Breaking Point

 

I woke up not in heaven, but in yet another hospital room. It took me a few minutes to get my bearings. When I did I saw Michael sitting in the chair next to me.

He looked like absolute hell, but at least he was sober. 

“Wolff,” he said. “Welcome back.”

“Why am I not dead?”

“Because I woke up and found you before you had a chance to die. So here you are.”

After a long, horrible pause I forced myself to say, “I’m sorry.”

Michael gave me a weird smile that instantly put me on defensive. 

“For what?" he answered. "Not dying, or trying to kill yourself six inches away from where I was sleeping?”

“...I don’t know.”

“Well, we’ll have words about it later, but it will have to wait because I have other places to be.”  Michael stood up, his car keys jingling in his hand. “Your mother is on her way. Our family is a major donor to this hospital so they're letting you go home with her.”  He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t make me regret that.”

Confused, I returned, “Where are you going?”

“Rehab. See you around, Wolff.”

In that moment I understood that he was not only going to rehab, but that he was also leaving me. As I watched him walk out of the door I never hated anyone more in my life.

The Happy Ending -- New Prologue

 

Prologue

 

I know a thing or two about fairy tales.

Not the Disney kind. The kind that gives children nightmares.

When I was a kid, a family friend gave me a recording of Rumpelstiltskin for Christmas. Either they had never listened to it, or they had a sick idea of fun, because nothing about that recording was suitable for children. The memory of Rumpelstiltskin’s scream as the queen got his name right still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

That kind of fairy tale.

Look up the definition and the first one will say a fairy tale is a magical story set in an idealized world, filled with happiness. But the sting comes in the second definition: a fabricated story, especially one intended to deceive.

It’s a paradox, and one I’ve lived. I was the little girl orphaned young, sent off to live with the wicked relative. The teenager who fell in love with a dimpled prince, only for forces of darkness to separate us. The woman who realized I had read the moral of the story wrong from the start, and battled evil for my own survival. 

I experienced the magic, and confronted the lie, in search of my happy ending. 

Because even in the Disney fairy tales, happy endings aren’t simply granted—they’re earned.

This is how I earned mine.

Servant of Time, Redux

I am the servant of time

of a truth I cannot

form

made of wisps and

dirt and stolen pieces of

lung

I tried to breathe around it

that was always my way

until the gasping became a

forbidden scarring in the

mind

do not talk of journeys

of hope without destination

decades mean nothing to me

I am still there

counting the tick tocks of

passing

serving a master who knows

I will never be free

Turning Point

 

I slipped into the booth across from Bryan, where he sat nursing a drink.  At his half smile I said in a stiff voice, “Hi.”

“Hi. You’re early.”

“So are you.”

“I’m always early,” he returned. “Do you want something? Iced tea?”

“No thanks.”

Bryan lowered his gaze to his glass. “How are you doing at Bob’s?”

“Fine.”

“You’re registered for school.”

“Yeah, I know. Thanks.”

A waitress approached our table; Bryan waved her way. “It’s no problem,” he told me. “But you wanted to talk about something, and I don’t think it was school.”

I took a moment to steady myself. For some reason, having Bryan squarely under the heel of my shoe felt a lot less rewarding than I’d thought it would. “Bob said when I went to live with him that I would need to do something with you once in a while,” I answered. “I guess we need to set something up. If you want to.”

Bryan just looked at me.

“If now isn’t the time-”

“It’s as good a time as any.”

“We don’t have to do this,” I said, but he replied, “Just tell me what you had in mind.”

“I don’t know. Maybe dinner every couple of weeks.”

“Dinner every couple of weeks,” Bryan repeated. He laughed a little. “Wonderful.”

“If you don’t like it-”

“I don’t think I have a choice. Fine. We can do that.”

Bristling now—how was it that I kept coming off like the nasty, horrible person, when our reality was his fault?—I snapped, “Everything is difficult enough. You don’t have to make it worse.”

 “I’d like to know how I could possibly make it worse than it already is.”

“What did you think was going to happen?”

Bryan’s faint air of amusement vanished. “I have no expectations anymore. I just have how it is.”

