Izzy + Tristan

by Shannon Dunlap

  The pastor speaks, a few other people speak, but it’s all a senseless garble. No one is getting it right. There’s only one person, really, who has the words to explain who T really was, and she isn’t here.

  After the service, there’s a reception in the church basement. Too many people want to talk to me, and I know it’s because they’ve heard I was there, in the hospital, and they want me to tell them what happened. They want me to explain why she isn’t here, but the truth is I don’t know, except that Izzy, sturdy, practical Izzy, will never exist in the way she did before. They want me to tell them how we all go back to our lives now, and they want me to tell them what happens next, but there’s no tarot deck that could help me answer that one. And besides, I know now that grief doesn’t have a what-happens-next. It just goes on and on.

  EPILOGUE

  Port Anthony Mental Hospital.

  Three years later.

  IF LIFE RAN ACCORDING TO THE RULES OF THE MIND instead of the rules of nature, my heart would have stopped beating while I was lying next to him in the hospital bed. There would have been a graceful ending, a dying-of-a-broken-heart ending. We could have gone to the grave together, and everyone would know that the story was over and would understand what it all meant.

  But the heart, that tough muscle, keeps beating, even when you wish it wouldn’t.

  There are ways to overcome the heart’s persistence, you might be thinking, and you’d be right. I haven’t forced my heart to stop, though, not yet. Here are the reasons why: 1) It would kill my parents. Or, more accurately, it wouldn’t kill them. I cannot trust their healthy hearts to stop beating, even if they are thoroughly broken. 2) I am a coward who can no longer bear to think of the body’s workings. Me, the former future doctor, goes queasy at the idea of blood and guts now, and I can’t think about the heart as an organ, even for long enough to tend to the problem of how to stop my own. And 3) …Don’t you know what the third reason is yet? Think about it, for a few moments longer, a few more relentless heartbeats, and you can probably figure it out.

  After Tristan died, my family was patient with me. The school was patient with me. Everyone was patient with me. They didn’t hold it against me when I collapsed into a sobbing, vomiting, unfit-for-public-consumption mess in the hour before the funeral, and they didn’t hold it against me when I couldn’t force myself to go back to school. So I don’t blame them for misunderstanding. “When you’re ready,” everyone said, which implied that I would someday, in fact, be ready to go back to being the person I was before. I already knew that to be impossible. Even Patrice came by a few times and told me that Tristan would want me to keep going, but I could see for myself that she would never truly get over it, either. I spent over a year in my parents’ house while everyone waited for my mourning to be over and I waited for my heart to stop beating. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t read, I could barely eat and breathe and talk. My parents are big believers in paying for good mental health support after Hull’s remarkable turnaround, so they decided, finally, to send me up here, an excellent inpatient grief program of indeterminate length. The loony bin, some might say.

  Brianna has occasionally come to visit me here. Once, she burst into tears and confessed that she had long ago said something to Frodo that she shouldn’t have. That and something about a love potion that surely only Brianna could believe. She seemed relieved but also confused when I was not angry with her. Anyway, she graduated from Sagan and got a full ride to Fordham and now is thinking about graduate school, where she will write a thesis on medieval literature and the occult. She showed me a picture of her fiancé, who looks a little like Marcus but so much softer. I am, honestly, happy for her.

  Marcus himself has gone into business with Brianna’s brother. I know that she’s the one who arranged it, even if she’s modest about it. Marcus is great at knowing every potential customer in a ten-mile radius, and their store becomes more successful every year.

  Philip comes down from Cornell a couple times a year, and it is a small reprieve to see someone who barely knew Tristan. He tells me funny stories about the plays he’s been auditioning for, and he never acts like we are sitting in the visiting room of a hospital or references why we’re here. But before he leaves, he always leans down and whispers in my ear, “I know you’re still in there,” as though I have fallen into a coma. Maybe I have.

