounded like the tiny squeak of a hamster wheel, spinning without a destination.
“Maybe you’d like something of his.”
“Oh, I couldn’t…” I could. Yes, yes, please. I wanted it all, I wanted everything, ten thousand records. I had that dried leaf, and the silver bracelet you’d given me, but I was afraid to wear it. I might lose it, like I lost you. I didn’t trust myself with it.
“Go ahead.” She waved her arm toward your room. “I can’t go in there. Sandrine’s been helping, and I try, but…Go on.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”
She eyed the padded pizza warmer over my shoulder. “Don’t take anything without asking.”
She’d never known who I was, that was for sure. I wished she’d gotten the chance to, Mars. I really do.
It was like willingly walking into a tidal wave.
You might have died right there on that floor.
I didn’t know for sure. Through your doorway, my whole body clutched, like a faulty engine shutting down.
I willed myself to hold it together, seeing your room in such an unusual disarray, seeing the room in general, without you in it.
I imagined you collapsed there, and over there, too.
For the millionth time, I couldn’t understand where you were now.