by Jodi Picoult
We sat on the banks of the Seine and looked in its depths. We lay on our backs and pushed the clouds away with our imaginations until we could see nothing but blue, blue that hurt, blue that became the black of the universe. What are you looking for? you asked, and I said, I’ll know when I see it.
We tried to find my blue in the pottery sold by a Turkish man in a street market; in a handful of bursting berries. We stopped in front of a Chinese restaurant with a tank full of live fish and stared at their rainbow scales. We brushed our fingertips over the heads of pansies in window displays, and counted the navy knapsacks of schoolchildren in uniforms.
We went back to the studio, finally, and you mixed paint: aqua and cerulean, indigo, sapphire. You took your brush and stroked them in stripes on the back of my hand, up the inside of my arm. We watched the twilight, all the blues of night being born, and you turned me into art.
It was when you moved in me, when you cried out my name, that I found the color I’d been searching for. That blistering blue of your eyes. I’ve been looking for it ever since.
* * *
—
YOU CAN’T HAVE death without birth. The Ancient Egyptians believed that before creation, there was only unity—no death, no birth, no light, no darkness, no earth, no sky. Just an undifferentiated oneness, into which something had to be carved.
Atum was the androgynous creator god. His name literally means All. The Coffin Texts say that Atum created the first male/female pair. He masturbated into existence Shu—the luminous space between sky and earth, and spat out Tefnut—the divine moisture. In Middle Egyptian, the word hand is feminine, so the male Atum has a feminine element of himself that he uses to fashion the world.
It’s because of this belief that Egyptian religion uses the concept of syncretism. Two deities who appear as separate gods in temples can be taken back a generation, before they split. Amun-Re is the hidden Amun and his visible form, Re, together. You start with a unified whole, and then as time passes, you differentiate and organize and divide. Creation, by definition, is separation. Moving forward means being split apart.
This is what I think about, when I can’t fall asleep at night. When I stare at Brian across the table and try to remember who I married.
* * *
—
Time is a construct. Our brains take eighty milliseconds to process information, did you know that? Anyone who tells you to live in the here and now is a liar. By the time you pin the present down, it’s already the past.
If you had asked me back then where we would be ten years later, I would have laughed and asked why, when we had today? I would not have admitted to you, to anyone, that every now and then when I lifted my head from your shoulder and peered into the future, I could imagine you, and me, but not us.
I guess that’s the part no one ever tells you. You can love someone so much your teeth ache, so much that it feels like he is carrying your heart in his own rib cage, but none of it matters if you can’t find a practical way to be together. It’s like learning that you would be immortal if you could breathe nitrogen, but knowing you are bound to the oxygen of Earth.
I was the meteor that crashed into your life when you were already living it. I didn’t have any more control over my landing than you did when you froze, looking up at the inevitable sky. You had a past and a plan and responsibilities. You had someone who already loved you. We were gasoline poured onto fire. With you I burned twice as high and hot.
This is why you and I could never have stayed together. We would have consumed each other until there was nothing left.
When I met the man I would eventually marry, I almost blinked and overlooked him. He was quiet and thoughtful and steady and sure, all the things you weren’t. This is boring, I thought at first. Where are the bursts of color? Why doesn’t he talk over me when I’m talking because we have so much to say? When you’re used to flying, it’s hard to walk with your feet on the ground. But the strangest thing happened. Moving so deliberately, I noticed things I never had before: the way he never backed out of a parking spot unless my seatbelt was fastened; the way he asked before he kissed me, as if what I had to give was not his to take; how, when I got appendicitis, he was more worried about me than I was about myself. How he would order food that he knew I wanted, instead of his favorite meal. How he charged my phone daily, when I forgot to plug it in. How, when he held my hand, I didn’t just feel things. I felt everything. He wasn’t staid and slow. He was steady. When I stopped careening between the highs and lows of emotion, I didn’t feel bored. I felt safe.
For a while I was angry at you, because I had almost missed this—someone I didn’t just want to be with, but someone I wanted to be more like. You were the bright shiny thing at the corner of my consciousness. I made myself look away.
* * *
—
KIERAN IS SO busy as a neurosurgery resident that weeks at a time go by without my seeing him, and yet, I know him so thoroughly that the minute we meet up at Saks in Copley Square, I see something is wrong. I also know he can’t talk about it without getting more agitated. “I don’t understand why you need a suit,” I say casually, as we wander through the store, fingering cashmere blazers as soft as a dream and shirts so fine they slip through my hand.
“Because I can’t present my research at a conference in scrubs,” Kieran says. He glances at a price tag and goes pale. “That’s more than I make in a month.”
“I thought neurosurgeons were rolling in dough.”
“Residents aren’t.”
He’s fidgeting, the way he used to when he was younger and nervous—when he had to take his SATs or when he finally came out to me. So I do what I used to do—I grab his hand and squeeze once, like a pulse. I wait for him to squeeze back. We keep this little heartbeat between us.