“And how is that?”

“Exactly what you’re proposing. That you’ll spend an hour with me once every two weeks. And then, when you turn eighteen, you’ll tell me to fuck off and it will all be over.” Bryan pushed his now empty glass to the edge of the table. Wordlessly the waitress scooped it up on her way to the bar. “So,” he said, “let’s just get on with it, shall we?”

“This is how you wanted it,” I reminded him, but he was quick to answer, “This is not how I wanted it. This might be how I made it, but this was never how I wanted it.”

“Are you saying I should just forget what you did?”

“I’m not that delusional.”

Frustrated, I demanded, “Then what is it you do want?”

“For you to come home. For you to go to Northwestern after you graduate. And,” he concluded, in a voice so low I could barely hear him, “more than all of that, I want you to stop treating our relationship like some kind of fucking nightmare that you can’t wait to be rid of.” 

The waitress deposited his refill on the table. Bryan moved to take it, but I was quicker. Holding the whiskey well out of his reach, I asked, “What are you trying to do, drink yourself to death?”

“What do you care if I am?”

“Oh, that’s fucking great.”

“You don’t need me. You don’t even want to see me. How I choose to live my life shouldn’t make any difference to you.”

“That doesn’t mean I want you dead!”

“I’m dead to you now, anyway.”

Infuriated, I shot back, “If you are, it’s your own fault.”

“And let me assure you, I’ve beaten myself up for it far better than you ever could.” Bryan held out his hand. “So, if you don’t mind, I’d like my fucking drink now.”

“You were the one who didn’t want me around anymore!”

“We all know what I said and did, Katie. I can’t keep begging for you to understand. You’ve made your decision. Now let me make my own fucking decisions.”

“But all I want is to know why. You can never tell me why.”

“I did tell you,” Bryan retorted, and for the first time I noticed that his outstretched hand was shaking. “Maybe you don’t understand this,” he said, “but I thought all I’d become to you was some kind of fucking obstacle that you were stuck with and that you couldn’t wait to unload at your first opportunity. I’m sorry if this isn’t a good enough reason for you, or if it sounds trite, but I felt rejected, all right?  Like I meant nothing to the one person who meant everything to me.” 

He turned his head, his embarrassment almost palpable.

“I’ve been told I have an abandonment complex because of what happened with my mother,” he said. “That I don’t want to be left again, so I leave first. If you can believe that recycled, fucked up psychoanalytical bullshit.”

I could believe it. And because I did, I forgave him.

This is How I Break - Rick's return

 

I prayed to a god I no longer believed in and pressed the call button.

The line never rang on his end. There was just his voice, saying, “Hey, you,” in such a gentle way that suddenly I was in floods of tears. Whatever cool, sensible words I’d meant to utter were drowned in a tidal wave of grief. “Why did you come back?” I demanded. “Why didn’t you just stay away?”

“I guess because I didn’t want to.”

This classic Rick answer hit me like a hammer blow. Reeling, I told him, “I didn’t love you. I never even liked you. I was only with you because I didn’t know how not to be. You never gave me a choice.”

There was a long pause on the other end. I hated myself for being so cruel—so false—but had no will to apologize. I just sat there, dying inside, until Rick said, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “Okay. That doesn’t change how I feel about you, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean go ahead and say whatever it is you need to say, if it will make you feel better. It won’t make any difference to me.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I think you understand.”

“No, I don’t. What do you want?”

“You know what I want.”

“You can’t want to get back together,” I charged. “It would be insane.”

“We never broke up. You just needed some time away from me, and I needed to sort my head out. If you’d wanted me around, I would have stayed. I kept my distance until you needed me to come back. Now here I am.”

“What makes you think I needed you to come back?” I argued, but when Rick returned, “Are you saying you didn’t?” I lost my venom. In fact, I lost it completely. I just curled up into a ball on the floor, the phone still pressed against my ear, and nearly tore myself apart with the force of my sobs.

“Stevie,” Rick said, his tone changing, “I need you to get up and open the door.”

I struggled for breath as my bare feet worked against the floor, over and over again.

