Forever, Interrupted

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  “You mean there are millions of misguided friends buying books for their sad friends.”

  She ignores me.

  “There are other people that have gotten through this, and I wanted you to know that if all those stupid people can do it, you, Elsie Porter, can do it. You are so strong and so smart, Elsie. I just wanted you to have something in your hand you could hold and know that you can do this.”

  “Elsie Ross,” I say, correcting her. “My name is Elsie Ross.”

  “I know,” she says, defensively.

  “You called me Elsie Porter.”

  “It was an accident.”

  I stare at her and then get back to the issue at hand.

  “There is no getting through this, Ana. But you won’t ever understand that because you’ve never loved someone like I love him.”

  “I know that,” she says.

  “No one could. Certainly not a goddamn book.”

  My job is books, information. I based my career on the idea that words on pages bound and packaged help people. That they make people grow, they show people lives they’ve never seen. They teach people about themselves, and here I am, at my lowest point, rejecting help from the one place I always believed it would be.

  I walk out of the bookstore.

  I walk down streets with cracked pavement. I walk down neighborhood roads. I walk through large intersections. I wait at stoplights. I press the walk signals over and over. I avoid eye contact with everyone in front of me. I get hot. I take my sweatshirt off. I get cold and I put it back on. I cross through traffic jams by weaving in between cars, and somehow, I find myself in front of my house, looking up at my door. I don’t know how long I’ve been walking. I don’t know how long I’ve been crying.

  I see something at my door, and from a distance I think maybe it’s the marriage certificate. I run up to it and am disappointed to see it’s just the Los Angeles Times. I pick it up, aware of the fact that I have been so unaware of current events since the current event. The first thing I notice is the date. It’s the twenty-eighth. That can’t be right. But it has to be. I highly doubt that the L.A. Times printed the date wrong and I’m the only genius that figured it out. All of the days have been blurring together, bleeding from one into the next. I didn’t realize it was so late in the month. I should have gotten my period days ago.

  MARCH

  You’re a goddess,” he said to me, as he lay down on his back, sweaty in all the right places, his hair a tangled mess, his breathing still staccato.

  “Stop it,” I said. I was light-headed and my body felt hollow. I could feel sweat on my hairline and upper lip. I tried to wipe it away, but it kept coming back. I turned toward him, my body naked next to his. My nerves were overly sensitive. I could feel every place his body was touching mine, no matter how subtle or irrelevant.

  It was quiet for a moment, and he grabbed my hand. He pulled our clasped hands onto his bare stomach and we rested them there. I closed my eyes and drifted off. I was awakened by his snoring and realized that we should not be napping in the middle of the day. We had movies to see and plans to get dinner. I got up and cracked a window. A chill quickly took over what was a muggy room.

  “Ugh, why did you do that?” Ben groaned. I stood next to him and told him we had been sleeping long enough. He pulled me back down to the bed. He put his head on my chest as he tried to wake up.

  “I have to say, I am really glad you went on that NuvaRing thing,” he said, once he was alert. “I don’t have to worry about anything. I can just fall asleep after.”

  I laughed. So much of Ben’s happiness was based on his love for sleep. “It’s not in the way or anything?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, not at all. It’s like it’s not there, honestly.”

  “Right,” I said. “But it is there.”

  “Right.”

  “You saying that just made me paranoid.”

  “About what?”

  “You can’t feel it at all? What if it fell out or something?”

  Ben moved his body upright. “How would it fall out? That’s absurd.”

  He was right. That was absurd. But I wanted to check just in case.

  “Hold on.”

  I walked to the bathroom and shut the door. I sat down and braced myself but . . . it wasn’t there.

  My heart started beating rapidly and my face began to turn hot. The whole room felt hot. My hands were shaking. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. And soon enough, Ben knocked on the bathroom door.

  “You okay?”

  “Uh . . . ”

  “Can I come in?”

  I opened the door, and he saw my face. He knew.

  He nodded. “It’s gone, right? It’s not there?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know how! I don’t understand how.” I felt like I had ruined both of our lives. I started crying.

