DARK PLACE
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
AFTER HANK’S DEATH, Wyn insists we don’t have to postpone. He says we shouldn’t lose the venue or the deposit money. But he’s barely eating, hardly sleeping.
“It will be easier this way,” I tell him. “I’ll have more time to adjust to the residency, and then we can figure everything else out.”
Months go by, and his grief doesn’t abate. Mine hovers close too, always waiting to trip me up. Everything still makes me think of Hank, of what Gloria must be feeling, what Wyn must be keeping inside.
Something as innocent as a car commercial can split me open. I start taking long showers so I can let it all out without piling my pain onto his. Wyn starts taking long runs to burn it all off.
We don’t paint the apartment. One weekend he offers, but between his two jobs, it’s his one day off, and he looks so tired.
“We’ll get to it eventually,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” he croaks, grabbing me by the hips, pulling me toward where he sits on the couch, burrowing his face into my stomach.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I promise. “I want to be better for you,” he says.
“Stop,” I whisper. “I don’t need that. I don’t need anything from you.
I’m okay.”
I’m not. I live in a state of terror that he won’t ever come back to himself. That I’ve taken him from his friends and a job he liked and his family, and now I can’t even give him the time he needs.
And then there’s the loss of Hank, the dad of my dreams, and the guilt I feel for thinking that, after everything my own father gave up to give me this life.
The sacrifices he’s made, the jobs he’s hated and worked anyway, every bit of proof of his love. But he’s never been a soft man. He’s only accessible to a point.
The last time we visited the Connors before Hank’s death, Wyn’s father cried from happiness when we got there. As we were getting ready for bed that night, he gave me a tight hug and said, Sleep well, love you so much, kiddo, and afterward I’d shut myself in the bathroom and run the water while I cried for reasons I didn’t entirely understand.
More homesickness, I guess. That lights-on-in-an-unfamiliar-kitchen pang.
Love you so much, kiddo had been such a constant refrain of Wyn’s childhood that he and his sisters had all gotten it tattooed in Hank’s handwriting when we went to Montana for the funeral. They said I could too, but it didn’t seem fair. Hank didn’t belong to me. Now he never will.
The tracks of our lives split little by little, but the moments we’re together, my love still feels so big and violent it could consume me.
Every once in a while, Wyn asks if I want to look at venues or go sample cakes. He tries to be happy. I try to be enough in this small, small life I’ve pulled him into.
“There’s no rush,” I promise. “I’m so busy at the hospital anyway.”
I don’t want to make him celebrate. I don’t want him to feel like he has to be happy when he’s still acclimating to a world without Hank Connor in it.
It shouldn’t have happened like this. Hank was eleven years older than Gloria, sure, but he was still only in his early seventies. And aren’t seventies supposed to be like fifties now?
Sometimes we eat dinner together between his shifts. But most nights, we don’t see each other until he comes to kiss me on the head while I read in bed, before taking his shower.
Sometimes when he comes back, and he thinks I’m asleep, he’ll finally let himself cry, and I think, though I don’t know to whom or what, Please, please help. Please help him stop hurting this much.
I’ll make bargains with the universe: If I make the apartment cozier. If I don’t complain about work. If I make the most of the constant rain. If I need nothing from him, he’ll be okay.
We’ll get through this.
One night, some of the other interns invite me out. They always do. I never go. But lately Wyn has been pushing me to.
“I won’t be home anyway,” he says. “You need to have friends.” “I have friends,” I say.
“Not here,” he says. “You need those too.”
So I go out, and it’s nice, fun, but I lose track of time, and when I get home, Wyn’s asleep in our bed, and it breaks my heart to have missed even five waking minutes with him.
I feel guilty. I feel lost. I don’t know how to fix any of it.
The next morning, when I tell him I missed him, he says, “Honestly, I crashed as soon as I got home. I wouldn’t have been any fun.”
After that, I go out a couple of times a week with Taye, the fourth-year who’s taken me in like the hospital’s own feral cat, along with a couple of other first-years she’s unofficially mentoring, Grace and Martin. And it’s nice to have friends again, to not be so alone.
Finally, when Wyn has a full night off, he comes out to meet us at the bar down the street from the hospital, and I’m excited and nervous and a little regretful that we’re spending our night out instead of at home together, but he insists it’s important.
Martin, Grace, and Taye spend the whole night talking about the hospital, or else their worst professors in medical school. It’s the first time I realize it’s all we ever really talk about, and only because I watch Wyn zone
out, recede, and I have no idea how to hold on to him, keep him here with me.
Then Martin finally asks Wyn what he does for a living, and Wyn tells him about the upholstery.
“What kind of degree do you need for that?” Martin says. I don’t think he means for it to sound snotty, but it does, and Wyn reacts exactly how he always does to any suggestion of inferiority.
He leans into it. Jokes that he got a degree in chairs, but it took him an extra year, and everyone laughs it off, but for days after that, he seems even more distant.
My heart is screaming You, you, you, as if I’m watching him fall into a pit, and yet I’m immobilized, unable to find a way to reach him.
Whenever I ask him what’s wrong, he takes my face in his hands and kisses my forehead, tells me soberly, “You’re perfect,” and we forget, for a while, about everything except each other’s mouths and skin, and only later, while he lies curled around me like a question mark in bed, do I realize he hasn’t given me an answer.
Then comes Gloria’s fall. Her Parkinson’s diagnosis, or rather she admits she’s had it for years. Things have progressed more quickly since Hank’s passing.
