by Emily Henry
* * *
—
Happy second birthday, January. Your hair has gotten so much darker. You wouldn’t remember being a blonde, would you? I like it more this way. It suits you very much. Your mother says you look like her grandmother, but I think you take after my mother. She would have loved you. I’ll try to tell you a bit about her too. She was from a place called North Bear Shores. That’s where I’m from too. I lived there when I was your age. I was a nasty two-year-old, she used to tell me. I guess I screamed until I passed out. But that was probably at least in part due to Randy, my oldest brother. A bit of a jackass, but a lovable one. He lives in Hong Kong now, because he is Fancy.
* * *
—
January, I can’t believe you’re four. You are person-shaped now. I suppose you always were, but you’re more so now than ever. When I was four, I wrecked my tricycle. I was riding down a pier toward the lighthouse at the end. My mother had gotten distracted by a friend and I thought it would be neat to ride right off the pier, see if I was going fast enough to stay atop the water. Like Road Runner. She saw me at the last minute and screamed my name. When I turned to look at her, I yanked the handlebars and smashed into the lighthouse itself. That’s how I got that big pink scar on my elbow. I suppose it isn’t so big now. Or else my elbow is quite a bit bigger. Last week you cracked your head on the fireplace. It wasn’t too bad—didn’t even need stitches, but your mother and I cried all night after you’d gone to sleep.
We felt so bad. Sometimes, January, being a parent feels like being a kid who someone has mistakenly handed another kid. “Good luck!” this unwise stranger cries before turning his back on you forever. We will always make mistakes, I’m afraid. I hope they will get smaller and smaller as we get bigger and bigger. Older, really; we’re rather done growing.
* * *
—
Eight! Eight years old and smart as a whip! You never stop reading, January. I hated reading when I was eight, but then again, I was terrible at it, and both Randy and Douglas used to tease me mercilessly, though these days Douglas is as gentle as a butterfly. I imagine if I’d been better at reading, I would have liked it more. Or maybe vice versa. My dad was a busy man but he was the one who taught me how to read, January. And since he’d started, I wouldn’t let my poor mother have anything to do with it. Well, when the time comes, I’m teaching you to drive, she used to tell me. Your favorite book right now is The Giving Tree, but God, January, that book breaks my heart. Your mother is a bit like that tree and I worry you will be too. Don’t get me wrong. That’s a good way to be. But still. I wish you could be a bit stonier, like your old pop. Only for your own good.
You know, when I was eight, I shoplifted for the first time. Not condoning it, of course, but the goal of this is honesty. I stole gum from the old-fashioned candy store on the main drag in North Bear Shores. I loved that shop. They had these great big fans to keep the chocolate from melting in the summer, and on days when my mother was occupied, my brothers and I would stroll down there to get out of the heat. I never found it much fun to go to the beach on my own. Perhaps now I’d feel different. I haven’t been in a while. Your mother and I have been talking about taking you soon.
* * *
—
January, you are thirteen and braver than any thirteen-year-old should have to be. Today, I don’t know who I am. I am your father still, of course. And the husband of your mother. But January, sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes it demands so much of you that you start losing pieces of yourself as you stretch out to give what the world wants to take. I am lost, January. Remember that lighthouse I told you about? I think I told you about it. Sometimes I think about you as that lighthouse. Keep your eyes on January, I tell myself. She won’t lead you astray. If you focus on January, you won’t go too far off course. But maybe I was so focused I ran smack dab into you.
Your mother too. I know this year has been frightening for you, but please know that some way or another, your mother and I are going to find our way back to ourselves, and back to each other. Please don’t be afraid, my sweet baby, my daring pirate queen of the open seas. Somehow everything will be okay.
* * *
—
I got my first kiss when I was sixteen, January. Her name was Sonya and she was stringy and serene.
* * *
—
Your birthday isn’t for a few more months, but I have to write this now. Today, you are leaving for college, January, and I’m afraid it might kill me. Of course I can’t tell you that. You would feel so guilty and you shouldn’t. You are, by all accounts, doing the right thing. You have always been so smart. This is where you belong. And it’s not forever. But when you wake up this morning, and we start driving north, I won’t be looking at you in the rearview mirror. And when you read this (??? When will that be???), think back to that day. Will you even notice that I can’t look at you? Probably not. You’re so nervous yourself. But if you do remember, now you’ll know why. I worry I might turn around and drive the three of us back home if you show any ounce of hesitation. I want to keep you forever. Who am I without you?
* * *
—
You should be in graduate school, and we all know it. Fuck cancer, January. You’re an adult now so that means by the time you read this, you should be well acquainted with the word Fuck and we both know you’re already too closely acquainted with the word Cancer. Well, fuck it. I have to be honest, January. I feel like our lives are imploding and a part of me wants to shove you far, far away until the implosion stops.
I told you I’d be honest with you, so here it is. If I write it here, I know I will not be able to take it back. Someday you will read this. Someday you will know.
