REAL LIFE
Wednesday
I TAKE MY time in the movie theater’s neon green bathroom.
I wash my hands, then wipe down the sink area and wash my hands again.
On my way back through the burgundy-carpeted arcade in which the bathrooms are tucked, I nearly collide with Wyn.
“Sorry,” we both huff, stopping short.
My eyes drop to the smorgasbord of paper cartons he’s carrying: Twizzlers, Nerds, Red Hots, Whoppers, and Milk Duds.
“Going to a slumber party?” I ask. “I was thirsty,” he says.
“Which explains the cup of water and nothing else,” I say. “You think shortbread’s too sweet.”
“Thought you might want something,” he says.
His eyes look more green than gray right now. I’m finding it hard to look at them, so I train my gaze on the candy. “It looks like you thought I might want everything.”
His eyes flash. “Was I wrong?”
“No,” I say, “but you didn’t have to do that.”
“Trust me, it wasn’t intentional,” he says. “I walked up for the water, and next thing I know I’ve got a wagon filled with corn syrup.”
“Well, that’s the Connor family thriftiness. If you buy a wagon, refills are free.”
His laugh turns into a groan. He runs the back of his hand up his forehead. “I’m so hungover.”
“Didn’t you have one drink last night?”
“If we’re ignoring the half bottle I drank in the cellar,” he says.
“We should probably ignore everything that happened in the cellar,” I say.
He studies me for a second. “Anyway, I have no tolerance anymore. I drink less than ever these days.”
“Wow, humblebrag,” I say.
He laughs. “Actually, it’s just that I’ve been using edibles.”
At my surprise, he says, “They’ve been really helping my mom, but she gets kind of embarrassed. About taking them on her own. So a couple times a week, I’ll split a brownie with her. She’s funny. She’d never even tried weed before, and she gets super giggly. I sort of think it’s a placebo effect, but it doesn’t matter.”
I suppress a grin. “Moved back in with your mom and get high with her twice a week.”
“Living the dream,” he says.
“You are, though,” I say. “I’m actually jealous.”
“It is fun,” he says. “But she gets so munchy. I’ve probably gained like fifteen pounds.”
“It suits you.” I quickly add, “How is she, really?”
He glances at me askance. “You haven’t talked to her?”
I’m sure he knows I still text regularly with Gloria. I even field the odd text or two from his sisters. Mostly when his little sister, Lou, wants my opinion on a potential present for Wyn, invariably a gag gift that requires no special insight whatsoever, or when his older sister, Michael, wants an opinion on a medical ailment that invariably has nothing to do with neurosurgery. As far as his family knows, he and I are still engaged.
“I do talk to her,” I say. “But I figure she’s mostly lying.” Wyn’s laugh is low. “I’m sure she is.”
His gaze drops. I let mine linger on the dark fringe of his lashes, the curve of his full upper lip, until his eyes lift. “It really does help. The weed. Just . . . not enough.”
Emotions tangle in my esophagus. Globus sensation, my mind supplies, as if naming it will take away the ache. It doesn’t. “I’m glad you’re there with her,” I say.
His lips part, come together, part again. “I, um . . .” He sets the boxes of candy and cup atop the air hockey table beside us and shifts between his feet. He takes a deep breath. “I know you don’t want to talk about it all,” he says in a low, husky voice, “and I respect that. But you said something yesterday, and . . .”
Heat creeps all the way up my neck to my ears. “I was having a bad day, Wyn.”
“No, no—it’s not . . .” He shakes his head, then tries again. “Something you said in the cellar made me realize you thought he was why I ended it.”
He. It lands with a violent impact.
Wyn swallows. “That you thought I blamed you for what happened with him.”
“Of course you blamed me.” My spine stiffens as I will myself not to crack, or rather not to let the cracks show. The truth is, they’re already there.
“I didn’t,” he says roughly. “And I don’t. I swear. Okay?”
My chest pinches. “So sheer coincidence that I told you about him and you immediately dumped me.”
I have no idea what to make of his look of surprise and hurt. I have no idea what to make of any of this. I went into the bathroom in one universe and walked out into another.
“Harriet,” he rasps, shaking his head. “It was more complicated than that.”
More complicated than thinking I’d betrayed him. It wasn’t that he was angry. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust me.
He just didn’t want me anymore. It feels like my body is turning to sand, like in a minute I’ll be nothing but a shapeless heap on the floor.
