“I’m not asking for your forgiveness—well, I am. But I understand if you can’t give it. Maybe you can try.” She hesitates before reaching for my hand this time. “Please don’t go.”
Her body is melting into mine. I feel a tug in places I thought had banished Abby forever. “I have to go. It’s time.”
She’s thinking about this, and I can tell her mind is working through something big. A beautiful white-breasted nuthatch lands on the railing beside us, though Abby doesn’t notice. There’s a lot going on in her, even now. Her eyes are darting back and forth as if she’s just solved the world’s problems. When the bird takes off in to the sky, its loud yammering takes Abby’s eyes along with it. She’s gazing up and over the mountains, following the tiny creature through the blue sky. The smile that spreads across her face is strange, but the rest of her looks free and light.
I have no more room in my heart to be cruel. “Abby, I don’t mean to cut you off, but I have to make a flight.”
She turns from the sky, her glowing face causing me to pause. “Is there nothing I can do to get you to stay?” she asks.
“I can’t, Abby. Maybe some other time.”
Her arms are coming around me and her words fill my ears. “You were my best friend. The two of you. I loved you both so much there was never any room to love myself. And still I never showed you what you meant to me. I can do that now. I can prove to you that I’ve changed.” Then she whispers something so softly and so impossible, I, at first, think I am imagining it.
“Did you hear me?” she asks, backing away, her arms outstretched on my shoulders so we are facing each other.
Yes, I hear her. The crazy look in her eyes actually looks less crazy. I can’t imagine why she’s telling me this.
I have to move away from her or I will give in. I will remember sliding down falls with her, holding her hand as we skipped through Davidson, laughing ourselves to sleep. I will hear her telling me Ryan still loves me and I will wish for another chance. Abby. Her highs were always higher. Her lows always lower. The drama that surrounded her was hard to leave behind.
So I turn and walk away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
RYAN
The car ride home is always quieter than the ride down. The boys are worn out, and they put on headphones and drown out my compliments. At a traffic light, I reach behind me for one of Devon’s earbuds, tugging it out of his ear. He tries to fight me at first, but I’m stronger than he is, and I tell him how proud he’s made me, and I thank him. The grin covers his whole face, and he has to turn his head toward the window because it feels too good. If only I had the ability to fine-tune the women in my life as I have done these young men.
Solitude always brings her back to me, hard as I try to push her away. My mind wanders to what could’ve been, what would have happened if I had known Lauren was there. Instead of walking away without a fight, I run after her until I am out of breath. We fix the frayed edges until we are bound again. I shuffle in my seat and try to shake it out of me. And the feeling goes away, returning to a place I can’t visit. And there is Abby. New and improved Abby. Mother of my child Abby. Thinking about her makes me wonder why we didn’t have more kids, seeing how we made one that was so perfect. I’m reminded why: Abby’s illness, the push and pull of her moods. And then I get angry and chase after Lauren all over again.
The club is up ahead, and we pull into the parking lot by the pool where Jules and Abby are tanning themselves. The home we are staying in includes membership and access to the club’s amenities. E.J. is out of the car first, passing through the gate and diving into the water. Juliana, in an awfully small bathing suit, follows behind him.
I watch my daughter’s eyes train on E.J., and I try to remember when she stopped looking at me with hero worship. She’s growing up into a woman. We won’t have these moments for long. E.J. is splashing her with one hand while the other tempts her with a plastic ball. “Tell me you love me,” he keeps saying over and over again as she jumps for the ball, and he snatches it from her. I am thinking to myself, I loved her first and best. Just remember that, buddy boy.
Abby follows me into the water. She can still fill out a bathing suit, and I admire what I see. She doesn’t lean in to me, and I don’t wrap my arms around her, though her butt in the red bikini bottom is hot, and I give it a playful squeeze. She smiles, tells me her ass is fat, and snatches the ball from E.J.’s hand.
