by V. T. Do
He changed then, and the face I had seen him use when he was at work made its appearance. I was never on the receiving end of that, because with me, Wyatt had always been open. But not anymore.
“You are such a fucking hypocrite,” he bit out. “You tried to fight us from the very start because you didn’t want me to break your heart. Can’t you see that you’re doing that to me now?”
I looked away. I hated how his voice cracked at the end. “We weren’t supposed to last. We were going to hurt each other in the end, and you know that.”
“So you decided to do it first. You decided to rip my heart out rather than take a chance on us? What about all those things you said to me earlier. Were they nothing but lies?”
“Yes!” I shouted.
He shook his head. I knew a part of him didn’t believe me. I needed him to believe me now, believe the lies, and I needed him not to see how much this was killing me on the inside.
He took a step toward me. I didn’t move back, even when everything in me told me to. Told me I would regret it if I didn’t end this. End us.
The consequences were something I couldn’t handle. He didn’t know. But I did. So I would be to blame for whatever happened between us.
“I need you to leave me alone,” I whispered. “If you love me, then let me go.”
“I can’t do that.” He took another step closer to me. And another. “I am incapable of leaving you alone,” he whispered. And then he kissed me.
He kissed me with the sort of hesitancy and excitement of a first kiss, and the exploration and intimacy of many kisses after.
Time stopped, and nothing existed but his lips on mine and my heart breaking in two.
I pushed him away, and only when I tried a third time did he relent. The tears came then, and they wouldn’t stop. I wiped the imprint of his lips on mine with the sleeve of my shirt. “I hate you,” I lied again, and for the first time, I saw his mask slip as he showed some sign of emotion.
It was brief, but it was there, and it was enough to make me truly hate myself in that moment.
I wished I had never been born.
I walked out of the room. I knew he wouldn’t come after me. Grabbing my purse, jacket, shoes, and keys, I walked out and closed the door behind me, the finality of it hitting me harder than I expected. I made it into the elevator before I broke down, and there was nothing to anchor me to this world.
My chest hollowed out, and the heart I didn’t think could ever be given to anyone was left behind with the one man I could never be with.
The elevator stopped on the ground floor, and I walked outside and sat down on the bench. The snow was still coming down, though less intense, and I put on my shoes before calling Joey. She picked up on the third ring.
“C-Can you pick me up at Wyatt’s?”
“Yes,” she answered without hesitation.
“And can you please send Cole home? I can’t see anyone right now.”
“Consider it done. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Thank you,” I choked out, trying hard to keep from crying out again.
“You don’t have to thank me for this. Just hold on. I’ll be there soon enough.”
I hung up and watched the sky. New York City had always been beautiful, with the lights and the magic. And I had once believed this was the place where fairy tales came true. Because I had always believed in fairy tales.
I grew up believing in fairy tales, for no other reason than that Joseph Caldwell was my grandfather.
How naive was that, to believe that in our darkest times, there would be a light to guide us home?
That was never the case.
The world was an ambiguous place. Things were dark and scary and confusing, and sometimes it was easier to pretend that love could conquer all.
We knew the truth from the very start, even if some part of us hoped for the pretty lie instead.
He and I, we were never meant to be. We met purely from coincidence, and we fell in love purely from coincidence. And it was just easier to accept the fact that we were doomed from the very start. That no matter what could have been done differently, we would still break. And how silent that break was. I didn’t even hear its undoing until it was far too late.
Did Wyatt not know our ending?
He was an innocent in all of this, just like me, but perhaps there was a part of him that knew our story was written to end in tragedy from the very start, and that was why he’d tried so hard to warn me off.
We have no future, he’d said to me. And those words had never felt more true than they did in this moment.
Chapter Thirty-Four: The Mess You Left Behind
Emery
Joey found me in a near freezing state. I hadn’t realized how cold the weather had turned until she guided me into her heated car, and the feeling started to come back into my limbs. Like a thousand needles, prickling at my skin all at once. I ached down to my bones.
I leaned my head back and let out a small grunt of pain.
“Why didn’t you wait inside for me? Are you crazy? It’s almost below freezing, and you thought it would be a good idea to stay outside?”
“Joey.”
A pause. Then she softly asked, “What happened?”
My lips trembled, and I couldn’t tell if it was because I was still cold, or if I had more tears to shed. “I broke up with Wyatt.”
“Why?”
“Tomorrow, okay? I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. I just need to not have to say anything tonight.”
“Okay. You know it will be fine.”
But she was wrong. It wasn’t fine, and I didn’t think anything could be fine again. We drove home in silence, and I watched as the snow fell in swirls. It felt like we were in a little bubble. For once, New York was quiet. The streets were near empty, and the ride to her apartment ended way too quickly.
I wasn’t ready to move from the car. I wasn’t ready to deal with reality just yet.