I am cheating on your mother. Sometimes I feel like I am comforting myself and other times it feels like a punishment. Still other days I wonder if it’s all a big F-U to the universe. “If you want to destroy my life, I can destroy it worse.”
Some days I think I am in love with Sonya. Sonya, that’s her name. I was in love with her once, when we were kids. I think I told you in your sixteenth-birthday letter. That was the year I kissed her. I’m sure you don’t want to hear that. But I think I need to say it. I’m in love with a version of myself that can’t exist in this hell. Do you think I’m terrible, January? It’s okay if you do. I have been terrible at many different moments in my life.
I want to go back to being the man your mother made me: her new husband. The man you made me: your adoring father. I’m searching for something of myself I lost, and it’s not fair to anyone.
If I could have the past back, those beautiful years before the cancer came back, I would pounce. I’m going to fix this. Don’t give up on me, January. It isn’t the end.
* * *
—
January, today you are twenty-eight.
When I was twenty-eight, my beautiful wife gave birth to our child. On this day. January thirteenth, widely regarded as the best day in the history of days. Sometimes I think about what your children would look like. Not your and Jacques’s specifically, though that would be fine too.
I picture a girl who looks like January. Maybe she has ten fingers and ten toes, but even if she doesn’t, she will be perfect. And I think about the kind of woman you will be for her. The kind of mother.
When I think about this, January, I usually cry. Because I know you will do better than I did, and I am so relieved by that thought. But even if you don’t, even if you make the kinds of mistakes I made, I know you, January.
I know you so much better than you know me, and I’m sorry, but if there had to be an imbalance, I can’t say I regret it going this way.
Remember your first breakup? I mentioned it in the letter for your seventeenth birthday. You were devastated. Your mother called in to your job at Taco Bell and pretended to be you, too sick to come in.
In that moment, I was so in love with her. She knew just what to do. The way she took care of you. There are no words.
She knows, by the way. She knows everything I’ve told you. She’s let me take my time telling you. I worry she’s ashamed, that she thinks everyone will pity her, and you know how she hates that. She’s not sure you need to know. Maybe you don’t. If that’s the case, I’m sorry. But I guess I wanted you to see the whole truth so you would know.
If you think the story has a sad ending, it’s because it’s not over yet.
Since I started these letters, I’ve been a million different things, some good and some ugly.
But today, on your twenty-eighth birthday, I feel like the same man I was all those years ago.
Staring at you. Counting your fingers. Wondering what it is that makes you so different from the rest of the world. I don’t know when it happened, but I’m happy again. I think, even if things don’t stay like this, I will always carry this moment in me. How could I ever be sad, having watched my baby grow into the woman she is?
January, you are twenty-eight, and today I am your father.
26
The Best Friend
I lay back on the floor and stared up at the stars. Fluffy, dark clouds were drifting across the sky, blotting them out bit by bit, and I was watching them like a countdown, though to what I didn’t know. The letters lay in a heap around me, all unfolded, all read. Two hours hadn’t given me closure, but it was time I’d never expected to have with him. Words he hadn’t said to me finally spoken. I felt like I had time traveled.
I was a wound, half-healed-over and scraped raw again. “Everybody Hurts” was running through my mind. I could see the consolation of it, the idea that your pain wasn’t unique.
Something about that made it seem both bigger and smaller. Smaller because all the world was aching. Bigger because I could finally admit that every other feeling I’d been focusing on had been a distraction from the deepest hurt.
My father was gone. And I would always miss him.
And that had to be okay.
I reached for my phone and opened the YouTube app. I typed “Everybody Hurts” and I played it there, from my phone speakers. When it ended, I started it over.
The pain settled into a deep rhythm. It felt almost like exercising, a mounting burn through my muscles and joints. Once, in a bad season of tension headaches, my doctor had told me that pain was our body demanding to be heard.
“Sometimes it’s a warning,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a billboard.”
I didn’t know what this pain’s intent was but I thought, If I listen to it, maybe it will be content to close back up for a while.
Maybe this night of pain would give me even a day of relief.
The song ended again. I started it over.
The night was cold. I wondered how much colder it would be in January. I wanted to see it. If I did, I thought, that would be one more part of him I could meet.
I gathered the letters and envelopes into a neat stack and stood to go home, but now when I pictured the house on the edge of the lake, a strange new variation of that searing ache—Gus, in D minor, I thought—passed through me.
I felt like I was coming apart, like the connective tissue between my left and right ribs had been hacked away and I was going to split.
It had been hours now since we’d parted. I’d gotten no call, not even a text. I thought about the look on his face when he’d seen Naomi, like a ghost was standing in front of his eyes. A tiny, beautiful ghost he had once loved so madly he’d married her. So madly he wanted to work through it when she tore his heart to pieces.
I started to cry again, so hard I couldn’t see.
I opened my texts with Shadi and typed: I need you.
It was seconds before she answered: First train out.
