My success galvanized Nick to put more effort into his solo album, and he had part of the Newlyweds crew follow him around as he worked in the studio. I didn’t want any part of that, and I was surprised that he did. He chose the crew members he could go out for beers with after they wrapped for the day. He’d built a recording studio in the house, and I tried not to be home when I knew the crew would be there. That said, I tried not to be home in general. I spent more and more time with my friends, especially my hairdresser Ken Pavés.
I drank too much on my nights out, and so did Nick. He didn’t have a problem with alcohol, he had an issue with what it allowed him to say. One day I taped a Proactiv skin product commercial all day, and afterward a bunch of us went to dinner. Nick was at a bar, and said he’d come to dinner but never showed. Late that night he came home drunk. He was swaying back and forth, angry at me for a laundry list of reasons. I knew I deserved it. I was a terrible wife, and he was a terrible husband. But I knew deep down he was a good man. I wanted that man back.
I started to speak. “My friends say—”
“Your friends don’t exist,” he spat. “You just pay them to be around you.”
It was a knife, cutting me down to the rawest marrow. My mouth dropped open. The one thing I always had was my friendships. I’d been so cold, so unresponsive to him for so long that he must have seen a flicker of something. So he twisted the knife.
“And your parents are only around because they are on the payroll.”
I closed my eyes, willed myself away. I turned to go upstairs.
“All bets are off,” I quietly said to myself. The next day, I would tell him what he said. He wouldn’t remember. But I would.
14
I’ll Fly Away
October 2005
I arrived in Nairobi a little after six in the morning. I was in Kenya for Operation Smile, a decades-old medical charity providing reconstructive surgeries for children worldwide with cleft lips, palates, and other facial deformities that were either life-threatening or socially ostracizing. They were doing a two-week mission providing surgeries at three sites in Kenya: Nairobi, Mombasa, and Nakura. I’d brought my hairdresser friend Ken, who had been the one to introduce me to the charity. When I heard Operation Smile had scheduled the mission, I wanted to go along because I had made the charity a priority for me.
It was October 26, my third wedding anniversary, and Nick and I had arranged to be nearly four thousand miles apart. He was in Sweden, working with producers on his album. I was in Africa. It didn’t matter, really. We were barely speaking.
We got there in the morning, and I had the day to myself before we took a bus west to Nakura that night. I thought I would sleep, but I wanted to see if I could be anonymous so far away from America. I washed my face and threw on jeans and an oversize army-green jacket. I stood in the mirror, wondering if another tourist would notice I was Jessica Simpson. I decided to pull my hair back with a black bandana, the same way I had on mission trips as a kid. As I did so, I saw the shine of my wedding ring in the mirror. I looked at it, and it felt suffocating and heavy on my hand. I watched myself as I slipped it off to place it in the tiny pocket of my jeans and exhaled. The ring left a line of white on my finger, and I rubbed at it, trying to make it disappear.
I went to Nairobi National Park, a forty-five-square-mile nature preserve just outside the main part of the city. I walked in through the main entrance, and I had the feeling of being on a space walk as I got farther and farther from the safety of the car. I felt untethered, afraid that if someone spotted me, a crowd would form, and then I would have to run. I opened my backpack to get out a bottle of water and sipped nervously as I moved into the park.
“Excuse me,” said a woman behind me. The voice was British.
Please, I thought.
“Excuse me,” she said again. I turned to see an older woman with a husband who matched her to a tee.
She smiled. “Your bag,” she said. “It’s open.”
A wave of relief washed over me. “Thank you,” I said. They kept walking, and so did I, blissfully invisible. Near the entrance, the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust runs a sanctuary for orphaned baby elephants and rhinoceroses. As I blended in with a small crowd of people standing behind a light rope line, keepers led a dozen or so baby elephants to a mud bath. The parents of these animals are usually killed by ivory and rhino horn poachers, and the orphans are found close to death themselves. They grow up there, bottle-fed until they are old enough to be released.