Joey parked and turned off the headlights, but left the car on, the heat blasting. And when I fell apart, the sound that came out surprised even me. Joey didn’t say anything. She didn’t reassure me again that everything would be fine again. She pulled me into her arms, and that was all I needed.
I cried on her shoulder, clutching her like she was my lifeline. She felt like one then. Because aside from her, I couldn’t think of one reason to keep on going. And so we stayed there, for as long as I needed to break down in her arms, before we gathered up my mess and walked inside her apartment, where that breaking would be locked out. I would move on from this. I had to, because there was no other alternative. Just had to keep moving.
***
Joey was a neat freak.
I believed it was because so many things in her life had been out of her control, and cleaning was a way for her to assert some.
Whereas I was messy and all over the place, she had a place for everything, and everything was in its place.
I woke up in the bright room, with Joey still asleep next to me. My eyes moved about, from the textbooks neatly stacked on her desk, to the blank walls, to the purple bedding and matching curtains, and finally to my best friend.
Even in sleep, there was this control about her. She didn’t take up much space. She kept to herself in one little corner, and I couldn’t help but think it was because she’d only had a small corner growing up, which was considered her “bed,” and she was so used to sleeping like that that even with a queen-size bed, she still kept to her corner.
As for me, I was told I slept with abandonment. That I took up as much space as possible, that I felt secure enough of my place in the world and in my family that I didn’t have to be careful. On the outside, I had everything. Nice clothes, a good car, a big house, and a grandpa who had loved me more than anything else in the world.
On the inside, couldn’t they see that I was just as messed up as Joey? I was reckless growing up because I didn’t think it was fair that I had the security a
nd protection my family’s money provided, while others were hurting.
The more I saw how much money we had, the harder it was to ignore the fact that other people had very little. Joey’s family was one of them.
I had felt ashamed of us, because even if I couldn’t remember my dad, I remembered everything about living with him. At one point in my life, I had been poor. And then I somehow cheated at life and got more money than I knew what to do with.
I knew there were holes in my memory of my time with my dad, and that I could only remember the last few years there, but it was enough to tell me how miserable he had been, how miserable we had been.
Then he died, and my grandpa made me visit him in the hospital for the last time. It was drugs that had done him in, but on his last day, he was conscious, even if he had been unable to speak because of the tube down his throat breathing for him. He was brought into the hospital when his friend called an ambulance after finding him struggling to breathe on his kitchen floor.
That bought him a day.
A day in which I was forced to face the man who had abandoned me for drugs, who had forgotten he had a daughter who needed him, and who had sometimes done very bad things with very bad people that I had had to bear witness to.
But on that day, it wasn’t the bad things I remembered. It was the good. Like how happy he’d looked at my kindergarten graduation, or when he’d taught me how to read, or when we would sit at the dining table and color.
It was as if the bad things had never happened, but that feeling didn’t last. It was gone as soon as the life left his eyes, and I knew I was supposed to forgive him, supposed to understand that maybe life had gotten too hard for him, and he didn’t know how to live from one day to the next without those self-destructive habits.
I couldn’t.
I didn’t know how.
But what I did do was put him in the past with all the things I didn’t want to think about, let alone talk about. And now, his past was coming back and ruining my life.
I buried my face in the pillow, blinking away the burn in my eyes. I was supposed to be done crying by now. Yet it kept coming back, and all I could do was try to keep from thinking about Wyatt and how I had broken both his heart and mine.
Joey stirred, then her arms came around me. “Do you want to talk about it?”
And because she was my best friend, and I knew she would never judge me for anything, I told her. I told her everything.
All the things I couldn’t tell Wyatt, I told her. And by the time I was done, I was completely and utterly exhausted.
***
Cole came over late afternoon. From the look in his eyes, I knew he’d seen Wyatt already.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Hurt and confused. He doesn’t know why you broke up with him.”
I looked away so he wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. “And from the look of you, you’re hurting too.”
“Did you come here just to tell me that?”
He shook his head and sat down next to me on the couch. I grabbed the throw pillow and placed it on my lap, my fingers tracing the unusual color patterns.
“I came here to see how you were doing. Are you okay, Emery?”
“Do I look okay?”
“No, you look like hell.”
At that, I smiled for the first time since last night. “I feel like it.”
“Want to tell me what happened?” he asked softly.
“There are things he doesn’t know. And I can’t be with him.”
“Why not? Did he do something?”
I shook my head, my fingers clutching the corner of the pillow tightly. Wyatt didn’t do anything. He was an innocent. So was I. “No, he didn’t do anything,” I said, choking on the words.
He didn’t say anything for a second, as if he was thinking. Then he asked, “What do you know?”
So Cole was in on the secret too. Did he know there were things that had been kept from me since the very beginning, things that I had the right to know?
“What do you know?” I asked his question back to him.
“Secrets that aren’t mine to tell.”
“Will you tell me?”