If I ever needed proof that I had made the right decision to stay in Boston after my mother’s death, instead of going back to Egypt, all I had to do was think of Kieran. He excelled as a student, he went to Harvard undergrad and then Harvard Medical School; he was a resident at Mass General; and now, he’d been invited to present his research—aneurysmal therapy using retrievable Guglielmi detachable coils—at age twenty-eight. I know what a big deal this is for him. But I want to just smooth back his hair, like I used to when he had a fever, and tell him he can breathe.
“Hey,” I say now, softly, “you’re going to be great.”
He looks at me with my mother’s eyes. He nods and swallows, but his fingers are still clenched in mine.
“You could wear a burlap sack,” I tell him. “No one is going to even notice what your tie looks like, once you open your mouth.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Kieran mutters. “You’re not the one being judged. I know my shit, but I don’t know if I can explain it to a whole auditorium full of people.”
“You teach med students all the time.”
“In groups of five. Not five hundred.”
“Imagine them in their underwear,” I suggest.
“The med students?” he says. “The ones I know don’t wear any, because they have no time to do laundry.”
He is joking, but his pulse is still racing. It’s my job to read a human body, to see how close it is to crisis.
“Are you going to tell me what’s really wrong?”
He stops wandering through the racks. “What if this is it? I’ve been number one in my class. Twice. I got the match I wanted. Everything’s gone according to plan. Doesn’t it seem like it’s time for me to take a stupendous fall?” He drops his head. “It’s a big deal to be asked to present research this early in my career. Maybe I shouldn’t have said yes.”
“Kieran, you’ve gotten where you are because you work hard at it. Take a deep breath,” I suggest, and I inhale deeply, to model the behavior.
And nearly jump out of my skin, because I s
mell Wyatt.
Sugar and sunlight and something expensive. I yank my hand out of Kieran’s and turn around like I’m being hunted.
“Dawn?” Kieran asks, but his voice sounds like it’s coming from miles away.
I’m tangled in white sheets, in his arms. I am pulling his shirt around me like a robe. I breathe him in all around me.
The Ancient Egyptians believed that when a god came in its true form, there was an irresistible aroma. In the creation scene of the female king Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, Hatshepsut’s mother conceives when Amun comes to her. Even though Amun is taking the form of her husband, she knows he is really a god, because of his scent.
I feel Kieran’s hands on my shoulders, shaking me back to reality. “Dawn? Are you okay?”
I want to be strong for him, the way I have been for years now. But to my shock, my eyes fill with tears. “No. I don’t think so.”
He drags me deeper into the men’s department. He finds the fitting room, tugs me inside, and closes the door behind us. “What the hell is going on?”
I am shaking so hard that I cannot stop. Once I open my mouth, the words pour forth like an inundation. I tell him about Gita and Brian and the fight we had the night of Meret’s birthday. I tell him everything, beginning with the moment I left home and ending with Brian behind me, staring over my shoulder at Wyatt’s face on a screen.
I tell him I’ve made a mistake.
“You mean looking up Wyatt,” he clarifies, and I shake my head.
“How many times have I heard Brian talk about alternative universes?” I pick at a thread on the bottom of a coat hanging behind me. “It’s like I’ve opened Pandora’s box…inside my mind. I can’t unsee it.”
“Unsee what?”
“What my life might have been.”
My neck prickles with shame. What mother, what wife admits this? The only solace I have is that Kieran can’t possibly hate me any more than I hate myself right now.
But he doesn’t tell me I’m a monster. He curls his hand around mine. He squeezes. He waits for me to squeeze back. When I don’t, he tries again, and then I respond, and suddenly, there’s a beat between us. Thready, erratic…but present.
I look into his face, seeing the boy he was when he cried himself to sleep after our mother died, the teenager who delivered the valedictory address, the man who’d just suffered his first heartbreak. “You,” I say, “are going to be a great doctor.”
Kieran lifts his hand and I think he’s going to stroke my hair or my cheek, the child caring for the adult. Instead, he reaches behind me to the coat that is hanging on the dressing room wall. He flicks his finger to turn the price tag, and smiles wryly. “Fuck this,” he says. “Let’s go to T.J.Maxx.”
* * *
—
I thought about you whenever I painted. When I went to a museum. I wondered how you told the story of us, how different it was from the way I framed our story. To you, I was there one minute and then I was gone. You probably think that I stopped loving you. You didn’t realize that the reason I left was because I loved you too much.
I didn’t want to be a cliché and I didn’t want you to be one either. But mostly, I didn’t want to be the one left behind, and the only way to ensure that is to be the one who leaves. I kept thinking about your wife, about how she would feel if in the end you were mine. It was too easy to put myself in her shoes. I couldn’t let myself be the reason you made a woman feel that way, so whether I stayed or not, I lost.