“I know you’re having a terrible time,” he told me, “but you need to be strong for just a few seconds, all right? Stand up, go into the living room, and open the door.”

“I can’t do this, I’m not going to be okay, I keep trying and I’m never going to be okay...”

“Stevie. Open your door.”

“...What?”

“Open your door,” Rick repeated. “You’re going to be all right. You just need to open your door and let me in.”

“You’re here?”

“I’m right outside. And if you don’t let me in, I’m going to break the door down, and the neighbors will call the police. You don’t want that, do you?”

I certainly didn’t. But I had already stopped listening, because I was now running into the living room. I threw the door open and there he was, filling up the whole space.

Rick.

He caught me as I fell into his arms.

For a moment I was convinced my imagination had conjured him, but he felt strong and solid and like a million beautiful dreams all come true at once. Even Daisy, rubbing her head against his leg, wanted to be near him. “Don’t let go,” I wept to him.

“I’m not going to,” he said. “Ever.”

Lost

 

The pen bothered me. So I asked him, “Where’d you get this again?” It was fat and filled with ink cartridges, from black to the colors of the rainbow.

The strange animal character on the screen jumped over a crumpled brick wall with an appropriate boing sound.  “I found it,” he answered.

“Where?”

Now just a tiny dot hopping around some far corner of his pixelated meadow, he shouted back, "In the library."

“Okay," I said, but I still didn't remember. And I had no idea how to bring any of it back again.

 

Insanity

 

The message read, It’s over.  He then attached an itinerary for a flight reservation in my name from Madison to San Francisco, in one week’s time.  Provision had been made for one small animal to accompany the traveler in the cabin.  There didn’t seem to be a return flight.  I stared at the monitor, in a brutal war with myself, before I texted him, I can’t.  Five minutes later he answered, Please.  

Jesse never said please.  Convinced someone must have stolen his phone, I called him.  

“Megan,” his voice answered. 

                     

“You’ve gone crazy,” I told him, without any conviction.  

“In a way it feels I have,” he admitted, “but I don’t know what else to do.”

 

I went quiet, and so did he.  

“When would I come back?” I finally asked.

 

“I don’t know.  When it burned out, or we couldn’t deal with it anymore, I guess.”

 

“It might burn out in a week.  I can’t put Cookie through all of that—I’ll just come for a few days.”

 

“I might not know what’s going to happen,” Jesse said, “but I’m fairly certain it will take longer than a week.  It’s better to bring him with you.”

 

A Window to the World, Scene 1

 

The desert both fascinated and frightened Kitty.

Every time her family came to Nevada, Kitty’s ten-year-old brother Jack would say in an affected voice, “The desert is teeming with life.”  It was a joking reference to Mr. Henry, Kitty’s science teacher.  In addition to running a fire lab every year that gave the principal sweats in more ways than one, Mr. Henry liked to quote nature programs.  Most of the quotes weren’t worth more than a groan and an eye roll, but this one…this one made sense to Kitty.  She liked how she could look for miles and see nothing but the occasional cactus when, all around her the desert was—well, teeming with life.  Just life she couldn’t necessarily see.  Underneath the rocks, underneath the needles on the cactus, even in the sand beneath her very feet.  “Life finds a way,” Jack would conclude in a fake creepy whisper, this time quoting Jurassic Park.  And here in the scorching Nevada heat was the proof.

Life did find a way.

Kitty shielded her eyes against the sun and gazed out at the road.  No car was coming.  No car was ever coming, it seemed, except their own when Kitty, Jack, and their mother drove in from the airport for their annual visit to Aunt Jessica (why that visit always had to take place during the hottest month of the year Kitty could never quite figure out).  Aunt Jessica was only two years older than their mother, but after twenty years of baking in the desert sun her skin now resembled the cracked leather of Jack’s old cowboy boots.  She also wore too much perfume and teased her ginger hair too high.  But she was fun, and she was kind—both qualities Kitty knew not to take for granted.