  “I’m so sorry, Ben! I’m so sorry! I don’t understand how this could have happened! It’s not . . . I did exactly what I was supposed to! I don’t know how it would have just fallen out! I don’t! I don’t!”

  Ben grabbed me. By this time he had put his underwear back on. I was still naked as he clutched me.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “We have plenty of options.”

  To me, when a man tells you that you have options, he means you can get an abortion.

  “No, Ben,” I said. “I can’t do that. I can’t. Not . . . not when it’s yours.”

  Ben started laughing. Which was weird because there was nothing funny about it.

  “That’s not what I meant. At all. And I agree. We won’t do that.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Then what are you talking about?”

  “Well, we don’t know how long it’s been gone, right?”

  I shook my head, embarrassed. This was completely my fault. How could I be so incredibly careless?

  “So, we can get the morning after pill for this one. But we might not be out of the woods for anything days ago.”

  “Right. Right.”

  “So, if it ends up that next month, your period is late and you are pregnant, then I’m going to grab your hand and take you with me to the courthouse right across the street from my office. We’re getting a marriage license and I will marry you right then and there in front of the judge. That doesn’t scare me. Diapers scare me. But spending my life with you doesn’t scare me. Not one bit. And trust me, I do not want a baby right now. We can’t afford it. We don’t have a lot of time. We don’t have the resources. But you bet your fucking ass that if you’re pregnant, we will figure out a way to make it work and we’ll look back on it and say that you losing that NuvaRing was the smartest thing we ever did. So don’t cry. Don’t stress. Whatever happens happens. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. We are in this together and we will be fine.”

  No one had ever said that to me before. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Does that work for you? I want to make sure you feel the same way,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Okay. Just for the record, I hope you’re not pregnant because—” He started laughing. “I am not ready to be a dad.”

  “Me neither,” I said and then corrected myself. “To be a mom, I mean.” It was quiet for a while. “When is your lease up?” I asked.

  “It’s month to month.” He smiled.

  “I think you should move in.”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  And then, for some masochistic and stupid reason, we had sex again.

  JUNE

  I am sitting in the bathroom, not sure what to do. My period is nowhere to be found. And for the first time since Ben died, I find myself excited about something. Scared, for sure. Nervous, most definitely. I am anxious in every conceivable interpretation of the word.

  What if I’m pregnant? Maybe my life with Ben isn’t over. Maybe Ben is here. Ben could be living inside me. Maybe our relationship isn’t a ghost. What if my relationship with Ben is a tangible piece
of the world? What if Ben is soon to be living and breathing again?

  I run to the pharmacy down the street, the very same one that Ben biked to when he was getting my cereal. Normally, I avoid this street, I avoid this store, but I have to know. I have to know as soon as possible whether this is real. I know that having a baby won’t solve anything, but it could make this better. It could make this easier. It will mean that Ben will never truly leave my life. I yearn for that feeling so badly that I can’t take my usual detour. I take the most direct route.

  I run past the intersection where I lost him, the intersection that fractured my life from one long joyride to a series of days, hours, and minutes that are insufferable. As I fly through the crosswalk, I hear a small crunch under my feet and I am too scared to look down. If I see a Fruity Pebble, I might just drop to the middle of the road, willing cars to run me over, and I can’t do that now. I might have a baby inside me.

  I get into the pharmacy and I run right past the food section. I know that it was the last place Ben did anything. I know he stood in that aisle and he picked a box of cereal. I can’t look at it. I head to the family planning aisle and I buy four boxes of pregnancy tests. I rush to the cashier and tap my foot impatiently as the line moves slowly and inconsistently.

  When it is finally my turn, I pay for them, and I know the cashier thinks he knows what’s going on, a woman my age buying boxes of pregnancy tests. He probably thinks he gets me. He doesn’t. No one could ever understand this.

  I run home and race into the bathroom. I’m nervous and I don’t have to pee, so it takes me quite a while to finally pee on a stick. I do two just to be sure. I figure I have the other two left over if I need them.