I lied to you, before. I told you that I could see you in the future and me in the future but not the two of us. This is not true. I did see us together, the very best of us, for fifteen years—in the face of our son.
This is the part where you are allowed to hate me—because not only did I keep him from you, but I also kept you from him, and now it is too late to fix. His name was Arlo and he had your blue eyes and height and my crooked front tooth. He loved Dixie ice cream cups, but only the chocolate half; he hated peas. He couldn’t draw a straight line, so much for genetic artistic ability. He was not easy—but that only meant that when he decided to love you, it mattered more. I think maybe that he was born with fire instead of blood.
I guess you could say he got that from both of us.
Was. Got. Past tense. You noticed, I’m sure. The reason I know that you and I in tandem were not sustainable is because of Arlo. Whatever it was that raged in him could be soothed, but only for snatches of time. First, a toy. A piece of candy. A hug. But as he got older, the only thing that could lift him from himself were drugs.
He died three years ago.
I used to imagine him, walking the streets of Boston, and you, walking wherever you are, somehow being able to feel each other through the thickness of this planet. Like an echo in your footsteps, or a tremble in your pulse.
I used to imagine this because I can’t bear to think that you never knew he existed. And it’s all my fault.
* * *
—
ONCE UPON A time, there is nothing but darkness. You stumble around blindly, so close to the edge that you are sure you’ll tumble over it, and if you are going to be honest, you must admit you are so low already you don’t necessarily think that would be a bad thing. Then one day, you meet someone. He finds you kneeling right at the precipice and instead of telling you to get back up, he kneels next to you. He tries to see what you are seeing. He doesn’t ask anything of you, or beg you to snap out of it, or remind you that there are people who need you. He just waits until you turn and squint and think to yourself: Oh, yes, I remember. This is what light looks like.
You don’t know how it happens, but you become friends. You find yourself looking in the parking lot to see if his car is there. You see something on TV or read it in a book and think, I must remember to tell him. You learn how he takes his coffee and what his favorite color is—not by asking, but by observation. Then you realize that your day speeds up when you see him. The hair stands up on the backs of your forearms when his shoulder bumps yours in the elevator. His presence is so filling, the absence of him aches.
You begin to reconfigure the puzzle of your life to fit him into it. You don’t want to spend time without him, if you can help it. You introduce him to family. You suffer their elbow jabs and their raised eyebrows because later, it gives you two something to laugh about. You wish you could introduce him to the family members that aren’t here anymore. They would have loved him. You see him around children and think, One day.
When he asks you to get married you let out a breath that you never realized you were holding. On your wedding day, your face hurts because you are smiling so hard. Your life isn’t simple, but does that really matter if you have someone like him to help shoulder the burden? Money, jobs, promotions, failures, they are only speed bumps on a track that will go on forever.
You have a child. You do not believe he could love anyone the way he loves you, until you see him with her. She is not just a treasure, meant to be kept safe at all costs. She is the proof that the two of you belong together.
Not that you need proof.
You keep that baby alive like it’s your only job.
One night when she is sick, you are so tired from taking care of her that you go to sleep in the office, on the couch. You think you will never be able to fall asleep without him beside you. You are wrong.
In fact, you sleep pretty well.
It happens again when he gets a cold; when you come home late from work; when you argue. It stops being a guest room and becomes a sanctuary. Your daughter asks if you are going to get divorced. No, you tell her. We love each other.
You move back into the same bed that night. You say I love you, but it’s no longer like throwing open the windows of your heart. You say it the way you’d say It’s Tuesday or I’m a brunette: matter-of-fact, a truth, a statement. Not an exaltation. Not a mira
cle. You wonder when the core of love changed from passion to compassion.
You never surprise him, anymore, by slipping into the shower when he’s in it. He shuts off the light on his night table while you are still reading in bed, and turns onto his side. You remember how he used to stand with you in crowds, his hand at your waist, protective and possessive. Now he holds your daughter’s hand, rather than yours.
The things that used to endear him to you now drive you crazy. How he clears his throat all the time. How he doesn’t replace the empty roll of toilet paper. How he sings off-key to the radio. But that’s the stupid stuff, you tell yourself. You have real love, not Hollywood love. You have a child. That’s what’s important.
Yet there are days that you fight with him just because it lets you feel something.
You begin to wonder if you still love him. You wonder if you ever did. The opposite of love, you think, isn’t hate. It’s complacency.
One day you find yourself in the darkness again, stumbling around, at the edge of a cliff. He’s there, too. But you think maybe he isn’t light, was never light at all. He was just sucking up what was left of your light, to illuminate his own shadows.
You’ve changed. You don’t want to jump into that void. You don’t have to, because the source of your pain is standing right beside you.
When you fall in love, it’s because you find someone who fills all your empty spaces.