All these months of watching Abby improve, something deep inside of her has changed. Her eyes no longer sprout question marks; her lips seem to have found all the answers. The water rises and falls around us. Everything looks normal and as it should. Only, she is a few feet away from me, and there is an ocean between us.
At some point, she stops playing and swims toward me. Her strokes and her eyes are precise. When she reaches me, her smile is genuine.
“You’ll never guess who I saw today.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
ABBY
Ryan. Dear, sweet Ryan. He would stay with me no matter the price. Sweat and chlorine mix with his personal scent. He comes close to my ear and whispers, “I don’t care who you saw today.”
How long had I wished for this? How long had I wanted a clear conscience and a chance at a new beginning, to be able to feel tranquility from the moment I awoke in the morning?
Ryan is forcing me closer, and his hands tickle my neck. I feel as though I’m suffocating. The only thing that gets him to stop horsing around is when I say her name. His fingers lose their grip on my shoulders, and he turns away.
“She’s here,” I’m saying into the back of his head where the hair falls against his neck in the shape of a V. I am studying him. He is older, though he is the Ryan I fell in love with a hundred years ago. Our love was never predestined or otherworldly, but it has always been safe and reliable. He is safe and reliable. Good old Ryan. Everyone can count on him.
When he turns again to face me, I go on. “You know that book I devoured in a day last week? The one you said was the title of a Bruce Springsteen song?”
“I remember.”
“Lauren wrote it. She moved to London after she found us and wrote novels for years, a string of love stories that became best sellers. It was the way she channeled her pain. She used a pen name. It’s the name of two waterfalls she visited abroad. Virginia Sutherland. She strung them together and created a person to hide behind.” I stop to take a breath. “Did you know any of this?”
The serious way in which he presses his lips together tells me he had no idea. “How could I?”
“She spoke at the club today. Seems everyone has a secret. She was the guest author I was dying to meet. Her big unveiling. I thought I was going to fall out of my chair. You really didn’t know?” I ask again.
His hands break the water with a splash. The drops land on his cheeks and chest, and I think about wiping them off. “That my ex was a famous author? I’m pretty sure I would’ve mentioned it.”
I walk toward the shallow end and step out of the pool.
“Are you mad?” he asks, coming after me.
I’m being elusive, though not for the reasons he thinks. Lauren’s forgiveness, unearthing the truth—both mine and hers—has given me a gentle nudge toward true understanding. While I was hiding facts and hiding behind my disease, Lauren was hiding, too. We were both living fake lives.
We walk toward our chairs and grab our towels. Juliana is so immersed in E.J. that she barely notices we have left. Devon is nearby playing pickleball. The deck is hot, and we sit in our lounges. I am a bucket of nerves. One movement and I will tip over, and things will pour out that I just cannot stop.
I pull the string on my wrist. I take deep breaths. I can do this. I lie back on the chair and inhale, counting to three, exhale, counting to five. Ryan grabs hold of my hand because he senses I am struggling. It’s like walking into a pitch-black room with no windows. Most people adjust to the dark, but I don’t. And then I panic. But not today
. Today I’m going to hold it together.
“Why don’t we go back to the house,” he says.
I suggest that we take a walk around the lake instead. Stepping into my shorts, I grab my jacket. It has a zipper in the front, and I pull it up as high as it will go. My bathing suit leaves a wet imprint across the front.
Ryan throws on a T-shirt. He looks nervous.
“It’s all right,” I tell him. “I think everything is finally going to be okay.”
The short walk to Lake Coffey is made longer by my need to stretch out the moment. Clarity has come to me, like a stream. Like Jeannie said in our sessions, the work I had done would continue to reveal itself through “authentic interactions with those around me.”
Lake Coffey is quiet and calm. A group of young boys is fishing at the new pier, and couples are walking their dogs around the circle. We start off to the right and follow the path around the water.
