The Last Resort

by Marissa Stapley

  She turned from the window. Ruth was standing near the door, a large folder in her hand. “What bungalow is my husband staying in?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”

  “But why not?” Shell felt the flare of anger, so customary in her life. It was welcome this time because she had grown so used to it and so many things were unfamiliar now. But she couldn’t sustain it. Almost immediately she felt tired again.

  “You’ve been separated, haven’t you?” Ruth asked her.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then that’s the rule.”

  Ruth narrowed her eyes and Shell felt as though they were squaring off. Why? She thought back, tried to remember—oh. Yes. The morning before, on the beach. Her heart thudded a few times as she considered what it may have looked like to Ruth, her and Miles embracing. Surely he would have explained it, though.

  “I’ll be back in ten minutes. Is that enough time for you?”

  Shell didn’t reply, just sat and swiveled in the chair, then logged in to her email. But she found she couldn’t focus on the pointless and macabre task ahead of her, the only task she had, aside from seeing Miles, to fill her day with. Instead, she pictured Colin again, walking in the rain. Ruth’s voice: You’ve been separated, haven’t you? She hesitated for just a moment, then picked up the phone beside Ruth’s computer. She tried his cellphone and was surprised when it went straight to voicemail. The same for his work phone. Both, off.

  There had been moments at home when Shell was sure this was what she wanted: to be separated from her husband, to eventually be severed from him altogether, to leave behind the part of her life where she relived a single moment over and over in her head. It was that or die. To die alone and let him have another life. Are you trying to kill me? He had asked her that night, as she stood in their kitchen, an empty bottle in her hand and broken glass everywhere. No, she was sure she had said. No, I am trying to kill myself. Had he not heard her? Had he not believed her? Had her words been so slurred he didn’t understand?

  Her fingers were still on the keyboard. She typed in Colin’s email address instead of her mother’s.

  Dear Colin,

  Maybe we need to talk. This doesn’t feel right. What bungalow are you in?

  Seeing Colin out there—he hadn’t always been a stranger, walking in the rain. Had he? She rested her fingers on the keyboard and tried to remember the Colin she had first met, the man who had been a stranger, had at one point been entirely unexplored terrain, uncharted territory that made her breathless with each discovery. That was what love was like, at first, always. Theirs had been that, too. And these memories were what she had been searching for, that first night on the terrace when Ben had been going on about his passion for his wife, Johanna. Her story was different, but it had still contained love, once. And more than love: tacit understanding.

  “We shouldn’t drink anymore,” she had told Colin, years ago, back when they were new, and he hadn’t asked a single question or said a single word, except, “Okay, let’s stop.” And they had. This had meant more to her than a stranger could ever understand. This had made her sure that he was the one. And of course, there had been more to it than just those two sentences. But they’d never had to rehash it. Until now.

  It had been after a night out with friends, the weekly university pub night they went to religiously to drink jug after jug of watered-down beer, or shots of tequila, or—Shelley’s preference (she still went by Shelley back then; now it seemed like the name of a child she had once been)—tiny and cheap glasses of vodka and water with lemon, because she was trying to avoid the freshman fifteen but also because, and she remembered this so clearly, the vodka made her drunk faster, did something to her that other drinks didn’t. She could tell, even then, that she wasn’t experiencing the parties, the drunkenness, in the same way her friends were. It wasn’t harmless—or at least, it wasn’t going to stay that way. But she was young, and consequences weren’t a necessary concept yet.

  This night, the one she was remembering now, Shelley was on the dance floor with her friends. She had been trying to ignore the fact that she wanted to throw up or pass out or both, when a group of young men they didn’t know, rowdy and over-refreshed, approached their group, hands outstretched, to place on their waists. Strong bodies ground up against their unsteady ones. Some of her friends, the ones who were single or whose boyfriends were long distance, paired off with these forceful boys and danced with them and batted their hands away until they grew too tired and relented, but she pulled away entirely. One of them followed, putting his hands on her over and over. She stumbled away, and her eyes searched the crowd at the edge of the dance floor for Colin. Finally, she saw him, his expression dark as he moved across the room toward her. This darkness was unfamiliar; Colin was known in their fledgling group as the easygoing one.

  “Get your damn hands off her.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because she wants you to leave her alone. And she’s too drunk to tell you.”

  “How do you know what she wants?”

  Colin had grabbed the young man’s collar and pulled him close. “Put your hands on her again, I’ll kill you,” he’d said before abruptly letting go. The stranger fell into the crowd, then reemerged, fists clenched. She remembered gasps, grunts, curses, fear.