Aunt Jessica’s pre-breakfast cigarette had driven Kitty out of the double-wide trailer in which Aunt Jessica lived, past the outer limits of the small trailer community.  For a little while, at least, Kitty could explore the desert before the sun drove her back to the trailer again.  She could have gone with Jack and a couple of the neighborhood kids to the trailer park’s community pool but the kids were Jack’s age.  At nearly sixteen years old Kitty found she no longer possessed the same tolerance for horseplay and fart jokes she had in years past.

So here she was, outside at 8:32 a.m., on their second to last day at Aunt Jessica’s.

Up until now the trip had gone pretty much like all the ones before it.  Mom and Aunt Jessica sat in the trailer, watching soap operas and crowding near the little air conditioner, while Kitty and Jack amused themselves--in Kitty’s case with her acoustic guitar, or latest knitting project.  It wasn’t very exciting but it wasn’t bad, either.  Aunt Jessica made the best BLT ever, and she told funny stories about her waitressing days in Los Angeles, before she married the first of her three husbands and somehow wound up living in a trailer in the Nevada desert.  After the third divorce Aunt Jessica swore she would never get married again, but Kitty had noticed one of the neighbors—a quiet, balding man in his fifties—hanging around, offering to tune up Aunt Jessica’s air conditioning unit.   Kitty had asked her mother about it, but she hadn’t noticed him.  Her mother didn’t notice a whole lot sometimes.

Kitty squatted down to examine a delicate flower seemingly out of place in the harsh desert environment.  It looked terribly exotic compared to the flowers the neighbors grew in the suburb of Milwaukee, where Kitty lived with her mother and Jack.  They never planted flowers of their own, because her mother’s job at the school district didn’t pay enough for non-essential items like marigolds or geraniums.  Her mother had never finished college, and after she was left with two children to support all on her own…well, there wasn’t much of an opportunity to take classes then, either.  That meant no flowers, no paint, no pretty decorations.  Their slowly deteriorating house occasionally embarrassed Kitty, now that she old enough to notice it.  There just wasn’t anything she could do about it. 

As for Kitty's mother, she spent most of her free time watching old movies on television.  As long as Kitty got decent grades at school, her mother seemed content to let her live her life exactly how she pleased.  Or at least how she’d lived it so far, anyway.  Ever since the accident, Kitty hadn’t done much.  Her friends from grade school had long since drifted away.  Sure, she knew a few kids well enough to have lunch with at school, and occasionally she was even invited to a party.  But the shadow permanently cast over her five years ago made true friendship difficult.  The longer she stayed removed from her classmates, the harder it became to cross the ever-widening gulf that separated them. 

Busted

 

Ursula sent Andy a long email, in which she denounced him as an emotional cripple.  She also compared him to her father, who had never loved anything but the family dog, and said neither of them (Andy and her father, not the dog) had no idea what emotional intimacy was.   I’m sure you’ve already stopped reading by now, she sniffed at the end, but she was wrong.  Andy read the whole thing.  He even showed it to Jake, who had a good chuckle over it.  

“Women,” Jake snorted.  “Always so damn superior.  Talk about needing a psychiatrist, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, whadya want with a chick named Ursula?  I’m telling you—stick to the women with normal names.  The ones who sound like they should be in a Bond movie are always psychopaths.” 

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Andy answered.  But he wasn’t smiling.

Lucky, Redux

 

No longer me

just a girl on a screen

he bit her once 

she never told

they already knew far

too much

 

for a shot at forever

a lie wrapped in power

she and he bundled 

together

then lavender powder

a hiss in the ear

and the end of it all

 

but smoke and threats

no match for this master

yesterday jumps out

again and

again

I am so sorry

she screams in the closet

he made her laugh

he was her friend

Forgiveness

 

When I woke up from my nap the house was dead quiet. For a while I just stared at the ceiling, until I got bored and pushed myself up. As I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror I considered taking a shower, but the thought of blow drying my hair made me feel tired, so I drifted into the living room.

Someone who was not my mother sat on the couch.

“Hello, Wolff,” Michael said.  He set his book down. “Did you have a nice nap?”

