“I’m messed up, Emma,” he continues. “I’m not OK, I don’t think. I keep acting as if I feel OK here, but . . . I don’t. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. Not here, not there. I’m . . . struggling to keep it together almost every moment of the day. One minute I feel overwhelmed by how much food is around and then the next minute I can’t bring myself to eat any of it. The night I landed I woke up around three and went down to the kitchen and ate so much I made myself sick. The doctors say that I still need to be mindful of what I eat and how much, but I just want to eat nothing or everything. There’s no in-between. It’s not just food, either. When we were in the shower earlier, I was thinking, ‘We should get a bucket and save some of this water. Store it.’ ”
He’s finally ready to say how he really feels and it’s all spilling out of him like a turned-over gallon of milk.
“I can’t even stand to look at my hand. I can’t stand to see that my finger is still gone. I know it sounds so stupid, but I think I thought that if I could just get home, then things could go back to the way they were. I’d get you back, and I’d feel normal again, and my pinkie would, I don’t know, magically reappear or something.”
He looks at me and he breathes in and then breathes out, all with great effort.
“Do you want to sit?” I ask him, pulling him toward the sofa. I sit him down and I take a seat beside him. I put my hand on his back. “It’s OK,” I say. “You can talk about it. You can tell me anything.”
“I just . . . I hate even thinking about it,” he says. “It was . . . awful. All of it. Losing my finger was maybe one of the most painful things I’ve ever been through. I have been working so hard to block it out.”
I am quiet in the hopes that he will keep talking, that he will continue to be honest with me and with himself, that he will share what he’s been through, what plagues him.
“I sliced it almost clean through,” he says finally. “Trying to open an oyster with a rock. I thought it might heal on its own but it wouldn’t. I lived with it growing more and more infected until I finally just had to . . .”
I can see that he can’t bring himself to speak the words.
But he doesn’t have to.
I know what he can’t say.
He had to cut off his own finger.
Somewhere in the years he’s been gone, he was forced to save his hand the only way he could.
“I’m so sorry,” I say to him.
I can’t imagine what else happened, how many days he went without food, how near he came to grave dehydration, the searing pain of being stung over and over as he was trying to swim to rescue. But I am starting to think that he will tackle that pain when he is ready, talking and admitting more as he grows stronger. It will be a long process. It may even be years until he can unpack it all. And even then, he’ll never be able to erase it completely.
The same way I’ll never be able to erase the ache of grieving him.
These are the things that have made us who we are.
I step away from Jesse for a moment and head into the kitchen. I look through the cabinets and find an old box of Earl Grey.
“How about some tea?” I offer.
He looks up at me and nods. It is so gentle as to be almost imperceptible.
I put two mugs of water in the microwave. I grab the tea bags.
“Keep talking,” I say. “I’m listening.”
His voice picks up again and I realize that he must have, whether it was conscious or subconscious, been waiting for permission.
“I think I’ve been trying to undo the last however many years,” he says. “I’ve been trying to put everything back the way it was before I left so it can be as if it never happened. But that doesn’t work. I mean, obviously it doesn’t. I know that.”
I stop the microwave before it beeps, pulling the mugs out and putting the tea bags in. The smell of the tea reminds me of Marie. I sit back down next to Jesse, putting his steaming cup in front of him. He takes it into his hand but he doesn’t drink it yet.
“I’m not the same person that I was back then,” he says. “You know it and I know it, but I just keep thinking that with a little effort, I can change that. But I can’t. I can’t, can I?”
He puts the mug down and starts gesticulating with his hands. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in Acton,” he says. “I’ve spent too long trapped somewhere I didn’t want to be. I want to go back to California. I respect that Blair Books means as much to you as it does, but I don’t get it. We worked so hard to move away from New England, to get away from the life that our parents were pushing us toward. We sacrificed so much so that we could travel, not so that we could stay in one place. I don’t understand why you came back here, why you chose to spend your life here, doing exactly what your parents always told you you should do.
“I’m really, really angry, deep down in my heart. And I wish that I didn’t feel that way and I hate myself for feeling it. But I’m furious that you could fall in love with someone else. I know you say that it doesn’t mean you forgot me, but, you know, at least right now, it sure sounds like it to me. And I’m not saying that we couldn’t get past that, if everything else about us made sense, but . . . I don’t know.
“I’m mad at you and I’m mad at Friendly’s for turning into a Johnny whatever you called it. I’m mad at almost everything that changed without me. I know I need to work on that. I know it’s just one of the strings of issues that I’m facing. I know I said that now was supposed to be the easy part but I don’t know why I thought that. Coming home is hard. This was always going to be hard. I’m sorry I didn’t see that until now.
“Of course I’ve changed. And of course you’ve changed. There is no way we could be the same after losing each other; we meant too much to each other for that to happen. So, I guess what I’m saying is that I’m miserable and I’m angry, but I guess I do get it. What you said in that letter makes some sense to me. You had to let go of me if you were ever going to have a chance at a normal life. I know you loved me then. I know it wasn’t easy. And, obviously, I know this is hard for you, too. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t see what you see.”
He puts his arms around me, pulling me close to him, and then he says what has taken us days to understand.
“We loved each other and we lost each other. And now, even though we still love each other, the pieces don’t fit like they used to.”
I could make myself fit for him.
He could make himself fit for me.
But that’s not true love.
“This is it for us,” Jesse says. “We’re over now.”
I look in his eyes. “Yeah. I think we are.”
After everything we’ve been through, I never predicted it ending like this.
Jesse and I stay still, holding each other, not yet ready to fully let go. His hands are still a little bit frozen. I take them in my own. I hold them, sharing the heat of my body.
He pulls one hand away to brush a hair off of my face.
I think, maybe, this is what true love means.
Maybe true love is warming someone up from the cold, or tenderly brushing a hair away, because you care about them with every bone in your body even though you know what’s between you won’t last.
“I don’t know where we go from here,” I say.
Jesse puts his chin on my head, breathing in. And then he pulls away slightly to look at me. “You still don’t have to be back until late tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“So we can stay,” he says. “For another day. We can take our time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m saying that I know what’s ahead of us, but . . . I’m not ready yet. I’m just not ready. And I don’t see why we can’t spend a little bit more time with each other, a little bit more time being happy together. I’ve waited so long to be here with you; it seems silly to squander it just because it won’t last.”
I smile, charmed. I consider what he’s saying and realize that it feels exactly right to me, like being handed a glass of water just as you realize you’re thirsty. “That sounds good,” I say. “Let’s just have a nice time together, not worry about the future.”