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“Emmy,” he said. “Do we have to do this right now? If I opened my eyes, I’d see seven of you.”
I pulled my knees closer to my chest. “The reason is that you know I won’t be able to let it go,” I said. “Because, if the situation were reversed, you wouldn’t let it go. Not until you knew I was okay.”
Against the light coming in from the window, his chest rose up, fell again. I covered my eyes, my head spinning a little also. I wanted to finish this conversation. I wanted this to end, right here, okay.
“Are you okay?”
“Not really,” he said.
I paused, but only for a second. “Do you think you need to see her?” I said. “Is that even possible?”
“She’s in Pascoag.”
I wasn’t sure if that was a yes or a no.
“Pascoag, Rhode Island,” he said. “It’s on the northern tip. The other tip from you.”
I didn’t say anything. The northern tip was probably an hour from me, somewhere on the other side of Providence. I started doing the math in my head. If she were located north—that would take three hours at the least, probably closer to four. That would take the better part of tomorrow, just driving back and forth.
“It’s a cool story, where the name Pascoag comes from. See, there’s this cliff to the east of it, and getting over the cliff used to be the only way in to the town. But the problem was that the cliff was completely crawling with these snakes. Really enormous, boalike snakes. And you used to have to ‘pass’ all the snakes. So . . . pass coag.”
I looked back down, shaking my head. I knew what was coming next, knew why he was telling me that story—knew he knew that I was a sucker for stories—knew even before I was willing to let myself admit that I knew it.
“It would really help if you would come with me, Emmy,” he said finally.
“I’m not sure it would really help, Josh.”
He put his hands over his eyes, already mostly asleep. “It would,” he said.
I looked back down, my eyes starting to close too. If I were a different person, I could have slept right there. I could have bunched up a sweater under my head and wrapped my arms around myself and just drifted off. And then, maybe tomorrow, it wouldn’t feel so pressing. Josh would submerge—the way he had been submerging—everything that was bubbling to the surface right now, everything he was too scared to be feeling.
For this reason, more than any other, I willed myself awake.
“Then,” I said. “That’s what we’ll do.”
part two
The week after Matt and I got engaged, my parents—in a notable act of engagement-present generosity—took us out for dinner and presented us with two plane tickets to Paris. I knew, of course, that my mom had picked Paris because when I’d returned from our first trip there some four years ago, I had told her all about how Matt and I had discussed getting married. And, more importantly, I had told her how excited I was about it, how I felt that something important had been solidified between us in Paris—something intangible, unnamable—that made me certain Matt was the person I was supposed to spend my life with, that made me certain, whatever my future held, he would be a part of it. And my mother had remembered, and wanted to celebrate that.
Only, on the cab ride back to our apartment after dinner that night, Matt asked me if I thought my parents would be offended if we exchanged the tickets for ones that would take us to another destination. Prague, maybe, or Vienna. “I just don’t remember us having such a great time in Paris,” he said. “You know what I mean? It wasn’t so memorable.”
What can I even say? There are moments when you can feel something fall down inside of you, and never rise up in exactly the same way again. For me, this was one of them.
“Women have better memories than men,” he’d argued, when I tried to remind him of the conversation we’d had there about getting married, tried to relive for him that morning at the Eiffel Tower, that night in that small coffee-barroom, everything, everything, we had done together there, and that he’d seemed so excited about.
That was what I feared most: that he just wasn’t excited about us anymore—that something between us had altered irreversibly. And afterward, I started seeing the evidence everywhere: in the way he didn’t sleep facing me anymore, or the way he’d stopped asking me the questions he used to need to know the answers to, the way he stopped needing to tell me things in order for them to count. At first I told myself I invented this. Or that I was overreacting. Especially because there were slight reprieves. He’d make us Valentine’s Day dinner in bed, or leave a sunflower by the front door, he’d reach for my hand in the parking lot without looking first. But it was almost a sadder thing, waiting for these small victories. Because they were so infrequent, and because they seemed to be more like an apology for something he didn’t have the strength to tell me about.
I waited it out anyway. I waited for almost
a year, the entire length of our engagement, for Matt to show me someone resembling the Matt I thought I’d known. But the longer I waited, the more I understood that something crucial and irreplaceable had been lost, probably long before that cab ride when I first noticed its absence. Which left me with these constant questions—these awful, often avoidable questions—about what exactly I was willing to live without. In order to keep him. In order to not have to face the impossibility of another kind of life.
And now I couldn’t help but worry about what kind of life Josh was walking into, or away from. Maybe it wasn’t my job to figure it out, but it felt a little too close to home to not contemplate it, to not try to help him make some sense out of it. Better sense, at least, than I had managed to make of it for myself.
My alarm clock unsnoozed itself again, buzzing for the sixth time that morning, demanding that—whatever I thought—I at least did it fully awake. It was 6:34 A.M. We were supposed to be on the road fourteen minutes ago, and my head was still throbbing from my ample tequila consumption a few hours before. As if that wasn’t grim enough, according to the thermometer that my father had put in the window sometime around my tenth birthday, it was already seventy degrees outside. Not even seven in the morning, and seventy degrees outside.
I flipped my alarm clock off and stood up.
“How is that possible?” I said, tapping on the thermometer, trying to regulate it. It held its ground.