I ignored the tiny tug I felt in the last living corner of my soul and glared at him. His hair was super short again, and he had the kind of healthy glow that made it clear he no longer lived in Wisconsin. Other than hints of tiredness around his eyes I never would have known he was surfing the misery wave. Not that I should have expected any different: he was a Gibson male. His destiny was to be forever gorgeous, no matter what happened in life. “You have a really bad habit of showing up uninvited,” I informed him.

“I’m innocent. Your mom invited me.”

“Why?”  

“She likes me,” Michael said, and leaned forward. He was wearing a v-neck sweater that was woefully inadequate for Milwaukee in January. “How are you, Wolff?” 

“I’m fine.”

I stiffened as his eyes swept over me. “Yeah,” he replied. “I can tell. A gentle breeze could blow you away.”

“Fuck you. So thanks for stopping by, but...”

“Sorry, but I promised your mom I’d hang around until she got back. She went to the grocery store—she’s going to make me fried chicken.”

Of course she was. The worst mistake I ever made was introducing her to him; she hadn’t been the same since. “That’s just great,” I snapped.

“Come on,” Michael returned. “It’ll be fun.” 

“You have a weird idea of fun.”

“Maybe. Age and experience have probably warped me.”

Here I might have made a joke about his love of grocery shopping, or dreadful Star Trek movies. But I hated him, so I said, “I thought I made it pretty obvious I didn’t want to see you.”

“I live in hope.”

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“That’s all right. I’ve got a book.”  He held up something with a French title. “Research,” he explained. “For my manuscript.”

“You should get back to California so you can work on it.”

“Everyone needs a vacation sometimes. And how can I say no to Wisconsin in January?”

“Now I know you’re sick.”

“Too much sunshine is boring.”

“Then move back to Madison and leave me alone.”

The smile faded from his face. “I can’t. It reminds me of you.”

“You lived there for years before you met me.”

“I guess my time with you overshadows everything else.”

I fussed with the drawstring of my running pants, willing myself not to feel what he was trying to make me feel. “What are you really doing here?”

“Wheedling my way back into your life. You never answered my emails, and then you blocked me.”

“Were you that surprised?”

“No. But I did hope, particularly once I started begging.”

“You never begged.”

 “Then you don’t know what begging looks like,” Michael said. “But at least I know you read them.”

“That’s right. I even have a special folder where I keep all of them. It’s called Asshole.”

With a faint air of amusement, he said, “My own folder. I’m flattered.”

“I like to re-read your messages to remind myself why I never want to talk to you again.”

“Are they that bad? I thought they were nice. Maybe even kind of funny.”

“The first one wasn’t.”

“I’d just gotten out of rehab so I wasn’t in a great mood. And I was still upset about the incident with the sleeping pills.”

“But you’re not now.”

“I’ll always wish it hadn’t happened,” he said, “but I’m not angry. Once I stopped feeling sorry for myself, I remembered that you’d been in a world of pain, too.”

I snorted.

“There is one thing I don’t get, though.”

“And what’s that?”

“Do you not want to talk to me because I remind you of what happened with Jamie, because you hate me for the relapse, or both?”

I considered that for a moment, surprised not to have an immediate answer. I guess I’d just been happy to hate him and leave it at that. “Pretty much the relapse,” I decided. “When you sucked down all that vodka you abandoned me in the worst way possible.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Everything just felt a little too hard.”

“Yes, it did. And you made it worse. There I was, trying to cope, and there you were, snoring on the rug and smelling like a fucking liquor store.” 

“And then I just waltzed off to rehab, leaving you alone in the hospital.”

“Yep. Proving that you, too, were a self-absorbed asshole. But that’s what I get for mixing myself up with an alcoholic. You know that old saw: how do you tell when an addict is lying?”

“His lips are moving,” Michael finished. “You’re right—we aren’t always very reliable. The only explanation I can offer—and it’s not an excuse—is that I felt responsible for absolutely everything.”

“Join the club.”

 “You shouldn’t. You didn’t think you were marrying a murderer. Whereas I had a bad feeling that night, after I left.”  He opened and closed his book, his thoughts clearly a million miles away. “I wish I’d trusted my instincts and warned my mother.”

“I should have just stayed at home. If I had, he wouldn’t have gone on his rampage.”

“You had no reason to expect that he would kill his own parents.”