There is silence in our steps. The warning signs of anxiety that spiked my brain earlier are all but gone. What is left is the feel of my heartbeat as it awakens. We stop by the plank bridge and stare down into the shallow water. Ryan’s reflection stares up at me. He is handsome and strong, the man I have loved for a lifetime.
“God damn you Southern boys,” I finally say, “making us girls fall in love with you. All that sugary righteousness. None of us could have known it would tear the three of us apart.”
He’s staring at his hands, not our reflections below. He’s been waiting for this all these months.
“When you really love someone, you want them to be happy. When you really love someone, you would rather die than hurt that person.”
“Abby,” he begins, to me, to the fishermen across the way.
“No. Let me finish. You don’t need to do this anymore. You don’t need to keep sacrificing yourself for me or anybody else. My head has never been clearer.” I take a breath and whisper into the air, “I’m letting you go.”
He turns away from me as though walking away will erase the words. “You’re not making any sense, Abby.”
I follow beside him and continue talking. “It would be a lot easier if this were one of those stories where everything broken got put back together, but it’s not. I care about you too much to hold on to you any longer.”
He stops walking and we are facing each other. He’s confused, bringing his fingers to his forehead, and for the first time, I’m clear. He says, “Why are you doing this?”
My palm brushes his cheek, and he lets it rest against my hand. “Why are you fighting me?” I ask.
His eyes are filling with tears and his voice catches. “You’re my wife.”
I’m shaking my head. The gentle winds spill around us and the fresh air promises us hope. “We don’t love each other the way two people in love should.”
He takes a step back and swipes at his eyes. “We’ve been together a lot of years, Abby. Marriage changes people.”
“We were never in love. I didn’t even know you. I barely knew myself.”
He stops at the footbridge and his hands grip the frame. “That’s it? You get to decide? You go all Eat, Pray, Love on me, and we’re supposed to forget the years we had together? We break our daughter’s heart?”
“C’mon, Ry. You deserve more. So does she.”
“You’re not thinking rationally,” he says.
He is holding everything inside. The fingers I once desired on my body run through his hair, only the strokes are angry and troubled, and those hands are no longer for me.
“I always thought you’d leave me for her. I spent most of our marriage waiting for that day to come.”
“Is that what this is? You think I want Lauren?”
“She told you she loves you. You walked away from her because of me. You need to find her. You have to fight for her this time.”
He takes a step back from me, his wife and this life. He is staring into my damp eyes as though to stop the words from pouring from my mouth. His eyes are wet too.
It’s a subtle movement, a burst of glowing orange, but I feel her all around us. I take my eyes off his and scan the lake and its surroundings until I find her there. He has no idea what I’ve done for him. They were reckless, unplanned words, and she listened. And she is here. His eyes follow my gaze, turning in the direction they know best. When he sees her, coming up from alongside the brush, his entire body weakens.
I am crying because I know what this means.
“You need to tell her.”
He doesn’t look my way when he says, “She already knows.”
We are watching her as she hesitates, standing beside a lengthy tree that makes her look small and unsure.
“She needs to hear it from you.”
The winds whip the lake and the ripples creep into the banks. The voices of the children fishing sprinkle laughter in our ears. The sun flashes through the trees, as I take Ryan’s hand and lead him along the wooden planks and around the circle. He doesn’t speak. We stroll in silence. Dogs bark. I close my eyes and feel the warm air hug my cheeks and lick my tears. Just as we are nearing the bend to where she stands, I let go of his fingers. “Go ahead,” I tell him. “I’m not afraid anymore. I can go down the falls by myself.”
My face turns up toward the sun. There are a few stray clouds against a bright blue. The trees are larger, the flowers vivid, the leaves more brilliant. Their rustling mimics a peaceful rain. And I turn away, stepping along the path that takes me away from him. I can’t look at her as I pass by, and I’m certain she’s not looking at me. They are fixed on each other, watching the years they lost start to return. They are remembering how completely they once loved, how old feelings never die.
