by Jessica Park
“Blythe, what are you doing?” He kneels down in front of me.
I can’t speak. There is no way to begin.
“Sabin is all right,” he says. “He’s going to rehab. The hospital staff is very nice here, and they’re helping us find a good place. He’d like for you to call him later.”
I nod. “Of course. I’m relieved he’s okay.”
Chris fiddles with his watch so that he doesn’t have to look at me. “We’re going to pack up today. Probably leave tomorrow.”
“No,” I say clearly. “No you’re not. You are not ending things between us. You are not ending us.”
“I need to. I can’t do this with you. It’s too much.” He stands.
“You’ve said that before, but I’m not going to accept it this time. You don’t know what you’re saying, and you’re not being fair to me.”
“Look, the things you think you love about me? You shouldn’t. Not really. My … past. It’s part of me; it affects everything that I do in the most fucked up way. You think that I’m strong; you love that I take care of you. But I’m only like that because of what happened. I was forced to become bulletproof and competent because I faced complete insanity. That competence and diligence that you get off on is tainted. Jesus, even in bed. You like how I am with you. I’m … controlling. I’m in charge a lot. You even said it to me, that I don’t like to be out of control. See? How am I supposed to be who you want when you know why I am the way I am? It’s not real strength.” His voice shakes. “Every part of me is affected. It’s why I left you in the first place, why I ran to someone safe. Because you can’t possibly deal with what a fucking disaster I’m bound to be. You know all that. So you should know that I’m not good for you or for anyone. I have done everything wrong so far. Everything. I’ll end up destroying you the way I’ve destroyed everything and everyone. The only smart thing that I can do now is to leave.”
“Stop it. Just stop it!” I’m angry now. “Don’t you ever talk about yourself like that, and you don’t you dare presume to tell me why I love you. Give me more fucking credit than that. You got yourself, and your brothers and sister through the unimaginable. And you got me through my own nightmare. I love you for so many reasons, but I don’t love you because of those reasons. I love you simply because I do. And that’s it. That’s the only goddamn thing that matters. I love every single part of you. So, no, Christopher, no. We are not over. And I can prove to you why.” I stand up, using the bed for support. I am shaky, but I am also clearheaded. “I want to show you something. I need you to trust me. Can you do that? Just for a minute.”
Chris looks so tremendously sad, but he nods.
“I’m going to fix this. I’m going to make this okay.” I don’t know if I’m talking more to him or to myself, but I am trying hard to believe in what I am going to show him and tell him.
I stand him with his back to my dresser. “Just stay there. Don’t move.” I take the lightweight full-length mirror from the other side of the room and lean it against the bed so that it reflects into the mirror across from it. I stand in front of him and take his face in my hands. I lift up and kiss him softly. He doesn’t kiss me back because, I’m guessing, he feels broken and unworthy of anything even close to love. I can’t stand that. As I lift the bottom hem of his shirt up, he tries to stop me, but I brush him away. “Trust me.” Chris lets me raise his shirt. I move my left arm under his right and set my forearm on his back, angled up to meet the other hand that goes over his shoulder. “Look in the mirror.” I hold him tightly, close my eyes and wait. “It’s okay.”
In a few seconds, I feel him tense. His panic sets in. I know how this feels from him because of the many nights that he has awoken me with his nightmares. It was disconcerting for me when I saw this, but for him it is terrifying because it defies how he makes sense of the world. There is no logic or explanation to this and I know that he’s scared.
“Breathe with me, Chris. Breathe.” I inhale and exhale. It’s simple. This is how you do it. In and out. Breathe.
“Blythe, how can … No. This can’t be real.”
“But it is. This is real. We are real.”
There is disbelief in his words that I know all too well. “We’re like … puzzle pieces that fit together.”
“Yes. Exactly. I first saw this when we were at the hotel. I didn’t want to tell you then because I didn’t understand it. But I do now.” I step out of the way as Chris reaches for his shirt and pulls it quickly over his head.
“How could you possibly understand this? It’s just some weird … coincidence. It doesn’t mean anything. It can’t.”
“It does. It means everything.” I reach behind him and take something from the dresser. I hold up the torn remnants of my red shirt up and rest it again my chest.
“Why do you have that?” He is momentarily angry. “I don’t want you touching that.”
I step out of his reach. “I know. Because this shirt means something to you, doesn’t it?”
He pauses. “Yes. It does. Put it down.”
“You don’t see it yet. Think, Chris. Remember. Do you remember me?”
His face drains of color, and he starts to shake his head.
“This is my shirt. This is my Matthews shirt.”
“No, Blythe. It’s not. It belonged to … someone else.”
“No. I remember that day now,” I say gently. “You were the boy on the beach. With the buckets. And I was the girl on the dock. I gave you this.”
“No. No, there’s some kind of mistake.”
I drop the shirt. There is fear in his eyes that I have to get rid of somehow. “I know that this is a lot, but you have to listen to me. Just listen. I saw you, I talked to you. I am the girl who gave you the shirt and water.”
He is near tears. “What?”
“You know this. Some part of you remembers. It’s why you gave me a piece of my shirt back with my Christmas present. I didn’t find it until today. Until it was time.”