He shook his head. I didn’t think it would be that easy. “You should talk to Wyatt. Whatever you think you know might not be true. He can tell you. Hell, you can even talk to your aunt. She knows more than anyone else.”
“Can I talk to Erin?” I asked.
Cole tensed. “Erin? Why do you want to talk to her?” he asked carefully.
I laughed, the sound bitter. “Isn’t she directly involved in this whole goddamn mess?”
“Emery, tell me what you know.”
“I want to talk to her. Will you help me?”
“Help you how?”
“Tell me how I can find her.”
He stood up, his hands resting on his hips. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Please, Cole. I just need to talk to her. I need to know.”
“Then talk to Wyatt.”
“He doesn’t know!” I yelled, standing up too.
Tense silence followed. Joey came out of the kitchen then, her hands still wet from washing the dishes. “Cole.”
It was a simple enough word. But coming from Joey, it sounded like a demand. We made plans that morning to go see Erin. But I didn’t know how to find her. I knew that Cole knew where she lived, and I needed him to tell me. I needed to confront her. Ask her why she thought it was okay to abandon me. Had I known, none of this ever would have happened. I wouldn’t have fallen in love with Wyatt, and I wouldn’t feel like something was ripping my insides to shreds every time I thought about him.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Emery,” Cole said finally. “You’re looking for answers from the wrong person.”
“I’ll be fine.” At least, I would be after this. I just needed to see her.
“Okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
***
We took the red-eye to Chicago.
If I thought winter in New York was bad, it had nothing on Chicago.
Joey and I huddled closed to each other while waiting for the cab outside of the airport, and then we drove straight to the hotel. It was uneventful. I didn’t know what I had been expecting. That my heart would burst out of my chest from anxiety? Or that I would feel something, anything, other than the indifference I’d been feeling since we got on the plane?
Joey and I shared the bed, and even with the wind raging outside the window, Joey slept soundly.
I was awake, missing Wyatt so bad it literally hurt. Since the night I’d walked away, I swore sometimes I still felt remnants of his touch on my skin. It felt so real, I had to pause in whatever I was doing and remind myself that he wasn’t actually there with me.
I fell asleep around three in the morning and woke up two hours later. The wind had died down sometime during the night, and everything was silent in its wake.
I got up and readied myself for the day.
It wasn’t until breakfast arrived two hours later that Joey stirred. Her short blonde hair was sticking up all over the face, and her eyes were slightly puffy.
“Sleep well?” I asked.
She groaned in response.
I smiled. “I ordered us some breakfast. Come and eat something before it gets cold.” She mumbled something into her pillow. “What was that?”
Sitting up, she brushed the stray hair from her face. “How do you do it? Wake up so goddamn early and be so chirpy?”
“I don’t know. Habit, I guess.”
“Ugh. Fine. I’m up. Tell me there’s bacon.”
“Of course. But if you don’t hurry, I might eat it all.”
She laughed and climbed out of bed, walking over to me and taking a seat on the sofa. “Are you nervous about today?” she asked, taking a bite of bacon.
“About meeting Erin?” I couldn’t bring myself to refer to her as Mom. Mainly because she still didn’t feel like one t
o me. She was so terrible to me when we first met, I wondered if I was just setting myself up for a world of hurt. I shrugged. “I don’t know how I’m feeling. I’ll tell you when I figure it out.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re not going into this expecting anything but answers from her. No matter the outcome today, we’re going home, and you will be fine.” I wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince, me or her. Either way, she was right. I wasn’t expecting anything from Erin. I just wanted to know about my family’s past.
“Right. I’ll be fine.”
***
According to Cole, Erin worked part-time as a medical transcriptionist. It wasn’t that she needed the money, just something to fill her time. Wyatt provided for her well enough. But the job meant that she was more likely to be home than not.
We got to her house early that afternoon. The wind was gone, but there was still this numbing cold that filled the air, and I had realized in my short time there that I hated Chicago. The weather was too much.
We stood side by side, staring up at the modest two-story house in a nice neighborhood. There was nothing unusual about the house, and in fact, it looked a lot like the other houses nearby, but there was a red SUV parked in the driveway, which told me that she was home.
“You’ll be with me the whole time?” I asked.
Joey grabbed my hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze before letting go. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
We walked up the driveway and rang the doorbell. I could see a puffy white cloud in front of Joey’s face every time she breathed. While I waited, I focused on that instead of on my own thoughts. Anything to go back to the indifference I had felt after arriving in Chicago the night before.
After a minute, Joey shot me a look and was about to ring the doorbell once more, when we heard the click of the lock. The sound was almost deafening in my ears.
When the door opened and revealed Erin to us, I could see the shock in her eyes. But what I saw surprised me. Now that I knew the truth, it was easy to see the resemblance between us.
Joey must have seen it too, because she didn’t say anything as she continued to stare at Erin.