“I was in a dark place,” he goes on.
I turn from him because I feel the cracks spreading, my eyes stinging. “I know.”
I did know. Every second of every day. “I just didn’t know how to fix it,” I choke out.
“You couldn’t have,” he says.
I close my eyes as I try to gather myself, stuff all these messy feelings back down.
The truth is, I knew he hated San Francisco. I felt guilty that he’d followed me there. Guilty about keeping him there, even as it was killing me not being able to make him happy.
His hand slides through mine, tentatively lacing our fingers and tugging me back to him.
“It wasn’t just that,” he says. “My dad . . .”
I nod, the ache in my throat too severe to speak.
Hank’s passing was so sudden. I don’t know if that made it any worse. There never would have been an okay time to lose him. Not for Wyn. Not for anyone who knew Hank.
Everything combusted at once, and somehow I still thought we’d make it. When he promised to love me forever, I believed him. That was what made me the angriest, with both of us.
“I didn’t think that I . . .” His eyes hold mine, his jaw muscles working. “I never wanted to hurt you.”
“I know.” But it changes nothing.
“All I want,” he says, “is for you to be happy.” There it is again, that word.
“That’s what I was trying to say, down in the cellar,” he goes on. “That I don’t want to do anything this week that messes anything else up for you. And I’m sorry I almost did.”
The pieces click together.
“I’m not with him,” I say. “There’s nothing to mess up.” His lips part.
I wish I could roll the words back into my mouth and down my throat. “If that’s what you were getting at.”
“Okay,” he says.
Okay? What kind of response is that?
After a beat of awkward silence, he says, “I’m not either.”
I suppress a smile. “You’re not in a long-distance relationship with my coworker you’ve met once?”
An irresistible blush hits the tops of his cheekbones. He knocks his foot against the leg of the air hockey table. “I can hardly believe it myself. The chemistry was undeniable, but it wasn’t enough.”
I swallow the second half of a laugh, and he looks up at me from under that one lock of his. “There’s no one else,” he says.
It doesn’t matter, I tell myself.
It can’t matter.
He wasn’t happy with you. He broke your heart.
He was never yours to keep, and deep down you knew that.
I watched him fade from me, bit by bit, day by day, a mirage receding into nothingness.
But the way he’s looking at me threatens to obliterate logic, to erase history. If he’s a black hole, I’ve reached his event horizon.
My chest aches, but I don’t want it to stop. I want to lean into the feeling, this wholeness. My heart and body and mind are all finally in the same time and place. Here, with him.
I don’t want to go back into the theater, but something has to give. We can’t keep walking out along this tightrope, or someone’s going to get hurt. I’m going to get hurt.
I clear my throat. “How’s the furniture repair business?”
His Cupid’s bow twitches. “Still a furniture repair business.”
“Oh?” I say. “Not using it to run drugs and host illegal gambling nights yet?”
His lips split into a smile. “Still in the same apartment?”
Our apartment. It still manages to hold traces of him. Or maybe that’s me, carrying his ghost around wherever I go. “Mhm.”
“How’s your sister?” he asks.
“Good, I think,” I say. “She and her hairdresser friend went into business together. They mostly do weddings and dances. Still FaceTimes me twice a month, makes about five minutes of small talk, then says goodbye.”
His teeth skate over his bottom lip. “I’m sorry.”
He’s the only person who knows how much it bothers me that I barely know Eloise, that despite having a sister, I always felt acutely alone in our childhood home. Between our six-year age gap and her constant disagreements with our parents, we didn’t have much time to bond.
I shrug. “Some things never change, and the best thing is to stop hoping they will.”
“Other things do, though,” he says.
I break eye contact. “What about your sisters? How are they?”
“Good,” he replies, half smiling. “Lou’s with my mom this week. Said to tell you hi.”
I smile despite the twinge in my chest. “And Michael? Still in Colorado?”
He nods. “She’s dating another aerospace engineer, who works for a competing company. They moved in together, but they’re both under NDAs, so neither of them even lets the other into their home office.”
I laugh. “That,” I say, “is so unbelievably on-brand.”
“I know,” he says. “And Lou finished at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in May.”
“That’s amazing,” I say.
Together, the three of them could be loud and rude and competitive. They argued over everything—what to have for dinner, who got first use of the shower, who really understood the rules of dominoes and who was totally off—as if as soon as a thought or feeling occurred to them, it spewed out.