“Well, then, neither did you.” 

Michael managed a small laugh. “Touché.”

 “Speaking of mothers,” I said, because I no longer wanted to think about that night, “mine is getting a divorce.”

“Yeah, she mentioned that.”

“How did she seem about it when she told you?”

“Calm, I’d say. But let’s face it, he was a dick.”

“Yeah. But he was her dick.”

“Well, there are plenty more where he came from. And maybe this time she’ll find a guy who’s halfway decent.”

“I’m not sure a guy like that exists.”

“I can see why you’d think that,” Michael said, “but there are probably a few of them milling about, and your mom has a lot going for her. I’m willing to bet there’s some nice middle-aged guy out there who’d appreciate her many fine qualities.”

“You do know she’s pushing 60, right?”

“So? Sixty is the new 40, or something like that. And she seems okay in herself, which is the most important thing.”

“If you say so.”

I sank into a chair, suddenly very tired. “You’re leaving after you get your fried chicken.”

“Your mom invited me to stay for a while.”

“You must be staying in a hotel.”

“I thought sleeping on a couch would be more fun. I haven’t done it in years.”

“You’re too tall for that couch.”

Michael surveyed his proposed bed with an unworried air. “Maybe. But there’s always the floor. When you’re a drunk you spend a lot of time sleeping on floors, anyway, so I’m used to it.”

“Given that I hate you, why would you want to stay?”

“You talked about your mom’s cooking so much, how could I say no?”

I rolled my eyes. “You know you can’t save me, right?”

“Maybe I’m here to save myself.”

“Then you came to the wrong place.”

“And yet this is the only place I want to be.”

My eyes suddenly burning, I turned and looked out of the picture window, into the gray afternoon. God, this place was depressing in the winter. “Anyway,” I said, girding myself on the arms of the chair, “I should go back to bed. Feel free to get yourself a cup of coffee if you want one.”

“I’m saving myself for the fried chicken,” Michael reminded me. “And you just got up. You can’t want more sleep already. Besides, I might steal something if you don’t keep an eye on me.”

“My mother has nothing you could possibly want.”

“I don’t know. That collection of ceramic dog figurines is calling me. I’ve got my eye on the German Shepherd.”

“Shut up.”

“I mean it,” he insisted. “I like dogs. I think we should get one.”

We. I sunk into my chair again, not sure whether to admire or deride his determination. As it was easier to do neither, I asked, “When is she coming back?”

“I don’t know. A couple of hours, maybe. She said she had a few errands to run.”

“She could be gone for days and you wouldn’t be able to save me. I don’t know why she’s bothering.”

“Mothers are like that,” Michael said. “The decent ones have a thing about their kids being safe. At least she’s not running away from her parental responsibilities anymore.”

“Too bad it’s about twenty years too late.”

“I don’t know—you two seem like you’re doing all right.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. But you can’t want to live in your mom’s bungalow forever. You’re young, you’ve got money, you’ve got skills. You must want more from your life than this.”

“That isn’t really any of your business anymore.”

“Why not? You made my life your business when you took those pills next to me.”

“I was stupid, and I was wrong. Sorry about that.”

“You shouldn’t be,” Michael answered. “You saved my life. I just wish you’d picked a less fatal way to do it.”

“I wasn’t trying to save your life. I was trying to end mine.”

“Jean seems to think you’re planning on doing that again.”

“I don’t know why.”

“Well, let’s see...you’ve made a will, sold everything you own, and have been acting like someone who doesn’t want to live anymore,” Michael retorted. When I refused to take the bait, he said, “You can’t really blame her for thinking that, can you?”

“Once again, it’s none of your business. You’re not my boyfriend, you’re no longer my brother-in-law, you’re not even my friend. I don’t owe you anything.”

Michael drew himself up. “Except that you left one thing off of that list—you are, and will forever be, my co-survivor. You’re the only other person who really understands that night. Call me selfish, but I don’t want to be the last one standing.”

“That is selfish.”

“Sorry.”

He said this with such an utter lack of apology that suddenly I felt furious. “I was willing to let you die when you wanted to,” I raged at him. “But now that you’ve decided you want to live, I have to live, too? No matter how much I hate it?”