“In the beginning, they follow us around,” the keeper told us. “But then they start to make their own decisions about where they want to go, and so we follow them.” Usually, around two years old, the elephants have the confidence to go back into the wild.
I watched them frolic, dropping themselves on the ground and rubbing up against each other, their huge ears flapping. I took my sunglasses off so I could look them in the eyes. People slowly left the viewing area, but I stayed, transfixed. It had been so long since I had spent that amount of time alone among people. This was my sanctuary, too.
I heard the click of a camera’s shutter like a gun cocking. It was to my left, but I didn’t want to turn my face to see it. I shoved my left hand in my pocket and tried to fiddle my wedding ring onto my finger, like Houdini with a hidden key.
Come on, Jess, I said to myself. I scrunched my finger up to catch the ring with my nail.
Another click. Got it. I pulled out my hand and put my sunglasses back on with my left hand to be sure my ring was in the shots. I turned just slightly to see a heavyset white man training a Canon camera on me. I was the game, and I was caught.
I deadened my face, put my sunglasses on, and left the park.
That night, on the bus to Nakura, I wrote in my journal and asked God to replenish my heart so I could be of use to the children coming in for screenings and surgeries the next day. I was so tired of focusing on my own sadness and anxiety.
“I release this pain to You, so You will free me,” I wrote. “Lord, use me as I deny myself anything having to do with ‘me.’ That ‘me’ is denied, passed on, set aside.”
I meant every word, and I thought the same when I walked into the hospital the next morning. “Use me,” I said again to God. There were so many children, and the surgeons would perform over 150 procedures on this mission trip. I stood around and posed for photographs, knowing my job was to bring attention to the charity. The real work was done by people like Dr. Bill Magee, the pediatric plastic surgeon who cofounded the organization.
And then I met Boke. She was eighteen months old, gorgeously chubby, and had come in to have surgery on her cleft lip and palate. Her mother had terrible anxiety about the procedure and had gone outside to calm down. I later learned they had traveled twelve hours to get to the hospital. She must have been overwhelmed to work so hard to get somewhere, only to then face the fear of her baby being operated on by strangers.
Boke began to cry, and I lifted my arms to a nurse out of some instinct I didn’t know I had. The nurse sat her in my lap, and I smiled at her, making soothing shh sounds as I rocked my body to be one big cradle for her. She looked up, and we regarded each other for a moment, two strangers brought together in a place unfamiliar to both of us.
“Look at you,” I said. “You’re so pretty.” She had the tiniest bit of short, tight curls, and as she relaxed, I couldn’t help but kiss her pretty head. Her cleft lip was on the right side of her face, and the wide split went up to her nose, exposing her front teeth.
We relaxed together, and people moved on from watching us. Everyone was so busy that day that Boke and I just blended in until it was her turn. I went to give her over, and she started crying again. Dr. Magee was doing the operation himself and asked if I wanted to scrub in so I could stay with her. I nodded yes, and after I was scrubbed up and capped and gowned, I carried Boke in myself.
“You’re already so beautiful,” I whispered to her. “This will just make things easie
r for you.” I held Boke when they gave her anesthesia and stroked her head as she slipped off to sleep. I thought I’d leave, but Dr. Magee invited me to stay. I watched, wanting to be a witness to this miracle. It took what, forty-five minutes? And it would change Boke’s life forever. And mine, too. I had come to Kenya thinking I would be blessing these kids with good works, and I was the one being blessed. When it was over, Dr. Magee said he was impressed I didn’t flinch once. It was one of the best reviews I’ve ever received.
I went with Boke to recovery so that I would be the first person she saw when she woke up. I sat cradling her and marveling that you could already see the transformation of her mouth being made whole. I held her in the crook of my right arm, and in her postoperation sleep, she wrapped her little hand around my left index finger.