He sits on the bed. I give him a few minutes to let the memories take over. I’ve had the entire drive home and time in my room, and I still can’t process this. He’s in the thick of it.
He looks to my dresser, at the sea urchin. “I must have known. It’s why I gave you that. That day on the shore, when my father made me stay out and fill bucket after bucket with water and I thought I would collapse. The day you were there, with me, I found a sea urchin in one of the buckets—”
“And you stopped what he was making you do, and you gently set it back into the water.”
“Yes. I did.”
“There’s more, Chris.”
He looks at me and waits.
“That night? Later that night was the fire. And also later that night, your father tried to drown you.”
“The same night?”
“Yes. The same night. Our worlds exploded on the same night. Your father almost killed you, but he didn’t. Tell me why again.”
“What? Because … because his fucking pager went off.” Chris puts his hands in his hair. Then he freezes. “No way, Blythe. Don’t say it. That is not possible.” He is starting to piece it together.
“It is possible. Your father was a volunteer firefighter, wasn’t he? His pager went off because of the fire at my house. He is the man who saved my life.”
“Oh Jesus, no.” Chris walks to the window and keeps his back to me. “Stop this, Blythe. Stop it. This cannot be right.”
“There are reasons that we have never talked about certain parts of our life. Neither of us mentioned Maine, and you never told me what your father’s volunteer work was … Some part of us sensed this. But we weren’t ready. We’re ready now. We’re strong enough.”
“It’s too much.”
“I saw him today. Your father. Zach and I went to see him. Don’t worry, he didn’t see us. When I saw him, it took me back to the night of the fire. I know your father, Christopher. He is the person who pulled me off the ladder.”
I let
silence take over for a while. Chris has to figure out how to accept this. If he can.
“My father tried to kill me. And then he saved you.”
“Yes.”
“There is no way that this happened.” He can’t stop shaking his head. “This means that your fire saved my life. That your parents’ death saved my life. That your depression, your guilt, those years you lost? Everything you suffered through gave me life.”
I stand behind Chris,but don’t touch him yet. “We can’t begin to piece this all together in any kind of logical way, but no, that’s not what it means. It means that there was a fire that was going to happen no matter what, and my parents were going to die no matter what. But don’t you see what else? That night had a purpose. A very good one. To keep us both alive. Maybe it’s our connection that protected us. We both could have died that night, but we didn’t because of each other. Your father was close to the house, and he got there in time so that I didn’t die, and that saved you. I know the irony is incomprehensible. I do. But it’s what happened. God, my parents would never have wanted children to go through what you all did. If the fire ended it for you? I know them. I know them so well, and they would be grateful to know that something good came from the fire. Our lives and the love we share are the saving graces of that night.”
He drops his head, crying now. “That shirt? That really was you. You were on the dock.”
“Yes.”
“You stayed with me. For hours. You stayed all day.”
“Of course.”
“I was so amazed that you didn’t leave.”
“I would never leave you, Chris. Even then, when I didn’t know you.”
“You kept me from falling apart. Not just on the shore. But that night. When I thought … when I thought that I was going to drown, I thought about you. How I would never get to meet the girl who stayed with me. The girl who gave me strength. Who helped me plan a future and who got me to Matthews. I think that I must have gone to school there to … to find you. I didn’t think about it like that until now, but I was looking for you. Focusing on you that night made me hold on longer than I might have. When I couldn’t breathe, and I was choking, and dying in the fucking toilet … I fought to stay alive because of you. His pager went off, and I felt so guilty being grateful for that because it meant that someone else was in trouble. I didn’t want anyone else to be hurt, but … I also didn’t want to die. When I woke up in glass and covered in my own blood, I thought about you. You were all I had. I’ve kept your shirt with me since that day because it was all that I had of you. Or so I thought.”
Now I press my body to his and wrap my arms around his waist. I lean my head against his back and wipe my eyes on his shirt. “Don’t you see, Chris? You and I are supposed to be together. Not because we have to be together. There is always a choice. This is not an obligation or a duty. But our lives are entwined, they have been, for good reasons. I’ve known that from the moment I set eyes on you. It never made sense to me before. How I felt so deeply connected to you before we’d even spoken. But I did, and I do. I have loved you since that day on the dock. Probably even before that. I feel as though I have loved you my entire life. Please, Chris, I’m right here. I will give you everything I have if you’ll just let me. I am strong now, and I can handle anything. More than that, I want to go through your life with you. I am begging you, Christopher. Begging you with all of my heart. Let me take care of you the way that you have taken care of me.”
Chris turns around, wraps me up in his arms, and rests his chin on top of my head.
I hold him tightly. This is terrifying because I don’t know if he will take the risk to stay with me. I know he’s not one for reaching out for help or love even in better circumstances. I shut my eyes. “You think that I couldn’t possibly fall in love with the vulnerable side of you. And you’re wrong. I love that part of you, too. Chris, I don’t know what I believe in anymore… . I know that you don’t believe in God, or fate, or anything. If you can just push aside that rational, logical, fucking solidly cognitive piece of your thinking and just feel. Listen to your heart. The other shit? It doesn’t matter. The past? The horrible nightmare you’ve been through? We can handle that. We can. We already have, don’t you see that? For you, telling me the details of your life seems like something new between us, but I’ve always known in some ways. Maybe not the specifics, but I’ve known, and it’s never made my total love for you falter one bit. Never.”