“Yep. That’s pretty much it.”

“Well, that’s just fucking great,” I spat out. “But it doesn’t matter, because I don’t care what you want—I don’t care. I’m very happy for you that you’ve worked everything out, but you need to leave me alone to make my own choices.”

Michael let out a short, bitter laugh. “What makes you think I’ve worked everything out? It’s going to be a while before that beautiful day comes around. But until it does for both of us, I refuse to leave you alone to make your own choices when the choice you want to make is irreversible, not to mention fucking stupid.”

“That’s your opinion. And it’s not as if you can stop me.”

“Don’t be so sure. I’ve got nothing but time. There’s nowhere I need to be, and I’m sure Jean would let me stay here for as long as I want to. Given that you’re too depressed to move out I shouldn’t have any trouble keeping track of you.”

“You wouldn’t,” I protested. When he just arched an eyebrow, as if to say, Wanna bet? I yelped, “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Because my survival is tied up with yours. Like it or not, that’s just the way it is.”

“For christ’s sake, get a girlfriend, will you?”

 “That’s not as easy as you seem to think. I mean, the unemployed alcoholic thing is bad enough. But even if someone could get past that, finding out that all the men in my family are serial philanderers, at least two are wife abusers, and my brother was a murderer would probably nip any potential romance in the bud. A family history like that would make most women understandably nervous.”

“So you have been trying, then,” I accused, but Michael answered, “No, actually, I just think it’s a safe assumption. In fact, the way I see it you and I don’t really have any choice but to end up together. You’re pretty much the only woman out there who will take me as I am, because you know that despite my many faults I would never hurt you.”

“Do I? You are a male Gibson, after all.”

“If you’re nervous you can always keep me under constant surveillance.”

“You’d enjoy that too much,” I snapped, prompting him to laugh. “You’re right,” he said, “I would. Which brings me to my next point: when you don’t hate me, we get along great. The only problem is, you want to die, so I need to make sure you don’t. Otherwise all of my plans will go to shit.”

“Your plans,” I repeated. “And what would those be, or don’t I want to know?”

“Well, in a nutshell, you stop hating me, move out to California, we get married, have kids, get old together...that sort of thing.”

“You’re joking!”

“Nope. I still love you, Wolff. I always will. What Jamie did can’t change that.”

God, I hated myself, for how much I had wanted to hear that. Self-loathing almost oozing out of my pores, I told him, “My plan was to never see anyone named Gibson ever again.”

“I don’t mind taking your last name. I’m not that attached to mine.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“I most certainly would. Or we could choose a new one. I was also toying with the idea of taking my mom’s last name, Santiago—Tim would have a coronary. It would be worth it for that reason alone.”

His grin caused me to lose my train of thought. When I remembered it again, I wondered how differently things might have turned out if Edward hadn’t tried to mold his beautiful Hispanic, Catholic wife into a WASP suburban queen. But that never could have happened. Like Jamie, Edward equated control with love. “Michael Santiago has a certain ring to it,” I allowed myself to say.

“I thought so too. Angie Santiago’s not bad, either.”

Scowling again, I replied, “But you’re a bad bet.”

“And yet a committed bad bet. And maybe not as bad of a bet as you think.”

“I’ve seen plenty of proof. Anyway, you’re too old to have kids.”

Affronted, he answered, “I am not. I’m just hitting my prime.”

To be fair I had to agree—which was pretty annoying, really. “Even if that were true,” I said, “I can’t just leave my mom. She’d be all alone.”

“She’d be the first one to put you on a plane. For some reason she loves me. I suggested she move out to California, too, but she wasn’t really into the idea. Although she did promise she’d visit.”

“You’ve talked about it with her that much?”

“I wanted to give her a chance to voice any concern or objections. It only seemed fair.”

“Right,” I scoffed. “She probably just wants to get rid of me.”

“Not at all. She’s happy to have you back in her life. She just wants what’s best for you. But,” Michael went on, now wearing the expression of a martyr, “if you’d rather stay here, I’m sure I can find a way to cope with winter again-”

“I don’t want to stay here,” I broke in. “I just don’t know where else to go. And I can’t help but think you’re only doing this because you feel guilty.”