When she was fully awake, someone went to get her mom to tell her that the surgery was a success. She came in, and we smiled at each other. She had no idea who I was and wanted nothing from me but to step in when she was in need. I hugged her, thinking how scared she must have been.
The doctors worked all day, so I stayed late and did the same the next day. When it was over, Ken and I were exhausted, and I could not stop thanking him for getting me involved in Operation Smile. It gave me perspective on what mattered. I hadn’t planned on doing so much soul searching, but being so far away gave me an opportunity to look inward in stillness.
As part of the trip, we arranged to take a Jeep out to the Masai Mara National Reserve to camp. As we drove farther and farther into the flat grassland, I looked out at the trees dotting the landscape here and there and felt a growing freedom. I could have been anybody to Boke’s mom. Could I be anybody to me? And who did I want to be?
That night I slept in a tent. Don’t worry, it was luxury glamping. I don’t want to make you think I was suddenly roughing it. I was changing, but I was still me. Still, under that blanket of stars woven by God, I didn’t have my usual fear of the dark and what could happen. I went to bed early, not putting it off like I usually did, and slept soundly. I dreamed something about my life in Hollywood and being chased by paparazzi. I was so grateful when the Kenyan sun woke me, safe, a world away from all that.
I went outside and saw I was the first up. There had been just the lightest rain. Now the early-morning sun was shining. It was so beautiful that I bowed my head to pray, thanking God for giving me clarity. I knew now what I had to do.
When I opened my eyes, I looked up to the sky and saw it: a double rainbow. I know how that sounds, but it’s true, and it was the confirmation I needed. I stared at it, my hands on my hips, and began to sing softly up to the sky.
“If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow,” I sang, “why, oh why, can’t I?”
When I got back to America, I would make steps to start my new life. I had to escape, and I wouldn’t be leaving Nick to be with anybody. I was escaping to be with myself.
THERE’S A LINE IN MY JOURNAL FROM THAT TIME THAT I KEPT RETURNING to: “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” It’s a quote from Joseph Campbell, who studied mythology to describe what it takes to be a hero. I probably got it from one of the many, many self-help books I devoured back then, underlining points and dog-earing the pages that seemed to tell me a way out. I repeated that quote to myself for weeks, in the shower, on a red carpet, driving in my car. There was a life waiting for me, I told myself. I owed it to the people in it to be brave.
On the night of November 22, two days before Thanksgiving, I couldn’t make that life wait any longer for me.
“I think I want a divorce,” I told Nick.
I later heard that he told the press he was blindsided. I don’t know how. At that point we were not even speaking to each other. Maybe he was just shocked that I stood up for myself. I don’t think he ever thought I would take the leap. He immediately tried to talk me out of leaving him, saying we should sleep on it.
When I told him the next day that we should announce a separation, that seemed to make it real to him. I knew I would be disappointing so many people. He went to the studio to record a song he said he wrote the week before, called “What’s Left of Me.” I later found out he had his camera crew record him singing the demo.
That evening I rushed through LAX to make a flight to Dallas so I could be with my family in Waco. I was dressed like I was trying to disappear: black jeans and a black button-down, with a black-and-white-plaid newsboy cap and the darkest, biggest sunglasses I had to hide behind.
I made it to the gate as they were boarding and got out my phone. There was one more person I had to tell: my father.
“Dad, I have to do it,” I said. “I have to leave him.”
I waited to see who was going to respond, my father or my manager.
“Absolutely, baby,” he said. “I love you, and I’ll do whatever you need me to do.”
That was my dad.
“We should do a statement,” I said. “That way I’ll stick to it.”
“Jess, don’t talk about it out loud,” he said. “This is gonna break and break hard. We need to control it.”
That was my manager speaking. There was no controlling this, I thought. My life was about to turn upside. “Okay,” I said. “But do it right away.”
“I’m so proud of you.” And then he paused. “I wish I had the courage that you have to do that with your mom.”
