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I hadn’t said a word about Nick, not a word, not since my best thing/worst thing explanation of us. That was no small miracle. But immediately I thought, I wish I’d told Griffin. I wish he already knew. I can’t follow someone else somewhere. I had followed Nick across the county, and where had I ended up? I wasn’t heading back, just because he was asking me.
Which was when—as if reading my mind—Griffin did something I wasn’t expecting. He got down on one knee.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Then we said this next part at the same time: “This is crazy.”
Sometimes you don’t know it. What you have been waiting your whole life for. You don’t know it until it is happening.
“The thing is I know that we are supposed to be together. I knew it the second you walked in wearing that dress. . . .” He shook his head. “I can’t exactly explain why. Really, I’m not sure I’d want to, even if I could.”
He was right. A part of me agreed with him. But it was also crazy. A part of me agreed with that more.
“I will give you an out here if you want it,” he said. “I will give you whatever you want. But I don’t think we should take it. I think we should be brave here. I think we should start this life right now. Right where we are. . . .”
The words were out of my mouth before I could think about it. When it all started happening—everything that came next—I asked myself: Wasn’t that how it was supposed to happen? Wasn’t that how it was supposed to begin?
“I can’t,” I said.
He looked downtrodden, and I felt it in my gut. I had never felt anything exactly like it before. It was like I was hurting myself and he was showing me how it looked. It was right there on his face. How it looked when we listened to our fear. Our uncertainty. When we let it be the thing that guides us. How, even if it may masquerade as safety, it almost always, ultimately, does more damage than figuring out how to do something greater, braver. Something bold.
Be the opposite of yourself. Jordan’s words rushed back into my head, reannounced themselves to me. Then Nick’s did: Sometimes it feels like you’ve neve
r really been here, like you couldn’t be even if you wanted to be. Which was when I knew I had to say what I really meant.
I shrugged. “I know it’s crazy and impossible and any therapist worth her salt would tell me I’m an insane person. And maybe I am an insane person. Maybe that’s true. But I can’t, for the life of me, stand here and say no.”
He stood up.
This was the way I said yes.
Part 2
Happily Ever After
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
—LEWIS CARROLL
9
One of the first things “Checking Out” taught me was how amazing the beginning of a trip could be. How there was nothing at all like the realization, early in one’s travels, that all options were readily available. A day could be a top-down convertible car ride from Brussels to Amsterdam, or a warm afternoon at Don Alfonso in Sant’Agata sui Due Golfi eating the world’s freshest lemon (skin and all), or an evening singing karaoke at the Townhouse in Tokyo. You could make a million choices, or none, and it barely counted yet. It took me time to realize just how invaluable that feeling was—and why.
It isn’t only that at the beginning of a trip the entire world is shiny and bright and possible, but also that we get to believe it again. Before any fractures show, before we feel like we are running out of time, before we make a bad choice. Before we realize that we are the reason something is going terribly wrong. In the beginning, we get to believe that, this time, we’re going to get it exactly right.
When Griffin and I drove into Williamsburg for the first time—drove down its very sleepy Main Street, past the church steeple and the post office, all the Christmas trees still standing, light snow falling onto the remnants of a previous day’s thick snowfall—I wasn’t quite sure what moved me so much, why I felt so content. But I pulled out my camera and immediately started taking photographs. I had, over the years, driven down a hundred Main Streets made up of similar components. I could, in fact, think of many that were more picturesque. But there was something different this time. Something oddly specific. Like I had been there before. Or maybe like I knew I’d be there again. Seeing it for the thousandth time instead of the first. Something you’d only recognize one way—as a place you were supposed to be.
And I must have been wearing my enthusiasm on my face because Griffin lowered my camera and met my eyes. Gave me his biggest smile.
“Makes a good first impression, doesn’t it?” he said.
I nodded. “It does,” I said.
Griffin took a right off Main Street, and then another, until we were crawling into the outskirts of town: the picture-perfect Craftsman houses lined up like jewelry charms, shiny and bright against the snow. We drove farther out—the houses separating out from each other, space growing between them, farms starting to pop up. Then we took a final right onto Naples Road, and he slowed the car down.
There it was. A modest Craftsman, all by its lonesome. Griffin’s house. My dream house. I don’t mean that in any overly indulgent way—like it was the most special house I’d ever seen or the house I’d always longed for—I mean, quite literally, it was a house I’d seen in my dreams. Nighttime dreams, daytime ones. Same blue shutters and strong posts, a wooden porch complete with rocking chairs. Two windows peeking out from the second story, like eyes. A white brick chimney. Making me smile.
There was the wedding, of course. In a small chapel right near the Las Vegas border, on our way across the country. It involved an ivory sundress, a pair of seventy-year-old witnesses, simple gold wedding bands, and a poem “Happiness” that Griffin read out loud to me. There was a very fun (and too-fast) car trip minimoon across the rest of the country together. There was all of that. But the two of us sitting in the car, on Naples Road—the world’s smallest U-Haul trailing out behind us, carrying the pieces of my old life that I’d decided to bring (a few striped chairs, my file cabinets, my favorite photographs of Mila)—that was the moment. I was staring at this house I was sure I’d seen before—and that was the beginning of my new life, my new marriage.