As I cross the narrow path that leads back to the pool and my daughter, I turn to take one last look. They are facing each other, their hands fumbling as though they can’t trust what is happening. She is looking up at him the way she once did long ago, and he finds me there with tears in his eyes. I nod in his direction: it’s okay. And my heart tells him I will always love him, but he has to let me go, too.
When he pulls her toward him, it is a sudden movement. It’s as though he had saved all that love for this moment, and his arms grab her in a deep embrace. It was the kind that stole time and returned promises. It was different from the ones I’d witnessed before. At once I am both free and tortured. The colliding of these emotions thrusts me into an alternate universe, one where love ends and begins, dreams fade and ignite. I must close my eyes from them while my face turns toward the sky I can’t see but can feel. It hurts and it heals.
Babs was right. The dream made perfect sense. I would be okay without Ryan’s arm around me. I had learned that in the past year. My eyes open and fix upward. I am ready to take a giant leap.
I hear Juliana’s laughter coming from the direction of the pool. I am a few short steps away. When she sees me approaching, she gets out of the water and heads in my direction.
“Mama, I wasn’t sure that was you walking up. Have you been crying?” she asks. I tell her what she’s noticing is me, just lighter.
“Where were you? Where’s Daddy?” she asks.
I tell her, “Daddy’s where he needs to be.” Then I take my daughter into my arms and tell her how much I love her. She doesn’t squirm away. She actually hugs me back.
“Mama, you’re acting weird.”
Still I grip her tighter and love her through the pain and joy of what’s to come.
And even though it is awful what we are about to go through as a family, I know for the first time that this is what true happiness feels like.
Imagining it any other way would be impossible.
BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS
Falling in love, falling out of love, falling apart—how do the individual characters fall into and away from each other? How does this work for them? How does it fail?
The author uses water throughout the story to emphasize themes and emotions. How did it connect Abby, Lauren, and Ryan?
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Mental illness is real and affects millions of people. How has this affliction become so far-reaching and how can we, as a society, reduce the stigma attached to it?
Lauren’s eyesight played a minor role in the novel. Do you believe we see only what we want to see? Why?
In some ways, Abby is a selfish, distant parent. At the same time, she has raised an independent, self-sufficient teenager. How did benign neglect benefit Juliana? Where is the right balance for raising children?
How did E.J. and Juliana’s young love impact Abby and Ryan’s adult marriage? What were some notable parallels between the two relationships?
Platonic love is a love that is more ideal than romantic love. When Abby makes her final decision, is she proving this to be true?
In seeing all of Abby, and her flaws, should Lauren forgive her friend? Is there someone in your life you need to see more clearly in order to understand him or her better?
Why do you think Abby was able to make the choice she made at the end of the novel?
Imagine you are able to write another chapter of Where We Fall. Where do you see the various characters at the next stage of their lives?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Authors will tell you how hard it is to capture every person who has touched them during the writing process. There are those who inspire, teach, support, critique, or simply provide a listening ear or the hook for the next book. So much goes into the creative process; it is a collaborative effort complete with hair-pulling, love, and commitment. I am grateful to the following individuals for their contribution to Where We Fall.
Adam Chromy, my agent, for believing in this story and hustling like a rock star to make it happen. Danielle Marshall and the team at Lake Union Publishing for welcoming me into their home and providing a seamless entry into the world of publishing. Tiffany Yates Martin for your brilliant developmental edit. While there were moments of pure frustration and teeth-clenching, you challenged me to create a better story while shaping, smoothing, and polishing. It was truly an honor working with you. Kathrine Faydash, thank you for your eagle-eye edits. Your attention to detail and ability to fine-tune a sentence have made the manuscript shine. Thank you for making me dig deep below the surface for the perfect line—every time. Martine Bellen and Jan Blanck, your input and careful editing were an integral part of the manuscript in its early stages.
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