  I set them down on the counter and look at the time. I have two minutes. Two minutes until I know what the rest of my life is going to look like.

  Then I start to realize, I have to be pregnant. What are the chances I’m not? I must be. I messed up my birth control, I had unprotected sex multiple times, and it’s just a coincidence that my period, which is never late, is now late? That doesn’t make any sense. My period is days late. That can only mean one thing.

  It means I’m not alone in this. It means Ben is here with me. It means my life, that felt empty and miserable, now feels difficult but manageable. I can be a single mother. I can raise this child by myself. I can tell this child all about his father. About how his father was a gentle man, a kind man, a funny man, a good man. If it’s a girl, I can tell her to find a man like her father. If it’s a boy, I can tell him to be a man like his father. I can tell him his father would have been so proud of him. If he’s gay, I can tell him to be like his father and find a man like his father—which would be the best of all worlds. If she grows up to be a lesbian, she won’t need to be or find anyone like her father, but she’ll still love him. She’ll know that she came from a man that would have loved her. She’ll know she came from two people that loved each other fiercely. She’ll know not to settle for anything less than a love that changes her life.

  I can tell her about the time we met. She’ll want to know. She’ll ask over and over as a child. She’ll want to keep pictures of him framed around the house. She’ll have his nose or his eyes, and just when I least suspect it, she’ll say something that sounds like him. She’ll move her hands in a way that he did. He’ll live on in her and I won’t be alone. I won’t be without him. He’s here. He didn’t leave me. This isn’t over. My life isn’t over. Ben and I are not over. We have this. We have this child. I will dedicate my life to raising this child, to letting Ben’s body and soul live on through this child.

  I grab the sticks, already knowing what they say, and then I drop to my knees.

  I am wrong.

  There is no child.

  No matter how many sticks I use, they keep saying the same thing. They keep telling me Ben is gone forever and that I am alone.

  I don’t move from the bathroom floor for hours. I don’t move until I feel it. I am bleeding.

  I know it’s a sign that my body is fully functioning, that I am physically fine. But it feels like a betrayal.

  I call Ana. I say I need her and I’m sorry. I tell her she is all I have left.

  PART TWO

  AUGUST

  Are things easier with time? Maybe. Maybe not.

  The days are easier to get through because I have a pattern to follow. I’m back at work. I have projects to occupy my mind. I can almost sleep through the night now. In my dreams, Ben and I are together. We are free. We are wild. We are what we were. In the mornings, I ache for my dreams to be real, but it’s a familiar ache, and while it feels like it might kill me, I know from having felt it the day before that it won’t. And maybe that’s how some of my strength comes back.

  I rarely cry in public anymore. I’ve become a person about which people probably say, “She’s really bounced back quite nicely.” I am lying to them. I have not bounced back nicely. I’ve just learned to impersonate the living. I have lost almost ten pounds. It’s that dreaded last ten that magazines say every woman wants to lose. I suppose I have the body I’ve always wanted. It doesn’t do me much good.

  I go places with Ana, to flea markets and malls, restaurants and cafés. I’ve even started to let her invite other people. People I haven’t seen for ages. People who only met Ben a few times. They grab my hand and say they’re sorry over brunch. They say they wish they could have known him better. I tell them, “Me too.” But they never know what I mean.

  But when I’m alone, I sit on the floor of the closet and smell his clothes. I still don’t sleep in the middle of the bed. His side of the room is untouched. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think two people lived in my apartment.

  I haven’t moved his PlayStation. There is food in the refrigerator that he bought, food I will never eat, food that is rotting. But I can’t throw it out. If I look in that refrigerator and there are no hot dogs, it will just reinforce that I am alone, that he is gone, that the world I knew is over. I’m not ready for that. I’d rather see rotting hot dogs than no hot dogs, so they stay.

  Ana is very understanding. She’s the only person that can really get a glimpse of this new life I lead. She stays at her place now, with an open invitation for me to come over anytime I can’t sleep. I don’t go over. I don’t want her to know how often I can’t sleep.

