He burst into a laugh, but it didn’t last long. “These days! It’s been a week.”
I had to keep joking or else I would lose it. I had hurt this person beside me, I could feel it in the air, just as I used to feel his connection to me. And I had hurt myself. I wished I could take it all back, but I had wished that so many times in the last few months the words meant nothing to me anymore. I had no tears left.
“It feels like forever.”
“Because you want me back?” Stuart said. I couldn’t tell if he meant it. He was still looking down the mountain.
“Why, do you want me back?” I teased.
“I don’t know about that. Not that you aren’t… I just…” he said.
“I was joking. I wasn’t easy. Even before NPC.”
“You will be the first and last girl that I will ever let drag me into a boyfriend/girlfriend conversation over goddamn text message. You have the patience of a goldfish.”
I spit back, “Yeah, no duh.”
“Oh! Well!”
Mom walked out in her clogs, threw a towel over one of the empty chairs, and walked back in.
Stuart put his chin in his hands. “It was just… terrible timing.”
“Ha!” I let out. “Preaching to the… the, uh…”
“Choir.”
“Choir,” I echoed.
He exhaled. “I guess I’ll just say it. My agent dropped me. That’s why I was in New York.” He stared at the ground.
“Oh.”
“I hadn’t done a single page of writing while I was here.”
“I’m so sorry.” So that’s why he never wanted to talk about what he was working on. His future didn’t exist as he thought it did, either. “What about the piece you wrote for Mariana Oliva?”
“That was old. Already published in a tiny journal in Portland.”
I looked at him, his head lowered. Stuart continued. Apparently, he only went to New York to beg his publisher not to cancel his contract. He was so ashamed.
And he shouldn’t have lied to me, he said.
“It’s okay, Stu,” I told him. “Are you writing again?”
“I’m trying.”
“I remember the story you read with Mari’s piece, and the ones that had gotten picked up before this. I even reread a few recently, even after you and I fought, and the stories still struck me. You’re talented.”
“I don’t know about that,” Stuart muttered.
I almost laughed. “Remember how young you are? There’s a reason you’re doing what you’re doing. You’ve got to keep going.”
Finally, a smile. A real smile. The first one I had seen on him in a long time that lit up his dark eyes.
“You can argue with me all you want, you can give me excuses, but you know I’ll win,” I told him, smiling back.
“I know,” he said.
The words hardly came from my mouth, more from my chest, exploding. “I wanted to give more to you, to everyone, I just didn’t know how,” I said. Stuart’s eyes filled up, and so did mine. “I am learning how to be less selfish now, I really am. I just want you to know that, even if it’s too late.”
“You don’t have to be anything right now except yourself.”
“Sometimes myself is too much to handle.” My lower lip was shaking. “I wanted everything all at once.”
Stuart reached for my hand, like he always used to. I felt the sobs subside a bit. “You have a terrible disease. Smaller things have turned people into ego monsters.”
I let out a laugh.
He added, “Being born turns people into ego monsters.”
We laughed together, in between sniffs.
He stood up, helped me stand, and we faced each other. We hugged for a long time, ribs shaking against each other as we wet each other’s shoulders, and I moved my fingers to his spine.
He looked at the time.
“Time to go?”
“Time to go.”
“You meant so much to me,” I told him.
“Don’t speak in past tense like that,” he said, his voice breaking.
“You mean so much to me,” I corrected myself, because he does.
“I think we would have been good, if things had been different,” he said into my ear.
“I know we would have.” But things were. There’s no “will be” or “could be” for me anymore. Things just are.
“Tell me if you ever need anything.”
“First thing I need.”
“What is it?”
“Keep trying.”
We let go. “Okay,” he said, nodding. “Okay.”
MASS
I went to mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help with my parents for the first time in six years I didn’t talk to God, but it was a comfort to hear the voices together, their chanted prayers so deeply memorized they don’t even have to think I cling to every memory now so hard
I’m glad Harry and Bette and Davy have something that can dig deep traces in their memories, and it’s something beautiful, something outside themselves Mom and Dad took my hands on either side