“Of course I feel guilty. But that has nothing to do with how much I fucking miss you.”

“Why? How can you miss me?”

“Easy. I feel better around you—more like myself. Or at least the version of myself I like best.  Does that make sense?”

“No. You were with me when you relapsed, remember?”

“But in a weird way it was what I needed,” Michael said. “I still had the mentality of an angry 14-year-old. You forced me to grow up. Besides, you’re smokin’ hot, even when you’ve been living like you want to die. And I just really like you. I’m sick of having conversations with you in my head—I want to have them with you in real life again.”

“But I’ll always remind you of what happened. Don’t you want to start over?”

“You know as well as I do that there is no starting over. There’s just carrying on.”

“That’s the problem—I don’t know how to.”

“I don’t either. I just think it has to be easier if we do it together.”

“We tried,” I reminded him, my voice breaking, “and we failed.”

“We didn’t fail—we just needed to be apart for a little while to figure some things out. Unfortunately, the separation went on a lot longer than I wanted it to. But now it’s time to move on to the part where you take me back and we never split up again, because I can’t do this separation thing anymore. I’d rather have you around and punishing me, than have you in another state blocking my emails.”

“I don’t want to punish you. That was never what I meant to do.”

I saw a flash of torment in Michael’s eyes—and in that moment something fierce and uncontrollable started banging against the walls of the room where I’d locked it away to die. I tried to hate Michael for waking it, but I couldn’t. It simply wasn’t possible anymore.   

“What then,” he asked, “were you trying to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “I guess survive.”

“It will be more fun with me.”

The memory of our grocery trips flashed in my mind. How he loved Woodman’s, Madison’s enormous grocery store with aisle after aisle of strange and exotic food. Once we were there for two hours. And I’d been laughing almost the entire time.

“Maybe,” I answered.

If I’d thought he was beautiful before, it was nothing compared to how he appeared now.

“It will be,” he assured me. “I have Nintendo. We can play Mario Kart—you’ll love it!”

Mario Kart. Against my will I imagined the two of us, sitting on the couch, talking smack to each other as our cartoon characters zoomed around a race course. It was the us I’d always wanted to be.

Watching him out of the corner of my eye, I admitted, “I guess your relapse was also an act of despair and desperation.”

“Yeah, it was. That doesn’t make it okay, and I should have gotten the help I needed before doing something so fucking idiotic, but some of us need to learn our lesson more than once.”

“Do you think you have now? Learned your lesson, I mean?”

“I hope so. I’ll always have the mentality of a drunk, but finding you like that was a warning I’ll never forget.”

“You should probably hate me for it.”

“That would be incredibly unfair, considering the state you found me in. And you didn’t really know how to ask for help, either. Hopefully we’re both a little smarter now.”

Tears stung my eyes. I couldn’t disguise the crack in my voice, as I said, “I don’t know. I still feel pretty fucking lost.”

 “Don’t worry, Wolff. I’ll find you.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because I’m wandering the same wilderness. And I won’t give up until I do.”

“You promise?”

“I promise. After all, you’ve left me about a million times, and yet here I am.”

“That just makes you stupid.”

“The least of my crimes,” Michael answered, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Which reminds me,” he said. “Do you still have the ring?”

I nodded.

“Good.”

I gave him a sideways look. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Too late. I’m already there.”

His there, where we were married and playing video games in between nervous breakdowns. It sounded better than what I had going now. But would it stay better for the next fifty years? That was what I could never figure out. When was it okay to trust?

“Well this has been fun,” I said, “but I need to take a shower.”

As I stood up I watched his expression transform into a mask of worry.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “There aren’t any knives or pills in the bathroom. If it makes you feel better I won’t lock the door, not that that’s an invitation to come barging in.”

Relaxing again, Michael replied, “I won’t. I’ll just be here with my book if you need me.”

“Okay. And leave the doggy figurines alone.”

“Shucks,” he returned.

With a chuckle I headed to the bathroom.