I stared at my phone for a second longer. There was only one other person I really wanted to talk to now. I tapped the contact info and held the phone to my ear.
It was the middle of the night. I didn’t expect an answer, but on the second ring, the line clicked on.
“Janie?” Mom whispered in a rush. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I squeaked.
“Tell me, honey,” she urged. I could hear her sitting up, the rustle of sheets drawing back and the faint click of her bedside lamp turning on. “I’m here now, honey. Just tell me everything.”
My voice wrenched upward as I started at the beginning. “Did I tell you Jacques broke up with me in a hot tub?”
Mom gasped. “That little shit-weasel!”
And then I told her the rest. I told her everything.
* * *
—
Shadi arrived at ten AM with a duffel bag an NBA player could’ve slept comfortably in and a box of fresh produce. When I opened the door to find her on the sunlit porch, I leaned first to see into the cardboard box and asked, “No booze?”
“Did you know you have an amazing farmer’s market two blocks from here?” she said, whisking inside. “And that the only Uber driver seems to be legally blind?”
I tried to laugh, but just the sight of her here had tears welling up behind my eyes. “Oh, honey,” Shadi said, and set the box down on the couch before enveloping me in a hug that was all rose water and coconut oil. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her hand toying in my hair in a gentle, motherly way.
She pulled back and gripped my arms, examining me. “The good news is,” she said softly, “your skin looks like a newborn baby’s. What have you been eating out here?”
I tipped my head toward the box of squash and greenery. “None of that.”
“Drafting diet?” she hazarded, and when I nodded, she patted my arm and turned toward the kitchen, gathering the box in her arms as she went. “I figured as much. Before the booze and the crying, you need a vegetable. And probably, like, eggs or something.” She stopped short as she reached the kitchen, gasping either at size, scope, and style or at the disgusting mess I’d managed to make of it. “Okayyyy,” she said, regrouping as she began to unload the veggies on the lone spare bit of countertop. “How about you change out of those pants, and I’ll start on brunch.”
“What’s wrong with these pants?” I gestured to my sweats. “These are my official uniform now, on account of I’ve officially given up.”
Shadi rolled her eyes and drummed her blue nails on the counter. “Honestly, Janie, it doesn’t have to be a ball gown, but I will not cook for you until you put on pants that involve a button or zipper.”
My stomach grumbled then, as if pleading with me, and I turned back to the first-floor bedroom. There were a handful of wrinkled T-shirts Gus had discarded in the past couple of weeks on the floor, never to be picked up again, and I kicked them into a pile behind the closet door where I wouldn’t have to look at them, then dressed in cutoffs and an Ella Fitzgerald T-shirt.
Making brunch was an hour-and-a-half-long affair, and then there was the fact that Shadi insisted we finish all the dishes before we took a bite. “Look at this stack,” I reasoned with her, gesturing at the leaning pile of cereal-crusted bowls. “It could be Christmas by the time we’ve gotten through all of these.”
“Then I’m glad I packed a coat,” Shadi replied with a casual shrug.
In the end, it only took half an hour to load the dishwasher and hand-wash everything that didn’t fit. When we’d finished eating, Shadi insisted on cleaning the entire house. All I really wanted to do was lie on the couch, eating a pile of potato chips off my chest and watching reality TV, but it turned out she was right. Cleaning was a much better distraction.
For once, I didn’t think about Dad’s lies or Sonya approaching me at the funeral. I didn’t replay tidbits of my fight in the car with Mom or picture the pretty, apologetic smile on Naomi’s full lips. I didn’t worry about the book, or what Anya would think, or wh
at Sandy would do. I didn’t really think at all.
Deep cleaning put me into a trance; I wished I could stay in an emotional cryogenic chamber that would allow me to sleep through the worst of whatever heartbreak I was avoiding.
The first phone call from Gus had come at about eleven, and I didn’t answer. There wasn’t another for twenty minutes, and when that one finally came in, making my heart knot up into my throat, he left no voice mail and sent no follow-up texts.
I turned my phone off and stuck it in the dresser drawer in my bedroom, then went back to mopping the bathroom. Shadi and I decided not to talk about it, about SEG or the Haunted Hat or anything else, until we’d finished with our work, which seemed like a good policy, since the cleaning was helping to numb me, and any time my brain even gestured toward a thought about Gus, the numbness started to unravel from my middle.
At six, Shadi determined we were done and banished me to the shower while she started on dinner. She made ratatouille, which she’d apparently been craving ever since she watched the movie Ratatouille with Ricky’s little sisters during Fourth of July weekend.
“You can tell me about him,” I promised, as we sat on either side of the table, my back turned to the window into Gus’s house, despite the fact that it and its blinds were both closed. “I still want to hear about you being happy.”
“After dinner,” Shadi said. And again, she was right. It turned out I needed this, another meal, comprised mostly of vegetables, with nothing but comfortable small talk. Things we’d seen our old classmates post online, books she’d been reading, shows I’d been watching (only Veronica Mars).
