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“No.”
He nodded. “Well, we should probably talk about it when they’re in front of us, but my idea . . .”
“You know, maybe it’s a little soon for ideas, Griffin,” I said. “And maybe we should both start anticipating that I’m going to get nowhere with all of this photography stuff.”
“That’s a good attitude,” he said.
He paused, as I shrugged—shrugged as if to say, sorry, but it’s the only one I’ve got right now.
“Annie, you have talent. And you can do something here. We can do something. We’ll figure it out, together.”
Figure it out together. All of a sudden, Gia’s words came back to me: Griffin only knows how to love broken people.
“I don’t need saving, Griffin,” I said.
He gave me a confused look. “Who said anything about you needing saving?” he asked.
“No one,” I said. And then, before I could stop myself: “Gia did, actually. Or, rather, she shared that that part of a relationship is a hobby of yours.”
“Gia is wrong about that. Which maybe is my fault.” He paused, a look of shame coming over his face. “I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I stayed in the relationship too long. But I wasn’t trying to save her. I loved her. I was trying to fix our relationship, which is a different thing. It made me willing to do the work for too long after I shouldn’t have been, after I knew we probably weren’t going to get to where we needed to be.”
He met my eyes and I had to admit what he was saying sounded like the truth—or at least the truth as far as he understood it. So why, even with evidence banking up on our side of things, did I not feel any calmer?
“It was never about saving Gia, Annie,” he continued. “And it certainly isn’t about that with you.”
“Well, then what is about then, Griffin? Because I’m just saying we can put together whatever plan you want, but I’m probably better off preparing for the fact that my photography is just a hobby,” I said. “And I’m most likely going to end up jobless in this town unless I take a job writing for the Boondocks Bee.”
My tone stopped him, pulling him away from him whatever was left of his understanding.
“What did Jordan say to you today, Annie?” he asked.
“Nothing . . .” I said.
“Then why do you want to fight with me so badly? Why is that, apparently, the only thing that’s going to make you feel better?”
I was already heading away, not stopping to drop the lights back into their bucket—the small, innocent lights that I was still squeezing between my fingers, that had nothing to do with any of this.
“It’s not,” I said. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I’m just going home,” I said.
It occurred to me, as I said it, that maybe my biggest problem of all was that I still wasn’t at all sure where that was.
22
Something that always shocked me, during the years that I was writing “Checking Out,” was how many letters I’d regularly receive from readers asking me about how they could get out of a trip they no longer wanted to take. How they could get out of a trip that they’d known, in advance, was not refundable. I never knew what made them think I would have that answer. Then, after time, I realized that most of the readers didn’t really want that answer. They didn’t even really want out. Not of that trip they had been planning for, hoping for, and waiting for. But like whenever you feel your options close in—even if they close in on what you were aiming to find—those looking to cancel still wanted to feel like they had the option of out. That it wasn’t a fait accompli, everything that was coming. That there was a back door they could find their way to, whether or not they were going to use it.
When I got back to the house, there was a note from Emily waiting for me on the kitchen table.
Annabelle,
I was hoping to talk with you before I left, but I need to get back to Manhattan for an early class tomorrow morning. Soon?
–Emily
I put the note back down wondering what she was hoping to talk to me about. All the other things I didn’t understand about her son? About what he needed? All the other things we should have thought about before falling into a life together?
