Helena staggered back to her easy chair and bundled herself in blankets. She knew he knew how he was, as she knew that Meg had told him what she looked like. He didn’t know about the diagnosis, and she’d never wanted to tell him.
“I’m great,” Helena lied. “How are you doing?”
“Oh, fine. I mean.” Elliott tried to laugh. “You know, I thought you’d skipped town. I figured you’d be somewhere like LA by now, building your art career. Honestly, it’s strange. In a town as small as Orangeburg, you would have thought we’d run into each other.”
It stung, especially given the fact that Helena hadn’t felt strong enough to so much as raise a paintbrush in nearly a year. “Orangeburg has a power over me, I guess,” she said.
“It has a power over all of us,” he said. “Remember how we always said we were going to get out of this town? I guess that was even back in middle school. We had all those dreams about moving to Europe.”
Helena could picture them: preteens, basically, reading Hemingway for the first time, pretending they could have different lives.
She could see them after that, even their first kisses, their first “I love yous,” their first decisions together. They’d graduated in the same year and gone on to the same university, where she’d majored in art and he’d majored in business with a music minor. She wondered if he still played the alto saxophone anymore. She guessed he didn’t.
They’d gotten married immediately after college. There had been talk about moving to LA or New York City, but they’d come back to Orangeburg first, as both Helena’s mother and Elliott’s father were ill, and they wanted to be around to take care of things. Eventually, they’d bought the house—probably the house from which Elliott spoke right now and dug their roots deeper and deeper. They’d talked about having kids, and then they’d begun trying to have children, but months had turned into years, and no children had come.
By then, Helena’s mother’s illness had returned, and Elliott’s father was dead. Everything in life had felt grim andpurposeless. That wasn’t really the energy you wanted to bring into parenting.
When Helena asked herself, now, why she and Elliott had gotten divorced five years ago, which felt remarkable, she remembered their final full year together. It had been 2020, the COVID year, and everything in the world had shut down. At nearly forty years old, their busy lives had suddenly halted, and they’d shut their doors and turned toward one another. Helena had been so excited to spend more time with Elliott. His world—working for the sales division at an app she didn’t really understand—was not her world. But they’d been married for nearly twenty years, at that point, and she was anxious to discover who they were to one another, now. She was eager to feel at peace in the love they’d been building since they were fourteen years old.
At first, during lockdown, Elliott had been charming and funny. He’d invented new dinner recipes, and he’d written songs. They’d worked on a painting together, stretching an enormous canvas in the garage and hurling colors at it. They’d read plays together, saying the lines aloud and striding through the kitchen. When faced with what parents of children had to go through during lockdown—full-time parenting alongside full-time schooling—Helena had felt sort of grateful not to be a mother. It was she and Elliott against the world.
But at some point around September or October, there’d been an emotional shift. Suddenly, Elliott seemed irritated with Helena. Nothing she did was good enough: not the way she vacuumed nor the way she styled her hair. He picked fights about the stupidest things. Helena wondered if something was wrong at work. She didn’t think for a second that she and Elliott would break up. They’d been together for most of their lives.
It was around this time, incidentally, that Helena had first noticed an incredible, all-encompassing fatigue. She’d thoughtshe had COVID, but her tests were constantly negative, so she chalked it up to a vitamin deficiency and ate salad after salad and plenty of meat. But her fatigue did little to calm Elliott down. He used her body’s inability to do all the things he could do as a thing against her.
When Elliott asked for a divorce in February of 2021, Helena was in bed. She’d been in bed for the better part of the week, exhausted and struggling to walk. She couldn’t fight Elliott. She couldn’t tell him that she was beginning to think something was really wrong.
Elliott said, “I think maybe you’re really depressed or something. But I have emotional problems of my own. I have to start thinking about myself and what I want the rest of my life to look like.”
Helena nodded, curled into a ball, and slept the rest of the day. When she woke up the following morning, there were numerous missed calls from her mother. Elliott had told her mother that Helena needed to move out and find somewhere to stay for the foreseeable future. In the voice message that her mother had left, her mother said, “I don’t know what’s gotten into him. Unless you’re not happy in the marriage anymore? Honey, are you having an affair?”
Helena had been speechless. An affair? Her mother thought she was having an affair?
She’d gotten out of bed and limped through her house, searching for Elliott. Maybe he’d pop out of the kitchen and say, “Just kidding!” and the nightmare would be over. But instead, she found a note on the kitchen table from him, explaining that he was going on a business trip and that he wanted her to be gone by the time he got back. Again, Helena was speechless. But she knew Elliott was the one who paid the majority of the mortgage. It wasn’t like she could live here on her own, given what she earned as an artist.
She packed two suitcases, put them in her 2004 Chevy, and drove to her mother and father’s place. As soon as she walked through the door, she burst into tears.
But now, on the phone with Elliott for the first time since before they’d signed the divorce papers in 2021, she was floored to feel all these exhilarating, romantic feelings for him. She’d never stopped loving him, not even after he’d kicked her out. Did that make her a fool?
“Listen, I wanted to call because I saw you today,” Elliott said, his voice deepening. “I was in the grocery store parking lot when you came out. Helena, I’m worried about you.”
Helena rolled her eyes into the back of her head.
“What’s going on?” he asked, a note of panic in his voice. “I mean, are you not eating enough?”
Helena was amazed that he’d think that, given how much of a foodie she’d been when they’d been together. She’d been the one begging to try new restaurants. She’d been the one to put together their decadent dinners.
She realized that he thought she was starving herself because she missed him so much, as if that would ever happen.
“I’m really okay,” she told him again. “What’s going on with you?”
Elliott sighed again. Helena was beginning to think they were in an awful, post-divorce game. Previously, they’d told each other everything. Now, they told each other nothing.
But Helena could still remember what he smelled like. What was that about?
“I wanted to confess something to you,” Elliott said finally.
Helena closed her eyes. Panic rolled through her. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t in the mood for confessions. She wasn’t emotionally ready. But she’d just told him she was fine.