  My parents come to see me often, of course. They bring me treats from the city—bagels from Brooklyn, knishes from the Lower East Side—hoping to lure me back to the land of the living. They worry about me, and I worry about them, but they stand on one side of a canyon, I on the other, and not one of us remembers how to walk the tightrope between.

  Hull has never come, even on his vacations from Stanford when he must be back in New York. I don’t know why. I admit that it stings. If there were anyone who would understand that the old Izzy is dead, it would be the new Hull, but he is far away, on the opposite side of the country, and I cannot know how often he thinks of me, or even if he does.

  Mostly, my time here has been a river of moments, all the same, but here is one remarkable thing: When I first arrived, one of the nurses, the one with the sparkly blue reading glasses that are always perched in her hair, squinted at my name on her clipboard and gave a little murmur of surprise.

  “Another Izzy?” she asked. “Never knew another one in all my years here, and then we had another one six months ago. Not this unit, though,” and she gestured up the hill to the secure building where they keep the real crazies. “Poor girl,” she clucked, then stopped herself short, as if she’d already said too much. I know who it must have been, even if she used to shorten Isadora to Dorie instead of Izzy. I don’t know what became of her.

  Eventually, I suppose, the money will run out, and I’ll go somewhere else. Or maybe Hull will get that CEO position and send money and I’ll stay here until my heart really does stop beating. And then there will be an ending.

  The third reason, of course, that I haven’t called it quits yet is that I can still remember Tristan. I can still imagine him. I can still conjure him, and in that way, he is still here with me. It is an admittedly pale version of him, but that is better than nothingness. I remember and remember. I imagine and imagine. I remember what it was like for me to live those months, and I imagine what the world must have looked like through his eyes and through Brianna’s eyes, too. It doesn’t matter that surely some of the details are wrong; it is all true anyway.

  It was the doctors who first suggested that I write it all down. I think, though, that they now regret the advice, that they feel a little sheepish for having mentioned it, since I write for hours every day, finishing and then looping back to the beginning to start again. They now tell me that it might be advisable to stop this project and move on to other “avenues of healing.” But I can’t simply give up writing and replace it with attending another support group or painting watercolor landscapes; to do so would be to abandon him.

  “So many twists and turns in your story,” one of the doctors said to me while he was taking my pulse and giving me a reassuring smile. It is my opinion that they don’t really need to take my pulse; they do it because some patients find it comforting. It makes them feel cared for. It makes them feel as though someone sees them. “It could almost be a novel,” the doctor said.

  When he was done, I buttoned the cuff of my shirt tightly over my wrist, hiding my implacable heartbeat away from anyone who might be looking for it. He had it all wrong, of course. This is not a novel. It’s a romance.

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  Acknowl
edgments

  While it’s impossible to acknowledge everyone who helped me become a writer, let me single out my teachers and colleagues from the Creative Writing Program at New York University for sharing with me their sharp minds and their warm friendship.

  Thanks to the Maribar Writers Colony for the space to think and the camaraderie I found there.

  I owe special gratitude to two of the earliest readers of this manuscript, Jason Leahey and Dominic Romany, who were so generous with their advice and encouragement. You really are the bee’s knees.

  Kerry Sparks, my agent, is the stuff of legends. She’s the champion that all writers dream of finding, and I can’t thank her and her colleagues at Levine Greenberg Rostan enough for their work in bringing this book into being.

  Farrin Jacobs and her team at Little, Brown are incredible. I’m so grateful that they graced Izzy + Tristan with their immense talents.

  High school is full of more hope, transformation, and uncertainty than a Star card in a tarot formation. My deepest thanks go to those who loved me through it: Llalan Fowler, Mignon Miller, Rachel Barnette, Dave Humeston, Jay Goyal, Stephen Kennedy, Tom Hankinson and most especially, my patient family, Dwight, Nancy, Dawn, and Ryan.

  And finally, my endless devotion to Jason and Nora: You’re the kind of big love that most people don’t even dare to imagine.