“What?” I asked. “What are you even saying?”
He didn’t speak. I couldn’t handle what he’d just said, so I immediately shelved it. “Dad, the plane’s about to take off,” I said, and hung up on him. I was confused by what he’d said, but I put it aside because I was so overwhelmed.
I settled in my seat, and it was only when we took off that I started to cry. This was before Wi-Fi on planes, so this was my last three hours before the storm hit. The statement went out while I was in the air, but nobody on the plane knew a thing, except that Jessica Simpson was loudly sobbing in first class.
Then they announced that the movie we all had to watch was The Notebook. Oh God, I thought. The most romantic movie in the world, and I was leaving Nick. I knew exactly what the movie was about because I had read the script but turned it down because they wouldn’t budge on taking out the sex scene. And it would have been with Ryan Gosling, of all people. The movie was on every screen, and I was swept up into it, wishing I had that great love that would be forever.
The flight attendants all felt sorry for me, and I was trying so hard to be polite every time they came over with more Kleenex. I was a total wreck.
When I landed, the announcement had made the news in the airport. With my head down, I ran to a car to take me to my Nana and Papaw’s house before anybody could find me. It was a new house my family had bought them, one that they got to build themselves to make it perfect. I got in late, and they greeted me at the door. I collapsed into their arms. Safe.
My parents were coming the next day on an early Thanksgiving-morning flight, so it was just me and my grandparents for the night. Papaw seemed uncomfortable, not sure what to say. He went to bed while Nana and I talked late in the living room. I looked up at all the framed magazines covers and articles she had hanging up of Nick and me, like the InStyle wedding photos and Teen Vogue cover. She loved our love story and adored Nick for waiting for me. I know she prayed for him every night, and she probably still does. She was in denial that it was ending, and as much as she adored me, she was unable to hide her disappointment.
“You’ll sort this out,” she said.
“Nana, no. It’s time.”
“Pray on it. It’s God’s will that you be married.”
My heart broke just a little more. “He’s not really a Christian,” I told her. “And I’m not being the wife he deserves. What about this marriage is godly?”
“Well, divorce isn’t godly,” she said.
I paused, realizing my grandmother, my prayer warrior, thought I was doing
wrong in God’s eyes. I closed my eyes for a second and took her hand. “Nana, this is the decision God wants me to make. It’s not godly to stay together and be completely unhappy.”
She looked off. I knew she had stayed through Papaw’s struggles with drinking, but clearly, she loved him and saw the man he truly was. The Papaw I got to grow up with. My mother had stayed in a marriage with my father, who also apparently wanted out. Everybody just stayed, stuck it out, thinking God would close His eyes to them if we dared to ask, “What about me?”
Sure enough, when my mother arrived, she hung on to her natural inclination that if you just worked at something enough, you will get the results you want. She waited until a quiet moment to give in to that Southern impulse to smile and get through it.
“Just give it another shot,” she said.
“Mom, you sound like your mom,” I said. I knew that would sting, but I couldn’t help myself. Like all mothers and daughters, especially strong-willed, dynamic ones, they, too, had a complicated relationship. “I know I’m breaking Nick’s heart, my family’s heart, hell, the world’s heart.”
“You are America’s couple,” she said. My mom said it like she was seeing everything in a different way than me. This wasn’t just some feel-good celebrity ranking. It was that in many ways we belonged to the public. She is a smart businesswoman, and she knew more than I did how many people might turn on me.
“What is the point in being a power couple if we’re faking it?” I said. “There’s no real power in this anymore. Real power is in authenticity.”
She nodded and took my hand. She loved Nick, but she supported me. At the Thanksgiving table, we all talked about what we were thankful for. When it was my turn I didn’t immediately speak, and my mother started to talk to smooth it over. Silently, I thanked God for the strength He gave me to leave the life I’d planned to find the life waiting for me. Thank you, I thought, and still do. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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