  The painful light of the next day had revealed a black eye for Colin and a difficult truth for her. Suddenly, the word consequences had meaning, as did the idea of a future. She knew she did not want to see him like that again and that she never wanted to feel like that again, either: helpless, tarnished. She had stayed silent beside Colin in the single bed of her dorm room and imagined their future life. She could stop now, draw a line in the sand with alcohol, or keep on going and never be able to stop. But she needed his help. She needed him to stand with her if they were going to go forward. So she took a chance, because she had a feeling he would understand. “We need to stop drinking,” she said. “I can’t anymore.” This was the only time in her young life she ever discussed the problem she had with anyone. Shell came from a good family. She was an aberration. Who knew where these things came from? Better not to talk about it. Colin took her hand. “Okay,” he said.

  He came with her to AA meetings, and held her hand throughout those, too. “My name is Shell and I’m an alcoholic,” she said at the second one. They went to dinner. He called her “Shell” that night, and she felt she had become a new person. And she had known: this was the man who would love her, always. This was the man who was strong enough to stand beside her through anything, everything. That was the story of Shell and Colin. But what a fool she had been to believe that was the happy ending, that life was always going to be easy and she’d never be hurt so badly she’d hit the bottle as hard as she could and beg for it to hit her back.

  No.

  She deleted the words on the screen before her. Stop. Enough dwelling on the past. No one was strong enough for what had happened to her. No one. And Miles knew what he was doing. She had to do what he said, if she wanted to be all right again. That meant no contact with her husband.

  Dear Mom, Dear Zoey,

  I wish you were here.

  I know it’s not Colin’s fault—Zoey, I know that. And I know I’ve said some awful things to him, and he’s said some awful things back, because, if only—But I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive either of us for not making different choices that night. So we’ve separated. I’m sorry. I wish it could be different, but it isn’t. We loved each other once, so much. And now that love is broken. Don’t be sad. We love you so, so much.

  My only hope now is to make myself okay. Then maybe I can start living in a way that would make you proud.

  Tears blurred her eyes until she couldn’t see the screen anymore. She wondered if there would ever come a day when she recollected the night their daughter died and didn’t fall
to pieces. Stop, stop. Save it for your session with Miles.

  Yes. She would tell him everything. She had so much to say. And he would help her.

  “Shell?”

  Shell turned her head and saw Ruth standing before the desk again.

  “Yes?”

  “That’s the third time I’ve said your name. Aren’t you finished? You’re due at your appointment with Miles soon.”

  “Oh. Yes. I’m done now.” Shell hit Send. She stood. She couldn’t feel anything. She would, though. Soon, she would.

  “Is it getting any easier?”

  “Is what?”

  “Missing your daughter. Is it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it won’t be long now. And then you’ll see her.” A strange pause. “Right?”

  Shell backed out of the room. She ran all the way down the stairs.

  “We made love last night.” Johanna’s voice in Grace’s office sounded as hollow and empty as she felt. “Things are good now.” Then she leaned down and picked irritably at the itchy scab on her ankle. This wasn’t Grace’s fault, the way she felt inside, but Johanna still felt frustrated with her.

  “Did it feel right to you?” Grace said, in a voice that was even more throaty than usual, as if she had a cold. Or had been crying.

  Johanna leaned up and looked at her, hard, trying to chase away her sudden concern for Grace when really, the person she needed to worry about was herself. “Why wouldn’t it? He’s my husband. It’s what you told me to do. Why does it matter to you if it felt right or not?” Their eyes locked and Johanna lifted her chin in defiance.

  Grace sighed. “During our last session alone, we talked about my showing you how simple it could be, to find your way to happiness again, to be okay inside yourself again after all you’ve been through. And I think in that moment we both felt good about what we could accomplish together. Am I right about that?”

  Johanna nodded. She hated that she wanted to cry.

  “But we didn’t do very well in the couples’ segment of the therapy, did we? I didn’t do very well.” Grace leaned back in her chair and put her notepad on her lap. She had on a long-sleeved blouse and she pulled the sleeves down as if she was cold. Johanna squinted at the notepad, thinking that if she had brought her glasses with her, she could have read the words, could have read what Grace thought she knew about her or what she wanted to say to her next. But from there it just looked like a squiggle. “I’m really sorry. Forgive me,” Grace said.

  Johanna was caught off guard. “For?”

  “I stopped listening to you, when you were in here with Ben. I stopped seeing you clearly. To be honest, I was having a tough day. It can be a challenge to treat the individual and then the couple. Miles thinks—” but she shook her head slightly and stopped, then began again. “What you are going through is very personal. It is not just about your marriage. I knew that, but I became focused on the task at hand—on the marriage part. That’s what we do here, but that kind of focus is not what you need right now. Am I right?”

  Johanna could only manage a slow nod.

  “Can we start over in here today? Can we attempt to rebuild the trust we had started to establish?”

  “How do you know?” Johanna asked.

  “How do I know what?”

  “That it’s not just about my marriage? That I’m not feeling good about last night? How do you know?”

  Silence. Then, “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Did you feel conflicted last night?”