  If I can’t have Ben, I can have being Ben’s widow, and I have found a modicum of peace in this new identity. I wear my wedding ring, even though I no longer insist people call me by my married name. I am Elsie Porter. Elsie Ross only existed for a couple weeks, at most. She was barely on this earth longer than a miniseries.

  I still have not received the marriage certificate, and I haven’t told anyone. Every day I rush home from work, expecting it to be waiting for me in the mailbox, and every day, I am disappointed to find a series of credit card offers and coupons. No one alerted the national banks that Ben is dead. If I didn’t have other things to be miserable about, I’m pretty sure this would set me off. Imagine being the kind of woman that gets over her dead husband only to find his name in her mailbox every day. Luckily, Ben never leaves the forefront of my mind, so I can’t be provoked into remembering him. I am always remembering him.

  I read somewhere to watch out for “triggers,” things that will remind you of your loss right out of the blue. For instance, if Ben loved root beer and had this whole thing about root beer, then I should stay away from soda aisles. But what if I went into a candy store and saw, unexpectedly, that they had root beer and I started crying right there in the store? That would be a trigger. The reason why this is completely irrelevant to me is that root beer doesn’t remind me of Ben. Everything reminds me of Ben. Floors, walls, ceilings, white, black, brown, blue, elephants, cartwheels, grass, marbles, Yahtzee. Everything. My life is trigger after trigger. I have reached a critical mass of grief. So, no, I don’t need to avoid any triggers.

  The point, though, is that I am functional. I can get thro
ugh each day without feeling like I’m not sure I’ll make it to midnight. I know when I wake up that today will be just like the day before, devoid of honest laughter and a genuine smile, but manageable.

  Which is why when I hear my own doorbell at 11:00 a.m. on a Saturday and I look through my peephole, I think, God dammit. Why can’t everyone just leave well enough alone?

  She’s standing outside my door in black leggings, a black shirt, and a gray, oversize, knit vesty-sweater thing. She’s over sixty fucking years old. Why does she always look so much better than I do?

  I open the door.

  “Hi, Susan,” I say, trying hard to sound like I’m not pissed she’s here.

  “Hi.” Although, just from the way she greets me, I feel like this is a different woman than the one I met almost two months ago. “May I come in?”

  I open the door fully and invite her in with my arm. I stand by the door. I don’t know how long she plans on staying, but I don’t want to imply she should stay longer than she wanted.

  “Could we talk for a minute?” she asks.

  I lead us into the living room.

  As she sits, I realize I should offer her something to drink. Is this a custom in all countries? Or just here? Because it’s stupid. “Can I get you anything to drink?”

  “Actually, I wanted to ask if you’d like to go to lunch,” she says. Lunch? “But first, I wanted to bring you something.”

  She pulls her purse from over her shoulder onto her lap and sorts through it, pulling out a wallet. It’s not a wallet. I know that wallet; its leather worn down in places by my husband’s fingers and molded around his butt. She hands it over to me, losing her balance slightly as she leans so far forward. I take it from her softly. It might as well be a Van Gogh, that’s how delicately I am approaching it.

  “I owe you an apology, Elsie. I hope you can forgive me. I offer no excuses for my behavior. The way I spoke to you, there is no excuse for being so cold and, truthfully, cruel. I treated you so poorly that I . . . I’m embarrassed about my actions.” I look at her and she keeps talking. “I am incredibly disappointed in myself. If someone treated my child the way I treated you, I would have killed them. I had no right. I just . . . I hope you can understand that I was grieving. The pain in front of me felt so insurmountable, and to learn that my only child didn’t feel comfortable telling me about you . . . I couldn’t face that too. Not at that time. I told myself you were crazy, or lying, or . . . I blamed you. You were right when you said I hated you because you were the only one around to hate. You were right. And I knew it then, that’s why I tried so hard to . . . I wanted to make it better, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t have it in me to be a kind person.” She stops for a minute and then corrects herself. “Even a decent person.”