I’m afraid to stop talking for fear that he will walk away for good, but at some point I have to turn the cards over to him. This could be the end. I may lose the only love of my life. But I have fought for him as hard as I can. It’s all that I can do.
“Just feel me, Chris, then nothing else matters. Belief in anything is hard, I know. But I am asking you to believe in me and to believe in us the way that I do. Can you do that? Please, Chris, please believe in us.”
He steps back and looks at me. His cheeks are damp as he lifts our hands between us so that we are palm to palm. Chris nods and drops his fingers next to mine.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Twenty, Twenty-One
At nine thirty this morning I left Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and I am now entering the town of Wellesley, somewhere around mile eighteen, I think. I am running the Boston Marathon. Sort of. It’s not the real marathon day because I don’t want that pressure. Next month, I will stand in Newton and watch the real one as it takes place, and I’ll hand out water and orange slices to exhausted runners at the finish line. While I admire those who have the ability to run on race day, it’s not for me. I don’t like the competition and the crowds. I just want to run the route and I want to finish. I don’t care how long it takes.
The weather is on my side today. This last Wednesday in March is cool and dry. Weather around Boston is very unpredictable, and some marathon days have been dreadfully hot and humid, leaving even well-prepared runners in bad shape. I’d fall apart in shitty weather, so I’m lucky. I’ve been carb-loading for a few days and I’m hydrated. My sneakers are a reliable pair that I broke in over the past month.
What’s working against me? If I continue this pace, I’ll come in at over five and a half hours. That’s a damn ridiculously long time to run, and my stamina is nearly depleted as it is. Yet I can’t imagine that I can pick up my pace. Eighteen miles is longer than I’ve ever run, and I’m hurting like I never have before. Fighting to do something that I’m not meant to do is scary. The fear of failure is scary. The average women’s time is closer to four and a half hours, but because I want this so much, I don’t give a shit if it takes me nine hours; I just want to finish.
Not only am I a slow runner, but running on an unofficial day means that I have to deal with sidewalks and cars and traffic lights.
However, I do have some help with that.
I take a quick glance at Zach, who is driving a few yards ahead of me with the hazards on. I love him for how he’s unabashedly blocked intersections and ticked off drivers by trying to keep a clear path for me as often as possible. At this point I’d welcome the excuse to stop at a traffic light, and I groan inwardly every time I hit a green.
My legs are jelly, and I have never been this exhausted in my life. I just can’t do it. Accepting defeat is my only option now. I stop running and bend over, shaking my head as I turn off my music. Fuck this. Zach beeps the horn repeatedly, and I shake my head. He backs up and yells out the passenger window to me.
“No way, Blythe. You can do this.”
“I can’t,” I manage. Jonah barks loudly out the window.
“Look ahead. Look up there.” He points up the hill. “Look what she did for you!”
Even in my state, I have to laugh. Estelle is just in my sight. She has traded in her usual high-fashion look for sleek neon-pink spandex and matching sneakers.
I restart a slow, painful jog on Commonwealth Avenue to reach her, steeling myself not to think about how far I still have to go, all the way through Well
esley and up Heartbreak Hill in Newton before I can reach the finish line in downtown Boston. She and the others were supposed to meet me at the finish line, but my sagging spirits are lifted.
“What’s up, bitch?” she asks as I come to a stop.
“I’m done,” I pant.
“No, you’re not. I came out here for spring break. I could have been in fucking Barbados or something, you know, but I’m not. Worse, I got all dressed up like an asshole for you, so now put your music back on and just run like I know you can.”
“I just can’t.”
Estelle glares at me and puts my music back on. She grabs my arm and pulls me ahead. I have never seen Estelle do anything resembling exercise, so to see her run is nothing short of amusing. And it gives me the kick I need to keep going.
She’s been in therapy since the end of last summer. They all have. And while she and James are not officially together, they are “on hold” the way Chris and I once were. I think they are going to make it, and I’ve been impressed with my brother’s compassion and patience.
Estelle jogs with me for a bit and then blows me a kiss and darts away to join Zach. He beeps the horn again, and Estelle points from the window.
I smile again. Now Eric is waiting for me. He’s got earphones in, too, and he pumps his arms up and down as I approach. He gives me a nod and then joins me. We run silently. It’s always been so easy to be with Eric, and today is no different. Our hours of silent studying together have instilled in us an ability to enjoy a comfortable silence. He’s had a hard year, and it was only a month ago that he and Zach got back together.
I stumble over a crack in the pavement, and Eric puts his hand on my back. I am soaked in sweat, and I wipe my forehead with my hand. As much as this run is killing me, I cannot stop. Whatever pain I am feeling is so much less than what my friends have been through, and I have illogically convinced myself that if I can finish this marathon, I will be completing some piece of all of our stories. That doing this will secure our healing. It’s dumb. But now that I am seeing my friends, I am even more dedicated to finishing.