  “Yes. Not exactly. I don’t know.” Johanna laughed self-consciously, although none of it was funny to her. It was a reflex that felt like it was leftover from another lifetime. “Okay, yes. I felt like I knew just what I had to do. I felt like I was giving myself a prescription. And it didn’t feel right, even though I wanted it to. I tried too hard last night, but instead of feeling safe with him, I came very close to feeling...exposed.”

  “What was it that made you feel exposed?”

  “It was the board game,” she said. “That one question.”

  “Which question?”

  “Who was your first love?”

  “Did you tell your husband about your first love?”

  “I said it was him.”

  “Is that true?”

  Johanna felt the softness of the leather couch beneath the palms of her hands. “No.”

  “Will you tell me about who your first love really was?”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  Her name is Amy. She has long dark hair. She always wears nude lipstick with dark liner. Like most best friends their age—fifteen—they brush and braid and crimp each other’s hair and they borrow each other’s clothes and they sleep on the floor beside each other’s beds, or sometimes in the same bed, and they call each other on the nights they’re not together and they talk for hours and meet each other before school and walk there together, and walk home together, and make cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches after school, but only with each other. When they’re together, time moves too fast.

  When they’re not together, Johanna has peanut butter and she hates the taste of it, of anything, when she’s alone in her trailer without Amy. “That song makes me think of you now,” said Amy of a cheesy nineties’ techno tune they both loved, something about Saturday night and liking the way a person moves, so be my baby. “Remember that time you danced like an idiot in the kitchen while you were making us sandwiches?” Amy said. “Remember you added sliced green onions and mustard and how gross?” The word gross reminded Johanna of Amy’s cruel older sister, Marybeth, who would say that about almost anything they did or said or wore, but most especially when they would go to the store to get the pasty white bread and plastic-wrapped cheese slices they adored. “Gross. We actually have real food here, we’re not trailer trash like she is.”

  It stings, when Marybeth calls Johanna trash the first time, but then it becomes another thing she and Amy are united against. She focuses on the things they agree on. Holes in the ozone layer are bad, alongside George Bush, and eating meat. They don’t like to eat meat because of Johanna’s mom’s boyfriend, who works at the butcher counter at the grocery store and always smells like blood. Sinead O’Connor is great, and they watch that video with the tears falling down her beautiful cheeks in silent reverence, maybe each for different reasons. Johanna squeezes her hands into fists at her sides when Sinead sings about how she could put her arms around every boy she sees. When they sing it out loud, Johanna screams that part and Amy laughs. “Whenever I hear this song, for the rest of my life, it’ll only remind me of you—your terrible singing voice,” Amy says. “We’ll be best friends forever, right?”

  “Promise,” Johanna says. “Cross my heart, hope to die, swear on my life.” Where do promises like these go, when they’re broken? Johanna wonders this later and she tries to never make promises like this again.

  They want to be different than their friends, they decide, so they start to listen to eighties music instead of nineties, discover the song “Asleep” by the Smiths and listen to it over and over, crying into one another’s shoulders. They don’t write songs like this anymore, they moan. They turn up their noses at Nirvana—it’s just music for boys to jerk off to, Amy says, and Johanna agrees because they always agree and then Amy asks Johanna if she would ever touch a boy’s penis and Johanna shrieks and says “No way!” They listen to “Asleep” again. They cry into one another’s shoulders some more and Johanna revels in the smell of her friend’s skin when they are close like this. Johanna saves her money and buys her the Sunflowers perfume gift set she so wants for her birthday, the one with the body wash and the body lotion, too.

  The difference between Amy and Johanna’s friendship and the friendships of other girls their age, though, is that Jo is in love. Not platonic love. Not that at all. She doesn’t kno
w when she realized it but she knows it to be true and the reality of it, of finally being in love with someone, is a revelation. All of her friends have been deeply, irrevocably in love by this point, some of them more than once. These crushes started up in grade six or seven, and Jo had never felt them, had felt only a subtle revulsion for boys she had assumed she would eventually “grow out of.” When she didn’t grow out of it, she started to pretend so she’d have something to talk about when the other girls were talking about their crushes. “Oh, yeah, he’s totally cute, yeah, he smells totally good,” she’d say to other kids her age, when really she thought the boy in question smelled like the rotten beans her mother threw in the compost. “Oh, yeah, I have a major crush,” she would say to their friends, as she started to fear she was incapable of love.

  But then there was Amy. It was around the time Johanna’s dad died that they started getting close, and maybe that’s what cemented it, that Amy was the one beside Johanna at the funeral, the one at school who linked arms with her in the hall on the hardest days, the one who guarded her and her grief at school, proudly, dramatically, as teenage girls do. “Not right now. She just needs some space.”

  Nothing compares to Amy. Especially with her father dead and her once warm and caring mother so distant and sad, she longs for love the way a drowning person longs for air, with no way to get it. She is paralyzed by fear, swims toward the light and then realizes she’s gone in the wrong direction. The only time she doesn’t feel like she’s gasping for air is when she’s with Amy.