“I’m old!” she says with a flippant hand wave when we video call her. “If Hank and I had started having kids sooner, I’d still be running all around, but we didn’t, and things are bound to start breaking down.”
She isn’t old. Older than my parents, sure, but not old enough for Wyn and Michael and Lou to have to contemplate losing their mother when they’ve only just said goodbye to their father.
Martin helps me wrangle a few days off from the hospital, and Wyn and I go to Montana, all three of Gloria’s kids and her soon-to-be-daughter-in- law crowded into their squat little house at the end of its long drive. Wyn comes alive. He lights up, loosens.
And for the second time, I tuck myself into their tiny second-floor bathroom with the water running and sob into my knuckles, because I know I can’t take him back to San Francisco.
Know I can’t bear to be the person who takes him away from where he belongs.
When I tell him I think he should stay while his mom recovers from her fall, he studies me for a long time. “Are you sure?”
“One hundred percent,” I say.
We agree he’ll stick around for a month while he, Michael, and Lou work out a long-term plan.
I fly home alone. As soon as I step foot in the apartment, I feel the shift. Somehow I know he will never live there again.
At first we talk all the time. Then we get busy. He’s catching up on the repair work that his dad hadn’t had the chance to finish. I’m exhausted from grueling days of scrubbing in and out to stand behind a ring of scrubbed-in surgeons and residents so thick I’m lucky if I get a glance at a scalpel. And when my intern friends bemoan that same experience over drinks, I pretend to agree when the truth is, even being tasked with a suture sounds like too much right now.
Lou has only one year left of her MFA in Iowa. Then she’ll move back to Montana. Wyn tells me this like it’s great news—“I’ll be home soon.”
You’re already home, I think. I wonder if I ever will be.
Cleo texts to ask how I’m holding up with Wyn away. I feel too guilty to say anything other than a variation on All good here. How are you?
I follow Taye to happy hours and trivia nights. I join her Bachelor viewing party too. But mostly I fill my spare time, snuggled in bed with a cup of tea and wearing Wyn’s old Mattingly sweatshirt, half watching and half sleeping through episodes of Murder, She Wrote.
The night before he’s supposed to visit, Gloria falls again and breaks her wrist, and he has to cancel. “It’s fine,” I tell him. “I was honestly going to be too tired for much this weekend anyway.”
We start missing calls. Sometimes I’m so tired I drift off on the couch while I’m waiting for the phone to ring. Sometimes he gets so lost in his work, he loses track of time. He’s always apologetic, beating himself up about it, promising to do better.
“Wyn,” I say. “It’s seriously fine. We’re both busy.”
I’m working over Christmas, so he plans to come the week after. His car skids off the road on the way to the airport. He’s uninjured, but he misses the flight. “I’ll come tomorrow,” he says.
Tomorrow is the only full day off I’ll have during his visit, and now he won’t get in until that evening. “Sure,” I say. “Sounds great.”
He’s in town thirty-six hours, and then he’s gone again.
A part of me still hopes that if I give him room, space, time, everything might be okay.
One night, after a last-minute video-chat cancellation, I decide to show up to the interns’ usual happy hour spot, and Taye and Grace aren’t there. “Grace had some family wedding in Monterey, and I think she took Taye,” Martin says.
Taye thrives in big social settings. She’s like Parth that way—so good at singling out the shiest or quietest or clumsiest person in the room and bringing them into the center of things. Probably why she took me under her wing.
I think nothing of it being just Martin and me that night. We stay for only one drink—I’m exhausted—and then he offers to drive me home.
When we get there, he insists on walking me to the door. I don’t think anything of this either. Because of Wyn. How many times did he suggest we meet Sabrina at her summer internship so she wouldn’t have to walk home by herself? How often did he give Cleo a ride to her car on the far side of the Mattingly campus?
On the stoop, Martin hugs me good night. Or that’s what I think he’s doing at first, and when I realize he isn’t, I’m so shocked I freeze.
Let the kiss happen to me. By the time I think to shove him backward, he’s already realized it was a mistake, that I wasn’t kissing him back. He looks embarrassed.
Which only intensifies my guilt. Did I give him some kind of sign? Was I flirting with him? I don’t know. A piercing pain starts behind my right eye. My brain feels like it’s sloshing around in my skull.
“I’m not . . . available,” I stammer. “You know that.” Martin laughs. “The furniture guy?”
I feel like I’m going to be sick. “Wyn,” I say.
“He’s not here, Harry,” Martin says. “He’s never here anymore. I am.”
I turn and run inside. I call Wyn immediately, even though it’s late here, which means it’s even later in Montana. It goes to voicemail. I call back, and he answers on the third ring, voice groggy.
I tell him everything, as fast as I can, poison I’m letting from my blood.
Afterward, I have to beg him to say something. When he does, his voice is hollow. “This isn’t working anymore.”
I want to take my plea back. I want to beg him not to say anything else.
I barely hear the rest of the call. Only snatches get through the raging of my heart.
. . . kids when we got together . . . different now . . . what’s best . . .
I don’t cry. It’s not real. He promised he would always love me. It can’t be real.
But a deeper part of me, a voice that’s always been there, tells me it was always going to end this way. That I’ve known since that first trip to Indiana that I would never be enough to make him happy, that I couldn’t give him the kind of love his parents had when my only education on the subject had been the one my parents had.
Two days after our call, my stuff shows up. No note. I don’t tell anyone.
I can’t bear to say it.