But nothing ever blew up. Little arguments flared and extinguished; small insults casually faded. And everyone went back to joking, hugging,
kicking, acting like siblings do in movies.
I wonder but don’t ask whether his younger sister, Lou, is just visiting their mom or if she ended up moving home after grad school like she’d been planning, back when Wyn’s stay out there was supposed to be temporary. She was going to take over Gloria’s care.
“I miss them,” I admit.
“They miss you too,” he says.
I ask, “Do they wonder why I never visit?”
“I go out of town sometimes,” he says. “For work stuff.” “Work stuff?” I ask.
He nods but doesn’t clarify. “They think we’re seeing each other then.” I nod. I don’t have anything to say to that.
He clears his throat. “My mom said you were taking a pottery class.” “Oh,” I say. “Yeah.”
“I pretended I already knew about it,” he says. “Right. That’s good.”
“But she mentioned that she thinks you’re getting better. And your newest bowl looked way less like a butt.”
The laugh rockets out of me as if shot from a cannon. “That’s funny, because you should have seen the rapturous text she sent me about that butt- bowl. She pretended it was very good.”
“Nah.” He grins. “She wasn’t pretending. She told me it was really good.
It just also looked like a butt. You know how she is.”
“Remember how nice she was about that painting we gave her as a joke?” I ask. “The fucked-up Velvet Elvis that looked more like Biff from Back to the Future?”
His smile widens. “She kept saying how unique it was.”
“But fully making unique sound like a good thing. So much nuance to Gloria’s opinions.”
“The nuance being that she can know something’s objectively terrible,” he says, “but if it’s even loosely connected to one of her family members, then it’s got to also be groundbreakingly special.”
The idea of being one of Gloria’s family members, of being
groundbreakingly special, pricks at my heart.
“It’s been weirdly fun, living with her,” he says. “Nothing weird about it,” I say. “Gloria’s a blast.”
He smiles to himself. “It’s just funny. I spent all those years convincing myself I needed to get away. I saw my sisters finding their things and talking about leaving, and my parents being so proud of how they were going to make something of themselves, chart their own path or whatever. And I thought I needed to do that too.”
I think back all those years to the day the five of us, sans Kimmy, lay on the Armases’ dock, charting our alternative paths, how even then, Wyn used his hypothetical other life to go back to the one he’d left behind. A part of him knew he belonged there.
Once I went home with him for the first time, met Hank and Gloria and Lou and Michael, saw the woodshop and the childhood bedroom filled with proof of a happy, love-filled childhood, a part of me knew he belonged there too.
I tried to hold on to him anyway. Watched, those months in San Francisco, as the walls closed in around him—and it killed me to see him so broken, so hunted, but I hadn’t been brave enough to cut him loose. Maybe that was part of the anger that burned in me too: disappointment that I hadn’t loved him well enough to make him happy nor well enough to let him go.
“Anyway,” he says, “if someone had told me, at twenty-two, that I’d end up living in my childhood bedroom and doing crosswords with my mom over breakfast every morning, I would have believed them, but I’d be shocked to hear I’m actually happy in this scenario.”
“You do crosswords?” I say. “You never wanted to do crosswords when we lived together. I used to try to get you to, every time it rained.”
“And I always said yes,” he says. “And we never finished them,” I say.
“Harriet.” His eyes settle on mine, a knowing glint in them. “That’s because I could never sit still that long across from you without touching
you.”
Blood rises to my cheeks and chest, thrums down into my thighs. Without my realizing it, we’ve moved closer together. Maybe it’s like
Cleo’s Bernie’s-induced hangover: a Pavlovian response that will always draw us together.
I say, “And here I thought it was the crosswords themselves getting you riled up.”
“As it turns out,” he replies, “it’s not writing letters in tiny boxes that gets me riled up.”
“That’s good,” I manage. “That would make breakfast with Gloria pretty awkward.”
The fan blows a wisp of hair across my face, and he catches it, twisting it between his calloused fingertips. My heart pounds, my every cell tugging toward him.
Behind us, the door to the theater swings open. Our friends stream out in a flurry of chatter and laughter. Intermission has begun.
I start toward them, but Wyn catches my wrist.
“I like the bowl,” he says. “She showed me a picture. I thought it was beautiful.”
