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It was a nice thought, to imagine the two of us in a situation where I could be happy again and return to a sense of normalcy. I didn’t see it happening anytime soon.
“Let’s practice,” Mila told me. “I’ll start by ‘baking’ you ice cream.”
This was a trick. I knew it was a trick and she knew I knew. One thing about Mila is that she believed ice cream was a panacea. No matter how sad you were, ice cream always had the power to cheer you up, even if just for a little bit.
“Not right now,” I told her. “I don’t feel much like eating.”
Even while watching the baking show, eating was just about the last thing on my mind. I wasn’t the least bit hungry. If my sister put something in front of me, I’d take a few bites to be polite, but I’m not sure how much I would have been able to keep down. Though I didn’t have a temperature — Mila, being a good sister, checked — I felt physically sick. It was the same lethargy and exhaustion I might have felt if I had the flu or something.
But it was just depression as a result of the loss I’d experienced. And, unfortunately, there was no medicine for that. Not even ice cream could replace Grace.
“Your life isn’t over, you know,” Mila said. “I know it’s sad and I don’t want to be insensitive, but lots of people have lost pregnancies. Maybe there’s a support group you can join.”
“Maybe,” I said, but right then, I didn’t want to leave the couch. But that didn’t matter to Mila. She was getting at something else. There was intention in her voice like she was trying to bring something up, but wanted to ease her way into it.
“I’m happy to be here for you,” she said, “but it might help to talk to some people who have gone through the same thing you did. To know you weren’t alone.”
“Maybe,” I repeated. I didn’t have the energy to fight with her, nor did I want to commit to anything right now. Still, it was clear that she was going to keep on talking, no matter what I responded with. Because she had an agenda.
“I just…” She trailed off. “Okay, don’t hate me, but I don’t see why you had to throw Wesley away.”
There were so many reasons. The first being I was afraid that looking at him would remind me too much of losing Grace. And every time I saw him, I’d just get unspeakably upset for reasons that were completely beyond his control. And then I’d take it out on him. That wasn’t good for either of us.
But that wasn’t the only reason.
“I know you don’t believe in destiny,” I said to Mila, “not the way that I do, but this feels like a sign. And I don’t want to ignore it.”
She paused before responding. Sometimes she used to make fun of me for following my heart too blindly. It’s not that she thought I was stupid, just that sometimes I’d listen to my heart without running the ideas by my brain first. That’s not what I was doing now, though. On the contrary, I was doing the exact opposite. I was reading the tea leaves of destiny and not letting a Pollyanna view of a perfect future cloud my judgment of how things would really go.
“What kind of sign?”
“A sign that Wesley and I don’t belong together.”
The show on the television was replaced with a window asking us if we were still watching. Mila pressed the enter button on the remote so the background noise would continue.
“Why would you think that?” she asked. This was one of those other tricks she did, where she thought she could fool me by leading me into her point without explicitly telling me what it was. She called it her Socratic method. I’d fallen for it in the past, but that wasn’t going to happen this time.
“For one thing, he’s twenty-five years older than I am,” I said. “And he’s my boss. And we have nothing in common.”
“You don’t?” she asked. “Nothing at all?”
“Nope,” I said. I wasn’t going to give her what she wanted. But she was silent as she waited for me to respond. The silence between us was uncomfortable, so I figured I should give her a little something. Just to get rid of the silence.
“Okay,” I told her. “We both like old comedies.”
“So, you’ve got a similar sense of humor?”
“That’s not what I said.” No, it wasn’t what I said, but there was truth to it anyway. This whole thing started when Wesley overheard the story about me throwing a shoe into Bradley Burke’s asshole and scolded me instead of laughing. It made me think that he had no sense of humor whatsoever, but as I got to know him, I realized that he was funny, just in his own subtle way. I had a feeling if I told him that story again, now that he’d loosened up some, he’d think it was hilarious. Context was everything. In retrospect, I wondered if he was forcing himself not to laugh as he reprimanded me.
“Also, compatibility isn’t always about having something in common with someone else,” Mila said, and I almost wanted to give her an award. For once, she outright told me what she thought instead of turning it into a question. “Look, I know I’m not the most experienced in love…”
“That’s an understatement,” I said. And it was. She had ideas about love, in theory, but never found the right man to put them in practice with. In fact, she’d never even had sex or, if she had, she certainly never told me about it. How many 25-year-old virgins were out there in the world? The problem was that she was a hopeless romantic and insisted on waiting for the one. The way things looked, she’d be waiting for forever and not having very much fun doing it.
But here, she got to live vicariously through me. I could tell between the lines that what Wesley and I had was what she wanted for herself. That’s why she was so insistent.
“I’m going to ignore that,” she said, “but two puzzle pieces don’t fit together because they’re the same. It’s because they complement each other.”
“Cute metaphor,” I said, “but we’re not puzzle pieces. We’re people. We’re a lot more complex than puzzles.”
